Revival Memories, Identities, Utopias
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REVIVAL MEMORIES, IDENTITIES, UTOPIAS EDITED BY AY L A LE PINE MATT LODDER ROSALIND MCKEVER Revival. Memories, Identities, Utopias Edited by Ayla Lepine, Matt Lodder, and Rosalind McKever With contributions by: Deborah Cherry Whitney Davis John Harvey Alison Hokanson Martin Horácek Phil Jacks Michelle Jackson Ayla Lepine Matt Lodder Jonathan Mekinda Alan Powers Nathaniel Walker Alyson Wharton Series Editor: Alixe Bovey Courtauld Books Online is published by the Research Forum of The Courtauld Institute of Art Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN © 2015, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London. ISBN: 978-1-907485-04-6 Courtauld Books Online Advisory Board: Paul Binski (University of Cambridge) Thomas Crow (Institute of Fine Arts) Michael Ann Holly (Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute) Courtauld Books Online is a series of scholarly books published by The Courtauld Institute of Art. The series includes research publications that emerge from Courtauld Research Forum events and Courtauld projects involving an array of outstanding scholars from art history and conservation across the world. It is an open-access series, freely available to readers to read online and to download without charge. The series has been developed in the context of research priorities of The Courtauld which emphasise the extension of knowledge in the fields of art history and conservation, and the development of new patterns of explanation. For more information contact [email protected] All chapters of this book are available for download at courtauld.ac.uk/research/courtauld-books-online Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders of images reproduced in this publication. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any way or form or my any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission in writing from the publisher. Designed by Jack Hartnell Cover Image: Henri De Braekeleer, The Man in the Chair, 1876 (detail). Oil on canvas, 79 x 63 cm, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp. CONTENTS List of Illustrations 5 Notes on Contributors 9 Acknowledgements 11 Foreword: The Interval of Revival 12 WHITNEY DAVIS Introduction 17 AYLA LEPINE, MATT LODDER, ROSALIND MCKEVER I. MEMORIES ‘Nostalgia’, Matt Lodder 27 The Ghost Begins by Coming Back. Revenants And Returns 29 In Maud Sulter’s Photomontages DEBORAH CHERRY 1937 and Victorian Revivalism 45 ALAN POWERS The Retrieval of Revival: Recollecting and Revising 67 the Evan Roberts Wax Cylinder JOHN HARVEY The Problem of Expiration of Style 86 and the Historiography of Architecture MARTIN HORÁČEK II. IDENTITIES ‘Historicism’, Ayla Lepine 101 The New Old Style: Tradition, Archetype and Rhetoric 103 in Contemporary Western Tattooing MATT LODDER Longing for Past and Future: Cultural Identity and Central 120 European Revivalist Glassware Designs MICHELLE JACKSON Henri De Braekeleer and Belgium’s 135 Nineteenth-Century Revivalist Movement ALISON HOKANSON Armenian Architects and ‘Other’ Revivalism 150 ALYSON WHARTON III. UTOPIAS ‘Anachronism’, Rosalind McKever 169 Ferro-concrete and the Search for Style 171 in the ‘American Renaissance’ PHIL JACKS Echoes of Manhattan in Parliament Square: 188 Transatlantic Medievalism for the Twentieth Century AYLA LEPINE Modernism and Revivalism in Italian Architecture 205 and Design, 1935-1955 JONATHAN MEKINDA Babylon Electrified: Orientalist Hybridity as Futurism 222 in Victorian Utopian Architecture NATHANIEL WALKER Photograph Credits 239 67 CHAPTER 3 THE RETRIEVAL OF REVIVAL: RECOLLECTING AND REVISING THE EVAN ROBERTS WAX CYLINDER JOHN HARVEY In 2002, two years before the centenary of the 1904 Welsh Revival, the National Screen 3.1 Cylinder of ‘Revival and Sound Archive of Wales (NSSAW), based at the National Library of Wales, Aberyst- address By E Roberts wyth, received a phonographic cylinder which, it was claimed, was a recording of Evan Jan. 18 1905 (ER)’. Carnauba wax, 1 Roberts (1878–1951), the charismatic leader of the Welsh religious revival of 1904–5. This National Screen & essay examines the recording, restoration, and afterlife of a wax cylinder and its status as an Sound Archives of Wales, Aberystwyth. index to the identity of both the revivalist and his cause. The cylinder is situated in the con- text of early sound-recording processes, technology and modernity, metaphors of ruin and fracture, Roberts’ preaching, and the promotion of religious idealism. This interrogation informs the core discussion about how sound art, specifically the R R B V E TE N S O A project, can serve as a medium and process of invention, interpretation, and historical enquiry.2 JOHN HARVEY | THE RETRIEVAL OF REVIVAL 68 EVAN ROBERTS’ WAX WORK The cylinder of Nabonidus (reigned 555–539BCE), the last king of Babylon, was pro- duced in the sixth century BCE at the close of the Babylonian empire and the beginning of the Persian one. The shattered remains were discovered in the Temple of Shamash at the ancient city of Sippar, near Baghdad. The cylinder is made of clay and its text is written in cuneiform with a stylus.3 Some of the wedge-shaped symbols, like the letters that make up the Roman alphabet, are logophonetic, that is, they stand for sounds rather than concepts. The text is, in this sense, an encoded speech; one that is made audible only when the reader turns the cylinder and speaks the words aloud. In part, the writing tells a story about re- vival and restoration: an angry god who has abandoned his shrine is reconciled with his people, and orders a king to repair the temples so that the gods may return to their abodes. Two and a half thousand years later, in 2002, the shattered remains of the cylinder of Evan Roberts, the figurehead of the most significant reparation of the Christian religion in the twentieth century (fig. 3.1), were discovered among a collection of recordings owned by a historian from Tredegar, Gwent.4 This cylinder is made of wax. As upon the Nabonidus cylinder, the ‘text’ is recorded using a stylus in the form of an inscribed sound. (The two cylinders are, therefore, phonographic, in the sense that they are each, in different ways, a speech-sound drawing.) And, likewise, the content of Roberts’ cylinder can be heard only when its surface is rotated and read audibly (only in this case by a stylus, again). The recording also tells a story about revival and restoration: a holy God who, having been abandoned by his people, seeks reconciliation; he orders them to repair their spiritual lives so that he may once again dwell in their midst. This is, in essence, the concept of revival in the Christian tradition: the renewal of the professing church’s spiritual ardour and power. The revival was manifest in what were claimed to be extraordinary operations of God leading to (on the part of the unconverted) a powerful conviction of sin, repentance, con- fession of faith, and mass conversion, and (on the part of the converted) personal, spiritual reformation and various forms of activism, such as missionary endeavour, evangelistic preaching, and witness.5 Historically, the revival of 1904–5 was the largest awakening of religious realism in Wales, as well as the most documented. (The Welsh newspapers ran daily accounts of its progress for over a year).6 The revival centred on the coalmining towns in the south, and claimed over 100,000 converts in Wales, principally to the Baptist, Congregational, and Methodist denominations, and an estimated million converts in the United Kingdom as a whole. As such, the corporate identity, cause, and cultural vigour of Welsh Nonconformity were enhanced beyond measure. While the phenomenon was local, its reach was global, spawning in the following decade revivals in places as far flung as Africa and influencing the birth of Pentecostalism in America in 1906.7 For a brief period, Wales was the centre of Christendom. JOHN HARVEY | THE RETRIEVAL OF REVIVAL 69 3.2 ‘Mr Evan Roberts Smiles while Preaching’, c.1904. Picture postcard. Rotary Photo. Roberts, a 26-year-old coal worker with no ministerial training, was elevated to the position of the revival’s leader and a national hero (fig. 3.2). He claimed to possess vision- ary and prophetic gifts and to be a divinely inspired preacher.8 His view of the revival was utopian in relation to both the past and the future. Roberts believed that the pre- sent revival would return the churches in Wales, and eventually throughout the world, to that primitive state of supernaturalism and influence associated with the apostolic age. The Welsh Revival represented the prospective culmination of biblical history: the begin- JOHN HARVEY | THE RETRIEVAL OF REVIVAL 70 ning of the final ingathering of the elect before the last judgement and second coming of Christ.9 More mundanely, the revival had a profound effect on the moral behaviour of the Welsh working class. The crime rate dropped and the judiciary became idle, drunkards were reformed, and public houses lost trade. Both the Nabonidus and Evan Roberts cylinders embody and transcend their historical moment. Both are products of specific linguistic, material, and technological cultures, and are inactive and unintelligible until the appropriate apparatus for reading are brought to them. Both are material memories that have been recovered from oblivion and restored for posterity. Both are presently incomplete, part forgotten. Nevertheless, both sets of remains are sufficient to provide an insight into the values, beliefs, and capabilities of the persons and cultures that produced them. Archaeologists argue that reconstruction, if based primarily on excavated evidence, is a creative act. Moreover, the reconstructed object or site must be considered a new object— one that is shaped not only by logic and a knowledge of how the extant pieces should fit together, but also by an imaginative, aesthetic, and intuitive judgement where there are gaps to be filled in one or all of these respects.