COLUMBIA Journalof ART HISTORY Summer 2020

COLUMBIA

ART HISTORY Summer 2020 COLUMBIA JOURNAL of ART HISTORY Summer 2020

The Columbia Journal of Art History May 2020 Volume 2, No. 1

Published by the Columbia Art History Initiative New York, New York Art demolishes the walls between people - Subodh Kerkar

Katherine Ko Co-Editor-in-Chief, Founder Clara Maria Apostolatos Co-Editor-in-Chief Noah Percy Lead Editor, Publisher Yasemin Aykan Lead Editor Assistant Editors Brianna Schmidt Amiee Morris Jung Kim Han Wen Zhang Sophia Fung

Cover Illustration Trinity Lester

A Letter from the Editorial Board

Dear Readers, With this issue, we are excited to officially distribute our first independent publication of the- Co lumbia Journal of Art History. We are immensely grateful to our editors for all their hard work in assembling this issue, particularly in light of the COVID-19 developments which abruptly disrupted our time at Columbia and displaced us across the globe. We are incredibly proud of how our editors and authors were able to work through these unexpected challenges, coming together virtually to support each other and create the best edition yet. This year we published six scholarly works covering a range of topics in the art history field, including the conservation of ephemeral art, iconoclasm in early Islam, and Shanzhai ‘counterfeit’ culture in contemporary China. Chosen from a record high number of submissions, these essays were selected for their depth, rigor, and breadth in exploring artworks from a variety of time periods and regions. Read together, they help paint a picture of the different methodologies and areas of research within the field. Additionally, we are also proud to display the work of CC’20 Art History and Visual arts double major Trinity Lester on our cover. This volume inaugurates a tradition of showcasing works by emerging student artists along with the art history research of their peers. We hope you enjoy these essays as much as we did. Once again, congratulations to our authors and thank you for your hard work.

Happy Reading, Katherine, Clara, Noah and Yasemin CONTENTS

Zhengqi (Ian) Li 4 The Two Faces of Shanzhai— UC Berkeley ‘19 Deceit and Rebellion: Transforming Intellectual Property Rights in China Through Shanzhai Art

Sophie Richard 17 Two Truths and a Lie Smith College ‘20 Iconoclasm in Early Islam: The Case of Christian Churches in Jordan

Cecilia Mou 33 Virtual Pilgrimage University College London ‘21 Through the Senses in Medieval Manuscripts

Amelia Griese 45 Time’s Up Virginia Tech ‘19 Artist’s Intentions and the Ethics of Preserving Ephemeral Art

Yixuan Doris Tang 60 Mirroring Tales of the Boudoir Smith College ‘21 Painting Women in Gardens in the Chinese Southern Song Dynasty

Solène Hababou 76 The End is in Sight St. Andrews ‘21 Representations of Death in Robert Mapplethorpe’s Late Self-portraits The Two Faces of Shanzhai— Deceit and Rebellion Transforming Intellectual Property Rights in China Through Shanzhai Art Zhengqi (Ian) Li Abstract This paper works into the “play” between reductive notions of fake and real, fraudulent and legitimate, and deceit and rebellion. By focusing on one unauthorized, fraudulent exhibition, titled “草间弥生&村上隆艺术作品双联展” (YAYOI KUSAMA X MURAKAMI TAKASHI Collection JOINT ART EXHIBITION Wuhan Station), in Wuhan, China, this paper speculates as to whether the unauthorized joint exhibition signifies more than a blatant, crude plagiarism, copyright infringement, and financial fraud. Could this exhibition, in fact, be considered a sophisticatedly organized, avant-garde conceptual performance, which not only critiques the hegemonic artistic norms and the globalizing IPR regime, but is also subsumed under and weaponized as a state narrative in order to make national progress in contemporary post-socialist China? This paper investigates the ways in which this phenomenon challenges the prevailing legal norms regarding artistic creativity and intellectual property rights (IPRs), and thus reconsiders the shanzhai culture—or the counterfeit/piracy culture—in contemporary China. This paper explores

Figure 1: “草间弥生&村上隆艺术作品双联展” (YAYOI KUSAMA X MURAKAMI TAKASHI Collec- tion JOINT ART EXHIBITION Wuhan Station) was held at 东原乐见城 (Wuhan Dongyuan Lejian City), a real estate sales office in Wuhan, Hubei Province, the People’s Republic of China, from May 26, 2018 to June 9, 2018. The theme of this joint exhibition is “为热爱, 而活!” (“Live for Love”). Images @ 荆楚网 (Cnhubei Co,.Ltd.). Columbia Journal of Art History 5 whether any global treaty, convention, principle, value, or moral is viable, when each context or nation-state is neither fixed nor identical. Ultimately, this paper asks is it perhaps that values, norms, or forms are constantly under negotiation, and shanzhai is part of such negotiation, rather than being simply fraudulent? Overall, by acknowledging shanzhai as an iconoclastic socio- cultural practice, which reveals the deconstructive and collective dynamic of creativity that is in direct opposition to the kind of creativity espoused under the global regime of IPR, this paper aims to present an alternative model of understanding and conceptualizing the notions of shanzhai in contemporary China within the global context.

Introduction: The Yayoi Kusama–Takashi Murakami Joint Exhibition as Shanzhai Deceit Starting in November 2017 and up to as recently as October 2018, a series of exhibitions titled “草间弥生×村上隆双联展” (The Yayoi Kusama–Ta- kashi Murakami Joint Exhibition) were held in multiple cities across China, including Shenzhen, Qingdao, Wuhan, Tianjin, Shanghai, Changsha, and Guangzhou, and were billed online as a joint production by Japanese artists Yayoi Kusama and Takashi Murakami. However, the entire exhibition series was “fake.” On November 2, 2018, the Yayoi Kusama Foundation issued a press release; an investigation by the Foundation revealed that forgeries of Kusama’s artworks had been exhibited at these unauthorized exhibitions without the permission of the artist or the Foundation.1 Yoshifumi Onodera, Kusama’s attorney, declared that neither Kusama nor Murakami had any involvement in the exhibitions, and that the displayed works were believed to be fakes.2 The Foundation condemned the actions of the unidentified organizers of these exhibitions. According to Akira Tatehata, the Director of the Yayoi Kusama Museum, forged artworks and fraudulent exhibitions of an avant-garde artist with such international recognition were “a serious infringement of the artist’s copyright,” and such actions have also caused significant damage to “the international brand and reputation” of Kusama.3 The Foundation concluded that “these dishonest acts are a violation of public morals and decency of a notably malicious nature, and are a contemptible transgression of the originality and copyrights of all artists.”4 In the aftermath of the press release,

1 Yayoi Kusama Foundation, "Declaration against Exhibitions of Forged Yayoi Kusama Works," press release, November 2, 2018, Yayoi Kusama Foundation, http://yayoi-kusama.jp/ pdf/181102/02nov2018_kusamafoundation_declaration_en.pdf. 2 Sayuri Kodama, "Fake Yayoi Kusama and Takashi Murakami Exhibits Pop up in China," Nikkei Asian Review, October 24, 2018, https://asia.nikkei.com/Life-Arts/Arts/Fake-Yayoi- Kusama-and-Takashi-Murakami-exhibits-pop-up-in-China. 3 Yayoi Kusama Foundation, "Declaration against Exhibitions of Forged Yayoi Kusama Works." 4 Ibid. 6 Li, The Two Faces of Shanzhai both Kusama and Murakami were considering legal action against the parties involved. Kusama’s attorneys have already shut down the exhibitions in Shanghai and Changsha, which both began in mid-September 2018, and plan to pursue civil and criminal action once they identify the parties re- sponsible. Meanwhile, Hiroshi Kamiyama, Murakami’s attorney, concurred with Kusama that “this is extremely malicious, and we are considering a similar response.”5 Intellectual property rights (IPRs) have been acknowledged and protected in China since 1979. However, it was not until 1992 that China formally enacted an intellectual property law and became a signatory member of the Berne Convention.6 In 2001, China became a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and engaged in the TRIPS agreement.7 However, despite the Chinese government’s continuous attempts to crack down on IPR offenses, in recent years, the spectacular rise of China as a “faking nation” is often mystified in ahistorical, essentialist claims about China’s “cultural tendency” to violate IPRs.8 To be sure, I do not aim to voice an assumption of unity in contemporary Chinese culture. By focusing on one unauthorized, fraudulent exhibition in Wuhan, I speculate as to whether the joint exhibition signifies more than a blatant, crude plagiarism, copyright infringement, and financial fraud. Could this exhibition, in fact, be considered a sophisticatedly organized, avant-garde conceptual performance, which not only critiques the hegemonic artistic norms and the globalizing IPR regime, but is also subsumed under and weaponized as a state narrative in order to make national progress in contemporary post-socialist China? In this paper, I investigate the ways in which this phenomenon challenges the prevailing legal norms regarding artistic creativity and IPRs, and thus reconsiders the shanzhai culture—or the counterfeit/piracy culture—in contemporary China. I explore whether any global treaty, convention, principle, value, or moral is viable, when each context or nation-state is neither fixed nor identical. Ultimately, I ask is it perhaps that values, norms, or forms are constantly under negotiation, and shanzhai is part of such negotiation, rather than being simply fraudulent? Overall, by acknowledging shanzhai as an iconoclastic socio- cultural practice, which reveals the deconstructive and collective dynamic of creativity that is in direct opposition to the kind of creativity espoused under the global regime of IPR, I aim to present an alternative model of

5 Kodama, "Fake Yayoi Kusama and Takashi Murakami Exhibits Pop up in China." 6 The Berne Convention, an internationally recognized agreement governing copyright, guaran- tees copyrights for a period of 50 years after an author’s death. 7 The TRIPS agreement, an international legal agreement between all the member nations of the WTO, introduced intellectual property law into the multilateral trading system for the first time. 8 Fan Yang, Faked in China: Nation Branding, Counterfeit Culture, and Globalization (Bloom- ington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 18. Columbia Journal of Art History 7 understanding and conceptualizing the notions of shanzhai in contemporary China within the global context.

Shanzhai as Rebellion and Alternative Creativity Forgery is a functional art form, which, in principle, “interchanges the uninterchangeable, substitutes the unsubstitutable.”9 However, in the context of these unauthorized, fraudulent exhibitions, in contrast to forgery, the term shanzhai (山寨) is a more apt word choice to describe this creative and performative art form. Shanzhai is a Chinese neologism that refers to “copycat designs of brand-name products, which often introduce something new to cater to the specific needs of potential niche clients.”10 Today, shanzhai products have infiltrated all areas of life in China. Literally referring to a “mountain fortress” occupied by anti-government bandits, shanzhai connotes a sense of defiance against the globalizing IPR regime.11 Shanzhai products are characterized in particular by a high degree of flexibility; they can be adapted very quickly to particular needs and situations, and thus the situation’s potential can be fully exploited. The new always emerges from surprising variations and combinations of what exists, and thus shanzhai illustrates a particular type of creativity—the kind of creativity to rework and reimagine.12 In this regard, these unauthorized exhibitions emblematize shanzhai, and thus can be considered a radical invention—a creative forgery. One of the many unauthorized exhibitions, titled “草间弥生&村上隆艺术作品双联展” (YAYOI KUSAMA X MURAKAMI TAKASHI Collection JOINT ART EXHIBITION Wuhan Station; fig. 1), was held at东原乐见城 (Wuhan Dongyuan Lejian City), a real estate sales office in Wuhan, Hubei Province, from May 26, 2018 to June 9, 2018. Before the exhibition’s grand opening, more than 3,000 early bird tickets had already been sold. On its opening day, the exhibition attracted 1,000 people, some of whom drove from nearby cities just to see the exhibition. In addition to the 14 works that were on display, there were three variations of Kusama’s renowned performance installations. The installation that best emblematizedshanzhai ’s creative potential was “隐形波点房子” (The Invisible Polka Dotted House; fig. 2). The room’s white walls were covered in a red polka-dot pattern, which was also featured on the surface of a group of inflatable balls and reflected on the mirrored cube in the center of the room. The installation was an unexpected take on

9 Sándor Radnóti and Ervin Dunai,The Fake: Forgery and Its Place in Art (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1999), 46. 10 Laikwan Pang, Creativity and Its Discontents: China’s Creative Industries and Intellectual Prop- erty Rights Offenses (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 1. 11 Yang, Faked in China, 26. This is an important argument I shall return to later in this paper. 12 Byung-Chul Han, Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese, trans. Philippa Hurd (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017), 72. 8 Li, The Two Faces of Shanzhai and combination of Kusama’s Dots Obsession and Infinity Mirror Room.13 It was through this surprising variation and combination that the shanzhai exhibition was able to realize an alternative form of creativity. That is, because the artworks were not made indistinguishable from the originals, it seems that the exhibition clearly showed a lack of interest in the overarching search for the expression of artistic genius. I insist that this shanzhai exhibition did not deliberately set out to deceive; its alternative creativity lay in how it specifically drew attention to the fact that the exhibitions were not original, and thus that the shanzhai “artists” were playing with the originals.14 Thus, because of this sense of humor, or the aesthetic principle of asobi 遊び (playfulness), I speculate that the shanzhai exhibition played an openly Dadaist game, which emblematized a playful, creative combination of “subversion and creation.”15 In the context of the socialist system in China, I further speculate that the exhibition assimilated, as a methodology, Chairman Mao Zedong’s idea of “no construction without destruction.” A shanzhai exhibition is a carrier and emblem of Mao’s dialectic method and revolutionary spirit, incorporating destruction and construction simultaneously: the shanzhai exhibition’s artistic method involves deconstructing those artworks that are complete—the works of Kusama and Murakami—in the service of creating something new. It is a combination of destruction and construction: a complex, contradictory, forceful, and radical aesthetic. Thus, the quintessential feature of this alternative creativity is determined by the playful enjoyment in modifying, varying, combining, and transforming the old.16 In this regard, the shanzhai exhibition cannot simply be criticized as one involving copying, plagiarism, deception, or copyright infringement; rather, it is an authentic, creative invention of its own kind—the exhibition modifies its models to such an extent that it develops its own, new identities. In this way, it establishes itself as an original and illustrates a particular type of creativity that is derived from shanzhai, as “gradually [shanzhai] products depart from the original[s] until they mutate into originals themselves.”17 Therefore, shanzhai, viewed as an pragmatic, adaptive, and iconoclastic socio-cultural practice to rework and reimagine, could be employed to call

13 Jing Hao and Jianwei Liu 郝菁刘建维, "cǎo jiān mí shēng yǔ cūn shàng lóng yì shù zhǎn liàng xiàng wǔ hàn; qiān yú fěn sī jìn jù lí mó bài dà shī zuò pǐn" 草间弥生与村上隆艺术展亮相武汉千余粉丝近距离膜拜大师作品 [Art Exhibition of Yayoi Kusama and Takashi Murakami Makes Debut in Wuhan; Thousands of Fans Worship the Masters’ Works at Close Range], trans. Ian Li, Cnhubei Co,.Ltd., May 26, 2018, http://news.cnhubei.com/xw/ wh/201805/t4116512.shtml. 14 Han, Shanzhai, 76. 15 In suggesting that this kind of shanzhai exhibitions played a Dadaist game as a result of their inherent playfulness, I draw from Han, Shanzhai, 75; Anne Nishimura Morse, Takashi Mu- rakami, and Nobuo Tsuji, Takashi Murakami: Lineage of Eccentrics (Boston: MFA Publications, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2018), 97. 16 Han, Shanzhai, 77. 17 Ibid., 72. Columbia Journal of Art History 9 into question the logic of copyright, as art forms embody the endless chain of creativity that the global regime of IPR tries to limit.18

Shanzhai’s Transformational Role: Commercial Space Becomes Art Space Although the works displayed at the shanzhai exhibition in Wuhan were forgeries, the public, perhaps buying into the cult of personality on both a personal and societal level, refused to believe that they were anything but “real” and of critical importance. In an interview with reporters, one lady, who drove two hours from Hankou, commented that the exhibited works were so beautiful and that she could not find the words to describe the delicacy of the color selections. As a fan of Murakami, she commented that being able to see the “originals” in China was definitely a rewarding experience. Moreover, according to the reporters, most visitors were young millennials, including a number of social media celebrities who took perfect Instagramable pictures at this Internet-famous site (fig. 3). There were also many parents who wished to cultivate artistic sensibilities in their children. Xinxin, a five-year-old who came all the way from Hanyang with her parents, told the reporters that the combination of red polka dots and the large mirrored cube in Kusama’s The Invisible Polka Dotted House as well as Murakami’s signature smiley-face flowers were fascinating; under her parents’ instructions, Xinxin took many pictures, not only of her mother (fig. 4), but also of the art, which she was going to learn to copy from when she got home.19 As evidenced by the three instances noted above, this shanzhai exhibition appeared to be “an unthreatening and victimless crime,” or rather, one that only challenged the “arbitrary and unfounded” decisions made by the capitalist elites, art historians, art experts, art dealers, and any other parties who have the right to determine what is art and what is not.20 It seems that no one else, except for Kusama and Murakami, lost out. Even the two artists hardly lost anything; because of these shanzhai exhibitions, they gained even more attention, popularity, and fame in China. According to the exhibition listings in the press release (fig. 5), all the shanzhai exhibitions were located at either department stores or real estate sales offices. In this regard, theseshanzhai exhibitions transformed commercial spaces into art spaces, thus blurring the line between commerce and art. As a Dadaist game, these shanzhai exhibitions challenge the public to reconsider the entire construction of art and the museum space conceived by the Western tradition. This business model, however,

18 Pang, Creativity and Its Discontents, 205. 19 Hao and Liu, [Art Exhibition of Yayoi Kusama and Takashi Murakami Makes Debut in Wuhan]. 20 In suggesting that this kind of shanzhai exhibitions could be considered an unthreatening and victimless crime, I draw from Noah Charney, The Art of Forgery: The Minds, Motives and Methods of the Master Forgers (London: Phaidon, 2015), 123; Radnóti and Dunai,The Fake, 56. 10 Li, The Two Faces of Shanzhai

Fig. 2 “隐形波点房子” (The Invisible Polka Dotted House). Image @ 荆楚网 (Cnhubei Co,.Ltd.).

Fig. 3 Posts on Xiaohongshu (also known as RED), which is a social media and e-commerce platform. Images @ 姜胜允的happy乔宝宝 & ppony. Columbia Journal of Art History 11 is not new; in early twentieth-century Japan, department stores emerged as “cultural showcases.”21 The exhibition spaces transformed art from a luxury reserved for the few to something close to a necessity within any well-appointed home. In this way, department stores worked with—but also modified—official narratives that had made art “public” through state and private museums, both enlarging the audience and strengthening the stores’ investments.22 In the case of the shanzhai exhibitions in twenty-first century China, through the win-win business model of “commerce + art,” department stores and real estate sales offices constructed an artistic, high-quality, and high-end brand image, attracted more consumers, and increased potential revenue, thus becoming more commercially viable. More importantly, they also democratized art, making these internationally recognized artworks available for viewing outside of museums and art galleries. For the exhibition visitors, they gained satisfaction in return. In the age of social media and consumerism, Daka Wenhua 打卡文化 (“check-in culture”), the act of checking in at popular spots, taking pictures, and posting the pictures on social media, has become a new life aesthetic. It is this “check-in culture” that stimulates the emergence of these shanzhai exhibitions, and Kusama’s and Murakami’s works are highly suitable for this space. In other words, Kusama’s and Murakami’s works are uniquely suitable for the contemporary age of social media and consumerism, and thus became the protagonists of this kind of shanzhai exhibitions. Kusama’s championing of consumerism is an important factor behind her career renaissance. Her partnership with Louis Vuitton in 2012 (fig. 6) dramatically increased the exposure of her work and her personal narrative. By embracing consumer culture and placing her work from museums and art galleries into department stores in Ginza, Tokyo, she expanded her market.23 For Murakami, too, it was his astonishingly successful handbag designs for Louis Vuitton in 2003 (fig. 7) that made him a celebrity. Murakami’s designs reinvigorated the stately luxury-goods company, making Louis Vuitton bags the must-have item for the wealthy and fashionable. Murakami explains that his art process is “more about creating [artworks] than about exhibitions.”24 By leveling the distinctions between “high art” and “low art,” Kusama and Murakami showed a keen understanding and manipulation of market forces, and their works celebrated commerce. In this regard, similar to Kusama’s and Murakami’s approach toward defying traditional classifications, theshanzhai

21 Noriko Aso, Public Properties: Museums in Imperial Japan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 6. 22 Ibid., 194–95. 23 Doug Woodham, "How Yayoi Kusama Built a Massive Market for Her Work," Artsy, November 20, 2017, https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-yayoi-kusama-built-massive- market-work. 24 Jeff Howe, "The Two Faces of Takashi Murakami," Wired, January 11, 2003, https://www. wired.com/2003/11/artist/. 12 Li, The Two Faces of Shanzhai exhibitions, having a playful creativity that is subversive and creative, also broke down numerous barriers between commercial space and art space, and played with the preciousness of the contemporary art world.

Shanzhai for “the People” and China’s Nation-Building With the reification of knowledge and creativity, a major ethical battleground of the current IPR regime is the protection of the author. A legitimate commodity has an author (or a team of creators, or a brand), while the shanzhai product does not.25 In the case of these shanzhai exhibitions, when the anonymous organizers were accused of copyright infringement, at the core of the matter was the rising confirmation of the individual, and the related concept of private property, which is arguably the cornerstone of copyright law. However, the core spirit of the socialist system lies in the public ownership of property. Article 1 of the Copyright Law of the People’s Republic of China states: This Law is enacted, in accordance with the Constitution, for the purposes of protect- ing the copyright of authors in their literary, artistic and scientific works and the copyright-related rights and interests, of encouraging the creation and dissemination of works which would contribute to the construction of socialist spiritual and material civilization, and of promoting the development and prosperity of the socialist culture and science.26 Although this law is enacted to protect the copyright of authors, what does it mean to also promote “the development and prosperity of the socialist culture?” Shanzhai’s ostensible appeal to “the people” does this precisely, as numerous state-owned media accounts label these cultural productions as “grassroots,” “subcultural,” and “resistance” productions, both in China and abroad.27 Although each shanzhai exhibition across China is imaginative in its own right, it is never attributed to any single organizer, as no organizer’s name can be found on any posters or websites. It appears that there is a tacit understanding among the organizers that the “ideas came from a community, not an individual.”28 In this regard, shanzhai’s tribute to collectivity differs significantly from the individualistic notion of property, which serves as the foundation of the IPR regime promoted by Western modernity.29 The IPR regime works to “enforce a new set of moral norms”—from the notion of ownership and property rights to the legally demarcated criteria for what

25 Pang, Creativity and Its Discontents, 187. 26 Copyright Law of the People's Republic of China (Promulgated by the Standing Committee of the National Congress on February 26th, 2010 and entered into force on April 1st, 2010). See https://www.wipo.int/edocs/lexdocs/laws/en/cn/cn031en.pdf. 27 Yang, Faked in China, 65. 28 Ibid., 76. 29 Ibid., 79. Columbia Journal of Art History 13

Fig. 4 Xinxin is taking a picture of her mother. Image @ 荆楚网 (Cnhubei Co,.Ltd.).

Fig. 5 A list of exhibitions that may include forgeries. Image @ Yayoi Kusama Foundation.

Fig. 6 A department store in Ginza, Tokyo, showing Yayoi Kusama’s partnership with Louis Vuitton. Louis Vuitton Lim- ited Edition Red Infinity Dots Monogram Canvas Keepall 55, 2012. Images @ Yamashita Yohei & Artsy. Fig. 7 A Multicolore Monogram bag by Takashi Murakami for Louis Vuitton. Image @ Louis Vuitton. 14 Li, The Two Faces of Shanzhai are “proper” and what are “illicit” copies.30 Thus, I speculate thatshanzhai , as a collective endeavor for cultural production, has been weaponized by the Chinese state to disturb, challenge, and resist the globalizing IPR regime, an ideological state apparatus, precisely because of its “criminalized,” “illegal” position. Under the IPR regime, creativity is “reified as intellectual property which the rights holders own and can benefit from.”31 For China, shanzhai is reworked to fit with a value-making notion of creativity; shanzhai is carefully channeled into “a developmen- tal force suitable for building the nation’s own brands.”32 I further speculate that the deconstructive characteristics of shanzhai’s creativity are being used by the Chinese state to defy the other conception of creativity that is com- modified in the creative economy under the IPR regime;shanzhai could be considered a destructive force to the profitable creativity.

Coda In this paper, I do not intend to legitimize the prevailing shanzhai phenomenon in contemporary China. Despite such a phenomenon existing, the discourse of dajia 打假 (“combating fakes”), as one of the top items on the national agenda, pervades Chinese media and government policy.33 Rather, I intend to propose an alternative model for understanding shanzhai exhibitions, shanzhai culture, and shanzhai creativity in contemporary China within the global context. I also confront the fiction that China is deemed to be a “faking” nation by the Western creative economy, which dialectically reifies its own vision of creativity and condemnsshanzhai creativity. Each shanzhai exhibition, if placed on a larger continuum, may be considered “a new serial position.”34 In other words, viewed as part of this alternative model, I hope that the series of shanzhai exhibitions could be considered a new creation that does not completely break with the old, as trial and error and imitation are necessary in the process of making a truly original product. As I hope this paper has shown, shanzhai, characterized by its defiant attitude toward the globalizing IPR regime, offers an alternative approach to countering the hegemony of global brands. Moreover, where the discussion of shanzhai gets more interesting, and something for further inquiry, is when the issue of the nation-state comes in, where shanzhai is not merely “subculture” but weaponized state culture.35 That is, although the

30 Ibid., 13. 31 Pang, Creativity and Its Discontents, 3. 32 Yang, Faked in China, 3. 33 Pang, Creativity and Its Discontents, 192 and 200. 34 In suggesting that each shanzhai exhibition can be considered “a new serial position,” I draw from George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1968), 64. 35 According to Professor Gregory Levine’s feedback, this approach is similar to CIA’s “weapon- Columbia Journal of Art History 15 IPR hegemonic regime imposes an “illegal” status upon shanzhai, it also lays out the route to be followed by the Chinese government. “Brand shanzhai” can thus be rendered to be in the service of “brand China,” since the shanzhai economy presents important lessons for branding legitimate national products that would buttress the nation’s competitive advantage in the global market.36 Although it sounds contradictory, I believe that with this deconstructive, collective, and state-sponsored shanzhai culture and shanzhai creativity, China will be able to transform from a nation that specializes in “making” or “faking” into a nation that can take pride in its ability to pro- duce IPR-eligible national brands.37 Still, the commercial element could understandably lead one to question the motive of these shanzhai exhibitions. The anonymous organizers behind these exhibitions were extreme in their capitalist outlook, making millions out of the move. I am still left wondering who took all the money from working people who were deceived into believing they were seeing and experiencing the “real” thing. There is arguably a commercial element to every mode of creative production. However, in the case of these shanzhai exhibitions, is the point not to rebel against such profiteering? Does the commerce and art “win-win” tangle in fact cross the line, slipping away from a simple “democratization” into an exploitation of “the people?” Would it not be better suited to the creative purpose then, that the exhibitions themselves were free to enter and “for the people?”

Zhengqi (Ian) Li is a graduate of the University of California Berkeley (Class of 2019) where he studied the History of Art.

Bibliography

Aso, Noriko. Public Properties: Museums in Imperial Japan. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. Charney, Noah. The Art of Forgery: The Minds, Motives and Methods of the Master Forgers. London: Phaidon, 2015. Han, Byung-Chul. Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese. Translated by Philippa Hurd. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017. Hao, Jing, and Jianwei Liu 郝菁刘建维. "cǎo jiān mí shēng yǔ cūn shàng lóng yì shù zhǎn liàng xiàng wǔ hàn; qiān yú fěn sī jìn jù lí mó bài dà shī zuò pǐn" 草间弥生与村上隆艺术展亮相武汉千余粉丝近距离膜拜大师作品 [Art Exhibition of Yayoi Kusama and Takashi Murakami Makes Debut in Wuhan; Thousands of Fans Worship the Masters’ Works at Close Range]. Translated by Ian Li. Cnhubei Co,.Ltd.. May 26, 2018. http:// news.cnhubei.com/xw/ ization” of Abstract Expressionism during the Cold War. 36 Yang, Faked in China, 86. 37 In suggesting that China is able to transform from a “making” or “faking” nation into a “creating” nation, I draw from ibid., 89. 16 Li, The Two Faces of Shanzhai wh/201805/t4116512.shtml. Howe, Jeff. "The Two Faces of Takashi Murakami." Wired, January 11, 2003. https://www.wired.com/2003/11/artist/. Kodama, Sayuri. "Fake Yayoi Kusama and Takashi Murakami Exhibits Pop up in China." Nikkei Asian Review, October 24, 2018. https://asia.nikkei.com/ Life- Arts/Arts/Fake-Yayoi-Kusama-and-Takashi-Murakami-exhibits-pop-up-in-China. Kubler, George. The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1968. Morse, Anne Nishimura, Takashi Murakami, and Nobuo Tsuji. Takashi Murakami: Lineage of Eccentrics. Boston: MFA Publications, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2018. Pang, Laikwan. Creativity and Its Discontents: China’s Creative Industries and Intellectual Property Rights Offenses. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. Radnóti, Sándor, and Ervin Dunai.The Fake: Forgery and Its Place in Art. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1999. Woodham, Doug. "How Yayoi Kusama Built a Massive Market for Her Work." Artsy, November 20, 2017. https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-yayoi- kusama-built-massive-market-work. Yang, Fan. Faked in China: Nation Branding, Counterfeit Culture, and Globalization. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015. Yayoi Kusama Foundation. "Declaration against Exhibitions of Forged Yayoi Kusama Works." Press release, November 2, 2018. Yayoi Kusama Foundation. http://yayoi kusama.jp/pdf/181102/02nov2018_kusamafoundation_declaration_en.pdf. Two Truths & a Lie Iconoclasm in Early Islam: The Case of Christian Churches in Jordan Sophie Richard

Abstract Absence of figural or fauna form in Islamic design is often associated with a reductive reading and assumptions surrounding Islam’s iconophobic doctrine, which downplay the historical and theological “goals of neutralizing the image” that were shared by contemporary Christians alike. After attending Oxford University’s 2019 Slade Lecture series on “Islam and Image: Beyond Aniconism and Iconoclasm,” led by Professor Finbarr Barry Flood, I began to understand that these reactions against the proliferation of the cult of images were not only paralleled in eighth-century Byzan- tium, but also continued to cause apprehension into the Reformation and French Revolution, distinguishing Islam’s reaction as part of a greater unease surrounding the worship of images. Through analysis of several seeming iconoclastic erasures made to floor mosaics in Christian mosaics in Jordan, I explore potential reasonings and results of the eventual disengagement from the figurative image. By attempting to dissuade the stereotype of random destruction and brutalization to imagery, I thereby acknowledge the dichotomous truth of iconoclasm and art making while highlighting the culturally perpetuated lie of total artistic abandonment.

Figure 1: Dome of the Rock, Qubbat as-Sakhra, Larger Entity: Temple Mount, Jerusalem, Israel, 687-692. 18 Richard, Two Truths and a Lie Introduction Our perception of religion is often synonymous with a cult of images. From muscular renderings of Zeus on Roman amphora to ink brush drawings of the Hittite weather god Tarhuna, we assume devotion to a deity must accompany the proliferation of figural representations. This misconception, in conjunction with the destruction and looting of cultural heritage sites by ISIS, wrongly perpetuates a significant lie that Islamic culture is fundamentally against the production of art and condones aggressive iconoclastic destruction. Conservative Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, wrote in his 2006 survey of the Roman Empire, Dreams of Rome, that Muslim art does not compare to the successes of Michelangelo because “it is beyond the technical accomplishments of Islamic art.”1 Significant examples of Islamic Art’s adherence to the complex aesthetics of form and color refute this claim. The Dome of the Rock [Figure 1], the oldest extant religious monument of Islam [built ca. 691],2 stands as a paradigm for the conscious ways in which Islamic art disengages from figural representations, but not from an aesthetic interest in color and form. An effusive array of design and pattern is paralleled on both the façade and interior establishing a rich con- figuration with sacred spaces. The absence of figural form is often associated with a reductive reading of Islam’s iconophobic doctrine. These assumptions downplay the historical and theological “goals of neutralizing the image” that were shared by contemporary Christians alike.3 Reactions against the proliferation of the cult of images were not only paralleled in eighth-century Byzantium, but continued to cause apprehension around the worship images into the Reformation and French Revolution, placing Islam’s reaction as part of a greater unease. I thereby acknowledge the dichotomous truths of iconoclasm and art making while highlighting the culturally perpetuated lie of total artistic abandonment. The goal of this exploratory essay is to analyze the multi-faceted early Islamic iconoclast modifications made to Christian mosaics in Umm al-Rasas, Jordan and to signify a complicated religious and political history relating to figural images. The three churches chosen for analysis, Church of the Lions, dated to 518, Church of the Priest Wa’il, dated to 586, and Church of St Stephen, dated to 718, are well studied and their relative dating indicates that they were built prior to the iconoclastic Edict of Umayyad ordered by the caliph Yazid II in 721 AD. As one of the first definitive decrees for the prohibition of images depicting sentient beings, analyzing the severity and methods of tempering figural imagery will give a better intro-

1 Frances Perraudin, Boris Johnson Claimed Islam put Muslim World Centuries Behind, The Guardian, July 15, 2019. 2 Dodd, E., ‘The image of the word’, Berytus 18, 1969, p. 19. 3 Flood, F.B., ‘Christian mosaics in early Islamic Jordan and Palestine: a case of regional iconoclasm’ in Byzantium and Islam: Age of transition, catalogue of Metropolitan Museum exhibition, 2010, p. 647. Columbia Journal of Art History 19 ductory understanding of the careful treatment of Islamic art.

I. Theological Analysis and the Edict of Yazid II In early Islam, the prohibition of figural images was primarily restricted to the mosque rather than secular spheres of life.4 This is demonstrated in the literary accounts of the magnificence of the Umayyad palace decorations5 which reflected exposure to the artistic wealth of the Mediter- ranean and Iran through the expansion of the Arab conquests beginning in the seventh century.6 Here the proliferation of animal and figural design took on an early naturalistic style with Byzantine, Syrian and Sasanian influences.7 Without a solidified political doctrine concerning the arts before the Edict of Yazid II (r. 720-724) in 721, which is only understood today through incomplete literary Muslim sources,8 the validity of any connection between the rise of subsequent iconoclastic destruction and the edict has been disputed.9 However, Caliph Yazid II’s extension of the prohibition surrounding images in Muslim and Christian places of worship signified an internal socio-political dispute regarding the need for legislative measures to control secular and religious visual representations. This ambiguity is further emphasized with the revocation of the edict by Yazid II’s brother and succes- sor Hisham ibn Abd al-Malik immediately after the former caliph’s death in 724,10 signifying initial Islamic reluctance concerning image destruction. Preserved Christian accounts further cast doubt on an inherent link between total iconoclasm and early Islamic orthodoxy. In a retrospective account written several decades later in 787, the Greek Bishop of Messana described the iconoclastic edict as a decision encouraged under the guidance of a Jewish magician from Laodicea, indicating that even some contemporary Christians did not view iconoclasm as inherent to Islam.11 This description was given during the eighth century Council of Nicaea, a Christian council which sought to revoke an iconoclast policy initiated by the Byzantine

4 Allen, T., ‘Aniconism and figural representation’, in Allen, Five Essays on Islamic Art, Manchester, Michigan, 1988, p. 18. 5 King, G., ‘Islam, iconoclasm and the declaration of doctrine’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 48, 1985, pp.267–77, p. 268. 6 Grabar, O., ‘Islam and iconoclasm’, in Iconoclasm, ed. A. Bryer and J. Herrin, Papers given at the 9th spring symposium of Byzantine Studies, University of Birmingham, 1975, p. 49. 7 Yalman, Suzan. Based on original work by Linda Komaroff. “The Art of the Umayyad Period (661–750).” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmu- seum.org/toah/hd/umay/hd_umay.htm (October 2001) 8 Ibid, p. 46. 9 King, G., ‘Islam, iconoclasm and the declaration of doctrine’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 48, 1985, p.268. 10 Sahner, C., ‘The First Iconoclasm in Islam: A New History of the Edict of Yazīd II (AH 104/AD 723)’, Der Islam, 1994, p. 10. 11 Vasiliev, A., ‘The iconoclastic edict of the Caliph Yazid II, A.D. 721’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 10, 1956, p. 30. 20 Richard, Two Truths and a Lie Emperor Leo III in 726 to remove sacred imagery from churches.12 This account indicates that total iconoclasm was neither accepted orthodoxy nor commonplace in Islamic government edicts. The main sources of aniconic and iconoclastic rhetoric are to be found instead in the Quran, and especially the Hadith— the former describes revelations from God while the latter are the traditions describing the life and teachings of the Prophet Muhammad.13 While neither explicitly prohibits the general use of images, there is an implicit rejection of idolatry in the Quran, for “idols [are] Satan’s work.”14 Furthermore, the command “thou shalt not make unto thee any graven images or any likeness of anything that is in heaven or that in the earth,”15 implies that image-making is something only God is capable of. The Hadith, reflecting the views of the Muslim world during the Arab conquests in the seventh century continues the rejection of imagery. “Angels will not enter a house where there is a picture or a dog” is a direct view on images themselves, while “a maker of images and pictures” will be punished on Judgement Day16 an imprecation against the artist himself. However, as previously mentioned, in early Islam these readings of the Quran and the Hadith were reserved for mosques and religious spaces, only to be interpreted later resulting in “an aniconic religion [which] left no central cultural story to be told by visual narrative.”17 This conversely focuses on the intricacies of nonfigurative images as seen in the Dome of the Rock.

II. Iconoclasm in Jordanian Churches The relative chronology and dating of Christian churches in the site of Umm al-Rasas, Jordan, places them in the wake of the iconoclastic Edict of Yazid II in 721. With a concentration of Christians in Jordan during the Umayyad period, there appears to be a correlation with a similar agglomeration of recorded iconoclastic attacks in northern Jordan and Syria.18 The following section will analyze three major churches including Church of the Lions, dated to 518, Church of the Priest Wa’il, dated to 586, and Church of St Stephen, dated to 718, all completed before the Edict of Yazid II in 721. The large floor mosaic in the nave of the Church of St Stephen [Figure 15] demonstrates inconsistencies regarding

12 Schick, R., The Christian Communities of Palestine from Byzantine to Islamic Rule, Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam 2, Princeton, New Jersey, 1995, p. 156. 13 Grabar, O., The formation of Islamic art, New Haven, 1988, p. 76. 14 Quran 5.92 of the Quran, Grabar, O., The formation of Islamic art, New Haven, 1988, p. 84. 15 Quran 20.4 of the Quran, Grabar, O., The formation of Islamic art, New Haven, 1988, p. 84. 16 Grabar, O., The formation of Islamic art, New Haven, 1988, p. 86. 17 Allen, T., ‘Aniconism and figural representation’, in Allen, Five Essays on Islamic Art, Manchester, Michigan, 1988, p. 28. 18 King, G., ‘Islam, iconoclasm and the declaration of doctrine’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 48, 1985, p. 271. Columbia Journal of Art History 21

Figure 2: Panel of the Benefactors, Church of St Stephen, Umm al-Rasas, 718. Image from: Guidetti, Mattia, In the Shadow of the Church: The Building of Mosques in Early Medieval Syria,” Boston, Brill Publishing, 2016, p. 217. Figure 3: Modified Mosaic Square, Church of St George, Jerash, 529. Image From: Schick, Robert, Perspectives on Byzantium and Islam: A Symposium, Metropolitan Museum of Fine Art, New York: New York, 2012, online: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=C8VIKJHvZuI.

Figure 4: Floor Mosaic Depicting Lions, Deer, and Flora, Church of the Lions, Umm al-Rasas, Jordan, 574. Image From: Schick, Robert, Perspectives on Byzantium and Islam: A Symposium, Metropolitan Museum of Fine Art, New York: New York, 2012, online: https:// www.youtube.com/ watch?v=C8VIKJHvZuI.

Figure 5: Close-up of Roundels from the Church of the Lions. Figure 6: Floor Mosaic Depicting Two Figures and Architecture, Church of the Priest of Wa’il, Ummal-Rasas, Jordan, 586. Image From: Schick, Robert, Perspectives on Byzantium and Islam: A Symposium, Metropolitan Museum of Fine Art, New York: New York, 2012, online: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=C8VIKJHvZuI. 22 Richard, Two Truths and a Lie the precision surrounding iconoclastic modifications. This raises the issue of who perpetrated the alterations and if they occurred at the same time. Since destruction happened at any time after the completion of the mosaics, archaeologists such as Robert Schick relied heavily on any remaining literary sources or Greek dedicatory inscriptions within the churches themselves in order to date their destruction. Iconoclastic modifications to these Jordanian churches could take on a variety of forms and level of destruction, reflective of the large geographical expanse that needed to be covered by Umayyad control. The site of Umm al-Rasas, located in central Jordan, offers an -ap plicable study into Christian and Islamic interactions through mosaic modification and destruction since the site exchanged religious ties and is well preserved and studied. Layers of architectural features dating from the third century indicate that the site grew from a Roman-Byzantine fortified camp,19 later accommodating a well-organized town plan and four churches within the walls. The floor mosaics of the church of St Stephen, dated to around 718 by the archaeologist Robert Shick, show a precision-based iconoclasm that renders the original images recognizable while still eliminating or scrambling a majority of the details. The Panel of the Benefactors [Figure 2], located in the central nave, depicts seven pomegranate trees dividing seven scrambled figures that have been adjusted to create geometric and vegetal abstract forms in a way that their overall outlines and forms can still be determined.20 The inclusion of the pomegranate trees aids the lush and congested scene as a whole and cel- ebrates the bountiful giving of the earth while the images of the personified benefactors have been lifted and the void replaced by new or reshuffled tesserae.21 The pixelated effect of reused tesserae, as opposed to monochrome pieces of mosaics replacing the void, indicates that the complete eradica- tion of the original composition was not the main intention. The addition of foliage and abstract shapes in a similar style to that of the trees show an appreciation for the rendering of naturalistic forms; emphasizing a denial of figurative embodiment only. Much like the Panel of the Benefactors, the floor mosaics of the Church of St George in Jerash, Jordan [Figure 3] underwent significant change. Here, it is possible to see that an original image was extracted because the replaced mosaic pieces are slightly larger than the surrounding ones. Whether erasing images of figures or fauna, extra effort was taken to provide new monochrome tesserae instead of scrambling the original, as seen

19 UNESCO World Heritage Site Report, The Old City of Umm er-Rasas [MEFA’A], The Department of Antiquities on Behalf of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, February 2002, p. 3. Online: whc.unescoworldher- itage.org. 20 Guidetti, Mattia, In the Shadow of the Church: The Building of Mosques in Early Medieval Syria,” Boston, Brill Publishing, 2016, p. 43. 21 Ibid, p. 83. Columbia Journal of Art History 23 previously in the Panel of the Benefactors. This shows a conscious effort into the preservation of the artistic integrity of the composition of the floor as a whole. The difference between the scrambling of the images in the Church of St Stephen versus the choice to fully obscure the design in the Church of St George may have to do with materials and size of the work. The Panel of the Benefactors at Umm al-Rasas is much larger than the work at Jerash, with a greater number of spaces to fill. Reusing the original tesserae would have been easier and less visually abrasive than trying to match the yellowed color of the original tesserae. In both cases, the aesthetic properties of the compositional layout may have been considered and the thoroughness of the iconoclastic destruction and modification is apparent through the outlines of the original images.

III. Actors and Ideologies The time-consuming nature of pixelating, adjusting, and modifying these mosaics begs the question: were artisans or militants involved in iconoclastic alteration? With no written record detailing the agents who destroyed or made modifications to these mosaics, the possibilities are limited to either Muslims tightening control over the arts or Christians modifying existing works just enough to demonstrate images were not venerated. The latter could be a response to either Muslim intervention or a rise in the Christian Iconoclast movement that would later be taken up by the Byzantine Emperor Leo III. Evidence of a Christian response to Muslim tightening legislative control over images may be indicated in the precision- based destruction of certain mosaics,22 suggesting scrambling as a means of preserving the original until authoritative Islamic control began to ease. This is where precise analysis of the methods of modification or destruction help to elucidate the various incentives behind their destruction. Imprecise iconoclastic disfigurement may indicate closer ties to legislative procedures carried out quickly over a large geographic area. The floor mosaic in the apse of the Church of the Lions at Umm al-Rasas [Figure 4], dated around 518,23 depicts three fruit trees dividing two lions and two slender deer. The modifications appear to dissipate moving left to right since the first deer has been reduced to an outline while the deer furthest to the right is unchanged. Most of the left lion has been erased, leaving only the head, neck, and one paw, while the adjacent right lion retains the head, neck, and most of the torso. There are no coherent or consistent iconoclastic modifications made to each animal or efforts to replace the voids with new pieces of mosaic and indicate a cursory attempt at iconoclasm. It is unlikely

22 Schick, R., The Christian Communities of Palestine from Byzantine to Islamic Rule, Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam 2, Princeton, New Jersey, 1995, p. 199. 23 Schick, Robert, Perspectives on Byzantium and Islam: A Symposium, Metropolitan Museum of Fine Art, New York: New York, 2012, online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8VIKJHvZuI. 24 Richard, Two Truths and a Lie

Figure 7: Maqamat of al-Hariri, Iraq, ca. 1240, later iconoclastic alterations. Image From: Flood, Finbarr Barry, Between Cult and Culture: Bamiyan, Islamic Iconoclasm, and the Museum, The Art Bulletin, vol. 84, no. 4, 2002, p.648. JSTOR, www.jstor. org/stable/3177288. Figure 8: Floor Mosaic Showing Men in Boats, Shell, and Fish, Church of St Stephen, Umm al-Rasas, Jordan, 718. Later iconoclastic modifications made. Image From: Schick, Rob- ert, Perspectives on Byzantium and Islam: A Symposium, Met- ropolitan Museum of Fine Art, New York: New York, 2012, online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8VIKJHvZuI.

Figure 9: Floor Mosaic of Fish in a Bowl, Church of St. Stephen, Umm al-Rasas, Jordan, 718. Image From: Schick, Robert, Perspectives on Byzantium and Islam: A Symposium, Metropolitan Museum of Fine Art, New York: New York, 2012, online: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=C8VIKJHvZuI. Figure 10: Alternating Squares and Roun- dels of Foliage and Bird Scenes, Church of St Stephen, Umm al-Rasas. Picture From: Umm al-Rasas, Church of St Stephen Floor Mosaics, http://www.art-andarchaeology. com/jordan/rasas/ra01.html Figure 11: Mosaic and Two Pigeons and Grapes, Twins Churches at Umm al- Rasas, Jordan. Picture From: UNESCO World Heritage Report. Columbia Journal of Art History 25 that these voids were due to accidental floor damage: specific zoomorphic forms within border roundels have been targeted and erased [Figure 5] while modifications or deliberate erasure have not affected the extensive geometric patterning surrounding the animal imagery. In a Syriac literary source, dated around the ninth century, it is possible to gather that execution of the Edict of Yazid II was carried out by one of the Caliph’s brothers, Maslama ibn Abd al-Malik, a military commander, and his soldiers.24 The organization of the destruction of images throughout a large geographical area by soldiers would have resulted in an unmethodical and irregular execution. In this instance, the symbolic permanent act of destruction was the salient goal. Comparatively, specific targeting of features of the figurative image denotes an attack on the power of imagery and coincides with theological, rather than legislative, objectives. Within the Church of the Priest Wa’il at Umm al-Rasas, dated around 586,25 there are depictions of figural forms within elaborate geometric and floral patterning. One of the floor mosaics [Figure 6] depicts two figures from the waist up in the foreground of the composition with architectural detailing behind. Through careful lifting, only the hands and face have been removed and scrambled, indicating an issue with the properties of these features. This is very different from the approach to the Panel of the Benefactors within the Church of St Stephen, where the entire figure had been lifted and scrambled. Interpretations of the Hadith’s objections to idolatry resulted in targeting the discontinuation of the soul through decapitation, defacement and recontextualization so the image could no longer be venerated.26 This may offer an explanation for the specific disfigurement of the head and hands, recognizable features of a living being. This attacking of the representation’s vitality through “lethal” strikes to hands, eyes, nose, and mouth can also be seen in the defacement of a thirteenth-century Islamic manuscript of the Maqamat of al-Hariri, origi- nating in Iraq [Figure 7]. Here, a line has been drawn through the saints’ neck in an attempt to “render the image powerless.”27 These direct modifications demonstrate that Islamic iconoclasm was not an issue of “otherness” looking only to repress Christian iconography, but a broader socio-political and theological discourse reflecting a growing concern with the cult of images.28 However, it must be noted that direct Muslim iconoclasm or the active destruction of art and the image seldom took place, and is instead an

24 Vasiliev, A., ‘The iconoclastic edict of the Caliph Yazid II, A.D. 721’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 10, 1956, p. 37. 25 Schick, Robert, Perspectives on Byzantium and Islam: A Symposium, Metropolitan Museum of Fine Art, New York: New York, 2012, online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8VIKJHvZuI. 26 Flood, F.B., ‘Christian mosaics in early Islamic Jordan and Palestine: a case of regional iconoclasm’ in Byzan- tium and Islam: Age of transition, catalogue of Metropolitan Museum exhibition, 2010, p. 643. 27 Flood, F.B, Between Cult and Culture: Bamiyan, Islamic Iconoclasm, and the Museum, The Art Bulletin, vol. 84, no. 4, 2002, p.648. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3177288. 28 Flood, B.F., ‘Christian mosaics in early Islamic Jordan and Palestine: a case of regional iconoclasm’ in Byzan- tium and Islam: Age of transition, catalogue of Metropolitan Museum exhibition, 2010, p. 17. 26 Richard, Two Truths and a Lie aniconism cultural tendency. This makes the Edict of Yazid II an example of caliph rule overstepping its control into the religious space. Selective disfigurement can also be seen in a floor mosaic at the Church of St Stephen [Figure 8] which depicts (left to right) a tall rectan- gular tower, conch shells, a large fish, and two men sitting in a boat. The figures of the two men are similarly censored in that both of their faces and hands have been filled in with colored tesserae from the background. Larger dolphins and aquatic animals have been almost completely erased, apart from an occasional fin, while the shells have been left intact. What is striking is the inclusion of an unaltered fish on the left-hand side of the composition. This is parallel to another unaltered fish on a bowl adjacent to this larger scene [Figure 9]. Barry Flood suggested that this inclusion is due to an interpretation of the biblical scripture concerning “life beginning at breath” and the previously held belief that fish breathed water.29 It is complicated to substantively differentiate why selective disfigurement occurred not only to certain body parts but also to certain figures within the work, although it clearly indicates the lack of a clearly defined convention within the Islamic community during the eighth and ninth centuries. After this analysis, it is possible to differentiate between two intentions behind modifying or destroying an image. The deliberate scrambling of certain features at the Church of the Priest of Wa’il was an act of “instru- mental” iconoclasm, where the action was to achieve the greater goal of preservation yet discontinuation of a potential spirited idol. This is compared to the “expressive” iconoclasm seen in the Church of the Lions where the desire to express a belief was through the act of destruction itself.30 There is a greater significance for the underlying religious meaning and symbolic at- tachment of an image than for the fact they are representations in general.31

IV. Unaltered Church Mosaics The juxtaposition of direct erasure or modifications of certain imagery and unaltered depictions of zoomorphic forms and figures indicate Islam’s stance against the image as irregular and changeable, reliant on the individual or agent conducting the modifications and the image itself. At the Church of St Stephen in Umm al-Rasas, there are several examples of careful pixilation to the images of birds in alternating squares and roundels [Figure 10]. The overall integrity of the birds is not obstructed since the torso, beak, and tail remain while the pixilation is concentrated to the outline of the head and feet. In this instance, complete censorship of the

29 Flood, B.F., Slade Lectures: Islam and Image: Beyond Aniconism and Iconoclasm, Oxford University, 2019. 30 Flood, B.F., ‘Christian mosaics in early Islamic Jordan and Palestine: a case of regional iconoclasm’ in Byzan- tium and Islam: Age of transition, catalogue of Metropolitan Museum exhibition, 2010, p. 646. 31 King, G., ‘Islam, iconoclasm and the declaration of doctrine’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 48, 1985, p. 2. Columbia Journal of Art History 27 total figure, as seen in the Panel of the Benefactors, was not the goal, rather a careful annihilation of the power of zoomorphic imagery, suggesting careful consideration for the cohesion of the entire floor mosaic. However, these pixelated modifications to bird imagery were inconsistent, as seen at the Twins Churches, two structures located inside the castrum, north of St Stephen. There, examples of unaltered birds decorate the borders and interior of an impressive mosaic [Figure 11-12].There is no sign of alteration to the numerous fanciful birds or signs of repairs after previous iconoclastic damage indicated by the consistent coloring of the tesserae. The dating of these churches to the late sixth century places the mosaics well before the completion of those in St Stephen’s, and, therefore, before the iconoclastic destruction that censored figurative and zoomorphic imagery. With much of the material context surrounding these mosaics destroyed, such as the walls, roof, and auxiliary buildings, it is difficult to determine why some mosaics were targeted more than others. It is possible to assume that the walls of these churches displayed a variety of wall paintings which would have been the primary concern of iconoclast destruction while floor mosaics could easily be covered by rugs. Furthermore, if the church fell into disuse, debris might have covered parts of the mosaics, thereby hindering their destruction. Comparably, the well-preserved city of Jerash, located in northern Jordan near the capital of Amman, retains some of the most detailed and elaborate examples of geometric and unaltered zoomorphic and figurative forms. As with Umm al-Rasas, Jerash was a prosperous city ever since the Roman settlement Gerasa, indicated by the discovery of fifteen churches, reflective of the establishment of Christianity through Emperor Constan- tine.32 During the Umayyad period of the eighth-century, the city of Jerash yielded to Islamic forces with little damage or destruction to the metropolis. An effective example of the preservation of the mosaics is the floor of the Church of Saints Cosmas and Damian, dated 533 CE, where two-tone geometric and animal forms are uninterrupted by any iconoclastic modifications [Figure 13]. White squares, similar to the previously examined modified square at the Church of St George at Jerash, depict slender deer and plumed peacocks. It is difficult to determine why certain images were left unaltered, but this does indicate inconsistencies within the doctrine of Islamic iconoclasm and a well explored appreciation for the beauty of the artistic mastery of Byzantine mosaics.33 One explanation for this selective destruction could correspond with the development of the mosque and the requirement that a portion of Christian churches be adapted for Muslim prayer, establishing a temporary

32 Buckley, Kristal, Victoria Archaeological Survey Register of Consultants in Historical Archaeology, Austra- lian Archaeology, 1988, p. 114. 33 Al-Asad, Mohammad. “Encounters: A Preliminary Anatomy.” Gesta 43, no. 2 (2004): 177-81. Accessed April 12, 2020. 28 Richard, Two Truths and a Lie contradiction between the surrounding imagery and religious conventions.34 This would explain inconsistencies within the site such as meticulous erasure in concentrated areas of the church, indicating Muslim involvement; targeted erasure of saints and imagery of Christ, perhaps indicating a rise in Christian iconoclasm against the veneration of depictions of holy figures; and more cursory or erratic modifications, perhaps linked to legislative control of the arts through the Edict of Yazid II. However, an essential part of substantiating these claims is the need for selective image destruction alongside a mihrab, or niche facing Mecca, a component no mosque is without.35 It is interesting to note, therefore, that a mihrab is often not found in most of the churches at Jerash. However, the alterations clearly demonstrate an incentive for selective disfigurement. The absence of physical Muslim religious interventions, besides modifications to figurative motifs, can be -ex plained through a history of repurposing from Roman temples to Christian churches, and, possibly, Muslim mosques, ultimately defining these spaces through syncretism.

V. Coeval Islam Perspectives Now that modifications of Christian figural imagery have been discussed; it is essential to understand what artistic embellishments defined Islamic spaces. As previously mentioned, the Dome of the Rock [Figure 1], traditionally believed to be the site of the Ascension of the Prophet Moham- mad, shares artistic values and influences of Byzantine sources and yet is an excellent example of the emergence of a unique Islamic style. From the exterior, the blend of geometric and Arabic script creates an exchange of complex visual stimuli and interest in repetitive symmetry which extends to the drum of the dome. The vibrant and monochrome golden copula acts as a focal point, drawing the gaze of the viewer up to heaven. However, the profusion of color, especially gold, green, and blue, throughout the exterior mosaics may be a reminder of the abundance and beauty of the Earth, God’s creation. The interior continues the rich repetitive coloring where Byzantine influences are more apparent. While figural representations may be missing from the design, there is a conscious effort to encapsulate and honor the beauty of naturalistic forms. Comparatively, the interior courtyard design was not limited to abstract or geometric form but extended to a mastery of architectural and fauna rendering in Islamic art. The Great Mosque of Damascus, Syria, completed in 715 [Figure 14],36 while heavily destroyed in a fire in 1893,37

34 Guidetti, Mattia, In the Shadow of the Church: The Building of Mosques in Early Medieval Syria,” Boston, Brill Publishing, 2016, p. 36. 35 Dodd, E., ‘The image of the word’, Berytus 18, 1969, p. 19. 36 Flood, F. B, Umayyad Survivals and Mamluk Revivals: Qalawunid Architecture and the Great Mosque of Damascus, Muqarnas, 1997, p. 59. JSTOR online: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1523236. 37 Grafman, Rafi, and Myriam Rosen-Ayalon, The Two Great Syrian Umayyad Mosques: Jerusalem and Damas- Columbia Journal of Art History 29 has its courtyard side vine mosaics still intact. The upper facade of the domed vestibule is decorated with elaborate mosaic work, also showing signs of repair in the aftermath of the fire. In gilded glass, four large trees frame the composition which includes several architectural features broken up by smaller vegetal features creating a congested scene. This verdure is comparable to what remains in the Panel of the Benefactors at the Church of St Stephen, where the pomegranate trees were left unmodified and more flora was added over the figures. Unlike decorations of the Christian faith, where religious imagery represents biblical linguistic and literary traditions, Islamic artistic doctrine relies on the pure beauty of form, color, and physical expanse of the composition, honoring the magnum opus creation of the natural world created by God. To further the discussion surrounding Islamic attitudes on the proliferation of the image, the portable and secular arts—pottery, coinage, medallions, and carvings—indicate shifting ideologies around figures and spaces through the inclusion of bust portraits. In an effort to create distance from Late Antique and western traditions, Islamic secular art began to reflect a cultural redeployment38 through the reduction of the classical figural form from the late Umayyad to Abbasid period. Early Umayyad palaces were lav- ishly decorated with large sculptural forms including imperial statues whose physicality and size matched those of a western tradition.39 However, scale and physicality were reduced and concerns surrounding excessive imagery were spreading to the secular realm during the Abbasid period.40 Indeed, after Abd al-Malik’s reform (ca. 691),41 no Islamic coin displayed figurative imagery, indicating initial indifference towards imagery had changed to litmus rules surrounding the use of disputed imagery in objects and spaces with social purposes,”42

IV. Conclusion This essay acknowledged the contradictory truths of art making and iconoclasm juxtaposed to the lie of artistic abandonment in Islamic art by analyzing the fraught interpretations surrounding specific alterations. The cus, Muqarnas, vol. 16, 1999, p. 7. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1523262. 38 Allen, T., ‘Aniconism and figural representation’, in Allen, Five Essays on Islamic Art, Manchester, Michigan, 1988, online: http://sonic.net/~tallen/palmtree/fe2.htm. 39 Crone, C., ‘Islam, Judeo-Christianity and Byzantine Iconoclasm’, Jerusalem Studies in Arabic & Islam 2, 1980, 59–95. Reprinted in From Kavad to al-Ghazali: Religion, Law and Political Thought in the Near East, c.600 c.1100, Aldershot, 2005, Chapter III, p. 43. 40 Allen, T., ‘Aniconism and figural representation’, in Allen, Five Essays on Islamic Art, Manchester, Michigan, 1988, online: http://sonic.net/~tallen/palmtree/fe2.htm. 41 Treadwell, Luke, Abd al-Malik’s Coinage Reforms: The Role of the Damascus Mint, Parcourir Les Collec- tions, p. 369, online: https://www.persee.fr/doc/numi_0484-8942_2009_num_6_165_2879#numi_0484- 8942_2009_num_6_165_T1_0369_0000 These reforms situate an important historical development towards neutralizing the image and dictate Islam’s growing dichotomy between the image and public spaces. 42 Grabar, O., ‘Islam and iconoclasm’, in Iconoclasm, ed. A. Bryer and J. Herrin, Papers given at the 9th spring symposium of Byzantine Studies, University of Birmingham, 1975, p. 50. 30 Richard, Two Truths and a Lie only concrete evidence of iconoclasm up to the fall of the Umayyad Caliph- ate in 750 was the Edict of Yazid II,43 making the order unusual for the time. The subsequent variety of alterations to Christian imagery in the churches of Umm al-Rasas, Jordan, also demonstrates an informal and irregular doctrine concerning the treatment of images. A conscious effort of avoidance and alteration of figurative representations was not a result of consistent mandated law or doctrine. Instead, it was a response to a formal vocabulary established through a culmination of centuries of slow disengagement from the image that spanned across many territories and religions. While the Edict of Yazid II does not constitute a direct impetus for iconoclastic modifications made to Christian floor mosaics, it does situate repression of the image as a central Islamic polemic. Artistic redaction and censorship, especially in a religious context, go against an ingrained western philosophy that assigns immeasurable monetary and moral value to art. This prejudice for safeguarding original art in its purest and most static form often obscures an appreciation for the susceptibility of artistic expression to history. The scars that it bares are proof of human sensitivity to moral conundrums. While iconoclastic alterations, often quite thorough and final, are an important component in the complex histories of Islamic politics and the Muslim faith, the mosaics present as active expressions which tell an ongoing story. In leaving flora and abstract forms and via the many examples of complex and intricate patternings on mosques and social spaces, the inherent value and truth for artistic expression is not lost. Instead, it is celebrated.

43 King, G., ‘Islam, iconoclasm and the declaration of doctrine’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 48, 1985, p. 267.

Sophie Richard is a senior at Smith College in Massachusetts (Class of 2020). Her research was conducted at Keble College, Oxford University (January-April 2019) under the guidance and supervision of Péter Nagy, DPhil Islamicist at St Regents Park College. Columbia Journal of Art History 31 Figures

Figure 12: Floor Mosaic Depicting Unaltered Bird, Twins Churches at Umm al-Rasas. Figure 13: Unaltered Zoomorphic and Figurative Imagery, Church of Saints Cosmas and Damian Jerash, Jordan. Picture From: https://universes.art/en/art-destinations/jordan/jerash/ tour-3/church-cosmas-damianus-1/

Figure 14: Entrance to prayer hall from courtyard, Umayyad Mosque, Great Mosque of Da- mascus, al-Masjed al-Umawi, Church of St. John the Baptist, original building built 706-715, rebuilt 1072-1092, 1401, 1894 Image From: 2008. Artstor, library.artstor.org/asset/ASA- HARAIG_1113122205 Figure 15: Entire Floor Mosaic from the Church of St Stephen at Umm al-Rasas, Jordan.

Bibliography

Allen, T., ‘Aniconism and figural representation’, in Allen, Five Essays on Islamic Art, Manchester, Michigan, 1988, pp. 17–38. Online at http://sonic.net/~tallen/palmtree/fe2.ht Crone, C., ‘Islam, Judeo-Christianity and Byzantine Iconoclasm’, Jerusalem Studies in Arabic & Islam 2, 1980, 59–95. Reprinted in From Kavad to al-Ghazali: Religion, Law and Political Thought in the Near East, c.600-c.1100, Aldershot, 2005, Chapter III. Dodd, E., ‘The image of the word’, Berytus 18, 1969, 35–79. Flood, B.F., ‘Christian mosaics in early Islamic Jordan and Palestine: a case of regional iconoclasm’ in Byzantium and Islam: Age of transition, catalogue of Metropolitan Museum exhibition, 2010, 17. Flood, F. B, Umayyad Survivals and Mamluk Revivals: Qalawunid Architecture and the Great Mosque of Damascus, Muqarnas, 1997, JSTOR online: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1523236? Grabar, O., ‘Islam and iconoclasm’, in Iconoclasm, ed. A. Bryer and J. Herrin, Papers given at the 9th 32 Richard, Two Truths and a Lie spring symposium of Byzantine Studies, University of Birmingham, 1975, 45–52. Online at https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/monographs/vq27zn57c Grabar, O., The formation of Islamic Art, New Haven, 1988, 75–103 + “Postscriptum”. Online at http://lib1.org/_ads/7a209233526e3223c7d2da131a3c66bf Grafman, Rafi, and Myriam Rosen-Ayalon, The Two Great Syrian Umayyad Mosques: Jerusalem and Damascus, Muqarnas, vol. 16, 1999, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1523262. Griffith, S.H., ‘Images, Islam and Christian icons: a moment in the Christian/Muslim encounter in early Islamic times’, in La Syrie de Byzance à l’Islam, ed. Canivet P., and Rey-Coquais, J.-P., Damas- cus, 1992, 121–38. Griffith, S.H., ‘Christians, Muslims and the Image of the One God: iconophilia and iconophobia in the World of Islam in Umayyad and early Abbasid times’, Die Welt der Götterbilder, ed. B. Groneberg et al., Berlin, 2007, 347–80. King, G., ‘Islam, iconoclasm and the declaration of doctrine’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 48, 1985, pp.267–77. Mundell, M., ‘Monophysite church decoration’, in Iconoclasm, ed. A. Bryer and J. Herrin, Papers given at the 9th spring symposium of Byzantine Studies, University of Birmingham, 1975, pp. 59–74. Online at https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/monographs/vq27zn57c Miles, G.C., ‘The iconography of Umayyad coinage’, Ars Orientalis 3, 1959, 207–13. Natif, M., ‘Concepts of idol anxiety in Islamic art’, Idol anxiety, ed. J. Ellenbogen and A. Tugendhaft, Stanford, 2011, 41–55. Sahner, C., ‘The First Iconoclasm in Islam: A New History of the Edict of Yazīd II (AH 104/AD 723)’, Der Islam, 94(1), 5–56. Schick, R., The Christian Communities of Palestine from Byzantine to Islamic Rule, Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam 2, Princeton, New Jersey, 1995. (see Chapter IX, “Iconoclasm”) Vasiliev, A., ‘The iconoclastic edict of the Caliph Yazid II, A.D. 721’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 10, 1956, pp. 25–47. (JSTOR via solo) Guidetti, Mattia, In the Shadow of the Church: The Building of Mosques in Early Medieval Syria,”Boston, Brill Publishing, 2016. Hanadi al-Taher, Basem Mahamid, Husam Hjazeen, Jehad Haroun, Ahmed Lash, Asma Shhaltoug, Hamada Al-Mor, Umm ar-Rasas Site Management Plan, UNESCO World Heritage Site Schick, Robert, Perspectives on Byzantium and Islam: A Symposium, Metropolitan Museum of Fine Art, New York: New York, 2012, online: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=C8VIKJHvZuI. Virtual Pilgrimage Through the Senses in Medieval Manuscripts

Cecilia Mou

Abstract: Thirteenth and fourteenth-century monks and nuns in medieval Europe hold a unique relation to pilgrimage-related manuscripts – they are amongst the few literate demographics of the era, yet due to their monastic duties they cannot partake in the kind of physical pilgrimages the depicted in the manuscripts. ‘Virtual’ or ‘armchair’ pilgrimage thus became a popular phenomenon in the medieval monastic environment; votaries began to internalise the experience of a pilgrimage through reading manuscripts of travel records, devotional texts, and maps. This paper explores how medieval manuscripts activated their readers’ sensory perceptions, which further translated into a ‘sixth sense’ (intellectual/imaginary sense) to mediate the virtual pilgrimage. With a deeply rooted legacy in Christianity, the human senses act not only as the bridge between material reality and the spiritual realm but also as a toolkit for medita- tion on Christ’s Passion, and thus achieve the same emotive response as a physical pilgrimage. Through a close reading of Matthew Paris’ itinerary map the Chronica Majora and a folio of Christ’s side wound in the Cistercian manuscript booklet the Villers Miscellany, the paper investigates the unconventional use of manuscripts beyond the scope of art objects and metric relics, but also as a mode of transport. Figure 1 Matthew Paris MS 26, fol. 1r Manuscript Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 34 Mou, Virtual Pilgrimage *** “And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or fields for my sake will receive a hun- dred times as much and will inherit eternal life.” Matthew 19:29

Virtual pilgrimage was prevalent but not limited to the thirteenth to fourteenth-century European monastic environment, in which manuscripts were used as the sole liable resource for votaries to partake in repentance. Jacques de Vitry (1216-1227), bishop of Acre gave two sermons addressing pilgrimage, announcing it ‘a time for atonement, suffering, and hardship.’1 Pilgrims are expected to meditate on Christ’s Passion by walking the path Christ walked, experience His suffering to a degree intellectually to gain indulgence – time off purgatory – with their final destination being eternal life in heavenly Jerusalem. Despite this, physical transportation was difficult for monks – who took a vow of poverty – and more so for nuns due to the strict enclosure enforced by the Dominican reform movement.2* Under physical limitation, manuscripts became the fuel to both initiate virtual pilgrimage and mediate it. Through the effects manuscripts have on votaries’ sensory perceptions, manuscripts activate votaries to embark on a virtual pilgrimage in which their secular act of reading is elevated into a spiritual deepening of their faith in Christ. The internalisation of manuscripts’ information from physical material into spiritual practice is achieved through a union of the physical senses, which ultimately transforms into an “internal sense” that is crucial to virtual pilgrimage. Virtual pilgrims make use of manuscripts such as pilgrim manuals, devotional texts, maps and images to create in their minds a journey to the Holy City, and through the derived emotive response in addition with physical prayer starts ‘the expression of the motions of pilgrimage.’3 In medieval Europe, sensory perception was not a transmission of information about something, but a device which enables spiritual qualities to be passed from one object (or being) to another.4 Strong moral connotation attached to the senses made it widely believed Christ’s miracles and virtues are passed through the senses: when a bleeding woman was healed by touching Christ’s garment, ‘Jesus, immediately knowing in himself that virtue had gone out

1 Debra J. Birch, ‘Jacques de Vitry and the Ideology of Pilgrimage’, in Pilgrimage Explored, ed. by J. Stop- ford (Great Britain: York Medieval Press, 1999), pp.79-94 (p.93). 2 Marie-Luise Ehrenschwendtner, ‘Virtual Pilgrimage? Enclosure and the Practice of Piety at St. Katherine’s Convent, Augsburg’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 60 (2009), 45-73 (pp.45). 3 Kathryn M. Rudy, Virtual Pilgrimages in the Convent: Imagining Jerusalem in the Late Middle Ages (Belgium: Brepolis 2011), p.29. * Dominican reform movement 4 C.M. Woolgar, The Senses in Late Medieval England(China: Yale University Press, 2006), p.2. Columbia Journal of Art History 35 of him, turned him about in the press, and said, Who touched my clothes?’5 The notion of senses in medieval times was inherited from classical antiquity and is often defined together as a general joint connotation of ‘to experience’.6 It should be noted the medieval senses are not to be considered within the framework of contemporary knowledge. For example, ‘speech’ is a known medieval sense perception, unlike the modern age’s division into touch, sound, and taste. The medieval sense of hearing ‘to hear’ oir( ) means ‘to understand or comprehend’, and has less to do with physical audibility.7 Amongst these are also vision, touch, and smell, which though are comparatively more similar to contemporary understanding, the extent to which these senses having the same meaning remains arguable. As a result, there was not as much a distinction between the ‘effect’ of each sense – all senses were inter- related to build a general consciousness; a sixth ‘internal sense’ of which the definition has been disputed amongst scholars. Archaeology archivist C.M. Woolgar defines the internal sense ‘the link between man and the external world on the one hand, and the intellect and spiritual truth on the other.’8 Art historian Sixten Ringbom sees it simply as the human imagination, whereas medieval studies researcher Richard Newhauser appears to associate it with memory. In the case of medieval virtual pilgrimage, it is perhaps feasible to see both memorial and imaginative practice working together to create meaning for the divine truth; both are present, but the nature of different senses evoke more or less of one from the other. In the case of medieval manuscripts, vision imparts the most technical and intellectual information about the pilgrimage due to manuscripts being primarily a form of visual material; the other senses act more in facilitation. Vision in medieval terms is more complex than sight; ‘to see’ (veer) embodies observation, recognition, study, and consideration.9 Vision is especially paramount to virtual pilgrimage when manuscripts synthesise texts and scaled images such as metric relics. Metric relics provide a sense of measurement to facilitate the viewer of the relic to make spatial or temporal connections with the holy persons or events.10 The measurement of relics depicted on manuscripts (and the physical manuscripts alike) builds a sense of space and time by intellectualising information through sight. Saint Augustine discusses a tri- partite model of vision, where there is a corporeal, a spiritual (or imaginative), and an intellectual vision. He argues when a person sees, a corporeal image is formed in the human spirit, and together with the human mind’s rationality, transport the image into the intellect, thus ‘spiritual vision consists of cor-

5 Mark 5:25-34. 6 Woolgar, p.2. 7 ibid., p.6. 8 ibid., p.19. 9 ibid. p.6 10 Hanneke van Asperen, ‘”As if they had physically visited the holy places”: Two Sixteenth-century Manuscripts Guide a Mental Journey through Jerusalem (Radboud University Library, Mss 205 and 233’ from The Imagined and Real Jerusalem in Art and Architecture (2014), p.203. 36 Mou, Virtual Pilgrimage poreal images and imaginations.’11 This could be seen in Benedictine monk Matthew Paris’ use of composition and imagery in his itinerary map Chronica Majora to direct spatial movements. Paris’ itinerary map presents a strip structure, directing the vision from the bottom up, with representations of sites encountered along the pilgrimage route to create a sense of movement (fig.1).12 The measured time required for traveling is mapped to give virtual pilgrim a physical sense of time. Starting the itinerary in London instead of in St. Albans (where Paris and arguably his primary audience – other monks in the abbey – are located), right from the beginning reinforces a desire for traveling.13 Considering the monastery context and liable access to Paris’ manuscripts, the targeted readership would be monks. The monk figurine illustrated in a boat docked outside Acre Je- rusalem brings an intimacy to the viewer, allowing him to envision himself on the pilgrimage journey (fig.2).14 Paris’ map ‘encourages the viewer’s entry ‘into’ the map by combining the familiar sceneries of the real and observable with imagined sceneries, so that the mimetic becomes an anchor for imitation and projection.’15 The accurate representation of the pilgrimage sites and their locations does not affect virtual pilgrimage; it is in fact this ambiguity that gives votaries the imaginary freedom needed to tailor a personal journey. Medieval maps were uncommon; when maps do exist they were used to record information rather than indicate direction.16 There are three known versions of the Chronica Majora created by Paris, in which are information mismatches across different versions in terms of location, depiction, and measured time.17 Variations in illustration of the Temple of the Lord, the Temple of Solomon, and the Holy Sepulchre from the firstChronica Majora to the last (as seen in fig.3 and fig.4) show that the viewers only need a visiblesymbol of the place to initiate imagination.18 As said before, pilgrimage is a moment to meditate on Christ’s suffering; a physical medieval pilgrimage would have been a time to leave home and walk great distances likely in hunger, fatigue, and pain to contemplate a damaged, wounded body of God in mortal form. For pilgrims to visit the sites Christ has physically walked during His time on earth is a way of recounting Christ’s life. Though restricted physically, having studied the bible and Christ’s Passion with great diligence as votaries, the votaries could activate their imagination and memories – their sixth sense – to recount

11 Sixten Ringbom, ‘Devotional Images and Imaginative Devotions: Notes on the Place of Art in Late Medieval Private Piety’ from Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 111 (1969), 159-170 (pp.162). 12 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 26, fol. 1r. 13 Daniel K. Connolly, ‘Pilgrimage in the Itinerary Maps of Matthew Paris’, The Art Bulletin,81 (1999), 598-622 (pp.607). 14 MS 26, fol. 4r. 15 Connolly, p.607. 16 P.D.A. Harvey, Medieval Maps of the Holy Land (London: British Library, 2012), p.5. 17 ibid., p.74. 18 London, British Library, Royal MS 14 C vii, fol. 5r.; MS 26, fol. 4r. Columbia Journal of Art History 37

Figure 2 (Left) Matthew Paris MS 26, fol. 4r (Detail of monk) Manuscript Cambridge, Corpus Christi College Figure 3 (Below and Left) Matthew Paris Royal MS 14 C vii, fol. 5r (Detail of Jerusalem) Manuscript London British Library

Figure 4 (Above) Matthew Paris MS 26, fol. 4r (Detail of Jerusalem) Manuscript Cambridge, Corpus Christi College

Figure 5 (Above) MS 4459-70, fol. 150v Manuscript Brussels, Koninklijke Bibliotheek Figure 6 (Right) Matthew Paris Royal MS 14 C vii, ff. 4r-5r Manuscript London, British Library 38 Mou, Virtual Pilgrimage Christ’s life emotionally. Even for pilgrims partaking a physical pilgrimage, using maps alone is not enough to achieve the emotive and spiritual connection with Christ. Medieval maps of the Holy Land are typically informed by the events of the Passion, personal travel accounts, and earlier mappa mundis (map of the world) – yet ‘the biblical information reached the maps at second hand.’19 To employ Saint Augustine’s definition, taking in information recorded by Paris in the Chronica Majora – the act of looking – is a corporeal vision, whereas the digesting of information requires the intellectual and spiritual visions. The sixth sense synthesises the physical location of the Holy Land with votaries’ biblical memories, and to remember suffering both physically and emotionally serves as a reminder of the price of sin. The votaries’ memories of the Passion are triggered by the images seen, which creates an emotive response to meditate on Christ’s suffering virtually. ‘The efficacy of pilgrimage, for both real and imagined travelers, is necessarily dependent on the establishment of a symbiotic relationship between the pilgrim and the site.’20 The value of the pilgrimage act depends primarily on the traveller’s interior attitude rather than his or her exterior action, thus the traveller and the destination derive meaning from each other – the space itself does not bear meaning. In some cases, the precision in visual depiction could also ascend the corporeal vision into imaginative devotion. Saint Bernard’s view on the internal sense is it is ‘a natural preparation for the imageless devotion.’21 He believes God assumed a ‘carnal shape’ for those devotees who cannot love un- carnally to fix their affection on Him, which then develops into spiritual love. Another type of manuscript used for virtual pilgrimage is the image of Christ’s side wound, and one of the earliest examples appears in a Cistercian manuscript booklet the Villers Miscellany (fig. 5, here on referred to asChrist’s Side Wound).22 In a way, both the gash and the Arma Christi (‘Weapons of Christ’, the instruments used during Christ’s passion such as stones and the crown of thorns) represented on the manuscript are also symbols, building viewers’ intellectual connection with Christ’s suffering during the Passion. However, unlike the Chronica Majora’s lack of representational accuracy, the measurement of Christ’s Side Wound along with its striking blood-red colour – the ‘realism’ communicated through the manuscript – is one of the most important media- tors for virtual pilgrimage. Red Latin texts surrounding the gash reads, ‘[t]his is the measure of the side wound of my Lord Jesus Christ. Nobody should doubt about it be-

19 ibid., p.6. 20 Richard G. Newhauser and Arthur J. Russell, ‘Mapping virtual pilgrimage in an early fifteenth-century Arma Christi roll’ fromThe Arma Christi in Medieval and Early Modern Mate- rial Culture: With a Critical Edition of “O Vernicle”, ed. by Lisa H. Cooper and Andrea Denny- Brown (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), pp.83-112 (p.100). 21 Ringbom, p.163. 22 Rudy, p.103.; Brussels, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, MS 4459-70, fol. 150v. Columbia Journal of Art History 39 cause he himself appeared to someone and showed him his wounds’.23 First- ly, the text activates votaries to turn the page 360°, the manuscript’s visuals work in relation to its spatial approximation to the reader’s body, creating a spatial awareness. Secondly, the measurement of God’s carnal wound gives it a three-dimensionality to be compared with the reader’s body, encouraging an interaction between reader and object to further envision the scale of Christ’s body.24 Manuscript metric relics communicate scale in time and space through active vision, immersing the viewers to step into pilgrimage through intellectualising visual information. Words in manuscripts are experienced not only through vision, but also through speech. Anglo-Norman sources have shown ‘speech’ was considered one of the primary five senses in the medieval period.25 The act of speaking and of receiving the sound of a speech was thought to have transcenden- tal power, recorded since the biblical instances of Christ performing miracle through His spoken words. There is a paradoxical power dynamic surrounding speech as a sensory device in a monastic environment; monasteries and convents associate voluntary silence with holiness, yet recitation of devotional texts, confession, and spoken prayer are not only daily obligations but also believed to have purification effects.26 Sermon is believed to be the transfer of moral benefits from God’s words to the listener and speaker through speech, whereas reading spiritual texts aloud creates a moral force through sound.27 Both the Chronica Majora and Christ’s Side Wound are covered in texts: the Chronica Majora with descriptions of pilgrimage itinerary and Christ’s Side Wound with prayer on the Passion. Other than visual elements in the complex mechanism of ‘reading’, in the context of ‘making sounds with the mouth’, there entails a sense of speech, hearing, taste, and even the physical sensation of the mouth moving. Speaking out loud the words of Chronica Majora makes ‘more concrete the progress up the page’ thus constructing distance and movement.28 The reader is limited to focus on the text he or she is reading and move along the itinerary in an episodic fashion, following the events of the Passion through the topographical design of the map as if personally experiencing it in real-time. Furthermore, one would notice when following Paris’ text along the verti- cal passage of the itinerary (fig. 6), the letters for jurnee varies on the map, with long wave strokes like stresses of intonation, stretching out the word jur~~~~~nee~~~~~~~ when one reads the text out loud. The lengthened

23 ibid., p.103. 24 Natalie M. Mandziuk, ‘Drawn to scale: The medieval monastic’s virtual pilgrimage through sacred measurement’ from Binding the Absent Body in Medieval and Modern Art: Abject, virtual, and alternate bodies, ed. by Emily Kelley and Elizabeth Richards Rivenbark (Great Britain: Routledge, 2016), pp.73-92. 25 Woolgar, p.6. 26 Ehrenschwendtner, p.47-49. 27 Woolgar, p.87. 28 Connolly, p.607. 40 Mou, Virtual Pilgrimage time given by these devices to create a temporal awareness of the virtual pilgrimage goes back to the idea of pilgrimage constructing a moral framework through the sixth sense – the lived experience of Christ’s Passion is savoured, the repentance for sin is meditated, and the pilgrim’s spiritual state and needs are expressed in the language of prayer. Though also manipulating text to create intonation in speech, unlike the Chronica Majora, Christ’s Side Wound’s visual elements and textual element clash together to disrupt speech. The gash of Christ’s wound takes up the centre of the folio, cutting the bulk of the text that is a prayer – the Salve Plaga – into two halves, with its margin not only shaped by the wound but each line confronting the reader with the price Christ paid to deliver human- ity from eternal damnation. On top of the folio is a rubric that instructs the readers, ‘Whoever shall have looked upon this daily in remembrance of the passion and the weapons of Jesus Christ, shall have 40 days of indulgence, given by Pope Leo and confirmed by the same.’29 The computation combined with spoken recitation of the Lord’s Prayer was part of the devotional practice, which illustrates the intellectual sixth sense working with the corporeal senses. The indulgenced wound of Christ confirms the first stanza of the prayer that reads, ‘Hail, wound in the side of our saviour,/For from you has flowed a wave the colour of roses/And [you are] the true medicine for all ill’.30 The manuscript treats the wound as a subject to the speech, calling it ‘you’, which taken further may even suggest the gash is treated as an abstract form of man himself. The physicality of the mortal God is the source of moral compass for the secular body; there is a physicality in God’s words, which is translated into the manuscript. Manuscripts based on the measurement of Christ’s physicality guar- antee protection from disasters. Pregnant women would cut the manuscript into small pieces and consume them in a drink, literally eating the Words.31 Whether monks and nuns practice eating the words of God is unknown due to the limitation of written records, but it shows a possibility to employ taste in a more literal sense in virtual pilgrimage. Food in medieval times was thought capable of influencing a person’s moral and spiritual state.32 Though there is no sufficient record of taste being employed in the use of manuscript reading, this is not to say that taste does not play a part in virtual pilgrimage. Christianity has a deeply rooted culture of revealing the divine truth through the sense of touch; the sense of touch has the unique property of being present in all parts of the physical body; Bartholomew the Apostle considered it to be the most earthly and animalistic sense.33 It was common medieval

29 Kathryn M. Rudy, Rubrics, Images and Indulgences in Late Medieval Netherlandish Manu- scripts (The Netherlands: Brill, 2017), p.57. 30 ibid., p.57. 31 Woolgar, p.54-55. 32 ibid., p.111. 33 ibid., p.29. Columbia Journal of Art History 41 devotional practice for devotees to kiss the object they consider to be a source of faith, especially any remains of a holy person – including manuscripts. The sense of touch triggers the memory to translate devotion from the physical realm into the spiritual realm – memories of the Passion from secondhand accounts, memories of devotional texts, or memories of one’s own spiritual encounters. Medieval virtualising strategies of the Passion could be traced back to the system of memories from classical antiquity, where ‘memories are stored in a house and can be retrieved by walking through the house and picking them up again’.34 This metaphor suggests memories were treated as an archival system, allowing votaries to play the Passion out at their own pace and fill in the narrative details with memorable stories or past spiritual encounters that are relevant to the subject. The mental existence of this ‘memory house’ had a physical application where new religious encounters including the virtual pilgrimage taken could be added to the archive. For example, nuns in Das Bickenkloster in Villingen (Kloster St. Clara) turned the convent into ‘a storehouse of shared memory’ by constructing 210 placards of indulgenced holy sites around Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Rome.35 Touching the Chronica Majora during a virtual pilgrimage triggers a two-fold memorial structure when considering the map as a contact relic. Contact relics are relics that have come into close physical proximity with the holy figure during his or her lifetime, but not the physical body of the figure itself; examples include the Arma Christi or even water from the River Jordan where Christ was baptised. Jerusalem the location is a contact relic; yet, the pilgrim’s experience visiting Jerusalem – imaginatively tracing the Pas- sion through reading – also becomes a contact relic.36 Contact relics originally received miraculous power through touching saints or holy persons, and this virtue is further passed down to whoever touches the relic itself (in this case when votaries hold or turn the manuscript pages). Furthermore, the Chronica Majora has flaps stitched to the folio that invites readers to flip, turn, or fold to explore different routes around the pilgrimage sites (fig.6).37 The performance aspect of a manuscript creates a personal engagement that allows each reading of the text to vary in experience, adding spontaneity to virtual pilgrimage which mimics a physical journey. Using the cooperative system of movements to generate meaning is also homologous to medieval mnemonic practices, and the manipulation of the flaps and images calls for a similar recollection of memories linking the act of reading manuscripts with the spiritual encounter of a pilgrimage. Constancy in sensory stimuli is part of the virtual pilgrimage journey. Contrary to the Chronica Majora with an emphasis on transitioning from location to location, Christ’s Side Wound does not have a prerequisite timeline,

34 Rudy, Virtual Pilgrimage in the Covent, p.259. 35 ibid., p.260. 36 Newhauser, p.102. 37 BL, Royal MS 14 C vii, ff. 4r-5r. 42 Mou, Virtual Pilgrimage but still makes use of physical touch to deepen faith. Many religious persons carried relics or devotional texts as amulets, and Christ’s Side Wound was likely used for this purpose. The measure of Christ’s wound is small enough to fit into a pouch, able to be in close physical proximity with the devotee at all times in between reading, facilitating an imaginary interaction with Christ’s body. Though in this case,Christ’s Side Wound is a bound manuscript and the extent to it being fitted into a pocket is debatable, illustrations of Christ’s wound were highly common in medieval Europe, thus the possibility of loose manuscript folios of it is likely. There is an element of healing in the idea of wounding – Christ’s sacrifice brings forth salvation, and His death brings forth life. Christ’s wound becomes a portal for the votaries to enter the God- head – the touching of it, kissing of it, transforms their state of sin to one of salvation – Christ’s experience of wounding healed them.38 Not only so, but the format and proliferation of Christ’s Side Wound also displays how divine knowledge travelled within the monastic environment to mediate virtual pilgrimage. Though written in a Cistercian monastery of Vil- lers (Brabant), the Villers Miscellany booklet was given to the nuns in the convent of Parc-les-Dames outside Leuven.39 There is a sense of shared knowledge and memory in handling the physical copy of the Villers Miscellany, which in a way resonates with Christ’s divinity transmitting from His body to another through the sense of touch. Similar to Christ’s Side Wound, the Chronica Majo- ra is also a manuscript written in a monastic environment that communicates pilgrimage insights to votaries – in this instance, monks. If pilgrimage is the physical manifestation of prayer, then manuscripts surely act as the physical starting point for the spiritual and intellectual devotional practice. Though the harmony between the sixth sense and the physical senses takes priority in devotional practice over the geographical distance travelled in a pilgrimage, the location where the virtual pilgrimage takes place does affect the reception of information from manuscripts. The monastic setting provides a unique catalyst for the senses to serve virtual pilgrimage by manuscript. Votaries were not only literate, but their medieval monastic dormitories were also the few rare places where continuous light is allowed.40 In creating manuscripts, when scribing the folio, the residue of ink on the votaries’ hands could be interpreted as a divine mark left on the body. The continuous burning of wax candlelight provides a constant stimulus not only for the agent’s sight, touch (heat), but also smell. In addition, the materiality of vellum presuppos- es a smell. Votaries might have created their own vellum, and the time-consuming process involves excessive handling and smelling the animal skin – a constant sensory engagement between reader and manuscript. ‘The authority

38 Sara Ritchey, ‘The Wound’s Presence and Bodily Absence Activating the Spiritual Senses in a Fourteenth-Century Manuscript’ in Sensory Reflections: Traces of Experience in Medieval Artifacts, ed. by Fiona Griffiths and Kathryn Starkey (Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter, 2018). 39 Rudy, Virtual Pilgrimage in the Convent, p.103. 40 Woolgar, p.154. Columbia Journal of Art History 43 of the institution of the Church guided the interpretation of the parchment’s texts and images, and yet the final engagement with the text-image complex remained fully within the grasp (literally so) of each user’s devotional needs.’41 For votaries struggling to visit the Holy City corporaliter (physically), manuscripts allowed them to visit spiritualiter (spiritually) because their ado- ration towards saints and relics was not bound to the relics’ venerated and kept locations.42 Though the various senses are analysed here separately for the sake of clarity, in virtual pilgrimage they cannot be isolated from each other as they interrelate to contribute to a general consciousness. Our access to medieval viewers’ actual sensory response is limited by the lack of records. Speculations could be made upon the visible evidence of fading, scratches, or heavy handling on manuscripts, yet the legitimacy of these thought processes require more proof, which may be impossible to attain. Even so, the inference of medieval votaries achieving a spiritual realm and travel virtually by an im- mersive full-body reading of manuscripts is highly likely.

41 Newhauser, p.108. 42 Ehrenschwendtner, p.65.

Cecilia Mou is a third-year student at University College London (Class of 2021) studying the History of Art.

Bibliography

Debra J. Birch, ‘Jacques de Vitry and the Ideology of Pilgrimage’, in Pilgrimage Explored, ed. by J. Stopford (Great Britain: York Medieval Press, 1999), pp.79-94. Daniel K. Connolly, ‘Pilgrimage in the Itinerary Maps of Matthew Paris’, The Art Bulletin,81 (1999), 598-622. Hanneke van Asperen, ‘”As if they had physically visited the holy places”: Two Sixteenth-century Manuscripts Guide a Mental Journey through Jerusalem (Radboud University Library, Mss 205 and 233’, The Imag- ined and Real Jerusalem in Art and Architecture, ed. by Jeroen Goudeau, Mariëtte Verhoeven and Wouter Weijers (Boston: Brill, 2014), pp.190- 214. Marie-Luise Ehrenschwendtner, ‘Virtual Pilgrimage? Enclosure and the Practice of Piety at St. Katherine’s Convent, Augsburg’, Journal of Ecclesi- astical History, 60 (2009), 45-73. P.D.A. Harvey, Medieval Maps of the Holy Land (London: British Library, 2012). Natalie M. Mandziuk, ‘Drawn to scale: The medieval monastic’s virtual pilgrimage through sacred measurement’ from Binding the Absent Body in Medieval and Modern Art: Abject, virtual, and alternate bodies, ed. by Em- 44 Mou, Virtual Pilgrimage ily Kelley and Elizabeth Richards Rivenbark (Great Britain: Routledge, 2016), pp.73-92. Richard G. Newhauser and Arthur J. Russell, ‘Mapping virtual pilgrimage in an early fifteenth-century Arma Christi roll’ fromThe Arma Christi in Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture: With a Critical Edition of “O Vernicle”, ed. by Lisa H. Cooper and Andrea Denny-Brown (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), pp.83-112. Sara Ritchey, ‘The Wound’s Presence and Bodily Absence Activating the Spiritual Senses in a Fourteenth-Century Manuscript’ in Sensory Reflec- tions: Traces of Experience in Medieval Artifacts, ed. by Fiona Griffiths and Kathryn Starkey (Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter, 2018). Sixten Ringbom, ‘Devotional Images and Imaginative Devotions: Notes on the Place of Art in Late Medieval Private Piety’ from Gazette des Beaux- Arts, 111 (1969), 159-170. Kathryn M. Rudy, Virtual Pilgrimages in the Convent: Imagining Jerusalem in the Late Middle Ages (Belgium: Brepolis 2011). Kathryn M. Rudy, Rubrics, Images and Indulgences in Late Medieval Netherlandish Manuscripts (The Netherlands: Brill, 2017). C.M. Woolgar, The Senses in Late Medieval England(China: Yale University Press, 2006).

Manuscripts Brussels, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, MS 4459-70, fol. 150v. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 26, fol. 1r. CCC, MS 26, fol. 4r. London, British Library, Royal MS 14 C vii, fol. 5r. BL, Royal MS 14 C vii, ff. 4r-5r. Columbia Journal of Art History 45 Time’s Up Artists Intentions and the Ethics of Preserving Ephemeral Art

Amelia Griese

Abstract The mission of the conservator has been complicated by the multi-media practices of contemporary art. Artists have increasingly experimented with ephemeral art, meaning art that only lasts for a finite period. With the rise of ephemeral art, conservators and curators are faced with complex ethical and practical quandaries: how do they preserve these works that will inevitably self-destruct? More importantly, should they? Museum professionals must make difficult decisions regarding whether, or how and when, to maintain a work that is in material decline. Using Basel on the Rhine, 1969 by Dieter Roth and Construction in Space: Two Cones, 1927 by Naum Gabo as case studies for physical ephemeral works, this paper will examine how artistic intent can be used as a guiding principle for museum professionals in their ethical decision-making process, in order to uphold their role as caretakers of cultural heritage.

Figure 1. Dieter Roth, Basel on the Rhine, 1969, Museum of Modern Art, New York. 46 Griese, Time’s Up *** Works of art, therefore, have two kinds of life: that of the concept (the meaning) and that of the materials. As an object ages it changes; ultimately, the disintegration of the materials brings obliteration. But in modern art, ideas are often transient and materials ephemeral. So, what then is the question being asked of the conservator? Is it to preserve the material at all cost? To convey the artist’s intent? Or is it to simply define the nature of the materials and understand the degradation?1 - “From ‘91’ to ‘42’: Questions of Conservation for Modern Materials”

When one thinks of museums, there is a deep-rooted expectation that as institutions of cultural preservation, these sites will hold everything in limbo, and objects will stay in the same state of preservation forever. These expectations are based on the museum’s role in society as a repository of history and culture, a collection held in the public trust, including architecture, artwork, and other artifacts important to heritage.2 Museums are thus tasked with a duty to preserve these works, so that future generations may appreciate and learn from the material artifacts of the past. Museums rely on conservators to aid in their mission to preserve the art in their collections and to keep the timeline of visual history as intact and complete as possible, considering current states of technology. The mission of the conservator has been complicated by the recent increase in ephemeral art, meaning art that lasts only for a finite period. These works can be broken down into three general groups: installation art; technology/media-based art; and physically degrading works. The present study focuses on the third category: physically degrading works, defined as objects that, due to the nature of their materials, cannot withstand the test of time. There are two ways that these works arise in contemporary art: either decay occurs unknown to the artist since the materials used in constructing the piece are inherently unstable and deteriorate rapidly, or alternatively, the artist intentionally uses decay as a concept in the work. With the rise of ephemeral art (both intentional and unintentional), conservators and curators are faced with

1 David Grattan and R. Scott Williams, “From ‘91’ to ‘42’: Questions of Conservation for Modern Materials,” in Mortality Immortality? ed. Miguel Angel Corozo. (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Trust, 1999), 73. 2 "Museum Definition." ICOM International Council of Museums. Accessed February 24, 2019. https://icom.museum/en/activities/standards-guidelines/museum-definition/. Columbia Journal of Art History 47 complex ethical and practical quandaries: how do they preserve these works that will inevitably self-destruct? More importantly, should they? Museum professionals, therefore, must make difficult decisions -re garding whether, or how and when, to maintain a work that is in material decline. These decisions touch on controversies over which materials to use in situations that call for repair, and whether replacing parts of existing works subverts the intentions of the artist. Throughout history a precedent has been set to preserve unintentionally ephemeral art like Leonardo DaVinci’s own Last Supper (148, Santa Maria delle Grazi) which is in a state of decline due to unstable media. Conservators have gone to extreme lengths to attempt to preserve the Last Supper despite its decay because of its importance to our shared cultural heritage. Like the Leonardo, contemporary works testify to their ep- oque, offering a glimpse into its culture and values. It has therefore been the duty of museum professionals to preserve our cultural heritage, but without a clear understanding of an artist’s intentions, this can become a daunting task. Using Basel on the Rhine, 1969 by Dieter Roth and Construction in Space: Two Cones, 1927 by Naum Gabo as case studies for physical ephemeral works, I will examine how artistic intent can be used as a guiding principle for museum professionals in their ethical decision-making process, in order to uphold their role as caretakers of cultural heritage.

Dieter Roth and Naturally Decaying Art Dieter Roth was a Swiss artist born in 1930, and was known for his inventive work across multiple types of media, including books, prints, and nontraditional materials such as food.3 His work with food has presented conservators with the challenge of deciding the level of preservation that is appropriate when the artist intended the work to deteriorate. Roth’s Basel on the Rhine (fig. 1), for example, is a contemporary “painting” housed at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) that consists of a layer of chocolate painted onto a square steel plate with edge lengths of 31.5 inches.4 According to MoMA’s website, “over time, the chocolate has cracked, developed a bloom (a thin, whitish layer of fat), and been host to tiny insects, as evidenced by the small holes covering the surface.”5 Sarah Suzuki, associate curator at MoMA, says about Roth, “all of his works are wired to self-destruct.”6 It is well known that decay is an important part of his chocolate works, meaning that Roth did

3 Glenn D, Lowery, Wait, Later this Will be Nothing, 6, edited by Sarah Suzuki, Brenna Camp- bell, Scott Gerson, and Lynda Zycherman. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2013) unpaginated Foreword. 4 "Dieter Roth Basel on the Rhine 1969," The Museum of Modern Art, accessed April 24, 2018, https://www.moma.org/collection/works/80875#installation-images 5 “Dieter Roth Basel on the Rhine 1969.” 6 Robin Cembalest, "Self-Portrait of the Artist as a Self-Destructing Chocolate Head," ART- NEWS, February 24, 2013, accessed April 24, 2018, http://www.artnews.com/2013/02/21/ chocolate-self-portraits-by-janine-antoni-and-dieter-rot/. 48 Griese, Time’s Up not intend for them to last forever.7 Currently, Basel on the Rhine is housed under a vitrine, even though MoMA is aware that the artist may have dis- agreed with this presentation of his work, because it impedes the decay of the object.8 According to Garry Garrels, who organized retrospectives of Roth’s work in 2003, “[Roth’s] most important collaborator was really time – be it through mold or insects or other organic process, allowing things to continue to change.”9 He believed that works should have a life of their own — living and dying just as we do.10 Thus, Roth’s artistic philosophy of material degradation is an integral part of how museums interpret and display his works. In its efforts to preserve Roth’s chocolate works, MoMA is applying a “passive conservation” approach, which involves setting traps for bugs when they are identified in a work. In these cases, the insect is removed but the trails left behind are not altered.11 In comparison, at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne in Switzerland, director Bernard Fibicher has decided to allow Roth’s works in the collection to decay naturally, although Fibicher recognizes that at some point they will be left with nothing.12 A third approach, suggested by conservator Heide Skowranek from the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Germany, is to use replicas to “repeat the process of decay for eternity.”13 These three approaches highlight the vast spectrum of conservation approaches involving ephemeral art, and raise pertinent questions regarding the lengths museums should—or should not—go to in order to adhere to the artist’s original vision. The ethical guidelines put in place by professional organizations such as the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works (AIC) do not offer a clear answer to which solution is best. In a discussion of conservation dilemmas with Roth’s various works, curators and conservators acknowledged that the approach of “halting the biological processes” by adding pesticides to the pieces would fix the conservation issues but would negate the artists’ intentions, an evident ethical issue.14 Polemically, though MoMA states that the artist’s intentions were clear “to have the works naturally decay to nothingness,” they continue to preserve Basel on the Rhine by trapping the

7 Cembalest, "Self-Portrait of the Artist as a Self-Destructing Chocolate Head." 8 Cembalest, "Self-Portrait of the Artist as a Self-Destructing Chocolate Head." 9 Randy Kennedy, "Time and Other Collaborators," The New York Times, January 17, 2013, accessed April 24, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/20/arts/design/dieter-roths-works- live-on-as-a-family-business.html. 10 Stephanie Buhmann, “Roth Time: A Dieter Roth Retrospective.” The Brooklyn Rail, April 2007, accessed April 5, 2020. https://brooklynrail.org/2004/04/art/roth. 11 Brenna Campbell, et. al., “Dieter Roth and Questions of Conservation Two Case Studies,” in Wait, Later this Will be Nothing, ed. Sarah Suzuki et. al. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2013), 89. 12 Camille Polkownik, "Conceptual and Ephemeral Art: Conservation Issue." Journal of Art Crime, no. 18 (2017): 83-6. Accessed February 1, 2019. 13 Polkownik, “"Conceptual and Ephemeral Art: Conservation Issue," 83-6; "Participant Bi- ographies – Tate Papers." Tate. Accessed February 24, 2019. https://www.tate.org.uk/research/ publications/tate-papers/08/participant-biographies. 14 Campbell, “Dieter Roth and Questions of Conservation,” 89. Columbia Journal of Art History 49 insects that inhabit the piece or placing it under a vitrine. 15 These solutions create further ethical dilemmas; even as MoMA tries to protect the work as their mission instructs, they clearly negate the artist’s intentions by preserving the work in perpetuity.

Naum Gabo’s Ironic Ephemera Dieter Roth’s work raises critical issues of how museums should treat intentionally ephemeral works, especially considering that no real ethical guidelines exist to do so. As a contrast to Roth’s decaying Basel on the Rhine, Naum Gabo’s Construction in Space: Two Cones (1927) (fig. 2) is an example of an unintended ephemeral work that has degraded due to the unstable materials used by the artist, posing a separate set of ethical circumstances. While in this case, the artist’s input played a critical role in creating a replica of this work to replace the original, the artist will not always be available for consulta- tion, often leaving the conservator alone to determine what solution fits the piece best. This work was approximately 9 in. x 12 in. x 16 in. and consisted of two mirrored cones connected at their tips with several black arching struts coming out of the tips and wrapping around them. Construction in Space: Two Cones was part of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s collection but is no longer on display due to the deterioration of its materials.16 The sculpture was made from Rhodoid, a form of plastic that, unbeknownst to Gabo, can become very unstable. Due to the nature of the materials, the work is unintentionally ephemeral, raising the question of how to deal with the degradation of the object when ephemerality was not the artist’s intention. Gabo and his brother Antoine Pevsner were part of the Construc- tivist movement born from the Realistic Manifesto they published in 1920 in Moscow.17 The Constructivists rejected traditional sculptural principles of color and line and instead asserted that “[s]pace and time are the only forms on which life is built and hence art must be constructed.”18 As part of the Constructivist movement, Gabo did not place any importance on the artist’s mark on the physical material - the only object of importance was the concept being portrayed. At the time he created the work, Gabo chose to use Rhodoid due to its relative novelty (Gabo believed artists should use the newest materials available to bring the “constructive thinking of the engineer into art.”)19 In 1960, the Philadelphia Museum removed Construction in Space: Two Cones

15 Campbell, “Dieter Roth and Questions of Conservation,” 89. 16 "'Construction in Space ‘Two Cones’, Naum Gabo, 1936, Replica 1968." Tate. Accessed February 24, 2019. http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/gabo-construction-in-space-two-cones- t02143. 17 Teresa Newman, Naum Gabo: The Constructive Process. (London: Tate Gallery, 1976), 21-6. 18 Newman, Naum Gabo: The Constructive Process, 24. 19 Jennifer Mundy, "Lost Art: Naum Gabo." Tate. August 20, 2012. Accessed February 25, 2019. http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/gallery-lost-art-naum-gabo. 50 Griese, Time’s Up

Figure 2. Naum Gabo, Construction in Space: Two Cones, replica 1968, Tate, London. from the airtight display case that it had been housed in for several years. Upon doing so “[a] strong odor escaped from the case, then cracks developed in some parts of the construction, and on the following day the plastic base and thicker stem were fractured to bits.”20 Unbeknownst to Gabo and conservators, Rhodoid was as volatile as it was novel, and when the environment changed by opening the case, there was a rapid evaporation which caused the sculpture to contract and crack. The museum staff attempted to repair the piece but to little avail.21 By 1968, the Philadelphia Museum of Art took the work to Gabo for possible repair, but at that point he felt it was already beyond recovery.22 The predicament in treating Gabo’s work is different from that of Roth’s chocolate painting, because Gabo’s intent for the object did not include any kind of ephemeral concept. In fact, Gabo rather ironically believed that the sculptures would be durable unless intentionally damaged.23 When the damaged work was brought to Gabo in 1968, he took measurements from it and made a close replica that now resides at the Tate. While this replica has deteriorated as well, it has not reached the level of the 1927 original.24 With Construction in Space: Two Cones, the artist’s involvement directed the conservation team to a solution that allowed the piece to remain a part of the historical record.

20 TheodorSiegl, "Conservation." Philadelphia Museum of Art Bulletin 62, no. 291 (1966): 127-56. doi:10.2307/3795169, 151. 21 Siegl, “Conservation,” 153. 22 "'Construction in Space 'Two Cones', Naum Gabo, 1936, Replica 1968.” 23 Christina Lodder. “Naum Gabo and the Quandaries of the Replica”, in Tate Papers, no.8, Autumn 2007, https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/08/naum-gabo-and- the-quandaries-of-the-replica, accessed 25 February 2019. 24 Lodder, “Naum Gabo and the Quandaries of the Replica.” Columbia Journal of Art History 51 Historical Precedent Although deliberately ephemeral art is considered a part of contemporary art, the problem of preserving experimental methods is not necessarily a modern one. It is, in reality, a problem that has affected artworks throughout history. This precedent of conservation has led contemporary conservators to be inclined to preserve art despite an artist’s intentions. A well-known example of a historical work that is undergoing decay is Leonardo DaVinci’s wall painting The Last Supper.When painting The Last Supper, Leonardo was not satisfied with the current methods of fresco painting, and thus devised a new method for creating his mural which used a dry wall instead of the wet plaster traditionally used in Italian fresco painting as well as a white lead base to brighten it.25 The painting was then sealed with two layers of dried plaster. However, his paint never fully adhered to the dry wall onto which it was applied, leading to a piece that turned out to be inherently unstable and fell into a state of disrepair within 20 years of its production.26 Due to DaVinci’s established stature, extraordinary measures have been applied in the last several centuries, most recently beginning in 1980, to ensure The Last Supper remains on the wall of the refectory in the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, Italy.27 In this context, we see a precedent for dealing with degrading works, one which informs the orthodox argument for continued cultural preservation. However, even with this famous painting, conservators today struggle to distinguish between the original by Leonardo’s hand and countless preservation attempts from the preceding centuries.28 According to the authors of Leonardo: The Last Supper “[each] restorer has reclaimed the image differently, each bringing to the task different goals according to his or her own historical moment.”29 In translating this to current ephemeral artworks, conservation- ists are often left to fill gaps in understanding the artist’s intentions in order to restore the works. The goal of any conservator is to leave the original untaint- ed by their own perception, a difficult ethical boundary in these situations.

Current Guidelines for Preservation Conservators face challenges on how to proceed because modern guidelines are at odds. In addition to museum guidelines and the codes of ethics of professional organizations throughout the United States, art is protected by law with the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 (VARA). VARA gives

25 Luke Syson, and Larry Keith, Leonardo Da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan. (London: The National Gallery, 2011), 250-1;Syson, Leonardo Da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan, 250-1. 26 Syson, Leonardo Da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan, 247-50. 27 Pinin Brambilla Barcilon, and Pietro C. Marani, Leonardo: The Last Supper, Translated by Harlow Tighe. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 21. 28 Barcilon, Leonardo: The Last Supper,21. 29 Barcilon, Leonardo: The Last Supper,21. 52 Griese, Time’s Up an artist the right To prevent any destruction, distortion, mutilation, or other modification of that work which would be prejudicial to his or her honor or reputation, and which is the result of an intentional or negligent act or omission with respect to that work, and any such destruction, distortion, mutilation, or modification of that work is a violation of that right.30 VARA was passed in large part due to the United States’ agreement with the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works in 1988.31 The convention provided the United States with the means to protect copyrights internationally by establishing the need for “moral rights” applied to literary and artistic works. In this case, “moral rights” refer to (among other things) honoring the integrity of the artwork by respecting the artist’s original intent for the object, meaning that the artist must be fully credited and the work may not be altered. Although most would argue that VARA does not cover all the protections necessitated under the Berne Convention, it is an artist’s only legal right while they are alive. Under VARA, visual artists are given the right of attribution and integrity.32 There are a few notable exceptions to this rule; for example, any change to a work that is due to the material properties of the work or the passage of time is, in fact, not considered a distortion, mutilation, or modification. Similarly, any change made in the effort of conservation or preservation is also not protected under VARA unless “caused by gross negligence.”33 Based on these restrictions, VARA obscures the remedy for dealing with and discussing ephemeral art, rather than clarifying the issue, because the material condition of the art is considered an exception to the artists’ right of integrity. Thomas Dreier, a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Patent, Copyright and Compensation Law, sum- marized these complexities in his essay about copyright for nonpermanent works saying that “the artist’s right to the integrity of his or her work rests on two fundamental assumptions: (1) that the work does not change over time and (2) that the creator wants to see his or her work unchanged.”34 These assumptions contradict the entire premise of deliberately ephemeral art, so, despite the importance of VARA, we must look to other guidelines for how to deal with them. The AIC, for example, states in their code of ethics that the goal

30 The Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990, HR 2690, 101st Cong., 2nd sess. 31 Dana L. Burton, "Artists' Moral Rights: Controversy and the Visual Artists Rights Act." SMU Law Review48, no. 3 (1995): 639-67. Accessed February 24, 2019. https://scholar. smu.edu/smulr/vol48/iss3/6, 640. 32 The Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990. 33 The Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990. 34 Thomas K. Dreier, “Copyright Aspects of the Preservation of Nonpermanent Works of Modern Art,” In Mortality Immortality?, ed Miguel Angel Corozo. (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Trust, 1999) 65. Columbia Journal of Art History 53 of conservation “is the preservation of cultural property.”35 The International Council of Museums (ICOM) expands on this definition by stating that conservators are “to comprehend the material aspect of objects of historic and artistic significance in order to prevent their decay.”36 Museums also have a responsibility to ensure the care and preservation of all objects in their collection in order to uphold their mission of education and research and as stewards of our shared history.37 All of these guidelines support the practice of curators and conservators in preserving an ephemeral work from decay for the sake of the historical record. However, the AIC also advocates in their guidelines that “[a]ll actions of the conservation professionals must be governed by an informed respect for the cultural property, its unique character and significance, and the people or person who created it.”38 This guideline sets a precedent for using the artists’ intent as a guide for the conservation of the work. It is a fundamental part of a museum professional’s duty to protect and preserve the art in their care, but in the case of intentionally ephemeral art, if they followed the artists’ intentions, they would have to watch the objects turn to dust. In the end, the industry is left with convoluted guidelines that create a conflict between artists’ intentions and preservation. This makes the judgement of conservators and curators often the final word on how, or if, ephemeral art must be preserved.

Potential Preservation Techniques Considering the lack of clear guidelines in the area of ephemeral art, one can propose alternative ways of dealing with this difficult issue. At a meeting of conservation experts at the MoMA in 2008 titled “Conservation Issues of Modern and Contemporary Art (CIMCA)”, one of the issues discussed was a need to “establish a set of ethics for the conservation of ephemeral/transitory art.”39 Conservators are being faced with new challenges posed by not only physically ephemeral works, discussed in this article, but also other forms of nonpermanent work such as installation and technology/media based art that

35 “Code of Ethics and Guidelines for Practice,” American Institute For Conservation Of Historic And Artistic Works, accessed April 24, 2018. https://www.culturalheritage.org/ docs/default-source/administration/governance/code-of-ethics-and-guidelines-for-practice. pdf?sfvrsn=21. 36 "The Conservator-Restorer: A Definition of the Profession," ICOM International Council of Museums - Committee of Conservation, accessed April 24, 2018. http://www.icom-cc.org/47/ about/definition-of-profession-1984/#.Wt85acgvzIV. 37 "AAM Code of Ethics for Museums," American Alliance of Museums, accessed April 24, 2018. https://www.aam-us.org/programs/ethics-standards-and-professional-practices/code-of- ethics-for-museums/. 38 “Code of Ethics and Guidelines for Practice,” American Institute For Conservation Of Historic And Artistic Works. 39 Conservation Issues of Modern and Contemporary Art (CIMCA) Meeting. Proceedings, Mu- seum of Modern Art, New York. June 2008. Accessed February 28, 2018. http://www.getty. edu/conservation/our_projects/science/modpaints/CIMCA_meeting_jun08.pdf. 54 Griese, Time’s Up largely did not exist before the 21st century. Installation works are works for display that consist of multiple parts that must be put together on-site by a team of museum professionals at each exhibition location; as defined by the AIC, “essentially these works do not really exist until they are installed.”40 Technology and media-based works, as the name suggests, often have digital aspects to them that introduce unique challenges for data storage and display. Ephemeral media such as technology-based works creates issues considering the rate at which technology can become outdated. Those in the field have already identified these as a real issue that professionals are facing but yet these objects and problems remain outside of any current guidelines. What, then, are museums doing in the meantime? General consensus among museum professionals right now is that documentation is key to preserving ephemeral works, and a good first step to creating more precise guidelines. Ideally this documentation needs to start as soon as an institution accessions a work or even prior to the purchase. As most museum guidelines state, the museum must be able to care for each work in its collection; ephemeral works are not an exception, they just have different needs. A benefit of dealing with contemporary art is that in many cases the artist is still alive and can help clarify intentions about their work. Katrina Windon, in her essay entitled The Right to Decay with Dignity rec- ommends that “the artist’s desires are explicitly outlined to the curator or purchaser, and all mutually agree upon a strategy.”41 An ideal model for this initial documentation is through interviews with the artist. The Tate Gallery in London already employs this method and utilizes specific questions that fall into three categories: the work, the history of the work and information about the artist.42 Documentation methods are by no means perfect, but they do establish a basic understanding of the work and the artist’s intent. The downside of this method is that an artist’s intent can change over time, and “one has to remember that an artist keeps thinking, and his/her mind is constantly evolving unlike the artworks which reflect a precise period of the artist’s life.”43 Along with interviews at the accession of the work, there are other forms of “surrogate” documentation that can be collected such as photographs and articles about the piece.44 This is how the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Switzerland plans to preserve the Roth works in their care - once the piece has decayed, it will

40 Pip Laurenson, "Developing Strategies for the Conservation of Installations Incorporating Time-Based Media with Reference to Gary Hill's "Between Cinema and a Hard Place," Journal of the American Institute for Conservation 40, no. 3 (2001): 259-66. 41 Katrina Windon, "The Right to Decay with Dignity: Documentation and the Negotia- tion between an Artist’s Sanction and the Cultural Interest," Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America 31, no. 2 (2012): 144, accessed March 1, 2018, doi:10.1086/668108. 42 Windon, "The Right to Decay with Dignity," 150. 43 Polkownik, “"Conceptual and Ephemeral Art: Conservation Issue," 83-6. 44 Windon, "The Right to Decay with Dignity," 148. Columbia Journal of Art History 55 “live on through documentation.”45 “Surrogate” documentation can stand in place of the actual piece in the historical record and provide insight on the object, should it not be able to live on in its original physical form. However, some artists find even this level of preservation of their ephemeral work to be transgressive. For example, Russell Martin, a contemporary performance artist, rejects any form of documentation of his work due to his “ongoing unease about the impossibility of translating between experience and document.”46 Another method of documenting ephemeral works is the use of replicas. Replicas have been suggested for both examples analyzed in this study and in the case of Gabo’s Construction in Space: Two Cones, a replica was made by the artist after the original deteriorated. Replicas tend to be discounted by professionals in the field, as they lack an artistic process and are merely copies of a piece with an assumed deeper meaning. Replicas, however, raise greater questions about the authenticity of the artwork – can a replica be considered original to the artist? Conservator Louise Cone, from the National Gallery of Denmark, has supported the ideas of replicas in cases where “material holds no value or meaning for the artwork (or the artist).”47 This reasoning would suggest that replicas are not a proper preservation approach for objects such as Basel on the Rhine because Roth assigned meaning to the chocolate that he used, and he intended the piece to decay and nothing but photographs to remain.48 On the other hand, Gabo and the principles of Constructivism “[were] not dependent on the individual mark of the artist,” and thus his art serves as the perfect candidate for replication.49 According to The Realistic Manifesto, “[t]he realization of our perceptions of the world in the forms of space and time is the only aim of our pictorial and plastic arts.”50 In compli- ance with Gabo’s intent for Construction in Space: Two Cones, the replica allows the original to live on.

Conclusion: Future Approaches to a Complex Problem Ultimately museums must resort to their most fundamental function in collecting ephemeral art: to act in the best interest of the objects they hold and serve as a cultural repository. If a museum ignores an artist’s intent and preserves something that was meant to be ephemeral, they are caught between ethical responsibility, law, and their duty to preserve. Museums that intervene in a work create a different artwork with a new meaning, and the object can no longer authentically be known as the artist’s original work. The

45 Polkownik, “"Conceptual and Ephemeral Art: Conservation Issue," 84. 46 Windon, "The Right to Decay with Dignity," 152. 47 Polkownik, “"Conceptual and Ephemeral Art: Conservation Issue," 84. 48 Polkownik, “"Conceptual and Ephemeral Art: Conservation Issue," 84. 49 Elizabeth Rankin, "A Betrayal of Material: Problems of Conservation in the Construc- tivist Sculpture of Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner." Leonardo 21, no. 3 (1988): 285-90. doi:10.2307/1578657, 287. 50 Newman, Naum Gabo: The Constructive Process, 24. 56 Griese, Time’s Up orthodox assumption that Museums suspend artifacts in time entices institutions like MoMA to enact “passive conservation” approaches that try to prevent the work from actively decaying but do not take steps to restore the work. It may be counterintuitive to argue that allowing a work to decay is in the best interest of the object, but it is in the best interest of ephemeral art. Roth’s work and his intentions seem at odds with the notion of cultural preservation, but his works are an important part of the discussion of mortality through art. There seems to be a human reluctance to watch a piece decay, not only because of the loss of cultural heritage but also because of the financial repercussions of purchasing a work that you know will not last. Museums should acknowledge the impermanence of these works before acquiring them and therefore shift their accession practices to that of a rental or loan for as long as the work lasts. In fact, museums can use the ephemeral nature of these works to their advantage. If a work is allowed to decay naturally with no in- terference, it could bring in larger crowds and even repeat viewers due to the finite period they can see the piece. Noah Charney said of temporal art, “[t] hose who experience it will savor their moments there far more than if they were to visit something with the rationalization, if not assurance, that they could always come back and see it again.”51 Additionally, ephemeral arts constant flux could act as a continual draw for the museum. When from minute to minute a piece takes on new a shape, no two visits to a museum will yield the same experience. As the only legal means for artists to protect their work and intentions, VARA and copyright laws should be amended to clarify that change over time can be considered an integral part of a piece, and hence should be protected when decay is the artist’s intention.52 Intentionally ephemeral works play a significant role in contemporary art today and their decay should be afforded the same protection under artists’ right to integrity as any other piece. Furthermore, museums that deal with contemporary art should be encouraged to develop their own policies on acquiring works for their collections that they know were not intended to last or were formed from unstable materials. This will undoubtably place a burden on conservators to determine the artist’s intentions so that they know if they should follow the historical precedent for physical preservation or only make an effort to document the work and continue to let it decay. However, if artists of ephemeral works are to be respected, each museum must reassess their practices. They will have to consider their own mission statements and the financial burden ephemeral works may pose to them. But ultimately, museums should be influenced, if

51 Noah Charney, "Lost Art: The Joys of the Ephemeral."The Art Newspaper. October 1, 2018. Accessed February 25, 2019. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/feature/lost-the-joys-of-the- ephemeral.

52 Dreier, “Copyright Aspects of the Preservation of Nonpermanent Works of Modern Art,” 65-66. Columbia Journal of Art History 57 not bound, by an artist’s original intent when caring for their collection, and if allowing a piece to decay is not possible for the institution, perhaps they should reconsider their acquisition goals. Museums can likewise establish procedures for properly documenting the artist’s intent at acquisition. Finally, the works themselves should be documented if the artist is not opposed to this form of preservation. Using these suggestions, in the case of MoMA and Basel on the Rhine, MoMA should make every effort to follow the intentions of Roth and allow their piece to decay. This path would require conservators to remove the vitrine the painting is currently under and cease their “passive” conservation approach to removing bugs from the piece. In the case of Construction in Space: Two Cones, the Philadelphia Museum of Art was able to come to an agreement with the artist for the best means of preservation. A replica worked well with the concept originally envisioned by Gabo, since material was not the main focus of the piece but rather space and time. This study highlights the importance of knowing and understanding the artist’s intentions to determine preservation methods. Had a replica not fit within the Constructivist principles, we might have been left with little by which to remember Construction in Space: Two Cones. The ethical issues associated with intentional ephemeral art are new problems in the history of conservation and preservation. They present un- foreseen challenges to cultural institutions and defy the historical precedents in conservation. This makes it more difficult to make policy decisions because there has not been enough time to see how individual circumstances such as the Roth and Gabo can be resolved. Museums should be proactive towards this issue and start developing policies and procedures that address these dilemmas now, rather than wait until they arise. Ethical questions are inherently difficult to deal with, and do not lend themselves to one right answer. It is therefore important that museums should work to be as transparent as possible about their decisions regarding ephemeral works. Artists’ intentions are the pillar for creating and applying policy regarding ephemeral art. Museums have become, willingly or not, an active participant in history by documenting ephemeral art for future generations to appreciate. They are an important means by which the current period can be preserved – which will become the cultural heritage of tomorrow.

Amelia Griese graduated from Virginia Tech in 2019 with a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and minors in Art History and Classical Studies.

Bibliography

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Leonardo Da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan. London: The National Gallery, 2011. "The Conservator-Restorer: A Definition of the Profession." ICOM International Council of Museums - Committee of Conservation. Ac- cessed April 24, 2018. http://www.icom-cc.org/47/about/definition-of- profession-1984/#.Wt85acgvzIV. The Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990, HR 2690, 101st Cong., 2nd sess. Windon, Katrina. "The Right to Decay with Dignity: Documentation and the Negotiation between an Artist’s Sanction and the Cultural Interest." Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America 31, no. 2 (2012): 142-57. doi:10.1086/668108. Mirroring Tales of the Boudoir Painting Women in Gardens in the Chinese Southern Song Dynasty

Yixuan Doris Tang

Abstract Based on the depiction of female sitters in their boudoir, this paper investigates the lives of married upper-class women in the Southern Song dynasty (1127-1279) represented through mirrors and gardens. The use of symbolism brings forth the notion that women were increasingly aware of the social constraints on their individuality but simultaneously grasped for a role in society. Previous scholars have asserted that the social status of women turned sour in this period. However, by examining the boudoir of upper class- women through the reflective aspect of the mirror, we are able to peer into the hearts of women in the Song dynasty and their attitudes toward their social expectations. Stressing the commonalities of exhibiting a semi-opening space in three attributed Southern Song rigid fan paintings (Tuanshan hua), Lady Watching a Maid with a Parrot (attri. Wang Juzheng, 1127-1276), Looking in a Mirror by an Ornamental Box (Wang Shen, 1127-1276), and Lady at Her Dressing Table in A Garden (attri. Su Hanchen; mid-12th C.), this paper articulates the relationships among setting, objects and female sitters in the Portraits of Ladies (Shinu tu) while drawing evidence from Admonition for Women, Ladies’ Classic of Filial Piety and the Boudoir Poetry (Guiyuan shi). To achieve this goal, this paper first interrogates the symbolic meanings of the mirror and garden motifs. It then unravels the iconographic relations between the sitters and their surroundings.

Introduction In the history of imperial China, the Song dynasty (960-1276) was not only the golden period in art development but also an age of social trans-

Figure 1: Court Ladies Wearing Flowers in Their Hair. Attributed to Zhou Fang (fl. ca.780-810), Norther Song dynasty (960-1127), 10th century; hand scroll, ink and color on silk, 46 x 180cm. Liaoning Provincial Museum, Shenyang, Liaon- ing. Image courtesy of Liaoning Provincial Museum. Columbia Journal of Art History 61 formation, including the declining societal statues of women.1 With a focus on upper-class families, to study the life of Song women, this essay examines the portraits of ladies (Shinu tu) from this epoch. While married upper-class women are merely portrayed in domestic settings in paintings, they were increasingly aware of the social constraints on their feminine individuality, and so they grasped for a role in society. Across their oeuvres, Song painters represented the interaction between the subject and displayed objects within a limited space by fully utiliz- ing the background in conjunction with the intricate techniques of rendering the human figure.2 In particular, artists from the Southern Song (1127-1276) employed an ensemble of techniques in their visual expression. In their tableaux, the painters synthesized the treatments of human characters, landscape, birds and flowers, and architectural complexes.3 The pictorial composition observed in Song Shinu tu consists of architectural elements from ruler-lined paintings (Jiehua), the articulation of nature, and the portrayal of sitters. Stressing the stylistic and thematic commonalities of three attributed South- ern Song rigid fan paintings (Tuanshan hua), Lady Watching a Maid with a Parrot, Looking in a Mirror by an Ornamental Box, and Lady at Her Dressing Table in A Garden, typifies the relationships among setting, objects and female sitters in Shinu tu.4 This paper addresses the representation of dualities and contradic- tions in the lives of married upper-class women in the Southern Song dynasty, as symbolized in the depiction of mirrors and gardens. The disparity between upper-class women’s declining status and their husband’s strengthened position presumably contributed to the emergence of a new style in the depiction

1 The imperial era in Chinese history is from 221 B.C. to 1912 A.D., started with the unifica- tion under Qin dynasty and ended by collapse of the Qing Dynasty. 2 With an empty background, the depiction of the court ladies from the Tang dynasty (618- 907) focuses on presenting an individual sitter. The translation ofShinu tu includes “the painting of court ladies” and “the painting of upper-class women.” In regard to the Song dynasty, Shi nu denotes women from official’s families, palace maid, and also identifies a style of painting in which the subject matter is beautiful women. Either one of the translations can partially omit the meaning in Chinese, which is considered as untranslatable information. In the opening paragraph, Shinu tu is clarified as “portrait of ladies” to indicate that the subject of the paintings studied in this paper ifs ladies—upper-class women. However, in the following text, “Shinu tu” will be utilized directly to avoid any discrepancy among translations. 3 For instance, Ladies Wearing Flowers in Their Hair attributed to Zhou Fang (fl. ca. 780-810) (Fig. 1) and the copied work of Zhang Xuan- Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk, all consist of elegance and magnificent technical skills on the depiction of figures (Fig. 2). 4 Fan Painting is a leaf of silk in a round shape, made to be mounted on a rigid fan with which size varies (Fig. 1a). According to an anecdote from Painting Continued (Hua Ji) by Deng Chun (fl. ca. 1127-1167), “[in] the Zhenghe era (1111-1118), whenever the Emperor (Huizong) painted a fan, everyone in the Six Palaces and the residence of the nobility vied to copy it.” Being prevalent among professionals or amateurs, this form of artwork was in its heyday during the Song Dynasty. Susan Bush and Hsio-yen Shih, ”Sung Art History,” In Early Chinese Texts on Painting, (Hong Kong University Press, 2012),136. 62 Tang, Mirroring Tales of the Boudoir of women.5 With their iconography of a distressed female figure in her boudoir, Song painters differentiatedShinu tu from the contemporary portraits to form an independent category of painting designated to the portrayal of the female.6 Recurring across Song dynasty poetry and painting, the image of a female figure reflected in a mirror shedding tears in her boudoir deep in the inner courtyard indicates that women personify melancholy. In each painting, located inside of a residential complex, the garden is also isolated from the domestic area by the screen and pavement in the background. The distinctive architectural construction emphasizes the prominent position of the main figure in each composition, where the ambivalence between inclusion and exclusion features a zigzagging path leading women towards their discovery of social identity. Likewise, as a reflective medium of public judgment on femininity, mirrors embody the duality of a married woman’s domestic responsibility, and the memory of her maidenhood. Patricia Buckley Ebrey, an American historian specializing in the history of the Song dynasty, foregrounds a complicated historical fact of the Song in The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Pe- riod. She points out that not only did women have particularly strong control over the use of their dowries, but they also took charge of household finance and managing the servants, even as new brides.7 Represented in the fan paintings from the Southern Song dynasty, the significant position a wife occupied in a domestic sphere is illustrated through the view of inner quarters in the garden. Even though scholars have concluded in recent decades that the social

5 In the study of the Song dynasty, scholars have come upon a universal agreement that in this period of time, Chinese society had experienced a transformation in multiple societal aspects even though their perspectives on extent to which these transformations varied the development of Chinese society after 1279. In A History of East Asian Civilization, the author defines the social condition of the late Song as “essentially non-aristocratic and more egalitarian” in terms of the expanding gentry class were greatly improved by commercial development. Further discussion on the socio-historical analysis of the Song Dynasty from Chinese scholars refer to Li Huarui, “A Survey of the Study of Social Change and Reform in China and Japan in the Tang and Song Dynasties,” Historiography Quarterly, no. 4 (2003): 88-95. Edwin O. Reischauer and John K. Fairbank, “The Late T’ang and Sung: The Golden Age of Chinese Culture,” inA History of East Asian Civilization, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1960), 220-225. 6 It is a debatable viewpoint where some voices enunciate that the development of Shinu tu fell into a decline from the Tang to the Song. As a Northern Song art critic Guo Ruoxu wrote in Tuhua jianwen zhi [Experience in Painting]: “ […] in comparison with the past, modern times have fallen behind in many respects, but also have made further progress in others. If one is speaking […] gentlewomen […], then the modern does not come up to the ancient. [Tang artists’ articulation] exceeded normal human expectations of ‘spirit consonance’ and ‘structural method. Guo Ruoxu, “Tuhua jianwen zhi,” in Alexander C. Soper, trans, Kuo Jo-Hsü’s Experience in Painting was (T’u-hua chien-wên chih): An Eleventh Century History of Chinese Painting Together with the Chinese Text in Facsimile (Washington, D.C.: American Council of Learned Societies, 1951), 1.19; cf. Soper’s translation in ibid., 21-22. 7 Patricia E. Buckley, The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period (California: University of California Press, 1993), 6. Columbia Journal of Art History 63 status of women turned sour in this period, this decline was barely conveyed through the artworks. Female voices were omitted from the description of their own lifestyles, leaving them to be interpreted from male authors’ convic- tion.8 In the form of contained imagery of women authored by men, gardens and mirrors together symbolize the life of an upper-class wife in the Song.

The Song Discourse on The Portrayal of Women in the Boudoir During the Northern Song dynasty (960-1127), artists and art critics began debating on whether the subject matter of female portraiture should be an exemplary figure of moral instruction or a woman lamenting in her boudoir. From the Northern Song, not only did the content of the Ladies' Classic of Filial Piety, compiled in the Tang, impact women’s education, but the illustrations of the text served as an exemplification of portraying women with ethical behaviour. This artwork was considered to be a painting of virtue in the way that it visualizes the edifying conversation between Ban Zhao and her pupils; in the meantime, Song art critics praised its theme highly among portraits.9 With the understanding that women must be virtuous and selfless, a group of painters and art critics insisted on the portrayal of the female figure as an image of a didactic model of behavior. Art critics in the history of Chinese painting, such as Guo Ruoxu from the Northern Song, criticize the facile painting style of the Song representation of female figures by comparing their visual impression of the female portraiture from preceding dynasties to Song. In Experiences in Painting, Guo writes: “Look over a succession of paintings by famous masters of olden times […] female forms and faces whose look of severe correctness yet [reveals] an antique purity of soul. Theirs is naturally a stately and dignified beauty, which inspires the onlooker to look up to them in reverence. But the painters of today lay store only on pretty faces, to captivate the crowd; their eyes do not penetrate to the principles and the meanings of painting.”10

8 Ibid., 5. 9 The text ofLadies' Classic of Filial Piety was compiled in the Tang, but it was first documented in The History of Song Dynasty (Songshi). Two painters’ illustrations of this text were categorized in Xuanhe Imperial Painting Catalogue. One of them is a five dynasty painter Shi Ke who painted eight panels and a North Song painter Li Gonglin whose painting consisted of two panels from the text. None of their works survived, and the painting of Ladies' Classic of Filial Piety in the Palace Museum is likely from a Southern Song painter. Julia K Murray, “The "Ladies' Classic of Filial Piety" and Sung Textual Illustration: Problems of Reconstruction and Artistic Context,” Ars Orientalis 18, (1988): 95-96. 10 This journal of studying paintings consists of the works from the first year of Huichang (841) to the author’s present time—the seventh year of Xining (1074). The title ofExperiences in Painting by Guo Ruoxu in Chinese—Tuhua jianwen zhi— explicitly indicates the content of the writing: “Tuhua” means paintings or images; jianwen is one’s experience which consists of what he has seen and has heard from life; “zhi” is a form of documentation. As Guo Ruoxu mentioned in the preface that this work is not merely a chronological continuation of Lidai 64 Tang, Mirroring Tales of the Boudoir By criticizing the contemporary paintings of women in which artists deviated from the essence of characterizing female figures, Guo conveys his distaste towards the artworks that merely captured the beauty of femininity. In other words, the sitter’s spirit is neglected by the accent on her accessories and garments. Guo upholds his perspective that an artist’s rendering techniques should coordinate with a proper method of portraying women: the sitters should be virtuous to serve as a didactic example for moral instruction. In order to make the sitter appeal to righteous women, by articulating intellectual interests, the Southern Song painter of Lady Watching a Maid with a Parrot, attributed to Wang Juzheng (fl. ca. early 11th C.), intentionally captured the moment in which the main character ignores her mirror and instead focuses on the books and writing instruments that occupy her surroundings (Fig. 3).11 Meanwhile, however, in Chinese literary tradition, the relationship between paintings and poems is inseparable. As the Southern Song dynasty landscape painters pursued a poetic expression in their pictorial composition by making references to poetry, the portraitists could also adopt the method of characterizing female figures by making references to the boudoir poetry (Guiyuan shi).12 Thus, with the intertwined contexts between artworks and poetry, the development of Guiyuan poetry in the Song period likely had an impact on the painters’ depiction of female sitters. In order to embody poetic expressions in their oeuvres, artists employed the scene of a woman mirroring in a garden to reflect upon her poetry writing.13 As Song paintings can serve as direct illustrations or further interpretations for poetry, the inner-chamber depiction of a lady “gazing at [her] own image and lamenting [her] fate (Duiy- ing zilian)” in Guiyuan poetry flourished as a genre of artistic expression during the Tang dynasty.14 Understanding the motifs and symbolism of boudoir poetry informs the interpretation of boudoir paintings, as the two disciplines developed closely alongside one another. Contrasting to the didactic model of behavior developed in the texts on women’s exemplary deeds, female figures in artworks are depicted by the minghua zhi by Zhang Yanyuan from the Tang. By learning from the consistent issue of having “a great excess of verbiage” in the passed-down records of art analysis, the author compiled his journal with the interpretation on artworks in the regard of reflecting upon what he had experienced in his lifelong course (cf. Soper’s translation, 1). Guo Ruoxu, Experience in Painting, 1.15; cf. Soper’s translation in ibid.,18. 11 Lady Watching a Maid with a Parrot is currently collected at the Museum of Fine Art in Boston. 12 “Guiyuan shi,” aka the boudoir poetry, is a genre of poetry with a literal meaning “the poem of lamenting in inner chamber.” In the rest of this essay, in order to merely address the “boudoir poetry” as a genre in poetry composing, I will use “Guiyuan poetry” to refer to this term to not maintain the stereotypical connotations that come with the words. 13 Li Jing, “Grievance of the Gendered Self: Chinese Guiyuan Elements in Carolyn Kizer’s Poem,” in American Modernist Poetry and the Chinese Encounter, ed. Zhang Yuejun and Stuart Christie (Palgrave Macmillan US, 2012), 133. 14 Wu Hung, The Double Screen: Medium and Representation in Chinese Painting(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 22. Columbia Journal of Art History 65 male artists under the assumption that besides taking care of the family, an upper-class wife passes her lonely time in the boudoir being sentimental about her past. In Looking in a Mirror by an Ornamental Box attributed to Wang Shen (1036-1089), and Lady at Her Dressing Table in A Garden attributed to Su Hanchen (fl. ca. 1130s-1160s), the female protagonists are delineated with a poetic reference to Guiyuan poetry.15 Opting to render their main characters from a non-frontal view, both artists utilized the reflections in mirrors to magnify a dejected facial expression (Fig. 4, and Fig. 5). Their intention of depicting a figure’s sentiment and her body separately is an indication that in portraits, female sitters’ emotions are manipulated by male artists. Therefore, mirrors reflect the images of men’s understanding of women’s mental activities—male artists believed that portraying ladies with a gloomy expression could vividly articulate what the women truly felt. Although most of the upper-class wives generally appreciated the aesthetics that male artists captured through portraiture of lamenting in bou- doirs, female poets started revealing their oppressed situation in their work.16 Adapting the sense of melancholy and the prose of Guiyuan poetry, female poets sustained the symbolism of femininity as delicate flowers; however, they personified the brutal nature which withers away the beauty of blossoms as an implication of women’s pressure from society. In Falling Flowers, a Southern Song female poet Zhu Shuzhen (d.1233) describes a view of flowers falling from trees: “[w]henever intertwined branches bloom, the jealous wind and rain strips away their flowers; if not the King of Green could perpetuate his rule, they would not end up scattered across the moss.”17 The figurative use of “intertwined branches” implies a young lady’s expectation of intimacy, particularly conjugal affection, while the jealous wind is a metaphor for the social critique that restricted her life, forcing her to behave as the lady described in Chinese Classics and to have an air of melancholy as the characters described in Guiyuan poetry. Similar to instruction from a conduct manual, the portraiture of upper-class female figures presents a dichotomised depiction of women's lives, which is both biased and accurate, telling women how to behave and what to feel. The depiction of mirrors and gardens, where the discrepancy between the social status of two sexes is conveyed through two subject matters in the portrait of ladies, symbolizes the limited life of a Song woman in a male- dominated society. Virtuous figures offer instruction on how to behave as a

15 Looking in a Mirror by an Ornamental Box is currently collected at the National Palace Museum in Taipei, Taiwan, and a detailed explanation on this painting’s provenance and attribution is provided in footnote 34. Lady at Her Dressing Table in A Garden is in the collection at the Museum of Fine Art in Boston. 16 Lara C.W. Blanchard, Song Dynasty Figures of Longing and Desire: Gender and Interiority in Chinese Painting and Poetry is (Boston: Brill, 2018), 208. 17 Cao Yin. Poems of the Masters [Qian jia shi]: China’s Classic Anthology of T’ang and Sung Dynasty Verse, trans. Bill Porter (aka Red Pine) (Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 2003), 256-257. 66 Tang, Mirroring Tales of the Boudoir

Figure 1a, Detail (left), showing a court servant holding an elon- gated fan on which mounted with paintings, from Fig. 1. Figure 2 (Above). Court ladies preparing newly woven silk. Attributed to Emperor Huizong (1082–1135, ruled 1100–1125), Northern Song dynasty (960-1127), early 12th century; hand scroll, ink and color on silk, 37.7 x 466 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Special Chinese and Japanese Fund (12.886). Image courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Figure 3a (Above). Detail, showing the seated lady on her intricately carved daybed with a close view of her garments and accessories, from Figure 3. Figure 3b (Below). Detail, showing the display of books and writing instruments on the table and her daybed, from Figure 3.

Figure 3 (Second above). Lady Watching a Maid with a Parrot. Formerly attributed to Wang Juzheng (fl. ca. early 11th century). Southern Song dynasty (1127-1276), early 13th century; fan shaped album leaf, ink and color on silk, 23.4 x 24.2cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Harriet Otis Cruft Fund (37.302). Image courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Figure 3c (Above). Detail, showing the screen and a branch of pink blossoms in the background, from Figure 3. Columbia Journal of Art History 67

Figure 4 (Above Left). Looking in a Mirror by an Ornamental Box. Attributed to Wang Shen (1036-89), Southern Song dynasty (1127- 1276); fan painting, ink and color on silk, 24.2 x 25.0 cm. The Collection of National Palace Museum (VA15H), Taipei, Taiwan. Image courtesy of Taipei National Palace Museum. Figure 4a (Left). Detail, showing the screen and a branch of white blossoms in the background, from Figure 4. Figure 4b (Above). Detail, showing the side view of the standing figure attentively looking at her reflect image from the mirror supported by its stand, from Figure 4.

Figure 5 (Above Right). Lady at Her Dressing Table in A Garden. Attributed to Su Hanchen (fl. ca.1120s– 1160s), Southern Song dynasty (1127-1276), mid-12th century; fan painting, ink, color, and gold on silk, 25.2 x 26.7 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Denman Waldo Ross Collection (29.960). Image courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Figure 5a (Above). Detail, showing the seated lady mirroring in the garden and a close-view of the objects on her dressing table, from Figure 5. Figure 5b (Right). Detail, showing the bonsai, potted plants in the foreground and the arranged flower in the vase, from Figure 5. 68 Tang, Mirroring Tales of the Boudoir woman, while the depiction of lamenting in boudoir conveys the emotions she is expected to bear.

The Duality of Mirrors In the Southern Song dynasty, a married woman had to take care of her husband and his family. As a daughter-in-law, her first job was to “devote [her] energies to serving [her] parents-in-law and pleasing everyone [in the family].”18 Bridal dowries not only “g[ave] some small measure of assurance” to a married woman, but also served as an evaluation of the bride’s importance to her parents depending on whether they were willing to “sen[d] her out with lots of goods” to ensure her a well-off life after marriage.19 Thus, the monetary value of the dowry that she brought could determine her position in her husband’s family (Fig. 3a). An intricately designed bronze mirror is normally included as a part of the articles de toilette in a bride’s trousseaux.20 Owning an elaborately carved mirror was an upper-class privilege. Having an intricately designed bronze mirror as a part of the articles de toilette in a bride’s trousseaux demonstrated the economic well-being and social prominence of the bride’s natal family.21 In this section, the social expectations on the Southern Song dynasty women and their understanding of femininity are discussed through analyzing the symbolism of the mirror across the three paintings. The intricately designed bronze mirror on a woman’s dressing table reflects dual representation of the owner’s moment of recalling her youth and the public critiques of those women who cared so much about their appearances. By looking at their reflection in their bridal trousseaux, Song women reminisced about their maidenhood with mirrors symbolizing their natal home. Yet, as reflexive media of social judgment, mirrors conveyed an exhortation to women that fulfilling their duties of motherhood and being a virtuous wife were more important than spending much of their time on ornamenting themselves with luxurious accessories. Nonetheless, the social norms perceived a woman’s interaction with her mirror as a self-centred moment where she betrays the role of being a wife and mother by focusing on

18 Ebrey, The Inner Quarters, 115. 19 Ibid., 111. 20 The Oxford English Dictionary defines dowry as “ the money or property which the wife brings to the husband,” while trousseau means “a bride's outfit of clothes, house-linen,” more object-related. Thus, accordingly, in this writing, “dowry” refers to the wedding gift which women received from their natal family, and “trousseau” is used in the context of describing (a) specific object(s) from the wedding gift. 21 The use of metal was restricted to accommodate military consuming. According to the promulgated decree on prohibiting the private manufacture of bronze products and the official action on confiscating bronze utensils among commoners.The History of Song (Songshi), Record (Zhi) 133, Vol. 180 documents that in the sixth year of the Shaoxing reign period (1131 –1162), the private manufacture of bronze products was banished [...] and in the twenty-eighth year, the bronze utensils were confiscated among commoners by officials. Thus, Bronze mirrors were considered luxury goods in the Southern Song dynasty. Columbia Journal of Art History 69 herself instead of the family. As a part of a woman’s trousseaux, the mirror not only indicated one’s family’s economic strength, but, to the owner, it was also evocative of her maidenhood: in retrospection, the best years of her life. Hence, mirrors represented in the Song Shinu tu convey a sense of nostalgia. In Looking in a Mirror by an Ornamental Box, the artist divided three sitters into two parts: a younger lady and the maid attentively look at the cosmetics in a tray that the maid holds while the third sitter—a slightly older lady in pink drapery— steadily holds her body erect and gazes at a flower-shaped bronze mirror on an embellished stand with her wrists crossed in the front (Fig. 6). The contour of the mirror resembles the form of the dressing box next to it and the tray held by the maid (Fig. 7). The consistency in the design of these three elements suggests that they belong to a set presumably from the lady-in-pink’s trousseaux. Likewise, in Lady Watching a Maid with a Parrot, the painter rendered a female protagonist with, next to her, a display of her bridal trousseaux consist- ing of a bronze mirror and a dressing case fastened with red ribbon (Fig. 3b). Tied with a strip of fabric in the same color as on the case in front, the petalled shape of bronze mirror shown with its reverse side serves as a piece of decorative and functional furniture standing on its intricately designed stand (Fig. 8 and Fig. 9). Moreover, sitting alone and interacting with her reflection in a mirror, the sitter in Lady at Her Dressing Table in A Garden is self-engaged. She sits on an ornate bench, likely made of mahogany and decorated with reliefs of auspicious clouds and covered with a piece of embroidered tapestry. The oval-shaped bronze mirror occupies a prominent space; from its reflection, her frontal view presents a solemn expression, as if she is closely examining her countenance (Fig. 10).22 The objects in a woman’s dowry arouse a nostalgic feeling for her maidenhood. According to the inscription on a Tang dynasty mirror— “[...] she smiles in front of the dressing table; her beauty stands alone; facing the reflection in the mirror and vying in beauty”—women are relishing the leisure time by admiring their feminine elegance, when they are not burdened with household chores (Fig. 11).23 Recalling how the mirror reminds the lady of her natal home, the mirror can be interpreted with another layer of meaning associated with the owner's emotions. Hiding her hands in her sleeves, in Lady Watching a Maid with a Parrot, the female sitter is leaning against the corner of the table to convey a sense of elegance (Fig. 3).24 Likewise, the ornamented

22 The mirror in figure 8 from Jin dynasty with a diameter of 38 centimeters, is rare in its size, but it is still smaller than the mirror in this painting. Therefore, the mirror in the picture is likely to be depicted with the painter’s imagination. Moreover, the disproportional illustration of the mirror and the reflection of the sitter’s front view could be the painter intention which provides the viewers a clear view of the lady’s facial expression as an indication of her emotions. Jessica Harrison-Hall, China: A history in Objects (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2018), 136. 23 Harrison-Hall, A history in Objects, 99. 24 In Chinese literary tradition, female elegance can be depicted through expressing a sense of delicacy. For instance, in The Song of Everlasting Sorrow (Chang hen ge), when Bai Juyi 70 Tang, Mirroring Tales of the Boudoir furnishings evoke a sense of femininity in this scene. The tasseled headdresses laying out on a black tray next to a set bronze incense burner implies that she has just applied makeup and gotten dressed. Whereas, in spite of the prevalent subject of a lady sitting in front of her dressing table in the Southern Song paintings, the appearance of mirrors in domestic settings embodies a negative connotation of feminine coquetry and vanity. Since the social expectation reinforced that is was a women's duty to deal with familial affairs, passing time in front of a dressing table indicates one’s unfulfillment in domestic responsibilities. In the sixth panel of Admoni- tions of the Instructress to Palace Ladies, the juxtaposition of the inscribed texts from the Admonitions with the illustrations of court ladies getting dressed up depicts a critical lesson for its female audiences (Fig. 12).25 The court ladies’ intention on ornamenting their appearance buried the importance of culti- vating themselves. In the painting, the kneeling lady, on the left side, has her attendant combing a knot out of her hair when she focuses on the circular bronze mirror on a stand placed in front of her (Fig. 13). To the right, the three-quarters view of another female figure is seen through the reflection in the mirror. In her left hand, holding the back of the mirror closely to her face, this sitter is presumably adjusting her make-up with her right-hand fingers gently applying the finishing touches on her check.26 The inscription on the right side of the panel narrates: “All people know how to adorn their faces, but there is none who knows how to adorn [her] character.”27 With the display of cosmetic containers in the foreground evincing the scene of morning toilette, the inscription further suggests the social criticisms on women who spent too much time on getting dressed up. Besides symbolizing a female character’s nostalgia for maidenhood, the mirror on the dressing table also reflects a negative connotation of frivolity to remind its owner that “womanly appearance requires neither a pretty nor a perfect face and form,” but being virtuous is an ultimate goal which is worth spending a lifelong course to achieve. Encompassing the coexisting emotions of euphoria and sorrow, the duality of mirrors in Shinu tu reflects a lady’s

(772–846) a Tang-dynasty poet was delineating the graceful deportment of the beloved concubine of Emperor Xuanzong of Tang, he wrote “ The palace maids helped her to leave the pool, because she was too delicate and lacked strength. This was when she began to receive the emperor's advances.” 25 This anonymousBai miao in the style of Li Gonglin (1049–1106), is in the collection at the Palace Museum in Beijing. This painting is a Song copy of the work by Gu Kaizhi (317-420). It consists of eleven panels which depict the tales of the gracious manner of the Empresses in Chinese history as an illustration of the admonitory prose-poem of the same title by the female poet-official Zhang Hua (232-300)—the marquise of Wuguang of the Western-Jin dynasty (265-316). In Admonitions of the Instructress to Palace Ladies, the admirable behavior and the use of language of empresses or imperial concubine are documented to instruct the empress at the time to follow the examples of virtuous women. 26 Shane McCausland, First Masterpiece of Chinese Painting: The AdmonitionsScroll (New York: George Braziller Publishers, 2003), 64. 27 McCausland, First Masterpiece of Chinese Painting, 63. Columbia Journal of Art History 71 delight in recalling her age of youthfulness and her encumbrance of fulfilling domestic responsibilities for being a wife, a daughter in-law, and a mother.

The Dichotomy of Within and Beyond the Gardens Within a literati family in the Song dynasty, the goal of a boy's education was to create a well-rounded person who would be able to hold a position in the imperial government in the future. However, with exceptional cases existing, girls normally focused on learning female virtue (Nü de) that would prepare them to become a good wife, daughter in-law, and mother. Compared to the male literacy training based on classics (Jing), historical works (Shi), philosophical works (Zi), and literary anthologies (Ji) preparing for their future imperial examination (Ke ju), a girl’s general education in the Song was likely formed of studying the ladies’ Classics that consists of The Book of Rites, The Classic of Filial Piety, The Ladies’ Classic of Filial Piety, The Admonition for Women, and The Analects forWomen. 28 Across the three attributed works from the Southern Song dynasty, coining the terms “semi-private” and “half-enclosed” articulates the dichotomy between the space inside and outside the garden. “Semi-private” un- derlines the fact that in the Song dynasty, women were not segregated from society while “half-enclosed” emphasizes the spatial characteristic of the garden which were not entirely divided from the domestic area.29 With symbolic analyses on the representation of the branches in the background, this section discovers the relation between the female sitters and the surrounding space by studying the pictorial composition of the tableaux. The garden comprises the dichotomy between the conventional restrictions on female behavior from the ladies’ Classics and women’s inclination of freedom.30 With a display of carefully arranged plants, the use of screens and the fence evokes the sense of isolation to indicate the living situation of a married upper-class woman in the Song dynasty.31 Employing natural elements to spatially break the boundary

28 As these two Confusian treatise are incorporated in male’s education, the section of “Inner Rules” (Neize) from The Book of Rites, and the section of “Biographies of Exemplary Women (Lienü zhuan)” in The Classic of Filial Pietywere particularly emphasized in the teaching to female. In the late Ming dynasty (1368-1644), The Admonition for Women, The Analects for Women were edited into the collection entitled the Four Books for Women with other two books compiled during the Ming. Zhang Mingqi. “The Four Books for Women Ancient Chinese Texts for the Education of Women,” in Wenshi zhishi, no.6 (1988), 69–70. 29 In the regard of the essay’s context, the use of these two terms is interchangeable in this essay. 30 Compared to the male literacy training based on Thirteen Classics (Shisan Jing), a girl’s education in the Song was likely formed of studying Admonition for Women, Analects for Women which were later compiled in The Four Books for Women in the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). The section of “Inner Rules” (Neize) from The Book of Rites, and Ladies’ Classic of Filial Piety were also supposedly incorporated into the early training. 31 The subject ofShinu tu was limited to court ladies or women from aristocratic families. Since the accessibility of mirrors to the commoners in the Song dynasty is debatable, confining the study of women and their mirrors to the upper-class wives can efficaciously navigate the relationship between an object and its owner. Therefore, this paper focuses on studying the wives 72 Tang, Mirroring Tales of the Boudoir

Figure 6 (Below right). Flower-shaped bronze mirror with floral design and four-character inscription engraved on the rim, bronze, Song dynasty (960-1276). The Collection of National Palace Museum (J.W. 600-33). After the Trustees of The National Palace Museum, Catalogue of Special Exhibition of Bronze Mirrors in The Collection of National Palace Museum, plate 138. Figure 7 (Above). Silver mirror casket in floral shape decorated with low-reliefs on its top and bottom and with scrolling vine motif around the rim, Song dynasty (960-1276), silver, Shanghai Museum, Shanghai. Photography courtesy of the Shanghai Museum. Figure 8 (Below left). Eight-foiled mirror with paired dragon design, yellow bronze, Song dynasty (960-1276). Donald H. Graham Jr. Collection (M70). After Graham, D.H., Suzanne Cahill, and Tse Ecke, Bronze Mirrors from Ancient China: Donald H. Graham Jr. Collection, catalogue no. 109.

Figure 9 (Above left). Eight-foil-shaped black lacquer toilette case with five layers, excavated from Yuandai renshi jiazumu, Qingpu county, Southern Song (1127-1276) to Yuan dynasty (1127-1368), black lacquer. Shanghai Museum, Shanghai. Photography courtesy of the Shanghai Museum Figure 10 (Left). Large bronze mirror with flower and an inscription, bronze, Jin dynasty (1115-1234). The British Museum (1991,1028.23). After Harrison-Hall, China: A history in Objects, 136. Figure 11 (Above right). Inscribed mirror with flowers, bronze, Tang dynasty (618-907). The British Museum, Brooke Sewell Per- manent Fund (1963,0211.2). After Harrison-Hall, Jessica. China: A history in Objects, 99. Columbia Journal of Art History 73

Figure 12 (Left). The Toilette Scene. Scene 6 of the Admoni- tions of the Court Instructress to the Court Ladies. A Song copy after Gu Kaizhi (345-406), Song dynasty (960-1276); hand scroll, ink on paper, 27.9 × 600.5 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing. Image courtesy of The Palace Museum.

Figure 13 (Above). Mirror with a narrative pictorial design, yellow bronze, Song dynasty (960-1276). Donald H. Graham Jr. Collection (M69), After Graham, D.H., Suzanne Cahill, and Tse Ecke, Bronze Mirrors from Ancient China: Donald H. Graham Jr. Collection, catalogue no. 108 Figure 14 (Right). Palace Ladies and At- tendants. Traditionally attributed to Zhou Wenju (fl. ca. mid-10th century), Southern Song dynasty (1127-1276), 12th-13th century; fan mounted as album leaf, ink and color on silk, 23.2 x 25.1 cm. Freer Gallery of Art, Freer Gallery 15 (F1935.9). Image courtesy of Freer Gallery of Art. Figure 15 (Right below). Appreciat- ing Flower While Washing Hands. Anonymous, Southern Song dynasty (1127-1276), ink and color on silk, 30.2 x 32.1cm. Tianjin Museum, Tianjin. Image scanned from: Songhua quanji V, no. 1 (2015), 246. 74 Tang, Mirroring Tales of the Boudoir between the lady’s garden and the residential complex, Song painters established a half-enclosed space in their pictorial compositions, and thus gave expression to a woman’s longing to venture beyond her inner quarter. In the painting Lady Watching a Maid with a Parrot, the sitter exem- plifies a capable and virtuous woman whose intelligence is manifested by an ensemble of stacks of books and writing instruments on the table, suggesting a high level of education (Fig. 3b).32 She wears the daytime draped garment made of silk, sitting on the edge of her carved wooden couch with a book and a handscroll nearby as if she were always accompanied by the presence of books and artworks. Her torso is tilted to face her maid who is training a parrot for a moment of amusement. Keeping in mind the instruction from Ana- lects for Women, which imparts the idea of “not opening mouth wide when talking and not exulting with loud laughter when happy,” the lady only shows a faint smile creeping across her face.33 Demonstrating her abilities of reading and writing, the protagonist expresses the ethereal, unsullied, and subtle characteristics intended to permeate through the young ladies from upper- class families in the Southern Song to epitomize the conception of a virtuous woman.34 In her lifetime, the fundamental etiquette for the sitter was to stay in her boudoir after turning ten years old.35 Though after being betrothed to a man a woman subsequently had her limited range of activity relocated from her chamber to another inner quarter in her husband’s family, the illustration of a peach blossom tree behind a set of screens in the background, where flowers on the branch are painted with shades of red—the color of rouge—to resemble a lady’s delicacy, breaks the confined space of the female figure to form a semi-enclosed garden (Fig. 3c). Likewise, in Looking in a Mirror by an Ornamental Box, the artist depicted a tree branch extending into the female sitter’s space to create

from the upper- class in the Song dynasty, who are also depicted in all three paintings. 32 Liu Jiuzhou, “The Analysis onLady Watching a Maid with a Parrot,” in Comprehensive Cata- logues of Song Dynasty Painting 6, no. 1 (2008), 311. Guo commented on Wang’s art skill as: “good at painting gentlewomen, and made an intensive study of Chou Fang. However [his work] was as over-blown with minute details admit was lack in spirits consonance.” Guo Ruoxu, Experience in Painting, 3.17; cf. Soper’s translation in ibid., 53. According to the introductory article written by Liu Jiuzhou, the So-called Lady Watching a Maid with a Parrot in Her Richly Decorated Boudoir (Xuangui tiaoying tu) was formerly attributed to Wang Juzheng. Presumably, it is a work from a figure-painting-specialized court painter who was active from to the reign era of Xuanhe (1119–1125) of the Northern Song to the early Southern Song dynasty. Blanchard, Song Dynasty Figures, 214. 33 Sources of Chinese Tradition, compiled by Wm. Theodore de Bary and Irene Bloom, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 827-831. 34 Hui-Shu Lee, Empress, Art, and Agency in Song Dynasty China, (Seattle: University of Wash- ington Press, 2010 ), 103-106. 35 Neize in Liji, , juan 28, 542, (quoted from Scripta Sinica). Columbia Journal of Art History 75 a half-enclosed scene (Fig. 4).36 With the layout of pavement on the ground spatially intersecting with the border of a screen in the background, the physical space of the female figures is segregated from the rest of the garden, where branches of blooming jasmine grow above the partition and extend into this semi-private zone like a visitor who announces the advent of Summer (Fig. 4a). Figuratively, not only is an extended branch conveying the longing of entering the outside world but also, as a Song poet echoes in his poem, an indication of a capable female figure inside of the garden. In the last two cou- plets of Visiting a Private Garden without Success, Ye Shaoweng (1100-1151) describes his observation from a warm Spring day: “a branch of red blossoms reaches past the [wattled] wall” of a locked garden, no matter how desperately the owner yearns to keep the beauty of springtime inside.37 Among the poets from the Tang and the Song, the illustration of a branch of apricot hovering over the wall, extending outside the garden is com- monly used in their writing to present a Spring scene, in which the depiction of flowers also associates to femininity.38 Hence, visualizing the poetic description of women's lives, the painter further elaborated on the personification of a flourishing spring day that the poet adopted by depicting a stretching-out limb of a red apricot tree. Articulating a floral branch approaching the frontal scene to break the enclosed space of the garden reinforces that no matter how tall a barrier was, an able woman always had her aspiration of having a role beyond her inner chamber. Since the beginning of their lives, women in literate families bore the social criteria that stemmed from the moral instructions in the didactic classics for female audiences. Admonition for Women—a book of fundamental social guidance by Ban Zhao (ca. 45-116) for young ladies who were made

36 In the collection at The National Palace Museum in Taipei, this a painting is considered as an authentic piece of Wang Shen. In fact, its authorship is ambiguous, which Blanchard in her “Song Dynasty Figures of Longing and Desire” regards this work as attribution to Wang Shen, painted by an Academy painter from Southern Song Dynasty. Moreover, in the painting catalogs from the Song dynasty, this work is never listed under Wang’s name. The title of the painting has several versions in English. Blanchard uses the translation of “A Lady at Her Dressing Table, Embroidered Cage, Morning Mirror” in her book, which is more coherent to its Chinese title. Palace Ladies and Attendants, in the collection at The Freer Gallery of Art, is from the Southern Song Dynasty, attributed to Zhou Wenju (10th century). The depiction of females figures in this painting mimics the portray of sitters in Wang’s work (Fig. 14). Since this painting has an empty background, it is plausible that his work as a study of the figures inLooking in a Mirror by an Ornamental Box, in the style of Zhou Wenju. However, the “Ornamental Box” as in the title of Wang’s painting is presented visibly in this attributed work. 37 Cao Yin. Poems of the Masters [Qian jia shi], 229. As Kathryn A. Lowry mentions in her book, the last couplet is often reused in later works from Ming and Qing with a sexual innu- endo of a woman having a affair: “Spring colors [of desire] fill the garden, and the wall cannot contain them. A branch of red apricot hovers over the wall.” For more information on the later adaptations of Ye’s poem, see Kathryn A. Lowry, The Tapestry of Popular Songs in 16th- and 17th- century China: Reading, Imitation, and Desire (Leiden ; Boston: Brill, 2005), 280-281. 38 Qian Zhongshu, Song shi xuan zhu (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 2017), 161. 76 Tang, Mirroring Tales of the Boudoir to learn the words by heart—regards humility as the first essential principle of becoming a virtuous wife.39 The instructress commences her lesson with an archaic tradition of placing the girl below the bed on the third day after birth to plainly indicate that she was lowly and weak.40 Receiving education based on the classics texts initiated Song women’s self-impression that they play a secondary role in society; accordingly, their femininity should consist of humility and implicit obedience to their husbands and elders. Thus, the commonality of juxtaposing a half-enclosed garden with unpruned vegetation in these three artworks creates an overarching theme of a lady’s contradictory mentality between the choice of remaining inside or going outside.41

Conclusion Across the three Southern Song fan paintings, the illustration of a tree branch extending from the back of the screen breaks the enclosed garden to form a semi-private space; juxtaposed with mirrors, this spatial composition connotes a dichotomy between inclusion and exclusion in society of a woman’s life. In this time, the disciplines of art and literature were principally male-dominated. Men authored the story of a distressed woman sobbing in her boudoir from a third-person omniscient point of view as if they were able to grasp the thoughts and emotions of women.42 For the subsequent painters after Song masters, articulating women with the sense of melancholy from“[their] sad awareness of the inevitable fading of [their] beauty” became a way to mimic and make reference to these masterpieces of figurative depiction.43 Through the symbolism of mirrors and gardens, the feminine motif of portraits of ladies employs a biased yet accurate depiction of women’s lives to commemorate the decline in female social position during the Song dynasty. Moreover, besides presenting the comparable rendering of an extending branch in the background, in Lady at Her Dressing Table in A Garden, the painter also depicted the plants not only to fill out empty space on the tabletops but to serve as metaphorical elements (Fig. 5a).44 The use of bonsai and rock can bring a variety of decorative elements from nature into a limited space (Fig. 5b). Similarly, in an anonymous Southern Song portrait of la-

39 Ban Zhao, from the Eastern Han dynasty (25-220), is the first female historian in Chinese history. 40 Nancy Lee Swann, Pan Chao: Foremost Woman Scholar of China, (New York: Century Co., 1932), 82-90. 41 Blanchard, Song Dynasty Figures, 211. 42 Every painting is a visual interpretation of a story. Drawing an analogy between a literary technique in story-narrating and the artist’s intention in his pictorial composition accentuates painter’s flexibility in making decisions in depiction his figures. The third-person omniscient point of view is a method of storytelling in which the narrator knows the thoughts and emotions of the main character. 43 Wu Hung, The Double Screen, 60. 44 This painting is in the collection at the Museum of Fine Art in Boston. Columbia Journal of Art History 77 dies Appreciating Flower While Washing Hands, an activity of appreciating and practising flower arrangement is illustrated among women is visually documenting (Fig. 15).45 The female figure’s movement of putting sprays of flowers into order by following guidance can be seen as an insinuation about the Song woman’s fate of living a life planned by others. Shaped into an ornament, the bonsai and arranged flowers are a metaphor of cultivation and constriction, plausibly indicating that the female social role was particularly assigned by the family and marriage system.46 In Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Imperial China, the rise of female writers contributed to the first high tide of women’s literature.47 Blooming in the shadows cast by male literati authors, the female poets in late Imperial era gradually took their voice back from men to recount feminine stories by starting with the reinterpretation of their boudoir as a designated realm for women’s everyday activities.48 From the beginning of the Twentieth Century, along with the fall of the last imperial dynasty, the characterization of upper-class women with a somber expression in the tales of boudoir was gradually relinquished and replaced with a generation of empowered young women who entered society and started pursuing gender equality.

45 Li Xiaofen, “The Analysis onAppreciating Flower While Washing Hands,” in Comprehensive Catalogues of Song Dynasty Painting 5, no. 1 (2015), 246. One of the literati leisure activities during the elegant gathering is practicing “Four Arts of Life” which include tea brewing, flower arranging, painting appreciation, and incense burning. According to Li, the anonymous Southern Song painting illustrates the practice of flower arrangement besides the literati in Song society. 46 Ebrey, The Inner Quarters, 44. 47 In late Imperial China, education was not accessible to women in a public condition, but the father of a wealthy family was willing to financially support his daughters’ private tutorial for the study of The Four Books for Women: Admonitions for Women by Ban Zhao, Ladies’ Analects by Song Ruoshen and Song Ruozhao, Domestic Lessons by Empress Xu, and Sketch of a Model for Women by Lady Liu. The four books were combined in the early seventeenth century. Women were confined to the domestic area and largely marginalized from social activities after the destruction of Imperial China, around 1919. Yet nowadays, the arguments upon female social status and feminism is still an ongoing debate. Wilt Idema and Beata Grant, “Introduction,” In The Red Brush: Writing Women of Imperial China, Cambridge (Massachusetts); London: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004, 347-349. 48 Xiaorong Li, Women's Poetry of Late Imperial China: Transforming the Inner Chambers (Se- attle: University of Washington Press, 2012), 14. 78 Tang, Mirroring Tales of the Boudoir

Yixuan Doris Tang ls a third-year student at Smith College in Massachu- setts (Class of 2021) studying Art History.

Bibliography

Blanchard, Lara C.W.. Song Dynasty Figures of Longing and Desire: Gender and Interiority in Chinese Painting and Poetry. Boston: Brill, 2018. Bush, Susan, and Hsio-yen Shih. "Sung Art History." In Early Chinese Texts on Painting, 89-140. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012. Cao Yin. Poems of the Masters [Qian jia shi]: China’s Classic Anthology of T’ang and Sung Dynasty Verse, translated by Bill Porter (aka Red Pine). Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 2003. Chou, Diana Yeongchau. A Study and Translation from the Chinese of Tang Hou's Huajian. Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 2005. Ebrey, Patricia B.. The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Guo Ruoxu. Tuhua jianwen zhi. In Kuo Jo-Hsü’s Experience in Painting (T’u-hua chien-wên chih): An Eleventh Century History of Chinese Painting Together with the Chinese Text in Facsimile, translated by Alex- ander Coburn Soper. xu-6 juan. Washington, D.C.: American Council of Learned Societies, 1951. Harrison-Hall, Jessica. China: A history in Objects. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2018. Idema, Wilt, and Beata Grant. "Introduction." In The Red Brush: Writing Women of Imperial China, 347-58. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004. Lee, Hui-Shu. Empress, Art, and Agency in Song Dynasty China. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010. Legge, James. The Book of Rites (Li Ji禮記 ) : English-Chinese Version. Edited by Sheng Dai. Createspace Independent Pub, 2013. Li Jing. “Grievance of the Gendered Self: Chinese Guiyuan Elements in Carolyn Kizer’s Poem.” In American Modernist Poetry and the Chinese Encounter, edited by Zhang Yuejun and Stuart Christie, 133-152. Palgrave Macmillan US, 2012. Li Xiaorong, Women's Poetry of Late Imperial China: Transforming the Inner Chambers, 20-51. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012. McCausland, Shane. First Masterpiece of Chinese Painting: The Admonitions Scroll. New York: George Braziller Publishers, 2003. Murray, Julia K.“The "Ladies' Classic of Filial Piety" and Sung Textual Illustration: Problems of Reconstruction and Artistic Context.” Ars Ori- entalis 18, (1988): 95-129. Nancy Lee Swann, trans, Pan Chao: Foremost Woman Scholar of China. New Columbia Journal of Art History 79 York: Century Co., 1932. Qian Zhongshu. Song shi xuan zhu. Beijing: renmin wenxue chubanshe, 2017. Reischauer, Edwin O., John K. Fairbank. “The Late T’ang and Sung: The Golden Age of Chinese Culture.” In A History of East Asian Civilization, 183-242. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1960. Swann, Nancy Lee. Pan Chao: Foremost woman scholar of China. New York: Century Co., 1932. Wu Hung. The Double Screen: Medium and Representation in Chinese Painting. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996. Zhang Mingqi. “The Four Books for Women Ancient Chinese Texts for the Education of Women.” Wenshi Zhishi 6 (1988): 69–72. Zhejiang daxue Zhongguo gudai shuhua yanjiu zhongxin, ed. Song hua quanji: di liu juan, di liu ce. Hangzhou: Zhejiang daxue chubanshe, 2008. —————. Song hua quanji: di wu juan, di yi ce. Hangzhou: Zhejiang daxue chubanshe, 2015.

Glossary of Chinese Characters

Bai Juyi 白居易 Qing 清 Zhou wenju 周文矩 Ban Zhao 班昭 Shi 詩 Zhu Shuzhen 朱淑真 Cao Yin 曹寅 Shinu tu 仕女圖 Zi 子 Chang hen ge Shisan jin 十三經長恨歌 Song 宋 Deng Chun 鄧椿 Song shi 宋史 Duiying zilian Su Hanchen 蘇漢臣對影自憐 Tang 唐 Guiyuan shi 閨怨詩 Tuanshan hua 團扇畫 Hua ji 畫繼 Tuhua jianwen zhi Huizong 徽宗圖畫見聞誌 Guo Ruoxu 郭若虛 Wang Juzhen 王居正 Ji 集 Wang Shen 王詵 Jiehua 界畫 Xining 西寧 Jing 經 Xuangui tiaoying tu 璇 Ke ju 科舉閨調鸚图 Lie nü zhuan 列女傳 Xuanhe 宣和 Li Ji 禮記 Ye Shaoweng 葉紹翁 Ming 明 Youyuan buzhi Nei ze 內則遊園不值 Nü de 女德 Zhang Xuan 張宣 Qian jia shi 千家詩 Zhi 誌 Qin 秦 Zhou Fang 周昉 The End is in Sight Representations of Death in Robert Mapplethorpe’s Late Self-portraits

Solène Hababou

Abstract Robert Mapplethorpe‘s explicit photography, alongside the related obscenity trial over the nature of his art in 1989 and his AIDS diagnosis in 1986, has long skewed the academic approach to his work. His deliberately shocking photographs traditionally eclipse his more introspective out- put. However, a clear shift in practice in the last years of Mapplethorpe’s life regarding themes central to his practice, among them beauty and death, deserves a close analysis. Looking at representations of death in photographs following his diagnosis, more specifically in his last three self-portraits, all taken in 1988, a new narrative emerges of Mapplethorpe’s reaction to and artistic treatment of his own passing. Self-referencing earlier photographs and his past visual repertoire, Mapplethorpe’s late self-portraits illustrate a newly existentialist outlook on life. This includes a strong identification with the tradition of the memento mori and an increasingly pessimistic approach to the familiar themes of beauty and decay, which culminates with the staging of the artist as Death itself. Focusing on Mapplethorpe’s late works brings to light a new understanding of his overall oeuvre to reveal the deeply personal artistic process which courses throughout his career; an exploration of the physical

Figure 1 (left): Robert Mapplethorpe, Self-Portrait, 1988, gelatin silver print on paper, 57.70x48.10 cm, National Galleries Scotland. Figure 2 (right): Robert Mapplethorpe, Self-Portrait, 1988, gelatin silver print on paper, 58.60 x 48.90 cm, National Galleries Scotland. Columbia Journal of Art History 81 body, beauty, and identity.

Introduction ‘In New York, Mapplethorpe was famous and dying.’1 Robert Map- plethorpe was at the height of his fame when his career was cut short by AIDS. He passed away at age forty-two in March 1989, having received his diagnosis in October 1986. Throughout his career, Mapplethorpe produced a wide range of works comprised of nudes, flowers, statues and still lives, and an extensive portfolio of models and himself engaging in explicit BDSM activities. The culturally transgressive aspects of his art lead to national controversy following a trial regarding the nature of his photographs, art or pornography. In the ensuing years, the narrative of Mapplethorpe’s sexual activities drowned out the other themes he had addressed and cemented his cultural persona around his more graphic works. 2 This is particularly problematic for the artworks he produced between his diagnosis and his death, where a shift in themes and visual language is seldom acknowledged. Whilst some papers and articles have studied the matter in part, discussions of Mapplethorpe’s late works have mostly been confined to a shallow reading which continues to privilege his sexual themes and preserves the misguided understanding of Mapplethorpe.3 It is worth mentioning that, in addition to a tendency to consider Mapplethorpe’s death as a consequence of his sexuality, a few scholars have concluded that AIDS had no impact on his work. Richard Goldstein writes that Mapplethorpe, ‘whose death from AIDS is often mentioned[,] was re- luctant to discuss his own illness and did not confront it in his oeuvre’ and, for Georgina Colby, ‘[Mapplethorpe’s] later work is quite the antithesis to the

1 Corbett, ‘Robert Mapplethorpe’s Photographs’, 256. 2 Bonneau, ‘Honor and Destruction’, 90. 3 Dunne, ‘Robert Mapplethorpe’s Proud Finale’, 133.

Figure 3: Robert Mapplethorpe, Self-Portrait, 1988, gelatin silver print on paper, 27.10 x 57.50 cm, National Galleries Scotland. 82 Hababou, The End is in Sight notion of the artist as a bearer of death.’4 This essay will address such claims and recentre the discourse on Mapplethorpe’s confrontation with his diagnosis and impending death. Indeed, a marked change in his treatment of the themes central to his oeuvre can be observed after 1986. For one, Mappletho- rpe adapted his earlier symbolism to new circumstances, with a renewed reli- ance on Classical aesthetics, quotation of religious imagery and representation of flowers. Furthermore, a paramount shift in artistic process took place when he distanced himself from photographing nude models and stopped creating explicitly sexual works. The absence of bodies in Mapplethorpe’s late works is noteworthy and symptomatic of his transformed outlook on art and life. This essay will look closely at representations of death in Mappletho- rpe’s three last self-portraits, completed in 1988. These photographs offer insight into the impact that his illness had on his psyche and his works (fig. 1, fig. 2, fig. 3). In the 1988 skull cane self-portrait (fig. 1), Mapplethorpe specifically sought to play with light and wore a black turtleneck to appear bodiless. Similarly, his face is consciously blurred while the camera focuses on the skull on the top of his cane.5 The seated self-portrait in a robe (fig. 2) was taken for an interview with Vanity Fair and composed with the symmetry and care which characterised Mapplethorpe’s work through the decades.6 The picture of his eyes (fig 3.) symbolizes the final stage of his departure from a focus on the body to the anonymity of his subjects. There are varying accounts as to the order in which the self-portraits were produced, so a chronological reading will be avoided in favour of a more organic analysis.7 First, as photographs taken by Mapplethorpe, a visual and symbolic approach of the portraits ties them back to the rest of his oeuvre through both form and subject matter. Elements of continuity show how he adapted his style to new circumstances and how his life is reflected in his art. Then, as photographs, the 1988 self-portraits are representative of themes— coursing through the entirety of Mapplethorpe’s oeuvre—such as death, reality versus fantasy, and material decay, which are intrinsic to the medium of photography. Finally, as self-portraits, they build on a long-standing habit of Mapplethorpe to stage himself through the camera. Their performative dimension implies multiple levels of representation within the image: the characters interpreted by Mapplethorpe, including their traditional role in art, are offered to the viewer for analysis, in addition to the artist’s own relation with these identities and what they represent. These self-portraits compound years

4 Colby, ‘Reappropriation of Mythology’, 27; Goldstein, ‘Cultural Responses’, 311. 5 Morrisroe, Mapplethorpe, 335-336. 6 Dunne, ‘Robert Mapplethorpe’s Proud Finale’, 133; Morrisroe, Mapplethorpe, 352. 7 Corbett, ‘Robert Mapplethorpe’s Photographs’, 256; Morrisroe, Mapplethorpe, 334; 352; 354; Sante, Kill All Your Darlings, 279. It is worth noting that Patricia Morrisroe’s biography of Map- plethorpe, although quite comprehensive factually, presents the artist in a rather pejorative light (Craig Houser, ‘Review: Mapplethorpe’. In Art Journal, vol. 55, no. 3 (Autumn 1996), 99.). As such, this volume will only be referenced for facts and all interpretations of the author will be disregarded. Columbia Journal of Art History 83 of visual exploration in an intimate study of Mapplethorpe’s diagnosis and illness. A close study of these photographs, with references to the rest of his oeuvre both before and after 1986, will shed renewed light on an oft-overlooked aspect of Mapplethorpe’s art.

Symbolism and Aesthetic Significance The three 1988 self-portraits display motifs familiar to Mappletho- rpe which, rather than disappearing, evolve to take on different meanings specifically related to death. Blessing affirms that ‘allegorical photography’ does not ‘distance the modern viewer’ but rather offers an immediacy of access and understanding.8 Mapplethorpe’s late works rely on all the same tropes which he used from the 1970s onwards, ones that his audience has learned to recognise and interpret: a Classical aesthetic, religious undertones, and scattered references to the wider visual culture which he had appropriated throughout his career. In the self-portrait with a cane (fig. 1), Mapplethorpe places the skull in the foreground and blurs his own face, yet the work is titled ‘Self-Portrait’. Mapplethorpe creates a play on subject identity and points to the importance of the skull, both as an object and a representation of himself. The laughing skull is a ‘defian[t play] with the vanitas tradition’ and recalls a long legacy of existential imagery, from the memento mori of the Renaissance to Shake- speare’s infamous Hamlet scene.9 Saints have been associated with the skull attribute since the sixteenth century and although he had not used this specific object before 1986, Mapplethorpe had extensively worked with religious imageries. 10 His use of light echoes the Dutch still lives of the seventeenth century, another genre with which he was familiar. Indeed, the skull cane self- portrait (fig. 1) follows an extensive portfolio of still lives—often with flowers as their subject. In what Sante calls ‘a frank pursuit of beauty’, Mapplethorpe’s flowers are always perfect specimens, traditionally assimilated to metaphors for the sexual organ.11 Looking beyond this interpretation, Mapplethorpe’s flowers are rather another expression of his endless search for perfection; he was ‘obsessed with beauty’ and was ‘looking for perfection in form, […] with portraits[,] with flowers.’12 In his final photographs, Mapplethorpe entirely eschews sexual undertones and returns to exploring the more traditional elements of still lives, perhaps a result of his loss of sexual interest following his treatment.13 The skull itself, depicted in the visual language of the still life genre, gives the measure of ‘a fragile instant, still, without certainty of

8 Blessing, ‘Classical Allegory’, 29. 9 Blessing, ‘Classical Allegory, 30; Frye, ‘Ladies, Gentlemen, and Skulls’, 27-28. 10 Frye, ‘Ladies, Gentlemen, and Skulls’, 18. 11 Howard, ‘The Mapplethorpe Effect’, 154. 12 Celant, ‘Mapplethorpe as Neoclassicist’, 40. 13 Morrisroe, 290. 84 Hababou, The End is in Sight

Figure 4: Robert Mapplethorpe, Jesus, 1971, spray paint on magazine page, 40.32 x 29.84 cm, National Galleries Scotland. eternity’.14 Mapplethorpe relies on conventional aesthetic symbols to address his terrible circumstance ; his polished technique blends the subject and still life into a captivating photograph. Additionally, the skull cane approached and interpreted as a cane alludes to the physical weakness of Mapplethorpe. He turns the traditional memento mori on itself and, instead of a healthy man holding a skull, the cane is necessary for him to carry on. It is tightly gripped in Mapplethorpe’s fist, who is now ‘a blurred sight, as if he were already fading away in the dark night’.15 The skull and the cane come together to propose a modern vanitas, an ‘allegory of death’; the skull as a reminder of the threat of death, the cane an allusion to his illness and impending passing.16 Mapplethorpe had regularly referenced religious imagery in his photographs before 1986 , including satanic symbols, having himself been brought up a Catholic. The memento mori and vanitas referenced in the skull cane self-portrait (fig. 1) have sacred undertones. Early works likeJesus, 1971 (fig. 4), are followed by an abundance of crosses and frequent saint-like and worshipping images, often in Mapplethorpe’s most explicit photographs. This is a contrast by way of which he is able to ‘convey contents unbearable for [his] era[.]’17 By setting these highly sexual scenes in opposition to traditionally religious symbols, Mapplethorpe ‘overrode all institutional disclaimers and continued to make accessible that which [he] had been making accessible all along’—the inherent eros of human experience.18 The efficacy of these pre-

14 Tapié, ‘Vanité’, 14; 17. 15 Daydé, ‘Catalogue’, 187. All translations from French are mine. 16 Blessing, ‘Classical Allegory’, 30. 17 Celant, ‘Mapplethorpe as Neoclassicist’, 40-41; 45. 18 Celant, ‘Mapplethorpe as Neoclassicist’, 37; Hickey, Dragon, 24. Columbia Journal of Art History 85 diagnosis juxtapositions is perhaps among the reasons his sexual thematic has been retained in the public memory. The complicated and carefully staged relation between sadomasoch- ism and religion begun in the 70s is a direct address of questions of sin and forgiveness, and a reflection on the nature of morality and intimacy. As Colby writes, ‘rather than representing his desire and aesthetics as sin, Mapplethorpe equates himself with Classical figures […] punished only out of the gods’ malice and not for any wrongdoing.’19 At the end of the 1980s, as the AIDS crisis raged, this theme was more relevant than ever for Mapplethorpe and others afflicted by the disease , so readily accused by the public of being -re sponsible for their own condition.20 Mapplethorpe’s focus on the skull cane in fig. 1 brings to the forefront questions of physical death and, in light of his past works, addresses the erasure of the self, which can in turn be applied to the wider context of the AIDS crisis and its treatment—or lack thereof—in socio-political spheres.

Away from flesh Mapplethorpe had a well-documented interest in perfection that fed his Classical aesthetic and approach to nude figures.21 This culminated in 1987 when he decided to have all his reproductions of Classical statues cleaned to ‘make them look brand new’—copies which he had purchased because he disliked the markings of age on the originals.22 This interest was to be closely followed by a gradual disappearance of the living nude as a subject matter in his works. The numerous nudes Mapplethorpe had shot throughout his career gradually made way for ‘a phase of refinement of subject and composition that emphasize[d] a Classical, quiet, and formalized sense of beauty’ after his diagnosis.23 While nude living models were disappearing, statues and busts multiplied. This reflects Mapplethorpe’s heightened consciousness of the decay to which bodies are subjected and how much of himself is reflected in his photographs, including the prospect of his death. Looking at the three self-portraits taken in 1988, it becomes evident that Mapplethorpe’s relation to his own body had changed following his heightened consciousness of the human body’s inevitable decay. Although he had taken numerous self-portraits throughout his career, the exercise had never been motivated by a ‘documentary impulse,’ but rather by an artistic intent.24 After his diagnosis, the rejection of the living —and now rapidly aging— body is repeatedly illustrated in his works. In the skull cane self-portrait

19 Colby, ‘Reappropriation of Mythology’, 27. 20 Dunne, ‘Robert Mapplethorpe’s Proud Finale’, 126; Colby, ‘Reappropriation of Mythology’, 25. 21 Celant, ‘Mapplethorpe as Neoclassicist’, 40. 22 Morrisroe, Mapplethorpe, 334. 23 Marshall, ‘Mapplethorpe’s Vision’, 14. 24 Sontag, ‘Sontag on Mapplethorpe’, 72. 86 Hababou, The End is in Sight (fig.1), Mapplethorpe purposefully erases his body. In the seated self-portrait with a robe (fig.2), his body almost disappears under the silk robe, while in the eyes self-portrait (fig.3), he has quite literally cut off the viewer from ac- cessing his body. Through his decision to distance his body from the audience, Mapplethorpe turns from his once favoured subject and offers an alienating take on the self and on his oeuvre, one which his contemporary audience was ill-equipped to understand in light of the previous faces he had presented to the public.

The Nature of Photography As photographs, Mapplethorpe’s 1988 self-portraits cannot be studied without mentioning the inherent nature of the medium and its connection to death. Roland Barthes says that there is ‘nothing Proustian in a photograph’; by stopping time, photography highlights the irretrievability of the past.25 The camera’s ability to seize an instant both grants visual immortality and makes the viewer acknowledge the fleetingness of life. Mapplethorpe creates a final offering before the curtain falls, presenting himself for the last time. Through the three 1988 self-portraits, he is visually acknowledging that ‘he is dead and he is going to die’, at once facing his own demise and forcing the spectator to recognise it alongside him.26 The medium Mapplethorpe had been using for two decades allows him to reference his illness without sacrificing his personal approach to art. As objects, photographs are prone to destruction, which is especially relevant in the case of the skull cane portrait (fig.1) where Mapplethorpe’s own face is already fading in the background.27 The blurring of the subject acknowledges the unavoidable destruction of the physical support. The material and artistic aspects of the self-portrait photographs work together to represent Mapplethorpe’s physical and mental states, painfully aware of his own ephemerality. As he was forced to confront his diagnosis from 1986 onward, Map- plethorpe also had to consider the physical decay that came with his illness. The physicality of photography found, for him, an echo through a lack of representation of the body, which he had previously sought so relentlessly. In his last interview, he recognised that ‘this disease [AIDS] is hideous.’28 After 1986, he had to admit that his body would never be whole again; that there would be no healing.29 Mapplethorpe ‘[sought] an ideality in his own life and images’ and the 1988 self-portraits illustrate a gradual abandonment of hope in terms of his own physical perfection.30 The body disappears and the face is blurred to make way for the skull (fig. 1), or is cut off to leave only his eyes

25 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 82. 26 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 96. 27 Cotentin, ‘Les Nouveaux Masques’, 110. 28 Dunne, ‘Robert Mapplethorpe’s Proud Finale’, 186. 29 Kerster, ‘Aesthetics After the End of Art’, 45. 30 Celant, ‘Mapplethorpe as Neoclassicist’, 40. Columbia Journal of Art History 87 as subject (fig. 3); as if his whole identity could be summarised through them and nothing else was necessary, a rejection of his prematurely aging body. By doing so, Mapplethorpe acknowledges ‘the incompatibility of [beauty and pain]’ and, to preserve one, forgoes the other.31 He cannot find perfection in something that is so tied to his own decay. As a photographer and an expert in self-portraiture, Mapplethorpe had to navigate the duality of the roles of artist and subject. As a creator, he was able to show something beyond reality; the product of desire and ideali- sation.32 The skull cane and the seated portraits (fig. 1 and 2), with their symmetry and frontality, exude a sense of holiness; Mapplethorpe is otherworldly, powerful, and, in fig. 1, wielding power over life and death. This status of creator is a recurring theme for artists and Mapplethorpe is no exception.33 The symmetry of each of the self-portraits echoes the religious illustrations of saints and reinforces the aura of power.34 By dimming the lights, ‘Map- plethorpe reverses the sixteenth-century representation of the creation of the world in an act of de-creation, in which darkness is eclipsing the light.’35 He reinterprets the tradition of vanitas to cement his role as a Classical creator; a being who has as much power over death as he does over life. What can be observed in Mapplethorpe’s work before 1986—the absolute control over his subjects, the exacting need for perfection in living and inanimate things alike—is brought to new extremes after his diagnosis.

Performative Self-Protraiture Self-portraiture creates a three-way conversation between the audience, the artist as subject, and the artist as object.36 The performative nature of the genre challenges the notion of reality within the artworks, particularly in light of Mapplethorpe’s tendency to show himself as characters. The audience has to examine Mapplethorpe as much as he has to examine himself. He was no stranger to the exercise of self-staging and produced numerous photographs of himself in character, including as a drag queen, a 1950s smoker or an armed revolutionary (fig. 5, fig. 6, fig. 7). In light of the performativity of Mapplethorpe’s pre-1986 self-portraits, approaching the three 1988 self-portraits as staged photographs is an important step. Mapplethorpe, by assuming the identity of a devil or a practitioner of BDSM, presents to the public a thought-through, deliberately crafted image of himself, one that might be hard to differentiate from his ‘real’ identity, depending on the mask worn. In the seated self-portrait (fig. 2), Mapplethorpe offers what is prob- ably the most genuine self-image taken that year, in what Morrisroe calls the

31 Colby, ‘Reappropriation of Mythology’, 29. 32 Lacan, ‘What is a Picture’, 108. 33 West, Portraiture, 167. 34 West, Portraiture, 72. 35 Colby, ‘Reappropriation of Mythology’, 28. 36 Jones, ‘The "Eternal Return"’, 957. 88 Hababou, The End is in Sight ‘uniform of his illness.’ 37 Composed following the format of portraits of the powerful, down to the silk robe, it is nevertheless filled with signs of Map- plethorpe’s illness and declining health.38 He is dishevelled, his ankles bony, and his gaze seems caught out and uncertain; a contrast from the intense stare in the skull cane self-portrait or the confrontational effect of the eyes self-portrait (fig. 3). The latter is at the opposite end of the spectrum; he is as close to the camera as he is to death. It is as if he had come to accept what was happening to him, finally acknowledging his physical weakness. In both fig. 2 and fig. 3, we are offered a surprisingly vulnerable image, far from the iconoclastic and impetuous Mapplethorpe persona familiar to the public. As Barthes writes, ‘the subject […] is already dead,’ and through his haze reaches out to us one last time.39 Mapplethorpe has run out of characters to embody, perhaps a by-product of his difficulty to approach the body as subject matter, and can only offer the reality of his terminal diagnosis to the camera; it is a fall from grace, an exile from the perfected beauty he sought so passionately but can no longer find in himself. Adam has been chased from the Garden and the walls are crumbling behind him. Contrary to the seated self-portrait (fig. 2) and the close up of his eyes (fig. 3), which let Mapplethorpe’s weariness seep through and present an image closer to Mapplethorpe’s true self, the skull cane self-portrait (fig. 1) embodies Mapplethorpe’s ability to become someone or something else. It shows his ability to carry the characters outside of the studio; or rather, to bring reality in, to visually acknowledge his illness and impending death. The costumes take on the look of identities, the mockery turns into representation, the mirroring becomes reality. Mapplethorpe becomes Death. He dons the mantle of what he is fighting, of what his identity has been reduced to, a man in a liminal state. Corbett compares Mapplethorpe to Dorian Gray, a fitting image.40 The portraits keep him alive all the while offering an irrefutable proof of his passing. The photograph as screen, as a performative act, as a suspended instant or as death: what better medium for Mapplethorpe, who was confronted with a fast-approaching death, to represent himself? The three 1988 self-portraits function as Mapplethorpe’s swan song and echo the shift in method initiated in 1986, illustrating the importance which death had come to take in his vision of art, of life, and of himself.

Conclusion The artworks created by Mapplethorpe after his diagnosis were inevitable. They stand as the culmination of two decades of artistic development

37 Morrisroe, Mapplethorpe, 352. 38 West, Portraiture, 73. 39 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 79. 40 Corbett, ‘Robert Mapplethorpe’s Photographs’, 311. Columbia Journal of Art History 89 and offer a glimpse into the new tensions he had to address, between the perfection he had sought and the decay he was experiencing. The long-standing conception that neither his diagnosis nor the physical toll it took on his body influenced Mapplethorpe’s photography can easily be dispelled. In the two and a half years preceding his death, there is an unmistakable shift in the way he treats his subject matters, nevertheless remaining distinctly Mapplethorpe- like. His vision, while resonating with his past work, allows for an exploration of suddenly pressing existential questions—concerns that go beyond the mainstream cultural understanding of his work and which deserve to be closely examined. The complexity of Mapplethorpe’s work before 1986 did not wither after his diagnosis, rather taking on a new dimension independent from his more graphic photographs. The most evident change in Mapplethorpe’s artistic practice is the disappearance of the body, a direct consequence of his AIDS diagnosis. It stands at once for the rejection of his now imperfect body and as acknowl- edgement that the disease will ultimately cause his own disappearance. The multiplying references to Classical aesthetics call for past times of immutable bodily perfection, as do the religious imagery, which casts Mapplethorpe in

Figure 5 (Above Right): Robert Mappletho- rpe, Self-Portrait, 1980, gelatin silver print on paper, 35.20 x 35.20 cm, National Galler- ies Scotland

Figure 6 (Above): Robert Mapplethorpe, Self-Portrait, 1980, gelatin silver print on paper, 34.00 x 34.10 cm, National Galleries Scotland

Figure 7 (Left): Robert Mapplethorpe, Self-Portrait, 1985, gelatin silver print on paper, 38.40 x 38.60 cm, National Galleries Scotland 90 Hababou, The End is in Sight a saint-like role. Meanwhile, he visually and thematically recognise his mortality through props and method. This nod to the physical dimension of the medium is closely related to the nature of photographs as captured moments of time and perishable physical objects, and appears to take on a new significance in the three 1988 self-portraits. The ability of photography to show a curated reality and create a feeling of eternity adds yet another layer to these works. The dichotomy between time suspended and Mapplethorpe’s physical fragility is reflected in the skull cane photograph (fig. 3), which recalls at once the tradition of the memento mori and Mapplethorpe’s own still lives. The performative nature of self-portraiture and Mapplethorpe’s fa- miliarity with masquerade raise issues of identity and veracity—he was no stranger to blurring the line between fantasy and reality. Reality seeps through the cracks in the seated self-portrait and in the close-up of Mapplethorpe’s eyes, letting the camera reveal the man, exhausted, behind the art. However, the skull cane self-portrait (fig. 1), staged and dramatically lit, has all the characteristics of a performance. Its intertextuality, referring to Mapplethorpe’s own visual repertoire and to the wider cultural imagery, points towards this portrait as the artist embodying not himself, but what had come to define him in his last years. Through both medium and method, Mapplethorpe captures the final masquerade of Man.

Solène Hababou is a thid-year student at the University of St. Andrews studying Art History.

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The Columbia Journal of Art History May 2020 Volume 2, No. 1

Published by the Columbia Art History Initiative New York, New York