STICK HAND FATHOM SHACKLE Politecnico De Milano
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STICK HAND FATHOM SHACKLE Politecnico de Milano www.traces.polimi.it TRACES JOURNAL: Maxwell Stolkin Transmitting Contentious European Heritages with the Arts. ISSN 2531-7083 STICK HAND FATHOM SHACKLE Maxwell Stolkin Politecnico de Milano TRACES is an independent quarterly peer- Piazza Leonardo da reviewed, non-profit journal that brings Vinci 26 together original contributions to explore 20133 Milano – Italy emerging issues in the field of heritage and museum studies. www.traces.polimi.it [email protected] Each issue investigates a specific topic from different perspectives on practices, innovative approaches and experimental research actions. Free issues per year: ‘Snapshots’, with graphic- based contributions raising questions and investigating practices;‘Dialogues’, in which the topic unfolds through a semi- structured interview; and ‘Insights’, that expands the field of inquiry by means of theoretical and empirical critical thoughts. TRACES Journal ensues from the research project Transmitting Contentious Cultural Heritages with the Arts. From Intervention to Co-Production, which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under grant agreement No. 693857. The views expressed here are the sole responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union. material from the English landscape, and ignited a brief media uproar when he presented this bit of material as a work of art in an exhibition in a London gallery. A painter creates the illusion of depth in a landscape by directing all horizontal lines towards a vanishing point at which they will converge on the horizon. This is spatial depth. Forms in the foreground are near, and the space beyond those forms recedes into the distance. Linear perspective allows the viewer a ‘controlled, axial entry into the picture plane.’3 The use of perspective “...achieved visually and geographically what survey, map making and ordnance charting achieved practically: the control and domination over space as an absolute, objective entity, its transformation into property...”3 The piece of art that the Ecuadorian artist exhibited in London was not a picture of a landscape- the Frames of Reference and Molyneux’s Question: Crosslinguistic artwork consisted of a clump of rock. This rock Evidence. Levinson, Stephen C. Bloom, Paul. 1999. Language and space. Cambridge, Mass: MIT. measures exactly one inch- and it has made three crossings of the Atlantic Ocean over a span of more than 100 years. Edward Whymper was a mountaineer, engraver, author and The inch has been called: a ‘head in a bag,’ explorer- he left traces everywhere he went. He was born an ‘intruder,’ an ‘important ceremony’ a ‘small, in London in 1840- in 1862 he was the first person to suggestive gesture,’ a ‘natural history specimen,’ stand on top of the Matterhorn. He explored the Arctic, and a ‘mickey-’ among other things. Units of measure he ascended the outsized heights of the Ecuadorian Andes. only work insofar as they are agreed upon: He kept meticulous records of everything he did and saw, everything he measured, collected, and observed. “A unit is a particular physical quantity, defined and adopted by convention, with which other particular quantities of the same kind One of his collections consisted of 98 different species are compared to express their value.”4 of insects he found at elevations greater than 10,000ft in the Andes. He collected flora and fauna- bees, wasps, 3. Cosgrove, The frame of reference by which each subject will lizards, spiders, crickets, and beetles. He tested the Denis. 1985. “Prospect, interpret the object or event being measured will accuracy of barometers at high elevations, and he studied perspective and the evolution of the landscape vary according to a number of factors. Was the the effects of altitude sickness on his own body. His idea”. Transactions, measure made on a vertical or horizontal surface? notes are so extensive, so meticulous and detailed that, Institute of British Geographers. How is the object situated within the subjects for example, even if he happened to have left something view- is it a measure made on a bit of a figure behind somewhere- we can be reasonably sure that he made in the foreground, or a surface that recedes note of that, too. horizontally into the background of the picture? Is the object backgrounded by temporal, spatial, He left many things behind. 4. International System of Units. The social, or geographical distances? The particulars NIST Reference on of any physical quantity are never a subject of In 2015 an Ecuadorian artist found a trace of Whymper in Units, Constants, and Uncertainty. https:// dispute in the case of this inch. The comparative the Andes. He peeled it off of the landscape- as if it physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/ frameworks by which the value of this inch is were a transparency- and brought it back to Whymper’s introduction.html interpreted and expressed are more difficult to own birthplace. The artist set the transparency down and sync. A measurement is not a passive thing. made a measurement by it’s guide. He extracted a bit of “Perception organizes spatial distributions around an egocentric frame of reference that is implicitly indexed to the perceiving body, and things appear near or far, to the left or right, and so forth, only in relation to the body”5 A measurement can describe an attribute of an event or object, and it can also tell us a lot about the person who made the measure. In order to understand how one measurement could provoke such a range of discordant readings we need to trace the measurement from one perceiving body to the next. Our first perceiving body was born in England in 1840. Someone put a stick in his hand. 5. Gallagher, Shaun. 2013. How the body shapes the mind. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Here is a picture with a clear background: Josiah Wood Whymper was an engraver, and he trained his son Edward in that art from an early age. Edward Whymper is more widely known today as a mountaineer- but his background in engraving would figure heavily into how he oriented himself in landscapes. He produced countless illustrations of landscapes. “Landscape distances us from the world in critical ways, defining a particular relationship with nature and those who appear in nature, and offers us the illusion STICK of a world in which we may participate subjectively by entering the picture frame...”7 The printing process that preceded the engraving was the woodcut, and the two techniques differ in one fundamental way: the way in which the illustrator establishes positive forms against negative space. “[Wood engraving is] a printmaking method distinct from woodcut in that the line is incised into the woodblock, rather than the background being cut away to leave a line in relief.”8 In the wood cut, the negative space that lies beyond the contours of each positive form is chiseled, scraped, and gouged away- forms are only drawn forth into the foreground of the picture plane as the background is pushed further into the distance. The engraver establishes positive forms against negative space with a bit more immediacy: contours are incised into the flat surface of the wood block. The figure in the engraving is outlined against, cut into, asserted upon the negative space of the background. The engraver begins in the ‘sharp and near,’ delineating positive forms from negative space, figure from ground- with cuts and gashes. Self Portrait, Edward Whymper, from the frontispiece of; Whymper, Edward, and Ian Smith. 2008. The apprenticeship of a mountaineer: Edward Whymper's London diary 1855-1859. London: London Record Society. “So in this example, at the foreground, the markings of grass are strongly indicated; but, as the ground recedes from the front, the markings are lost in the tint. ”6 6. Fuller, Sarah 2015. Manual of instruction in the art of wood engraving: description of the necessary tools and... apparatus, and concise directions for their use. [S.l.]: Forgotten Books. 8. Art Term: Wood Engraving. Tate Modern, London. http://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/w/ wood-engraving 7. Cosgrove, Denis. 1985. “Prospect, perspective and the evolution of the landscape idea”. Transactions, Institute of British Geographers. At 20 Whymper was commissioned to engrave a series of 9. Fuller, Sarah 2015. Manual of landscapes in the Swiss Alps. Englishman, apprentice, instruction in the art son- recede into the background and he enters the of wood engraving: description of the picture plane of the Alps as an engraver. He brings necessary tools distant forms into the near by rendering them on a and... apparatus, and surface with a stick- but he advances his own figure concise directions for their use. [S.l.]: into the foreground of the Alps by way of his own Forgotten Books. hand. “The constitution of the Objective location and of the Objective spatiality, HAND is essentially mediated by the movement of the Body...”10 He grabbed rope and rock and stood himself upright: “We who go mountain-scrambling have constantly set before us the superiority of fixed purpose or perseverance to brute force. We know that each height, each step, must be gained by patient, laborious toil, and that wishing cannot take the place of working.”11 He incised his own form in the sharp and near by moving his body along a single axis- like a stick: one end pointed went against gravity and pointed upwards- and the other end sat below on the ground. Moving between this simple set of coordinates worked well for him- by the age of 25 he had made numerous first ascents in the Swiss and Italian Alps. He still enjoys the mountain scenery- sunrise and sunset, the hills, dales, lakes and woods- but there 10.