Cover Design by Chris Fernald Photograph by Jessie Alperin AIR BUBBLES

Volume One, Issue Two

Fall 2020

Table of Contents

Dedication

(1) Some Fragmentary Reflections on Air Bubbles Jessie Alperin | preface | 10

(2) Fragments in a Modulated Time Sylvia Gorelick | poetry | 24

(3) What Might Not, Might Last Mary Ann Caws | essay | 28

(4) Seven Mixed Media Works Lee Miller | visual art | 36

(5) “If you think the world is a balloon in your head:” Rethinking Vignettes Andrei Pop | essay | 42

(6) Puddled Vignettes: A Photo-Poem Jessie Alperin | poetry & visual art | 56

(7) Machado’s Counselor of the Air Kenneth David Jackson | essay | 60

(8) Brief Interlude Em Schwager | poetry | 73

(9) Colors of Light: Newton’s Observations & Chardin’s Representations Anita Hosseini | essay | 74

(10) Musical Interlude Haast - Hāwea | audio | 86

(11) Bubbles in Northern European Self-Portraits: Homo bulla est Liana Cheney | essay | 88

(12) Tunnels Petra Kuppers | poetry | 108

(13) Death in the Air: Exploring Tension, Threat, and (In)visibility in Teresa Margolles’ En el Aire Julia Banwell | essay | 116

(14) Bubble Murals & Muralist Jokes: Asco’s Skyscraper Skin Mariana Fernández | essay | 120

(15) Three Poems & One Painting Wayne Koestenbaum | poetry & visual art | 126

(16) Bubble Planets Melanie King | visual art | 134

(17) Leavening Agents: Some Meditations on Baking Bread under Lockdown Charles Keiffer | essay | 142

(18) Sink Paintings Amanda Rothschild | visual art | 150

(19) “Like my dreams, they fade and die...” Esther Leslie | essay | 152

(20) Appendix The Editors | suggested reading | 160

EDITORIAL BOARD

Editor-in-Chief & Artistic Director Jessie Alperin

Senior Editors Sarah Dailey Inês Forjaz de Lacerda Kate Moger

Managing Editor Charles Keiffer

Head Copy-Editor Troy Sherman

Contributing Editors Chris Fernald Mariana Fernández Sara Gabler Thomas Zach Metzger Yubai Shi Jenna Wendler

Consulting Editor(s) Eli Llera

Faculty Advisor Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen

Brand Identity & Visual Design Chris Fernald

Editorial Design & Layout Jessie Alperin

ADVISORY BOARD

Anna Abramson (Amherst College); Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen (Williams College Graduate Program, History of Art); Ina Blom (University of Chicago); Marco Caracciolo (Ghent University); Mary Ann Caws (City University of New York); Mark Cheetham (University of Toronto); Margareta Ingrid Christian (University of Chicago); Kate Elkins (Kenyon College); Caroline Fowler (RAP, Clark Art Institute); Susan Stanford Friedman (University of Wisconsin, Madison); Mort Guiney (Kenyon College); Eva Horn (University of Vienna); Alison James (University of Chicago); John Lansdowne (The American School of Classical Studies); Jesse Matz (Kenyon College); Jussi Parikka (Winchester School of Art); Craig Santos Perez (University of Hawai’i, Manoa); Sugata Ray (University of California, Berkeley); John Paul Ricco (University of Toronto); Lytle Shaw (New York University); Ellen Tani (Independent Scholar); Orchid Tierney (Kenyon College); Jennifer Wild (University of Chicago); Dora Zhang (University of California, Berkeley)

OVERVIEW

Venti: Air, Experience, and Aesthetics invokes both the number ‘twenty’ and ‘the winds.’ Conceived in the year 2020, the journal is a forum for discussions centered on the year’s foregrounding of air, its related themes, and historical, interdisciplinary, and critical resonances. Venti asks: how do we become aware of something invisible and of things that are always in the air — such as the air itself? Investigating this query in a series of thematic issues, Venti explores the indexical qualities of air and our awareness of it through effects and affects.

Venti’s inquiries into the field of the atmospheric humanities unfold through a series of multidisciplinary readings on a range of topics. Attempting to fulfill the impossible task of grounding air, Venti strives to do so through the unfolding of questions and answers within each particular issue and across all twenty. Containing interdisciplinary investigations and concluding each issue with a thematic definition allowsVenti to become not only a collective but also a collection, acknowledging and preserving relevant approaches to understanding the world and its atmosphere today.

VENTI journal air, aesthetics, experience venti-journal.com

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Dedication

2020 has been host to multiple crises in the air. They are all too familiar by now: amidst global climate catastrophe, a virus that targets our lungs has affected lives, economies, and sharply refigured our social and political atmospheres. Simultaneously, the death of a Black man at the hands of the police has laid bare the conditions of austerity and violence that the United States’ racialized poor must endure. Though having inspired many who believe in a future where people might one day be allowed to breathe easy, these tragedies continue to stifle the air of thousands across the globe. We take this moment to thank medical workers for their tireless efforts to heal us from a devastating pandemic; we thank those who continue to do the work and speak out, holding us all in bated breath for the change we know is yet to come. We also take a moment of silence to recognize and remember all those who have lost their breath in 2020. It is to these people, and to those who love and continue to fight for them — for all of us — that Venti is humbly dedicated. We recognize these events could neither be fully spoken to nor accounted for by a dedication. At its best, intellectual dialogue supplements and informs action. Venti, in its simple bid to think about the air, might be just one tool among many for weathering this tragic, tempestuous, yet hopeful moment. As we continue to move through the topic of air, we believe it is our duty not only to mourn but to also derive inspiration.

9 Preface Preface

Some Fragmentary Reflections on Air Bubbles

Jessie Alperin

Anne Carson’s translation of Sappho’s sixty-first poetic fragment reads, “they become [ ] for not.”1 To think of bubbles, we might begin thinking with fragments, for air is traditionally understood through simile, metaphor, and other means. The bubble’s physical existence is its very non-existence. The fragment and the bubble share a life that depends on the ephemerality of the whole. The word “become” signifies a beginning, or to begin to be, yet before the line has commenced, the parenthetical space creates a gap, and with “for not” the beginning of becoming is quickly denied. The line is enchanting in its mode of creating and negating itself in a single breath, much like a bubble that also carries a space at its center and drifts through the air only to disappear. Like a fragment that speaks to us through remains, we might like to imagine that once a bubble disappears it evaporates and floats in the invisibility of air, waiting to be brought to visible form again. The visibility of bubbles derives from their liminality, suspended in a state of liquid and gas, substance and transparency, and appearance and disappearance. Just as a fragment may reveal our distanced intimacy with the past, the bubble is a means of realizing our distanced intimacy with the air. This fragment-like nature of the bubble is manifested in both Sylvia Gorelick’s piece, “Fragments in a Modulated Time” and in Mary Ann Caw’s essay, “What Might Not, Might Last.” Both string together a series of art objects and personal experiences that bubble up to elicit enchantment, wonder, and play — much like how the bubble and the fragment allow our imagination to fill the gap at their centers to create a new life, a new world. The life of a bubble fills us with awe and wonder: its creation and disappearance within a short time frame — the fragility of its expansion before it becomes suspended in the air, briefly refracting light like a distorted rainbow, transparent, only to pop. Friedrich Schlegel wrote that the fragment is “just like a small work of art, [and] must be completely separated off from the surrounding world.”2 Central to our inquiry of “air bubbles” are the questions at the heart of his claim: Are bubbles separated from the surrounding world? What worlds do bubbles create?

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To blow a bubble is to create a world through breath. Like poetry, the bubble merges the animation of breath with visual play. Although most poets create dream-like worlds that appear floating on a page between sound and sense, the French symbolist poet, Stéphane Mallarmé may indeed be the poetic blower of bubbles par excellence. In his poetry, Mallarmé draws attention to simple everyday events, yet elevates them with poetic language that suspends itself between transparency and reflective play, appearance and disappearance. Take for example the first line of his sonnet “Salut,” in which the bubble appears as froth at the top of a toasting glass, “nothing, this foam, virgin verse.”3 Mallarmé’s foam is both an accumulation of tiny bubbles and of the art of poetry. The foam exists within the sonnet’s main event of a celebratory toast, and within the creation of poetry, drawing attention to the quotidian and its marvelous transformation into poetry. The foam and the poem are simultaneously transparent and reflective, diaphanously exposing the page, while concurrently acting as an illusion of non-referentiality and something more — a contemplative play of sounds and meanings brought

11 Preface together to form the poetic whole. We find a similar bubble-like construction theorized in Kenneth David Jackson’s “Machado’s Counselor of the Air.” Jackson probes the bubbly play of Machado de Assis’s narrative structure and its means of ultimately reflecting the airiness of the text’s main character, Counselor Ayres. Mallarmé, too, conceives of his poetry as a reflective unit, in which breath is made visible by the words that “light up with reciprocal reflections.”4 The pairing of transparency and reflection allows poetic language to become self-referential. The bubble-like nature of Mallarmé’s writing is best expressed in his “Sonnet en -yx” in the line, “aboli bibelot d’inanité sonore,” in which the first half of the phrase reflects the sonorous inanity of the second half. The sound of the words literally bubbles up until the reader realizes that, like Sappho’s fragment, the trinket of sonic inanity has already disappeared. The poem then leaves us like the bubble between presence and absence, this world and an imaginary world beyond. Another way to consider the bubble is as a represention of thought. Most obvious is the thought bubble — the cloudy cartoons that bubble from our brains. In depictions of the process of thinking, three smaller circles join together to show the action of actually having a thought, while the representation of speech is a lone bubble, created in a single swoop. The elliptical bubble of thought, like the ellipsis itself, is always in a state of suspension, omission, and silence. The words in a thought bubble are silent, unlike speech, yet discernible through the language that depicts them and the comic image below. The bubble leaves thought in a state of suspension between one and another, allowing the bubble to represent the action of thinking and the trace of thought, as it simultaneously expresses and omits the non-linguistic and muted processes of forming ideas. The representation of thought bubbles in image and text is explored in Andrei Pop’s essay “‘If you think the World is a Balloon in your Head:’ Rethinking Vignettes.” Focusing on the vignette’s likeness to our own visual fields and subjective perceptions, Pop weaves his way from Romantic tales and Symbolist illustrations of the nineteenth century to the ubiquitous comic bubble. In fact, the levity of the thought bubble is best expressed in comics, particularly in their depiction of human-animal relationships. Whereas human characters fluctuate between thought and speech, Jim Davis in Garfield represents the conversing and imaginings of the orange cat through thought bubbles alone. Suspended between speech and thought balloon, Garfield’s thoughts lightheartedly emerge in small globules to form a hazy cloud of both his and our own imagination. In these instances, the thought bubble becomes a hyperbole of what we cannot know — further exaggerated in this strip from September 28, 2015, with the response of “nothing” and the smile we cannot see. The bubble is as much about what is going on in our own heads as it is a form of telepathy.

Jim Davis, Garfield, September 28, 2015. GARFIELD © Paws, Inc. Reprinted with permission of ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION. All rights reserved.

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Engraved Frontispiece, Pierre Poiret’s De Eruditione triplici Solida, 1707.

In bubbles, we not only find thought, but also the world of dreams and reverie. The bubble as a symbol of illusion as opposed to reason is predominant in depictions of bubbles beginning in the eighteenth century. Take, for example, the engraved frontispiece of Pierre Poiret’s De Eruditione triplici Solida from 1707, in which men blow bubbles inside of a cave filled with ancient philosophical texts — like in Plato’s allegory of the cave or a world based on imaginings and illusions. Whether by way of philosophy or dreams, the transparent, yet reflective qualities of the bubble may tempt us to mistake an image for reality and lead us to good or bad ideals far beyond. In Thomas Couture’s painting, Soap Bubbles, a young boy sits in a cavernous study, looking dreamily past the bounds of the space. Two floating bubbles reflect the grilles of the window that are otherwise cropped out of the image. In “Bubbles in Northern European Self-Portraits: Homo Bulla est (The Individual is a Bubble),” Liana Cheney provides an iconographic history of the bubble as an allegorical motif of mortality in Dutch vanitas still lifes. The ephemerality of the bubble is also explored in Mariana Fernández’s essay, “Bubble Murals and Muralist Jokes: Asco’s Skyscraper Skin,” in which she extends the transience of the bubble beyond allegory to the performative dimensions of Asco’s public interventions. However, as imminent death haunts life, the bubble as an allegorical motif is still present in the nineteenth century. In the Couture, the allegory that penetrates the space is not only symbolized by the bubbles but is also reflected in the mirror by the word immortalité. While he ponders the bubbles as they glimmer and float to their own demise, his mind is also elsewhere, in the air, while his body remains grounded with his hand poised on the sole of his shoe. The

13 Preface

Thomas Couture, Soap Bubbles, ca. 1859, Oil on canvas. Catherine Lorillard Wolfe Collection, 1887. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

14 Preface

Odilon Redon, Evocation of Roussel, c. 1912. Oil on canvas. Chester Dale Collection. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art.

15 Preface suspension of the thought bubble in a world of dreams and reveries is perhaps best expressed by the nineteenth-century French artist, Odilon Redon. The mind is no longer grounded in a subterranean cavern nor by holding onto a shoe; instead, heads detached from bodies float freely in an ambiguous bubbly space of ether. In his painting,Evocation of Roussel, all the elements harmonize through tone and color to suggest the reflective interplay of light at the heart of a bubble. The gold mass at the top of the image gently breaks, folding and disappearing into the curvature of the azure of sea or sky, commingling the worlds of water and air. The man’s head is barely tied to his body and levitates upwards into the layered haloes of reverie. Microscopic forms, flowers, and decoration hang over and around him as if to share with us the aspects of his imagination made visible. ______

The subjective play at the heart of the bubble is complemented by the philosophical and scientific understandings of the bubble as matter. Bringing the bubble back to earth, we might stay with Redon a little longer and examine his paradoxical lithograph, entitled Le Jour (The Day) from his series Songes (Dreams). At first glance, the image does not seem to be in the suspended state of dreams like the majority of the artist’s work. The lithograph depicts an empty room illuminated by the light of a six-paned window that frames a single tree with branches and leaves slightly blown by the wind. However, strangely, bubbles move upwards from the ground as if they have been created by the floorboards. There is no one there to blow them, except for perhaps ourselves. The bubbles seem to pre-exist in space. It is easy to imagine that the bubbles contain within themselves a similar reflection to the bubbles in Couture’s painting — the window and space beyond. Like the boy’s state of mind in the Couture, the lithograph propels us to songer, to dream, but also to wonder, reflect, contemplate, and muse.

Planche 7. “La bulle de savon,” in Les phénomènes de la physique, par Amédée Guillemin. Fonds Françoise Foliot.

16 Preface

Odilon Redon. Le Jour (The Day), from the series, Songes (dreams), plate VI, 1891. Lithograph on chine collé; only state. Rogers Fund, 1920. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

17 Preface

The interrelationship between the art and science of the bubble is developed in Anita Hosseini’s “Colors of Light: Newton’s Observations and Chardin’s Representations.” Central to the trans-disciplinary dimension of the bubble is its means of optically displaying scientific fact and artistic encounter by way of experimentation, drawing attention tothe importance of observation in both fields. Redon’s composition also recalls popular scientific imagery of bubbles, such as the seventh plate, “La bulle de savon,” in Amédée Guillemin’s Les phénomènes de la physique. Here the bubble becomes a magnified image of an empty room with two paned windows and of perspective itself. Redon’s composition removes the first-person perspective to instead create analogies between things — the bubble and the tree’s leaves mirror each other in their movement upwards and downwards, their allegorical implications of transience, and can also both be understood as primordial forms of matter. The German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz hypothesized that the pressure of light against the earth creates tiny bubbles of matter, writing in his Hypothesis physica nova that “bubbles are the seeds of things, the foundation of bodies, and the ground of all the variety that we admire in things and all of the impetus we find in motions. The bubbles contain smaller bubbles, which contain smaller bubbles still, and so on to infinity.”5 While Leibniz’s claim sounds slightly ridiculous, it was not far off from the science of molecular dynamics and physics developing at the end of the nineteenth century. The British mathematician William Thomson merged the popular entertainment of blowing bubbles with new understandings of the physical sciences, stating “blow a soap-bubble and look at it — you may study all your life, perhaps, and still learn lessons in physical sciences from it.”6 The title of Redon’s lithograph, Le Jour, is extremely appropriate. The science of bubbles is the study of everyday things. The science of bubbles, although based in the quotidian, extends beyond the commonplace to the realms of infinite possibilities and speculation. This sentiment is expressed in Leibniz’s bubble hypothesis, imagining that the universe is composed of a series of little bubbles or multiverses. The bubble simultaneously forms the macrocosmic and the microcosmic. This idea does not stray far from discoveries and experimentation in contemporary quantum physics and the claim first proposed in 1955 by physicist John Wheeler: that spacetime is not a constant but is instead “foamy,” composed of a series of ever-changing tiny bubbles and mini-universes forming inside our own. It is in the bubble that worlds of science and fiction collide. The possibility that other worlds may float just outside of our perception has tantalized writers since the concepts were first laid down. Some writers imagined entire civilizations growing and thriving within those miniature worlds, as Dr. Seuss did with Whoville, or Voltaire did in his 1752 story “Micromégas,” with the twist being that Earth is a tiny world, being visited by the giant inhabitants of far-away universes. For other writers, like Michael Crichton in his 1999 novel Timeline, the multiverse might offer an opportunity to travel between worlds and even times. Crichton spent chapters of the book outlining the quantum science that underpinned his narrative and had one character describe the universe as an expanding sphere with “tiny, tiny imperfections in it. And the imperfections never got ironed out...at very small dimensions, space-time has ripples and bubbles...There may or may not be wormholes in that foam.”7 One might also think of Lewis Carol’s Alice traveling to a dreamworld in Through the Looking-Glass. For the Queen, the seemingly fantastical aspects of multiverse theory, or the marvelous in the everyday, are of little concern; after all, as she says: “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”8 For other speculators, the bubble could be a form of transportation to a far-off land. In the Frontispiece toa 1687 edition of Cyrano de Bergerac’s Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon. The narrator, also named Cyrano, attempts to discover the “exotic” beings of the moon, by bottling the fizz of dew to fly into the unknown realm of outer space. Miserably failing to capture the air, the narrator falls back to the ground and ends up in New France — an analogy for imperialism. The preoccupation with fictionalized “otherness,” particularly at the end of the seventeenth century, reflects the European desire to colonize and prosper from “far-off” regions and lands. The speculative imagination’s dream of exploration is not outside the context of imperialist conquest and the belief in the scientific betterment and advancement of humankind.

18 Preface

Copper-engraving for L’histoire comique contenant les états et empires de la lune, Cyrano de Bergerac, 1657.

19 Preface

This history is also intimately tied to the materiality of the bubble. The lightness of the bubble contains an element of horror. The creation of the soap bubble itself is intimately linked to the European imperial drives to manufacture and produce soap from colonial, exploitative labor to cultivate oil palms from Central and West Africa.9 Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the bubble not only became a symbol of the commodification of soap but also of the cult of hygiene and cleanliness of “civilized” Europeans. Paradoxically, the production of soap brought with it the polluted froth and toxic foams of steam engines and industrialization. In her essay “Death in the Air: Exploring Tension, Threat, and (In)visibility in Teresa Margolles’ En el aire,” Julia Banwell uncovers the tension between the fragile beauty of a bubble and its uncleanly and deadly associations through Margolles’ contemporary installation art. It is easy to mistake the levity of the bubble for simple playful jouissance or a world far beyond reality, yet within the bubble’s reflections, it carries the politics of a globalized world based on imperialism and industrialization. The ties between speculation and bubbles extend to the metaphoric. In economics, speculation refers to the act of buying something with the hope that it will rise in value. When this is widespread, it creates a so-called “economic bubble.” During periods of inflation, people may become filled with excessive financial euphoria, as prices, and profits, rise and rise with seemingly no end in sight. Of course, eventually — the bubble bursts, often quite spectacularly, bringing ruin to those who pinned their wealth to its rise as well as the greater economy as a whole. History is full of these bubbles. The first “popping” of a major financial bubble occurred in 1720, with the demise of the British South Sea Company, which had been formed for the purposes of the Atlantic slave trade. Shares were held by aristocrats, politicians, and even the general population all eager to participate in what seemed to be a sure investment. This can be seen in William Hogarth, Emblematic Print on the South Sea Scheme, in which men and women from all walks of life are caricatured alongside the representation of financial speculation and corruption. At the center of Hogarth’s graphic satire, he depicts a wheel of fortune ridden by these comical Londoners flanked by allegorical figures, such as a mutilated Fortune, a naked Honesty, and even Villainy scourging Honor. The nature of economic bubbles is paradoxical: on the one hand, they cloud and obfuscate the rational judgement of people buying into them. On the other hand, to those involved, they are completely transparent: no one recognizes that they are in the midst of a bubble, making them all the more surprised when they pop. In her essay “Just like my dreams, they fade and die,” Esther Leslie touches on the myriad of metaphorical constructs in daily life that are centered around the bubble, encompassing economic and labor froth and the bubble as an ideological symbol, a reality of both protection and danger, and a commodity.10 In our current moment, there are concerns regarding our position in the middle of a bubble: the stock market continues to artificially surge in value, despite the overall economy remaining in shambles from the ongoing coronavirus, and millions of people are still out of work. The pandemic resulted in a second outbreak: one of exuberance. The metaphorical nature of the bubble contains an enigma at its center. The bubble represents a world beyond and a world within, the transience of life, and a protective layer against death. Although fragile, understanding the many paradoxical qualities of bubbles might mean to look simultaneously within and without. As living during the coronavirus pandemic has shown us, the creation of personal bubbles is dictated by a larger bubble brimming with pathogenic ones. The term “bubble” has long been associated with one’s personal space. In 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, this idea has taken on an omnipresent resonance. In his essay “Leavening Agents: Some Meditations on Baking Bread under Lockdown,” Charles Keiffer details the intimate and privileged encounter with yeasty bubbles in the art of baking bread during quarantine as a media craze, form of self-care, and even revolution. Indeed, today, the bubble is a form of care and caring: it is to the benefit of others, and to society as a whole, to maintain a distance and wear a mask, to keep our bubbles from intersecting. Of course, the bubble is also a form of privilege; only those with the wealth and means to draw back from society are able to fully live within these spaces of clean and protected air. Either way, the bubble has perhaps never been as ubiquitous in everyday discourse and thought as it is today.

20 Preface

William Hogarth, Emblematical Print on the South Sea Scheme, 1721, Engraving, Public Domain.

21 Preface

To attend to the bubble is to attend to many aspects of life — the fleeting, the fragile, the transparent and the polluted, the simple and the complex, the privacy of worlds, thoughts, and dreams, the science of matter, the everyday and the extraordinary. With its special power of reflection, the bubble creates a bridge between worlds, and like it, the essays, poetry, and artwork in this issue attempt to do just that. Thinking of air bubbles might teach us how to be within and without, how to be mindful at a distance while not being wholly apart.

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Notes

1. Anne Carson, and Sappho, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (New York: Vintage, 2003), f. 61. 2. Friedrich Schlegel, “Athenäums-Fragmente,” in Kritische und theoretische Schriften (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun., 1978), 99. 3. Jacques Rancière, Mallarmé: The Politics of the Siren. Trans. Steven Corcorran. (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2011), 4. 4. Stéphane Mallarmé, “Crise de vers,” (1885) in Oeuvres Complètes II. (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 2013), 211. 5. Daniel Garber. Leibniz: Body, Substance, Monad. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 19. 6. Simon Schaffer. “A Science Whose Business is Bursting: Soap Bubbles as Commodities in Classical Physics.” in Things that Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science. Edited by Lorraine Daston. (New York: Zone Books, 2004), 168. 7. Michael Crichton. Timeline. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 120. 8. Lewis Carroll. “Chapter 5: Wool and Water” in Through the Looking-Glass. (Produced by David Widger: Project Gutenberg, 2016). 9. Simon Schaffer. “A Science Whose Business is Bursting,” 150. 10. Leslie also provides an overview and analysis of Peter Sloterdijk’s trilogy of spheres: Bubbles, Globes, and Foams. Due to spatial constraints, this preface does not include a summary of these massive texts. For a brief literature review indebted to Sloterdijk’s work and more on his theory of Bubbles, see our “Suggested Readings” as well.

Jessie Alperin is a graduate student in the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art at the Clark Art Institute. Her research focuses on the long nineteenth century, with a particular emphasis on the symbolist movement, works on paper, and the relationship between text and image.

22 Preface

23 Fragments in a Modulated Time

Sylvia Gorelick

how to immunize desire communicate with the dead yell loud enough that they can hear you from the other side

cannot accept day’s disappearance my life unbound

--

time between memories

--

she whispers in me so the scent of a longing gets dim as if immortal my tree always yielding

angel on fire what loss could catch you there unslept unspent sun time waning moonless

rosebud of a solitude

my city fills a cave of wonders

--

24 Fragments in a Modulated Time

birds of spring hiding in another body where’s the limit creatures crawl as one be like them the air urges keep getting caught by mystery skylight lifting to other moons

-- in deep wounding casual grief answers come to bathe in different light husk of matter stay a little longer riding ferries song sustaining no wings left the egg has dropped

--

I wanted to write about women wandering cities waiting

I wanted to heal

but now it is different to wander and I’m burning to shatter things -- today is purple-gray the sun has split divided through horizon so streets are shorter

25 Fragments in a Modulated Time

bleak aligned

hope flung hovering memory in body someone else has gone flight of objects over air waves missing

-- dreams imbue experience bridges extend for us their turning arms in grace a complex structure difficult to escape breaking enclosure the only option angel angry hungry surging aching and ever exposed

-- beating of wings against my heart limning spaces of pain & tenderness

-- a world where everyone is a vagabond apocalyptic weather heart in flames I want your gradual luminescence

26 Fragments in a Modulated Time

specularity spectrality

sift through lyric raindrops mystery withheld

desire to move against originating pain gradual opening of a palm eruption out of form

--

what was secret is no more daylight arriving at close of day

you cut me to the bone with word and act

--

light falls rough in afternoon flickering off surfaces of vehicular flight

in my dream the blue journals of a woman forgotten by history

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Sylvia Gorelick is a poet and translator who is currently pursuing a PhD in Comparative Literature at NYU’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

27 Édouard Manet, Boy with Soap Bubbles, 1867-69, Etching, lavis aquatint, and roulette on laid paper, second state of four, from 1905 Strölin edition, Rogers Fund, 1921, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Public Domain.

The etching shows Léon Koelin-Leenhoff, thought to be Manet’s illegitimate son with Suzanne Leenhoff, the artist’s piano teacher whom he later married. Whether such biographical information can be used to effectively “interpret” a work of art such as this is frequently debated by art historians. However, the curl of light on the bubble is echoed around the boy’s right eye, transposing some of the bubble’s delicate fragility onto him, suggesting a fatherly gaze. Similarly, light patterns are repeated in the main figure of Chardin’s Soap Bubbles and the bubble that he blows; it is with this painting her Mary Ann Caws begins this article. Bubbles, she states, are always somewhat about hoping. Using biographical information about Joseph Cornell — his Christian Science practice and belief in white magic — Caws traces the affects we associate with bubbles in the artist’s shadow boxes. - The Editors What Might Not, Might Last

Mary Ann Caws

A Bit of History

When I first started thinking about bubbles and the blowing of them, the Chardin image of 1734 in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., called Soap Bubbles, swept me up entirely. Here was a deeply concerned man leaning over a window ledge, with a natural image of a tree branch overhead, his concentration itself being a thing of beauty. Here were leaves above and beneath the window, and his intensity is doubled by the adorable child to his left, observing the magic of the bubble. The liquid, like soap, to his right, his hands gracefully placed one above the other, his hair as beautifully arranged as the picture itself. For that lock of hair, ending with a curl, echoed by the child’s hat, whose (as it were) feather reaches over, like the man’s hair, copying that natural if human item. All imitation, all joyful elegance, and all concentrated on the development of an optimistic vision, a bubble blower, bubble blown, and observer of the scene, of the creative gesture. This to me is the perfect concentration of the natural and the constructed to be observed: of all things, a window of the familial and the art inventiveness, so that the vision of the bubbles could spread into the world beyond.

Figure 1. Jean Siméon Chardin, Soap Bubbles, 1734, Oil on canvas, Gift of Mrs. John W. Simpson, National Gallery of Art, Public Domain.

29 What Might Not, Might Last

All that, of course, and here’s an odd thing. I am thinking, as I often do, of a beloved artist — a painter, no, an artist, just before our time, depending on our age, or way before, but still in the twentieth if not yet the twenty-first century: Joseph Cornell, himself obsessed with ritual, that of the Christian Science celebrations on Wednesday night, was no less concerned by the transparency, the ethereality of the soap bubble. These for him, as I see it now, made visible the transparency of that other world in which he so often lived, the world of Christian Science. Something, then, beyond our normal way of being. I am speaking here from my own experience of Science in that sense, dating from long ago. I grew up in Wilmington, North Carolina, where Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science and author of its major work, Science and Health and the Key to the Scriptures, (which you can consult in any of the Christian Science Reading Rooms) spent a night or several, as announced on a plaque on Front Street, the town’s major street. When I spent a year abroad from Bryn Mawr College in Paris, my roommate was a Christian Scientist from a family that adhered to its doctrine, as did she. If you were sick, as she turned out to be sometimes, you phoned the practitioner and explained the symptoms, which were, in principle, talked away or prayed away over the phone. Luckily, there was one of those in Paris, so the phone calls were not too expensive. Elsewhere, for example, in Aspen, Colorado, where Mina Loy the poet and painter (also a Christian Scientist) went to live the last years of her life, there was not one, and so the phone calls back to New York — where the Scientist she was in touch with was living — were ultra-dear. So, her daughter Joella, because of whose early leg paralysis Mina had entered the Christian Scientist flock, sometimes pretended to be that person to whom her mother needed to speak.1 In Paris, the French lady with whom we lived during that year was a believer in Roman Catholicism and would have a priest come and sanctify the room from which my roommate would make the call. And still in Paris, I would play the piano at the Christian Science Church, whereas later and here in New York, I now walk by the Church, built in 1921, on 9 East 43rd Street on Wednesdays and sometimes go in for a moment and read the Science material. For years, I was editing the papers and files of the box artist Joseph Cornell, very much a believer. When I wanted to publish his letters to his deceased mother and brother, I had to receive permission from the Mother Church in Boston to do so. Thus, I absorbed a bit of that thinking, in which the belief in the real is modified by a kind of Other Perception, to me a kind of bubble universe. So let me say that the very fragility and transparency of the miraculous object — too visionary and see-through- visible to be called by such heavy term visibily and orally as "bubble" — takes us through much. The soap component or whatever permits the blowing out of the bubble, as in the Chardin painting, is part of the essential sensed purity of the vision. This is crucial, for in art, in life, and whatever else there might be — once you open the air and the bubbled air, you have let all the genies or ghosts emerge.

Writing in a Bubble

Asked to write this piece for the journal Venti (wind, air, and I am sure, in some to be cases, Hot Air), I am dealing superficially and so airily, I guess, with it all, or part.2 Necessarily, it will happily disappear, since any whole piece I now read as a writer reads her own writing, as being itself much of a bubble. I am seeing, even as I write, something trivially up there in the ether, taking just the time I am taking right now to reflect upon it. I have chosen to envision the air bubbles in the boxes of Joseph Cornell — known for imprisoning his favorite nineteenth-century ballerinas and singers, those stars of the past, in boxes he would construct rapidly and treasure, even as he gave them away. A wonderful anecdote, and this too reads as sufficiently airy to be worth re-citing. (Yes, I heard me write “re-citing,” as if I were re-hearsing, or re-hearing with a rattlecall of the death chariot within my words and remembrance of those surrealizing early films like Satie’s and Picabia’sEntr’acte or the very great Relâche, in its humorous self-undoing, as it brings along its meta-meaning of the theatrical “closed now,” and I will end here my parenthesis.) Surely the bubbles do just that, they transport us beyond where we normally reside, and they make concrete the kind of magic in which Cornell so firmly believed, not that dark magic of the surrealists with its suspicion for him of a kind of evil 30 What Might Not, Might Last presence, but a pure and evanescent world indicative of another far beyond. A healing world, so that the bubbles for him signified the healing process, the essential goodness in which he so devotedly believed, that kind of performance of magic he followed with passion. Like smoke rings, the far other side of the natural, each mutation perhaps wishes for the same informality and purity and transparency. Something about the bubble is always about hoping, breathing, being. It is a remarkable image of perseverance. Of course, the very real danger from without is somehow reflected by the worry from within: bubbles are, by their nature, not meant to last. They contain their own vision, but they reflect, on their surface the outside: so, they are the perfect illustrations of without and transparently both: you can see one through the other. Created as if it were a real art, the act of blowing the bubbles that remain in globe shape is in many of Cornell’s boxes and games and frames. There, we can play with a roll of dice or a game-shaped ball — essentially for play, but no less for thought. For with them, we learn to roll along, to roll up and gather from below. What could be more good magic than a game in which a form infinitely fragile becomes an enduring piece, in a deeply literary and visual conundrum? It can be rolled along a wire, or tossed in the air or blown away. And the innocence of the game persists: we know how Cornell believed in white magic, and the bubble is supremely magical in its enduring or collapsing. It is multiple and magical.

Figure 2. Joseph Cornell, Soap Bubble Set, 1949-1950, glasses, pipes, printed paper, and other media in a glass-fronted wood box, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase made possible by the American Art Forum, 1999.91.

31 What Might Not, Might Last

So, the Soap Bubble Set of 1949-1950 in the Smithsonian American Art Museum is perfect in its illustration of the impermanence of the thing. The glass cup at the lower left is broken, and from it the bubbles will arise, indicating their whole life cycle: the blowing up of the air and the destruction of even the container of possibility. Meditating on the outside of the globe and that perfect circular containment is like looking at the outside of a world, complete in itself and, for that perfection, a threat to both its surroundings and its inward vision, so tightly bordered and such a refusal of anything not itself. What could thrive in this airlessness which is also complete? The perfection of the bubble in the long run is its undoing ­— its intense airlessness cannot express anything but itself, its own hemming in of existence. The irony of Cornell’s Pharmacy Series, with the bottles promising relief from normalcy, is that it is in fact an anti-life series, for nothing can be added to those shapes. Quote from wall panel of this Soap Bubble Set from 1949-50:

Soap Bubble Set offers a theatrical glimpse into the cosmos. Situated on Earth, the viewer observes the mountains and valleys of the moon, first discovered by Galileo Galilei in 1610. The glasses, holding specimens of land and sea, embody the gravitational pull of the earth, perhaps in relation to the lunar influence on tides. The freely moving sphere rolls between the opposing forces while cutouts of shells, stars, and other references to the natural world float above. Following Edwin Hubble’s confirmation of the rapidly expanding universe in 1929, the metaphor of a swelling soap bubble proliferated in the popular press. For Cornell, who had a long-standing interest in astronomy and stayed abreast of breaking news, this metaphor would have resonated with his own memories of blowing bubbles with clay pipes as a child and the wonder of their creation. Cornell’s series of Soap Bubble Sets, sometimes called planetariums, is a decade-long rumination on the great astronomers of the past and the contemporary discoveries and innovations in space technology.

But here is the play of the bubble as I focus my gaze again: the cup is in no way broken, I just could not see the top of the left glass for one of the insertions described as the “specimens of land and sea,” and its position against the pale backdrop. So, let me revise my point of view. The small globe at the bottom has, of course, the shape of the bubble, making it a global conception indeed, as if the magic of the airy construction were to be mirrored, no, compacted into the small space. And here is the other side of the misconception that was my initial entry into this box: brokenness would have been a dark side of the surrealist viewpoint, whereas Cornell’s entire way of imagining desired only the white magic, that which had no black magic to it. Thus, the purity of the soap bubble, whose conception was also its spiritual many-sidedness — in honor of which there are at the top what the panel describes as “cutouts of shells, stars, and other references to the natural world” which are indeed floating above. “The freely-moving sphere” rolls between those columns or pillars at the box sides, which are themselves pipes, the architects of the entire construction, so that the universe of this box is itself a world gone globular or global. As Duchamp’s Air de Paris in its glass vial cannot be changed or breathed, the bubble can only be broken, like a toy balloon. How to not desire (as in surrealism, the Art de Désirer is what is meant to last), the Air de Paris of Marcel Duchamp, with that air treated as precious and preserved in a tiny crystal space, no harm to it?

The Other Side of A thing

About Marcel Duchamp, in a way, and not just a small way, given his salute to the urinal and to art in his chamber music of a Fountain as a Parisian piss pot on exhibition — not only mocking the art man — there is a fine small book entitled Duchamp’s Last Day.3 What a brilliant, if breathily “trivial” subject, and perhaps such a writing is, not just was, the best way to celebrate not just air but art, in something so slight, as that air of Paris was slight, and something so meaningful as that

32 What Might Not, Might Last

Figure 3. Marcel Duchamp, 55 cc of Paris Air, 1919, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Public Domain.

33 What Might Not, Might Last gesture. Here in New York — so beleaguered — when we contemplate Marcel Duchamp’s Air de Paris, enclosed straight from Paris in a tiny woven glass bubble, that capture of French atmosphere, paradoxically opens up as much as we could now desire. This returns us to the whole scale of possibilities: the birth, the development, and the desire for completion. Let me, in closing this slight piece, salute the not entirely forlorn hope that the open air might someday bring to this country, a responding Air de New York. And then the possibilities are immense: the containment of Paris or anywhere else in that Marcel shape, and, before that, the containment of whatever vision we might want to include in our own visions, knowing they will not last.

______

Notes

1. Thinking from my forthcoming book: Mary Ann Caws, Mina Loy, Critical Lives (London: Reaktion Books, 2020). 2. I am thinking here of the HOT AIR which was playfully used as a title for the lunches of the artists frequenting the amazing Florence Griswold House in Old Lyme, Mass., which has a chapter in my Creative Gatherings: Meeting Places of Modernism (London: Reaktion Books, 2019). They lunched on the porch and told wonderfully long tales. As this piece might feel, even as I write it. 3. Donald Shambroom, Duchamp’s Last Day, Ekphrasis series (New York: David Zwirner Books, 2018).

Mary Ann Caws is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature, English, and French at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. She is an Officier ofhe t Palmes académiques, a Chevalier dans l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres, holds a Doctor of Humane Letters from Union College, is the recipient of Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Getty fellowships, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the past president of the Modern Language and Literature Association and of the American Comparative Literature Association. She is the author of The Eye in the Text, The Surrealist Look: an Erotics of Encounter, The Modern Art Cookbook, Blaise Pascal: Miracles and Reason, Creative Gatherings: Meeting Places of Modernism, a translator of Mallarmé, Char, des Forêts, Reveredy, Breton, Desnos, and the editor of HarperCollins World Literature, the Yale Anthology of Twentieth Century French Poetry, The Surrealist Painters and Poets, and Milk Bowl of Feathers: Essential Surrealist Writings, and the forthcoming Alice Paalen Rahon (poet series, The New York Review of Books) and co-editor of French Prose Poems (The New York Review of Books).

34 What Might Not, Might Last

35 Seven Mixed-Media Works

Lee Miller

Untitled. Mixed media on paper, 4 x 4 in. 2020. Lee Miller

Untitled. Mixed media on paper, 3.5 x 3.5 in. 2020.

Untitled. Mixed media on paper, 3.5 x 4 in. 2020.

37 Lee Miller

Artist Statement

A compelling idea overrides everything else. At least, this is the credo that has guided my work for the past several decades. It has become particularly central to my practice as an artist now, however, as I have developed an interest in exploring the immense power of ideas as manifest in the diminutive art object.

Part of the pursuit of this intersection of form and meaning is out of practicality: my hectic travel schedule in previous years has meant limiting my materials to those which are portable and that lend themselves to a traveling studio space.

What these limitations have paradoxically opened up to me, though, is a new avenue for creative exploration in which I combine drawing and painting with endless experimentation with various materials, shapes, and textures. In other words, having a traveling studio and working on this type of art allows me to live a creative life, stay focused, and continuously come up with new ideas to explore.

Some of my works are based on obsessive mark making and the act of creating them becomes a form of daily meditation. In these works, I dive into the minutiae of the very matter of our being: in some of my art, small hatches become the grid-like striations one would expect to see through the lens of a microscope examining amoebae; in others, I create texture and patterns on my painted surfaces to echo topography, whether it alludes to the sweeping landscape or to the intricate and delicate patterns found in each facet of a crystal or geode.

Within these explorations, it is the idea that reigns supreme. I become a vehicle for an idea to come forth, and I follow that inspiration by channeling its monumentality into each individual mark I make.

Untitled. Mixed media on paper, 3.5 x 3.5 in. 2020.

38 Lee Miller

Untitled. Mixed media on paper, 3.5 x 3.5 in. 2020.

39 Lee Miller

Untitled. Mixed media on paper, 6 x 6 in. 2019.

40 Lee Miller

Untitled. Mixed media on paper, 6 x 6 in. 2019.

Lee Miller earned a BA in Graphic Design from Penn State University before launching his career. He climbed the ranks of the design world to become creative director and to eventually run his own post-production company. Beyond his primary focus in the realm of motion graphics design, though, Lee has held a parallel passion for painting and drawing. Having studied painting at both the New School and the Art Students League in New York City, Lee has exhibited his art in various group shows — including at the National Arts Club, where his work garnered award-worthy recognition.

His art has become a more central focus in recent years, not only as a creative outlet but also in response to both his demanding travel schedule and the impacts of the current pandemic era. Taking the time of lockdown as a space for creative introspection, Lee has delved into a dynamic new series that explores the intimate nuances possible in smaller-scale works. Lee lives and works in New York City, the place he has called home for more than 25 years. Follow him on Instagram (@leemiller.art) to see more of his work.

41 Thomas Baldwin, “A Circular View from the Balloon at its greatest Elevation,” in Airopaidia: containing the narrative of a balloon excursion from Chester, the eighth of September, 1786, taken from minutes made during the voyage, 1786. Courtesy of Smithsonian Libraries.

What if the world were a balloon in your head? Looking at Thomas Baldwin’s vignette from 1786, we might be tricked into believing so. Set above the clouds at the balloon’s greatest elevation, the image suspends us in the air — almost as if we are looking down at the earth below. The image is neither an accurate depiction of the clouds nor the perspectival aspects of ascension, but, rather, the spherical formation is not unlike the shape of an eye with an iris containing the visible ground at the center. The magic of the picture is that it allows us to experience a hot air balloon adventure simply by looking at an illusionistic image in a book. In his article “If You Think the World is a Balloon in Your Head:” Rethinking Vignettes, Andrei Pop closely examines a series of primarily nineteenth-century vignettes that play with and resemble our own visual fields. Pop draws out the enclosed yet open quality of the vignette as well as its capability to blur distinctions between worlds, setting one simultaneously within and without, much like how the bubble creates a fluid boundary between the inner and outer. As Baldwin’s image raises us high above the ground, the vignette leads us to reflect on our own experiences of seeing and imagining. Pop’s subtle observations allow us to enter, exit, and create these bubble-like worlds, as well as ponder a myriad of interdisciplinary examples and our own subjective visions and daydreams.

- The Editors “If you think the world is a balloon in your head:” Rethinking Vignettes

Andrei Pop

The kind of picture I have in mind is described by Edgar Allan Poe in “The Oval Portrait.” Its injured narrator finds shelter in an isolated chateau and passes the evening perusing the resident picture gallery and its catalogue. One picture, of “a young girl just ripening into womanhood,” so takes him aback that he has to close his eyes before looking at it again just to get his bearings.

The portrait, I have already said, was that of a young girl. It was a mere head and shoulders, done in what is technically termed a vignette manner; much in the style of the favorite heads of Sully. The arms, the bosom and even the ends of the radiant hair, melted imperceptibly into the vague yet deep shadow which formed the back-ground of the whole.1

The narrator realizes he was dismayed by the work’s life-likeliness, and, in the catalogue, reads of its cause: a painter husband painting his wife, the color draining from her cheek even as it enters the painting, so that at the final touch, she expires. What Poe accomplishes in a very brief compass is a creepy and suggestive parable of the porous boundary between art and life. But I am more interested here in the narrator’s art criticism:

As a thing of art nothing could be more admirable than the painting itself. But it could have been neither the execution of the work, nor the immortal beauty of the countenance, which had so suddenly and so vehemently moved me. Least of all, could it have been that my fancy, shaken from its half slumber, had mistaken the head for that of a living person. I saw at once that the peculiarities of the design, of the vignetting, and of the frame, must have instantly dispelled such idea — must have prevented even its momentary entertainment.2

How odd that Poe draws attention to the vignette technique, which he himself labels technical jargon, twice in the same paragraph, only to discount its contribution to the work’s pull. Writers have their wiles, and this may be a technique of his own for emphasizing the singular origin story rather than the fashionable manner he associates with portraitist Thomas Sully.3 Still, one might feel the narrator’s first reaction, which Poe in the first version of the tale compared with “the shock of a galvanic battery,” has to do with the way the figure “melted imperceptibly into the vague yet deep shadow” of the background, especially since the painting is glimpsed by candlelight. Romantic themes of art and life, life and death, and art and death, and of the permeability of waking life, dream, picture and story, run rife in “The Oval Portrait.” A deconstructionist critic might insist that it is precisely the incompleteness of the vignette, its fragmentation of the complete figure, which makes it lifelike. But it would be a misstep to rule too categorically on something the vignette always does — even outside the confining question of lifelikeness. Its aesthetic valence may have been more on Poe’s mind, given his elaborate description of the frame: “oval, richly [, yet fantastically,] gilded and filagreed [sic] in Moresque.”4

43 Rethinking Vignettes

One peculiarity of the vignette is how it sets the subject emphatically apart from the world, like the richly decorated frame, while at the same time allowing it to emerge gradually, organically, like an inmate of the world itself. The text tends in this direction, since from the circumstances of the painting’s discovery we are plunged into the catalogue text recounting its making and the sitter’s demise: the painter, “crying with a loud voice, ‘This is indeed Life itself!’ turned suddenly to regard his beloved: – She was dead!”5 The story ends on closing quotes (read from the catalogue), as if itself vignetted off at the end. Poe made a symmetrical cut in his 1845 revision, striking the long opening of the text, which told of the narrator’s hardship — wounded by banditti, forced to break into an unoccupied mansion in the Apennines — and of his hesitating over the size of a dose of opium he intended to swallow to allay his pain.6 Whether the cut was made to focus better on the portrait or for formal reasons, the resulting in media res opening — “The chateau in which my valet had ventured to make forcible entrance…” — seems as peremptory a vignette effect as the sudden ending.7 It is as if, to compound the dreamy, florid frame on the fictive painting, Poe appended a real and equally artful, if simpler and deadlier, edge around the story. In departing from Poe, it is worth specifying what this essay is not about. The invention and mutation of the vignette, an image with indeterminate, often rounded edges that fade gradually, named after the “little vine,” from a printer’s decorative motif featuring classicizing grapes and vines to the familiar circular or elliptical open form (still vaguely recalling a bunch of grapes?) in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, its flourishing in the Victorian era of wood engraving, its decline in the rectangular age of photographic illustration, and its popular survivals and revivals, from portrait photography to the soft-focus close-up and the user interfaces in today’s first-person games, could fill several volumes of book and media history — to leave aside narratology, for a vignette is also an anecdote or brief tale pursued by Poe and peers like Washington Irving and E.T.A. Hoffmann.8 I leave that to less vignette-like writings. Nor do I argue for a programmatic relation between the vignette and the romantic fragment, or revolutionary ambitions like the breaking of all bounds between the arts, or between art and life, as do Henri Zerner and Charles Rosen in their path-breaking essay on “The Romantic Vignette and Thomas Bewick.”9 Their concern was the avant-garde’s romantic inheritance, which is extensive. The phenomenon that interests me rather is Poe’s modern theme of being drawn to the atmosphere of the artwork, made puzzling by the vignette’s apparent lack of differentiation from its environment. It will emerge that this particular self-enclosed ‘but open’ quality of the vignette makes it attractive not just for casual, light-hearted narrative — one that does not take its own verisimilitude too seriously — but also for representing subjective states like seeing and imagining, whose vividness and apparent self-sufficient enclosure coexists with failure to perceive sharp boundaries around the experience, much less what lies beyond. Indeed, the punctual but unbounded character of most conscious experience makes the vignette a humble but effective graphic means for evoking it, so that the image within may read as a daydream, a surmise, a visual glimpse, but in any case a bubble of the viewer’s own blowing.

Openings

The subjective use of vignettes has romantic roots. I prefer to approach it quietly, as it were, not in visionary works by the likes of Grandville or Delacroix, but from the muted, Biedermeier side of the romantic mainstream, in the illustration of a tale by Hans Christian Andersen. “The Princess and the Pea” (or “The Princess on the Pea,” its title in Danish) is one of Andersen’s shortest at about three hundred and fifty words. Published in 1835, it and the other Eventyr [Adventures] got the wood-engraved vignette treatment in 1851, at the hands of one Vilhelm Pedersen. They are found at the head and foot of every story, like clockwork, the first larger and more elaborate to draw the reader in, the second like a casual wave of the hand to see a friend off. Here is the headpiece advertising “The Princess and the Pea” (Figure 1), summing up the plot while posing a riddle for the uninitiated: by candlelight, a crowned personage and her attendant climb an armchair with the intent of stacking a

44 Rethinking Vignettes monumental bed, its floppiness emphasized by the wooden angel, looking more like a satyr, who decorates the bedstead and has been fairly turned into a caryatid, a mattress on his head. The backstory is this: a prince interviews aspiring princesses; disappointed with the applicant pool, he allows the queen mother to try her hand. She puts one (dried) pea beneath twenty mattresses and twenty eiderdown duvets. Then princesses are invited to spend the night on them. Despite all the padding, a ragged-looking candidate wakes up black and blue (black and brown in Danish), and complains that she slept on rocks. She duly gets the job, and the pea is put in a museum. The key sentence explains why: “Only a real princess could be so sensitive.”10 In the endpiece, Pedersen pictures this daintiness in the final resting place of the pea, a leafy setting dominated by the crown and other jewels, among which the pea is impossible to pick out; instead, there are round jewels all around and strings of pearls like peas in a pod, or eyes staring back at us (Figure 2). But the narrator told us with a wink that the pea is still there in the Kunstkammeret, “if no one has taken it”! Who would do such a thing and leave the crown jewels? And if the jewels (and pea?) are in their case as they should be, why so much vegetation? Or were the jewels thrown out to make room for the pea?

Figure 1. Vilhelm Pedersen, headpiece to “Prindsessen paa Ærten” [The Princess and the Pea], Hans Christian Andersen, Eventyr. Med 125 Illustrationer efter Originaltegninger af V. Pedersen (Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel, 1850), p. 299.

45 Rethinking Vignettes

Figure 2. Vilhelm Pedersen, tailpiece to “Prindsessen paa Ærten” [The Princess and the Pea], Hans Christian Andersen, Eventyr. Med 125 Illustrationer efter Originaltegninger af V. Pedersen (Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel, 1850), p. 301.

46 Rethinking Vignettes

Such comic agony of uncertainty is probably not a common response to the tale.11 But ending the story with a vignette has a contrary effect to the usual tying of loose ends: showing us a sliver of the fictional world we have just left, we wonder if that parting glimpse was in fact reliable. Pedersen throughout the book uses a simple convention: a dark, deeply shaded, vignette for headpiece, giving the space of the tale some depth, and a light, calligraphic endpiece without much inked negative space.12 The closing vignette is so tightly designed that it prunes the riotous vegetation (taking care to leave intact, in the lower right corner, the artist’s name), obscures whether we are outdoors or looking into a display case, and even shaves off the tips of the middle and index finger on the scepter to the left of the crown. Readers who have detected in the story a populist dig at neurotic royals will be pleased at this demotion of the symbols of power. But that is a moral more appropriate to “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” And it imputes a tendentiousness the last vignette just doesn’t have: its lighthearted poke is not at the characters, but at the reader. The story too is less about the foibles of the rich and frivolous than about the power of discernment — the hero is after all the wily old queen who devises a princess test of the right, vanishingly fine, resolution. We see her at work setting her trap in the beginning, with the image serving as a trap for us; in the end we are left staring at a scrap of that world, searching the little salad idly for a pea we may be too dull to find. Or perhaps I alone am dull and you have found it already, disguised as a pearl!13 Regardless of our own sensitivity, the coup of this very clever image is how it manages visually what the narrator does conversationally: turning from an object in the story to the reader, who may or may not be credulous enough to try to find it in some museum. It is deliciously pat that the last sentence, and paragraph, of the text is only an exclamation: “See, that was a proper story!”14 If the first frontispiece reveals the fable, the second reveals the reader. It could not do this, however, if the tightly-focused little ball of greenery and valuables was not capable of drawing us in more intensely than the image of the queen at her work, less as an epilogue to the story than a glimpse through a keyhole so that we doubt our eyes.

Shadow of Doubt

Pedersen’s vignettes work as a gateway to (and away from) Andersen’s fable. He may be aiding the storyteller in getting the audience to suspend disbelief. Diametrically opposed stands that self-image of the avant-garde as a challenger of reverie, often through an emphasis on the how rather than the what of representation. There is reason why the vignette, with its provocative petering out at the edge of its intrapictorial frame, and its witty play with narrative and decoration, might not participate in modernist practices of questioning the means of artmaking any more than modernists must assert the finitude of the pictorial field.15 True, the vignette’s use in realist novels and children’s literature — think David Copperfield or Winnie the Pooh — may have lulled modernists. But it was as beloved by those alleged paragons of avant-garde austerity, Édouard Manet and Stéphane Mallarmé, in their collaborations, which have not attracted much modernist attention either, being as it were narrative and illustrative.16 They do not, as we will see, renounce the kind of compulsive subjectivity we found in Poe and Andersen, but intensify it to a kind of breaking point of intelligibility. Manet drew his greatest vignettes for Mallarmé’s translation of “The Raven” by Poe (1875) and the poet’s own “Afternoon of a Faun” (1876). I have treated Manet’s transfer lithographs for the deluxe book edition of Le Corbeau at some length, so I will not rehearse here that interpretation’s focus on the ineffable in Poe at the expense of the grotesque, in contrast to the poem’s other great illustrator, Gustave Doré.17 Instead, I will begin by pointing out that Poe’s own theory, in his “Philosophy of Composition,” of the artistic superiority of the brief lyric poem and prose story might be extended to the visual vignette, which we have seen him praise in “The Oval Portrait.”18 Likewise, if, as Zerner and Rosen point out, lithography freed the vignette from the technical rigors of the wood engraver’s burin to make it a painter’s tool (e.g., in Delacroix’s Faust), then Manet’s full-page illustrations, with their cursive line coalescing into contemporary costume, facial hair and furnishings, rather than Poe’s 1840s milieu (Doré is again a salient contrast), argue for the autonomy of the illustrator — provided, of course, that like the translator, he had read thoughtfully.

47 Rethinking Vignettes

The first lithograph tracks the incantatory opening, “Once upon a midnight dreary / As I pondered, weak and weary.” Despite its wintry gloom and virtuoso lamplight, it is a ‘dark-style’ vignette akin to the Pedersen headpiece to the “Pea” (Figure 3).19 Once past the fuzzy zigzag edge of the black oval, the viewer swims through the inky murk toward a room where “I pondered, weak and weary.”

Figure 3. Édouard Manet, ‘Le Bureau’ [The Desk], first lithographic illustration to Stéphane Mallarmé’s translation of “The Raven,” Le Corbeau (Paris: Lesclide, 1875).

We peer at the speaker sunk in his volumes of “forgotten lore,” standing behind his left shoulder, not far from Manet’s signature and the chair bearing what may be his hat and cane.20 As palpable as this feeling of intrusion is the effect of lamplight, a recurrent motif in the poem. Here, diagonal strokes electrify the air around the lamp, making for inkless, negative-space flashes of light around the lamp and on the desk’s surface. These cursive strokes build a stylistic continuity with the dramatic second and third illustrations (of the window thrown open to admit the raven, and the narrator seated before its perch on the bust of Pallas). It is as if the opening vignette, with its relative distance to the action and its static presentation of the hero (it is telling that the 1991 editors of Mallarmé’s autobiographical letter to Verlaine reprint the lithograph as if a frontispiece portrait of the poet), printed in landscape format so that we have to turn the book to see it properly, presages the visionary irruption of the raven into this closed world. I hurry to the last, deceptively quiet vignette, which completes the cycle of immersion, intrusion, and renewed sinking into solitude as decisively as Pedersen’s play with the pea (Figure 4). It too is a ‘light’ vignette; the agitated diagonals of the lamplight reappear in the winding column of the raven’s shadow on the floor, and in the shadow of the chair — vignettes within a vignette, the chair (and its shadow) cut off peremptorily by the edge of the plate, like the fingertips on Pedersen’s scepter. There is more — a laughably sketchy doorframe and a double avian shadow hovering just over the edge of the seat,

48 Rethinking Vignettes smaller and conspicuously missing the beak which dominates the bottom of the print in the inverted shadow of the raven, projected from where it sits on the bust of Pallas, out of view. Manet’s signature, still at bottom left, is conspicuous against the blank page, where no human presence is any longer visible.

Figure 4. Édouard Manet, ‘L’Ombre’ [The Shadow], first lithographic illustration to Stéphane Mallarmé’s translation of “The Raven,” Le Corbeau (Paris: Lesclide, 1875).

The mustachioed protagonist of the first three prints is gone, even as the poem ends on the assurance that “my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor / Shall be lifted — nevermore!”21 The hero, then, is not so much absent as dematerialized, a melancholy viewer: a role the artist ironically proffers to us in his place, and which has made this image, within the modest compass of book illustration, as bracing as any performance by Manet.22 With Le Corbeau, we have reached a stage in the imaginative use of the vignette that, if we do not want to identify it with a state of catatonic melancholy (Poe’s own view of the narrator’s mind at the end of “The Raven”), we ought to interpret more capaciously as a depiction of the field of vision the subjective visual experience of the dejected narrator. As with Pedersen’s pea, this is less the effect of naturalistic mimesis — offering some question-begging argument that “this is what the world, or more precisely, seeing the world, looks like” — than of tactfully deployed conventions like narrow focus and indeterminate boundary. If the reader takes a moment to examine their own visual field, mono- or binocular, with its blurry probable impingements of nose, cheek, and hair, they will see that it hardly resembles a printed ink figure set framelessly on a page.

49 Rethinking Vignettes

Figure 5. Ernst Mach, “Figure 1,” engraved illustration to Beiträge zur Analyse der Empfindungen [Contributions to the Analysis of Sensation] (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1886), p.14.

50 Rethinking Vignettes

But then it doesn’t exactly resemble any other finite object of vision either. In the same way, we do not see a dead zone (not even the protean “field” experienced on closing the eyes) outside the bounds of vision. Spectacles aside (which impose their own blurry frame on the visual field of wearers like myself), we don’t even see the shape of our visual field — nor is there any reason to think it rigid, for the moving eye can extend it by muscular effort. On the other hand, if we take the visual field metaphor literally, as Ernst Mach did in his famous 1886 vignette of his act of seeing (Figure 5), we need not regard the blank paper as the content of a larger framed picture (the totality of the page), engaged in a figure-ground relation. The blank page, which in a printed book is not automatically a blank image in the modernist manner, becomes around the vignette an indifferent fictional environs, filled with type or blank paper, the indeterminate world out of which the image, understood as a mental representation of the physical world, emerges.23 That is because the world we see, or imagine, is not visible as a whole — or all at once — but it is open and apparently expandable beyond its limits, like a vignette. The purpose of Mach’s vignette — which combines ‘light’ and ‘dark’ modes to convey a sense of orbital arch and periphery — was to “carry out the self-perception ‘I,”’ perform the cogito, showing that it consists of ordinary sensation and nothing more, certainly not the intuition of a transcendental ego.24 It is almost as if noticing the vignette’s handiness for depicting consciousness led people to distrust it as penny-ante illusion. Like the vignette. After all, if being a subject is like devising and looking at the little clusters of grapes, why accord it any special value? Without throwing Manet and Mallarmé into a pot with the skeptical empiricist Mach, we can read the refined but restrained vignettes in the 1876 first edition ofThe Afternoon of a Faun (L’Après-Midi d’un faune) as a nostalgic farewell to the hallucinatory intensity of “The Raven.”25 There is a full-page, hand-colored frontispiece vignette of the faun, in lateral format so that once again we have to turn the book around to look at him. There is a playful headpiece of nude nymphs bathing in the reeds to lick off the theatrical plaint of the faun: “LE FAVNE / Ces nymphes, je les veux perpétuer. / Si clair. Leur incarnate léger … Aimais-je un rêve?”26 An erotic mock-epic follows, full of frustrated desire and verbal fireworks, before the intoxicated faun bids his (imaginary?) nymphs farewell and falls sleep. Manet’s final illustration (Figure 6) is a cursive, tossed-off cluster of grapes hanging on a vine, a literal sign of the faun’s state and a sexually suggestive soupçon on his closing words: “Couple, adieu; I will see the shadow you became.”27 The shadow, of the nymphs and their ordinary cause, the wine drunk by the faun, is bodied forth in the vine.28 We have returned to the etymological birth of the vignette, the little vine, which might as well spell its death. The subtle inner world of Mallarmé, unlike Mach’s, cannot be communicated in a doodle, and certainly not without language. It is primarily in the fragmentary, vignette-like verbal incantations of the desiring, dreaming faun that his subjectivity slumbers.29 This leaves the simple closing vignette in the air — perhaps a fitting place for it.

Figure 6. Édouard Manet, Tailpiece to Stéphane Mallarmé, L’Aprés-Midi d’un faune [The Afternoon of a Faun] (Paris: Alphonse Derenne, 1876), p.12.

51 Rethinking Vignettes

Figure 7. George Herriman, Krazy Kat Sunday comic, 29 August 1943, detail, reproduced from Krazy Kat: A Celebration of Sundays, ed. Patrick McDonnell and Peter Maresca (Palo Alto: Sunday Press, 2010).

52 Rethinking Vignettes

Popping the Bubble

The happy afterlife of the vignette, away from the front line of literary and artistic experiment, to say nothing of solemn doubts about the communicability of private experience, is borne out by the popularity of the cartoon thought bubble. Whether enclosed in simple ovals (preceded by little ovals tracing a path from a character’s head), sketched clouds of surmise, or left open in the manner of the old vignettes, the thought bubble is thought made transparent, even if only in substantival form: some food or object of desire, or else shorthand clichés like the brainstorm and the lightbulb, herald of good ideas. We may doubt such transparent thinkers have any inner world worth penetrating, or, in an art-historical vein, whether thought bubbles are genuine vignettes: they lack the isolation and casualness about their connection to the rest of the page.30 Profound or not, the vignette in thought-bubble guise need not be trivial in its aesthetic and psychological effect. A virtuoso like George Herriman manipulates the frame of a comic panel to convey both the standpoint of a character and the material conditions that have brought it there. In Krazy Kat for 29 August 1943, Ignaz Mouse foils Officer Pupp, who is surveilling him through a periscope, by blocking it with a flower pot (Figure 7). But the cop has the last laugh, because flower pots have holes in the bottom. The final scene of the mouse in jail is seen through a round-cornered frame that blends into the night, transforming the newspaper page into a periscope. The vignette is here understood as the material effect of seeing through an optical device of surveillance, such as that used in the story — though the fact that we see that very device through a periscope-frame might lead to worries that someone else is watching all, including the authority figure Pupp.31 This narrative twist aside, the disruptive role of the vignette here has less to do with immersing or shaking us out of a temporary perch in the story, as did Andersen’s or Poe’s illustrators. Herriman’s full-page comic, with its jive-talking animals and flat planes of color and abstractly framed panels, draws us into and pulls us out of the narrative at every step. What the vignette does here is bring the push and pull of attentive reading and detached aesthetic observation to a standstill: it is as if the two are aligned in the lens of the periscope, which is both formal device and narrative gimmick. We can both know “what it is like” to be someone and be wrong about it. As if to underscore the vignette’s simultaneous narrative and critical potential, the bottom of the comic, a kind of elongated gutter, depicts a periscope to whose visor is pressed not the eye of a viewer but a mere slip of paper with a drawing of an eye. A vignette seen by another, en abyme, it reminds us that art need not be ponderous to be wise.32 ______

Notes

1. The title of this essay is borrowed from the lyrics of the title song on Young Marble Giants’ Colossal Youth (Rough Trade Records, 1980). The song and album title is taken from a phrase by the art historian Gisela Richter concerning archaic kouroi which guarded the entrance to the Piraeus. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Oval Portrait” in The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, vol. 2: Tales and Sketches 1831-1842, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1978), 664. The tale was initially printed in Graham’s Magazine (April 1842) as “Life in Death,” and reprinted with significant changes in The Broadway Journal (26 April 1845) under the familiar name “The Oval Portrait.” 2. Ibid. 3. Or his nephew Robert Matthew Sully, Poe’s friend. Poe’s biographer Mary Phillips was told by Robert’s granddaughter Julia Sully that Poe was inspired by “an oval portrait, two-thirds life-size, of a girl holding in her hand a locket that hung about her bare neck.” (Poe, Tales, 660). Its whereabouts are unknown, but what Poe says of his figure (head and shoulders only) excludes any strong parallel. 4. Poe, Tales, 664. The bracketed “yet fantastically” was cut in the 1845 reprint, and “in Moresque” added. 5. Poe, Tales, 666. In the 1842 version, there follows some inadvertent musing: “The painter then added — ‘But is this indeed Death?’” The phrase was struck along with the original Coleridgian title. 6. Poe, Tales, 667. This includes a dazzling philosophical discussion of relative quantities and a standard for their comparison, connected to the life and death question whether the dose of opium he intended to take was sufficient or constituted an overdose. Mabbott thinks

53 Rethinking Vignettes the opening was cut because the story of the portrait was not supernatural enough to require the naturalistic alibi of an opium dream (such as Poe prominently provides in “The House of Usher”). 7. Poe, Tales, 662. 8. Linguistically, it is worth noting that the term is already in Antoine Furetière’s 1690 Dictionnaire universel (La Haye and Rotterdam: Arnout & Reinier Leers), III:619 (“printer’s term. It is a little wood or metal plate, generally engraved with vines or grapes, placed as ornament at the head of a page, at the beginning of a book. One has also engraved copperplates of divers designs, or of figures [chiffres].” Probably due to its ‘frenchy-ness,’ it is absent from Johnson until the posthumous 1827 edition enlarged by Robert Jameson (“ornamental flowers or figures placed by printers at the beginning or end of chapters, sometimes emblematical of the subject” (772)). Readers were quicker: the 1798 edition of Josiah Relph’s Poems (Carlisle: J. Mitchell), “embellished with picturesque engravings on wood by Mr. T. Bewick, of Newcastle,” refers in a footnote to “the vignette in the title-page,” and by 1804, Longman et al. were advertising Robert Southey’s Madoc, to appear the following year, as “embellished with Four beautiful Vignettes.” Note the ambiguity between decoration and content (flowersor figures, with or without connection to the text). On the side of persistence, I will mention just the photographic vignette, whose origin the OED dates to the 1850: I have a vignette portrait photograph of my grandmother, and I just saw one of Cory Booker, c.1992, reprinted in the July 2020 issue of the Stanford alumni magazine (96). 9. Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner, “The Romantic Vignette and Thomas Bewick” in Romanticism and Realism: The Mythology of Nineteenth-Century Art (New York: Viking, 1984), 71-96, still the best introduction to the subject; see also the first chapter of the book, “The Fingerprint: A Vignette,” 1-6. 10. The Danish is earthier: “There is no such thin-skinned customer [ømskindet kunde] as a real princess.” Unless otherwise noted all translations are by the author. 11. In the manner of Paul de Man’s reading of “How can we tell the dancer from the dance?”, which he claims may be a question of Yeats’s addressed to us! See Paul de Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric,” in Diacritics Vol. 3, No. 3 (Fall 1973): 27-33 and William Butler Yeats’ poem “Among the School Children.” 12. This convention is already established by the time of A General History of Quadrupeds (Newcastle: Hodgson, Beilby, and Bewick, 1790), whose entries routinely begin with one of Bewick’s wood engravings of an animal breed, with characteristic detail and a background, and conclude with a small generic decoration, e.g.,. For new directions in Bewick scholarship, paying close attention to his procedure, and the resulting “shuttling between the imaginary and the real” in the vignettes, see especially Esther Chadwick, “Bewick’s ‘Little Whimsies:’ Printmaking, Paper Money and Currency Radicalism in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain,” Art History, Vol.41, No.1 (February 2018), 42-71 (Quotation on p.65). 13. As you might know, and readers at mid-nineteenth century were more likely to, a dried pea is whitish and thus resembles a pearl even in color. I suspect the irregular sphere at lower right, just below the large gemstone: but I cannot believe Pedersen intended to make the ‘real’ pea obvious. 14. In his annotated translation, W. Glyn Jones, “‘Eventyr, fortalte for Børn’ (1835): ‘Prindsessen paa Ærten,’” in Essays in Annotated Translation, Norwich Papers, vol. 2, ed. Christopher Smith (1994), 115-24, following Leif Ludvig Albertsen, stresses the use of the predicates rigtig and virkelig, applied in sardonic fashion to princesses and stories, but alas he mixes up the two in English, turning rigtig into “real” and virkelig into “proper.” 15. Cf. Meyer Schapiro, “On Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art: Field and Vehicle in Image-Signs,” Simiolus, Vol.6, No.1 (1972-1973), 1-19: “Mondrian constructed a grid of vertical and horizontal lines of unequal thickness, forming rectangles of which some are incomplete, being intercepted by the edge of the field… we seem to behold only a small part of an infinitely extended structure… the conception of the world as law-bound in the relation of simple, elementary components, yet open, unbounded and contingent as a whole.” (19) One might also recall Rosalind Krauss’s conception of “the cut” in photography, though its relation to the vignette is complicated. 16. One notable exception is Michèle Hannoosh, “From Nevermore to Eternity: Manet, Mallarmé and the Raven,” in Livres d’Artistes 1874–1999: The Dialogue Between Painting and Poetry, ed. Jean Khalfa (Cambridge: Black Apollo Press, 2000), 37-57, which does however emphasize the familiar anti-narrative modernist themes of “negation, nothingness, chance” (50). 17. See Andrei Pop, A Forest of Symbols: Art, Science, and Truth in the Long Nineteenth Century (New York: Zone, 2019), 51-84. The ineffable in the poem is of course partly visual, but it also concerns feelings and sensations (notably touch) only indirectly visible in the prints in features like furniture. 18. Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition,” Graham’s Magazine, Vol.28, No.3 (March 1846), 66. Poe also insisted that “circumscription of space,” such as one gets in “The Raven” and vignetting subtly abets, “has the force of the frame to a picture,” concentrating attention. I am grateful to a brilliant term paper by Yun Ha Kim on “The Modern Room,” in my Spring 2020 seminar on Modernism, for drawing to my attention this part of Poe’s theory. 19. This is the firstnarrative lithograph: there is a small open-winged raven on the ex libris, and a bust of the raven, which one might call a vignette, on the book’s imitation parchment slip-case.

54 Rethinking Vignettes

20. A suggestion aired by Juliet Wilson-Bareau in Manet 1832-1883, eds. Françoise Cachin, Charles S. Moffett and Juliet Wilson-Bareau, Exh. Cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1983), 382-3. 21. Here particularly Doré’s more literal version falls far short, showing, rather anticlimactically, the narrator’s body contorted on the floor so that the raven’s shadow may fall upon it. 22. Most commentators on the book noted it: Sarah Helen Whitman, Poe’s one-time fiancée, told Mallarmé she wished to burn it, Mallarmé himself admitted to not entirely liking it, and Richard Hengist Horne opined that it would look just as good upside down (which would place the raven’s shadow right side up). Dante Gabriel Rossetti fulminated that Manet was “the most conceited ass that ever lived” and that a copy should be in “every hypochondriacal ward in Lunatic Asylums,” but he did not specify which of the prints led him to say this. See Pop, 69, 259, 262. 23. On the modernist ‘default’ of perceiving a blank field pictorially, see Clement Greenberg, “After Abstract Expressionism,” [1962] in Collected Essays and Criticism: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957-1969, Vol. 4, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), : “a stretched or tacked-up canvas already exists as a picture—though not necessarily a good one.” (131) Greenberg’s point is reasonable in light of the contextual cues to pictoriality embodied in stretching or tacking up canvas. 24. See Ernst Mach, Beiträge zur Analyse der Empfindungen [Contributions to the Analysis of Sensation] (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1886), preface, and Pop, 148-79, for exegesis and criticism of this negative argument about the substantiveness of the self. 25. There may be several motives for this: Lesclide’s financial losses on the Corbeau, the difference between a bibliophile edition of a beloved classic and an experimental single-poem brochure by the respected but still relatively unknown Mallarmé, and much more. 26. Mallarmé, L’Après-Midi d’un faune (Paris: Derenne, 1876), 7 (really the first page of text): “These nymphs I want to perpetuate. / So bright / Their light blush … Did I love a dream?” 27. The couple is not the union of faun and nymph but a pair of disappearing nymphs: see Robert Greer Cohn, Toward the Poems of Mallarmé (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1965), 25: “[the earlier phrase] mal d’être deux: implies the frustrated conjunction. They are not a true amorous couple but merely juxtaposed. There is a further allusion to a more general allusion between any two realities short of total union in pure love, not present in this life.” If Cohn is right about this being the case earlier in the poem, the final “couple” ought to recall some of this pain. 28. Of course “real” fauns and nymphs enjoy wine; but the faun worries that the nymphs are figments of his deranged senses, in which case the grapes could stand for disenchanted reality. One wonders whether, in turn, the faun is really a faun in that case. 29. As Jessie Alperin pointed out to me, Mallarmé since his first efforts to publish the “Faun” wanted the text set in generous blank space: “I would like quite a tight typeface, suitable for the condensation of the poem, but with air between the lines, space, so that they can be separated from each other, which is necessary even with their condensation.” See Stéphane Mallarmé to Catulle Mendès, 24 April, 1866 in Correspondance: Lettres sur la Poésie, 294. Cf. Brigitte Ouvry-Vial, “Stéphane Mallarmé Self-Appointed Publisher of His Own Work: 1865-98, the Editorial Epic of The Afternoon of a Faun,” Quaerendo, Vol.44, No.1-2 (2014), 1-36. 30. Should my tone leave it unclear, let me assure the reader that I believe in the interiority of Chip and Dale, and other users of thought bubbles, as much as I do in the faun’s or Hamlet’s! Nor will the formal quibble convince any reader of Réne Goscinny and Jean-Jacques Sempé’s Petit Nicolas: when Nicolas pictures his marriage to Louise amidst the detritus of the playground, or the unhappy boys envision the variform walloping they will get when their parents see their report cards, the effect of soaring imagination, or painful apprehension, is in no ways impeded by the mechanics of thought bubbles. There are even classic vignettes emerging ex negativo from inky darkness in Nicolas’s nightmare about being caught by the principal. 31. The pertinence of this and other comics to the critique of a “scopic regime” sketched in Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990) especially for the nineteenth century cannot be overemphasized; but their playful subversion suggests there is more to the story of surveillance than the glum Foucauldian metaphor of the panopticon in which we live. Periscopes are frequent in Krazy Kat, for instance on 12 December 1937 (where the optical device turns out to be an old gas pipe planted in the water by Ignaz) and 5 December 1942, where they are connected to the threat of Axis submarines (but still wielded by Ignaz). My thanks to Peter Maresca for permission to reproduce the 29 August 1943 Sunday page from Sunday Press’s lovely edition. 32. I may be pushing the sense of en abyme, since there is no regress: but the implication is that our eye might be of the same kind, in turn seen by another, etc.

Andrei Pop is an Associate Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago. He has published monographs on Antiquity, Theatre, and the Painting of Henry Fuseli (Oxford, 2015) and A Forest of Symbols: Art, Science, and Truth in the Long Nineteenth Century (Zone, 2019), and edited Ugliness: The Non-Beautiful in Art and Theory (2013) and Karl Rosenkranz’s Aesthetics of Ugliness (2015, both with Mechtild Widrich). He is interested in logic, subjectivity, and meaning in art and life.

55 Puddled Vignettes: A Photo-Poem

Jessie Alperin

the air saw its reflection, sighing, with the touch of earth — rustling with the leaves, so they could see themselves too — to rest for a brief moment together before the earth, water, and sky went separate ways

56 Puddled Vignettes

57 Puddled Vignettes

58 Puddled Vignettes

Out of the desire to duplicate, the wavering branches are gently preserved in the reluctant expiration of a puddle. Their bodies disappear as the water fades, resurrecting the intonations in the gravel, until they melt again with the rain.

59 Jacques de Gheyn II, Air (Melancholicus) from The Four Temperaments, 1596-97, Engraving, The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Public Domain.

The allegorical qualities of air — an interest shared between Dutch artist Jacques de Gheyn II and Brazilian author Machado de Assis, both of whom create figures that speak to the introspective and at times wistful nature of the at- mosphere around us. In “Machado’s Counselor of the Air,” Kenneth David Jackson argues for the air-like qualities of Counselor Ayres, the narrator in Machado’s last two novels. The text itself, presented as both “found” and randomly written entries in a diary, encapsulates the intangible qualities of air. Like the narrator Ayres, the narrative structure resists a singular textual mode and subscribes to the absence-presence dichotomy, rendering both text and implied author intangible. Certainly, the text is ghostly, ephemeral and diaphanous, occupying both physically external and spiritually internal worlds as it ties down the bubbles of experience to which Ayres’ written life is beholden; his life impermanent and tenuous, his words equally so.

- The Editors Machado’s Counselor of the Air

Kenneth David Jackson

Brazilian author Machado de Assis creates a narrator who is pure air: Counselor José da Costa Marcondes Ayres, or Counselor Ayres, is a diplomat who spent his entire professional life of thirty years representing Brazil abroad before returning to Rio de Janeiro to pass his remaining days.1 The name Ayres, meaning air, is symptomatic of transparency and absence: like Machado’s narrator Brás Cubas in The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, Ayres is another author who is dead yet returns to authorship in Machado’s last two novels, Esau and Jacob (1904) and Ayres’ diary-memoir, Counselor Ayres’ Memorial (1908).2 In a clever dissimulation, Ayres is introduced in a “notice” to the 1904 novel, in which Machado de Assis revives the conceit of the found manuscript. In the unsigned “notice,” Machado disguises the identity of an editor, possibly himself, who has discovered seven bound notebooks left by the then deceased Counselor in his desk: the first six boxes contained the Counselor’s diary, from which the editor selected entries in order to compose the novel-memoir, and the seventh included a completed novel ready for publication. This complex game of authorship opens the space between writer and character, editor and text, narrator and reader, and language and meaning. In a note to the 1908 memoir signed “M. de A.,” Machado as the hidden author explains the uncompelling marginality both of Ayres and his writings: they were completed in unoccupied hours at work, the pages are filled with a unique inner way of thinking, some pages are dull or obscure, and their main readerly interest would be to kill some time on the boat to Petrópolis. The editor selects only two years of entries (1888-1889) from the notebooks for publication as a memoir, and these writings are stripped of circumstantial anecdotes, descriptions, and reflections leaving only what the editor thinks may constitute a possibly coherent narrative. His assertion that these selctions are of small import is doubly strange, as it questions the value of his own work and elides the historical and human importance of those two years: abolition in the first and end of the empire and proclamation of the republic in the second. The note introduces an unexpected and seemingly gratuitous tone of pessimism as in the final dry observation that “the rest will appear some day, if some day comes.”3 Ayres’ voice returns from the insignificance of oblivion only within the editor’s selections, resulting in a doubly retrospective, selective memoir built around lost or abandoned writings. Ayres is air because his edited memoir, just as his thoughts and outings in the city, appears to be random or fortuitous. His 172 diary entries are like air bubbles that rise individually, apparently disconnected from their many companions. On the surface, they are connected only by their chronological order. Since Ayres is no longer around to aid in editing, his manuscripts take on the quality of literary archaeology. Narrative comes in bits and pieces, and Ayres quotes from his own writings while he observes life in the city. His personal observations and confessions, often recounting visits to a select group of acquaintances, are elective, nonessential, and written to seem inconsequential. He frequently addresses, questions, and converses with the reader using the second person, so that the role of imagined reader-listener inside the text extends to the reader of the novel outside of it. The narrative’s profound themes of narrative and memory, slavery and manumission, home and exile, presence and absence, faithfulness and betrayal, time and eternity are embedded in the stream of bubbles. Ayres is further encased in a secondary bubble that is his glass cabinet, a microcosm of the geography of his diplomatic service where he keeps relics of his former life: ribbons, medals, old photos, pieces of classical ruins.

61 Machado’s Counselor of the Air

Ayres is air because he no longer exists at the time of reading; he is an ephemeral figure because he is mediated by the construction of the diary form of the novel, which for him is disorderly and fragmented. His wandering thoughts make him seem more air-like. His writings are self-conscious and self-referential: in the novel he refers to lines recorded in his diary, and in the memoirs he converses with the paper on which he writes. The reader is disarmed and misled by the implication of the insignificance and even disorder of the Counselor’s writings, as if the unnamed editor were questioning whether the contents were worth his time and dedication, much less the reader’s attention. The confusion this produces begs the question of whether an annotated life can be successfully forged into art by a novice editor. Mirroring Brás Cubas’ comment in The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas about having only five readers,4 the editor here suggests that despite his struggles to piece together a connected narrative of minimal interest, the diary may be nothing more than another collection of retrospective and fragmentary memoirs by a dead author, of whom he says, “He did not play an important role in this world.”5 Yet the editor, in his dismissal of Ayres, seems not to grasp a meaning any deeper than curiosity or more than commonplace. The theme of death appears in the Counselor’s return to Rio de Janeiro at the age of sixty-two. Though retired, the always observant and supercilious Counselor haunts the city as if he were an airy absence, floating above the streets and people. Ayres is air because he has been away from Rio de Janeiro for thirty years. He turns his late and final return into a ghostly posthumous revisiting by diary, sparkled with his usual witty and wry reflections, now coming from beyond. The distinguished diplomat is Machado’s ultimate inside-outsider, an analyst of the familiar who from long absence speaks on his definitive return to Rio in 1887 as if he were a voyeur anonymously observing the city. Rio de Janeiro is the bubble that envelops him when he returns as a native from abroad. Illustrating the dichotomy of presence and absence, he decides to live as a recluse, communicating only with the physical city: “I will not live with anybody. I will live with Catete, the Largo do Machado, Botafogo beach and Flamengo. I speak not of the people who live there but of the streets, the houses, the fountains, and the shops.”6 The material city is the bubble that brings Ayres back to familiar environs. It is within the city’s unchanged spaces that he wishes to commune in his final years; thus the city’s geography forms an unchangeable and protective bubble as Ayres’ outer soul. Thematic keys to his reading of the city are found in a substantial number of literary quotes, allusions, and references; a gesture of the old couple Aguiar and Carmo reminds Ayres of a line from Madame de Sevigné.7 When he makes a bet with his sister, Ayres consciously shapes his words while thinking of a phrase of Goethe.8 He describes the situation of the widow Norohna by altering the opening lines of a pastoral novel by Bernardim Ribeiro, Menina e Moça (1554).9 Ayres occupies two worlds: the first is the exterior world of Rio de Janeiro and the second is his personal, private territory, limited to his manuscript and memoirs. Perhaps because of his training in diplomacy, Ayres has emptied his mind of any preconceptions or opinions in his interaction with society: “Ayres thought nothing.”10 His professional agreeability is a calculated position taken against life’s irresolvable duality and conflict: it is a dissimulation, a purposeful misreading, a diplomatic posturing. In the public world where Ayres is a diplomat, he chooses to appear empty of substance, thus airy, while in his personal memoirs he expresses more substantive opinions. Yet in his view, his compromise is a wise and beneficial synthesis as well as amodus vivendi. At the same time, we learn that Ayres held opinions that he reserved only for his manuscript: “When he did not manage to have the same opinion, and it was worthwhile to write his down, he wrote it. He was also in the habit of keeping notes on his discoveries, observations, reflections, criticisms, and anecdotes, keeping for this purpose a collection of notebooks which he gave the name Memoirs.”11 In all these notations, Ayres remains polite, sincere, and skeptical. He always confirms his position as a discreet diplomat, never contradicting or giving opinions. Ayres is also a widower but cuts the figure of a bachelor who has outlived or overcome his passions. He can therefore observe and judge the world of the Brazilian empire and republic with an aged, wise, and wry déjà vu. He is aware of his “usual drop of gall” sometimes expressed with “wicked mirth.”12 Ayres is air because of the impermanence or tenuousness of his return to Rio de Janeiro. While definitive, the return

62 Machado’s Counselor of the Air seems fated and futile because of the variability and decreasing number of his remaining days. His awareness of time gives him a marked philosophical turn, revealed in his reading of Horace and in his allusions to Faust, for example. Even with his title and charm, Ayres is keenly aware that his life has been wasted on the courtesies and falsities of the diplomatic profession: “My nature and my life have given me a taste for and the habit of conversing. Diplomacy taught me to endure with patience an infinity of intolerable individuals which this world nourishes for its secret purposes.”13 Yet his learned aplomb and neutrality on all questions for all appearances supports a position of wisdom, ostensible proof of his education in the ways of the world. To get to sleep he recites Horace, Cervantes, and Erasmus. Ayres distances himself from the present moment by being aloof, ironical, skeptical, measured, and diplomatically agreeable to all. Machado’s translator and interpreter, the American classicist Helen Caldwell, finds a parallel in Xenophon, who Machado read and quotes, since the Greek was also an adviser, retired from public life, and an observer of the surrounding society with detachment who spoke of himself in the third person in his Anabasis.14 Ayres’ story is shaped by the hidden editor who casts it as a dramatic allegory that, like Machado’s earlier novels, encompasses a variety of genres and arts, from the diary and novel to mythology, theater, and opera.15 The Memorial foregrounds its mixed genres: twice Ayres writes in his diary, “If this were a novel” and “If I were writing a novel.”16 The allusion to medieval romance and the allegory of love and death is confirmed by the epigraph from Joham Zorro’s Cantiga d’el-rei Dom Denis (late thirteenth century).17 The verses introduce the trope of the maiden who departs from her mother to see her friend, who desires a tryst with her. The Cantiga tells of preparations for traveling overseas to Brazil, but in this case Portugal is the point of origin and return, whereas for Ayres, Brazil is the point of origin and return. If left between Ayres and the editor, the Memorial would seem to be either a novel pretending to be a travel memoir or a memoir disguised as a novel, however there is another generic substratum. Ayres comments that his writing and the contents of his diary form a counterpoint to the city with its politics and social life: “time is a knowing rat that diminishes or alters things by giving them another appearance.”18 His skeptical opinions of human motives underlie his method and reinforce his position as an outside observer, the diplomat who is always keeping notes. He wishes his diary to be mimetic and therefore a truthful copy of observed life, however he knows that writing, like the stream of air bubbles in his diary entries, should be tuned to imaginative spheres and hidden realms in constant change:

If I were writing a novel I would strike the pages of the 12th and 22nd of this month. A work of fiction would not permit such an equivalence of events. On both those days — which I should then call chapters — I met the widow Noronha on the street[.] … I would delete the two chapters, or make them quite different from each other. In either case I would lessen the exact truth, which seems to me more useful for my present purposes than it would in a work of imagination[.] … All this is repugnant to imaginary compositions, which demand variety, and even contradictions, in behavior. Life, on the other hand, is like that, a repetition of acts and gestures, as in receptions, meals, visits, and other amusements.19

Ayres converses with his own diary, as if it were a guiding and more perceptive virtual self than the one that would appear to a reader of his diary, yet he sees advantages in his cutting witticisms: “If someone did read us, he would think me evil, and nothing is lost by appearing to be evil; one gains almost as much by actually being so.20 What politics contributes to the novel is perhaps a material surface that equals Ayres’ thumbnail definition of all of diplomacy as just “covering and uncovering.”21 In these notes he even acquires the habit of writing down a few random indiscreet, malicious, and even perverse thoughts — he admires the sharp-tongued Cesária — that he intimates to his sister Rita and confesses to the paper on which he writes. In this way, Ayres duplicates his personal conflicts and dualities, which he seeks to dispel diplomatically, suggesting that his solution is simply a strategy of fleeting benefit and soporific effect. Everything is material for a great baroque theater of the world, or for comic opera on the human condition, as if Machado

63 Machado’s Counselor of the Air

Abraham Bosse, Air, 1630, Etching, The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Public Domain.

64 Machado’s Counselor of the Air were staging the aphorism from Resurrection: “Life is an opera buffa with intervals of serious music.”22 Ayres, however, is more than aware of the existence of a great abyss ready to consume all the formal structures of life, and his own life now coming to an end, whether coming from Dante’s Inferno, Croesus’ misreading of Pythia’s prophecy, Camões’ Cape of Storms, or his own heart: “since the heart is the abyss of abysses.”23 In his final return to Rio de Janeiro, he is determined to maintain his equilibrium while waiting out an inexorable fate — whether classical, biblical, or tropical — that takes the measure of his world and of his philosophy. Ayres foreshadows another character who faces death, Ricardo Reis, whom Saramago brings back to Lisbon to meet his maker in his novel The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1984).24 As an allegorical drama framed by philosophy, Ayres’ novel is air because it has the open form of an intermezzo, or “Entr’acte. The intermezzo is a figurative space removed from the main act, which was a common performance practice in Italian baroque operas. Ayres thinks of his diary as an exterior space between acts of life, as if it could occupy a space apart, truthful and free of tearful artifice: “I will not set down those tears in this place, or the promises made, the reminders given, the pictures exchanged, between godson and godparents.”25 The elaborate staging has been pared down to resemble unadorned truth: “I will not set down the separate events or unrelated anecdotes, and I even exclude the adjectives, which held more interest in his mouth than my pen could give them — only those needed for understanding things and persons will appear here.”26 He lives in the fashion of a tragicomic “Entr’acte,” interviewing the theatergoers and waiting for the inevitable dénouement. He expects to find pure truth in his diary, whose writings will add up to more than the sum of their contents, with their concentration of sly observations and witty truths, yet there are moments when he seems aware of his own diary as performance: “Ayres dear, confess that when you heard young Tristão’s grief at not being loved, you felt a glow of pleasure, which, however, did not last long, nor did it come back.”27 Like Machado’s other character-narrators, Ayres overestimates the narrative truth of his memoir. Is his narration not also part of the theater? Ayres as narrator would dismiss the play in the world theater to go directly to its underlying theme or message as described in his banal, prosaic, and agreeable review, as if it were immune from representation. He is aware of the power of the theater, however, and in one scene “he confessed that he had killed more than one rival. That if he remembered correctly he must be carrying seven corpses on his back, done in with various weapons. The ladies laughed.”28 In his “Entr’acte” Ayres posits that there are deeper truths in the intervals between action which are vulnerable to our moments of meditation and solitude; yet in the end these truths cannot pass beyond another form of entertainment in his world theater: “hyperbole is the way of this world[.] … [O]nly by force of a lot of rhetoric can one fill [peoples’ ears] with a breath of truth.”29 In a moment of quiet and solitude, when meeting his sister Rita in the cemetery to lay a wreath at their family monument, she points out the young widow nearby at the tomb of her husband, who had died suddenly during a visit to Lisbon after only several years of marriage.30 The widow Noronha’s depth of emotion and devotion is symbolized by her having returned his body to Rio de Janeiro, contrary to Ayres, who had left his wife buried in Vienna. Ayres is offered a Faustian bargain by his sister: the challenge to marry the young and attractive widow Fidélia in the face of Rita’s determined opinion that she will remain faithful to the deceased husband and never remarry: “she cited the wager between God and the Devil over Faust, which I had read to her, here at my house, in Goethe’s own words.”31 Ayres makes light of the challenge, even as he is weighed down by his own imminent preparations for death. His morbid philosophizing serves as a vaguely disguised excuse for suppressing and abandoning the pursuit of Fidélia to his surrogate, Tristão. The clock on his wall strikes the hours mournfully and seems to be speaking to him with the message that he is a gravedigger. Because of his age, Ayres considers himself to be part of the dead and dying and is determined to act out a role he believes to be assigned by destiny rather than try to pursue Fidélia. He nevertheless feels attracted by a primitive instinct for freedom and Eros, which is outweighed and denied by what he calls life’s imprescriptible laws. The reader would have learned from Esau and Jacob that Ayres did not care for marriage, although he recognized

65 Machado’s Counselor of the Air its advantages for his profession. The editor reports that he had proposed to the first eligible woman, yet because of their differences it was as if he lived alone, and when she died “He did not suffer with the loss.”32 Ayres may thus take up Rita’s challenge lightly, although one may have doubts about his commitment to winning it. To emphasize what amounts to an alliance with death, Ayres writes, “Life, especially for the old, is a tiresome burden.”33 None of the city’s sounds — carriages, mules, people, bells and whistles — can overcome his determined march toward death: “I have a wife under the sod in Vienna, and none of my children ever left the cradle of nothingness. I am alone, completely alone.”34 As in other of Machado’s narrators, his bleak statement hides a more precise and honest truth. Ayres occupies an undefined dramatic space between life and death instincts. Counselor Ayres’ Memorial conveys the presence of absence and approaching death: “All my days are told: there is no way of recovering a shadow of what is gone.”35 Ayres is convinced that his return to Rio de Janeiro is a scenario for the final act of his diplomatic life: “I am a gravedigger,”36 he writes in his diary on September 30. Death has taken away the companions of his generation, “If I were to total the sum of friends I have lost throughout this world, it would come to a number of dozens.”37 He also makes reference to his own mortality when observing the young couple Tristão and Fidélia: “I saw them with these eyes that the cold earth will one day devour.”38 The insistent resurgence of instinct appears in his unexpected attraction to the “widow Noronha,” disguised in their mutual condition of permanent widowhood. The widow and widower have an eternal fidelity to the dead, which is set against the omnipresence and persistence of an underlying desire for each other. Ayres, the diplomat, is, as usual, on both sides at once: he is already dead for the reader and at the time of writing he is assumed to have filled his own personal quota of romance that life allows. Thus he maintains diplomatic propriety, agreeing with everyone on every topic, convinced that the fatality of destiny and the transmuting of love into death is simply a matter of patience and observation, a “drama performed every day.”39 Ayres floats through Rio de Janeiro as might the deceased Brás Cubas, who feigned to turn the absence of an heir into an insincere final advantage in his life.40 Rita’s bet with Ayres implies the possibility, however remote, of calling Ayres’ potential heirs from nothingness. To counterbalance Rita’s challenge, Ayres quotes Percy Bysshe Shelley. As in other novels based on quotations — Resurrection on Shakespeare and Esau and Jacob on Dante — in the Memorial Ayres frequently quotes a line from Shelley’s 1822 poem to Jane Williams, “One Word is Too Often Profaned,” which ends with the phrase “I cannot give what men call love.”41 Ayres misunderstands, or purposely misstates, the meaning of Shelley’s line: the English poet cannot give love because his feelings for Jane are more intense than what can be communicated by a word so commonly profaned; Ayres quotes the line to mean that he has passed beyond the will or ability to love.42 Ayres is actively involved, whether consciously or unconsciously, in the repression or denial of Eros — whether his own or those of other characters — and his literary justification comes through as a false memory. Ayres battles false feelings throughout his encounters with Fidélia. He has condemned his possible heirs to remain in nothingness. His quote from Shelley marks the inherent falsity and fragility of memory by reversing the English poet’s pretended denial of love. Throughout the Memorial, Ayres assumes the role of conspirator in death’s power over an equally eternal erotic impulse. He marks his return to Rio de Janeiro with an inverted Caesarean adage: “Here I am, here I live, here I shall die.”43 The phrase is Ayres’ “veni, vidi, mori.” Ayres embodies the struggle between Eros and Thanatos, the essential forces he seeks to reconcile by pretending to assume an external point of view of the eternal.44 The struggle takes place in the memoirs on multiple planes of action, comparable to an opera libretto, beginning with the archetypal references to Tristan’s love-death theme and to heroic Fidelio- Leonor’s freeing of her captive husband; these plots are adjusted to a Brazilian setting, where Fidélia continues to honor her deceased husband and Tristão arrives from Lisbon as a disguised challenger and “brother.” A second plane of action lies within the Counselor’s desires; he is motivated by Rita’s challenge and by Tristão’s growing interest in Fidélia, and Ayres struggles to deny his own attraction to the widow. The old Aguiar couple provide another setting for the love-death motif: the sentimental D. Carmo has devoted her adult life to raising Tristão as a son and caring for Fidélia as a daughter, two

66 Machado’s Counselor of the Air substitutes for the children she never had. The love motif, supported by the renewed presence of the youths with the Aguiar couple, is bound up at the same time with its deadly consequences: the end of their world, brought about by the permanent departure of the new young couple to Lisbon; the symbolic death of the parenthood of the Aguiar couple; and the closure of Ayres’ erotic reawakening. After the young couple departs for Lisbon, Ayres sees the old couple from afar, sitting silently, staring into space, overcome by their own melancholy. The Memorial is founded as an allegory both of life and death, symbolized for the Counselor by the figure of the young widow Fidélia at her husband’s grave, and is on every level a symbolic narrative rather than a realistic memoir. Its entire contents are described by Ayres as “All imaginings of mine.”45 The allegory is presented as an operatic performance between Eros and Thanatos: the common identitifcation of Fidélia with Fidelio, Beethoven’s only opera premiered in 1805, is hypothesized in the Memorial: “But Fidélia[?] …Could it have been given to the baron’s daughter as a feminine form of Fidelio in homage to Beethoven?”46 In the opera, Fidelio is actually Leonore in disguise, whose purpose is to rescue her husband Florestan from the prison of the dictator Pizarro where he is being starved to death. Fidelio is “Fidélia,” the ever loyal and courageous wife who pays homage to the tomb of her deceased husband, a devotion that introduces the love-death theme and the struggle between Eros and Thanatos. The second operatic theme introduced by Fidélia’s “brother” Tristão — both have been adopted by the Aguiar couple under different circumstances — invokes Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde (1865), which recreates a romance of the Middle Ages, perhaps dating from the twelfth century.47 Tristan, who has killed Isolde’s fiancé Morold (Fidélia’s husband in the novel) is conveying Isolde to be married to King Marke (Counselor Ayres in the novel). Meeting in the King’s castle, the couple drinks a potion meant to be a poison with which Isolde will obtain her revenge against Tristan; however, Bragane, Isolde’s companion, has changed the potion from poison to a love potion. In the ensuing duet between Tristan and Isolde, Tristan sings that only in the eternity of death can they be fully united. The couple performs the drama of timeless love, an eternally repeated spectacle that according to Ayres symbolizes renewal:

There is nothing like the passion of love to make original what is commonplace, and new what is dying of old age. That is the way it is with the engaged couple, whom I never tire of listening to, for they are always interesting. That drama of love, which appears to have been born of the serpent’s guile and of man’s disobedience, has never yet failed to play to full houses in this world. Now and again some poet lends it his tongue, amid the tears of the spectators, only that. The drama is performed every day, in every form, new as the sun, which is also old.48

Taking the position of King Marke, Ayres annotates the operatic allegories and romances that recur in the scenario and with characters of his city, in which he is both spectator and confidant, scarcely daring to hope that the drama of love will redeem and renew him as an actor as well as author. Yet in his ambivalence, and to dissimulate, he encourages Tristão’s enchantment with Fidélia by serving as confidant. In the diary’s final entries — after seeing off Fidélia and Tristão, now married, on the ship that will take the young couple to Lisbon on what seems certain to be their definitive return voyage to Portugal, where Tristão has been named a deputy of parliament — Ayres returns home to find a surprise visitor. There is an airy vision waiting on his sofa, and they stare at each other. Fidélia, in the flesh, confesses her desire for the aplomb diplomat: “just now there appeared before me the figure of Fidélia, exactly as I left her on board ship, but without the tears. She sat on the sofa and we looked at each other… [S]he dissolved in charm, I giving the lie to Shelley with all the sexagenarian strength left in me.”49 Only now that she has sailed away can Ayres admit his deep feelings by returning to Shelley’s line that he still has not understood. Yet even when there is no longer any hope, Eros conjures up his desired companion out of thin air. Is everything to be air and illusion, after all? Or do there exist myriad subtle ways of fulfilling and compensating one’s desires? Although he returns fatally to the city of his birth, which is the sphere or world that he has served as a dedicated

67 Machado’s Counselor of the Air

Abraham Bosse, Air, 1648, Etching, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Public Domain.

68 Machado’s Counselor of the Air diplomat, Ayres keeps intellectual distance; his witty observations and mental faculties are apart from both material and political society and even from the acquaintances in his circle. In his diary Counselor Ayres observes the ways of the world — his profession and practice as diplomat — as if he were an outsider, observing with ironic distance, displeased to find himself equally subject to them, while ever diplomatically accepting the inevitability and ambiguity of the human condition.

______

Notes

1. In the nineteenth century, the title of Counselor was an honorific title bestowed on select intellectuals and members of the liberal professions, such as the jurist, writer, and diplomat Rui Barbosa de Oliveira, as well as the term for official members of the Councils of State. Although the emperor awarded the distinction liberally, Machado de Assis declined the title; however he awarded it to one of his characters. For this essay I maintain the spelling of the English translation by Hellen Caldwell, “Ayres,” also used by Machado de Assis, rather than the current Brazilian orthography, “Aires.” 2. Machado de Assis, Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Paterson (New York; London: Liveright, 2020); Esau and Jacob, translated by Elizabeth Lowe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Counselor Ayres’ Memorial, translated by Helen Caldwell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972). 3. “O resto aparecerá um dia, se aparecer algum dia” (Memorial, “Advertência”). 4. “It would, however, cause neither astonishment nor, indeed, consternation if this book failed to find even Stendhal’s readership of one hundred, or indeed fifty, or twenty, or, at most, ten. Ten? Perhaps five,” “To the Reader,” Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (New York; London: Liveright, 2020), p. 4. 5. “Ele não representou papel eminente neste mundo” (Esaú e Jacó, “Advertência”). 6. “Não vou viver com ninguém. Viverei com o Catete, o Largo do Machado, a Praia de Botafogo e a do Flamengo, não falo das pessoas que lá moram, mas das ruas, das casas, dos chafarizes e das lojas” (Esaú e Jacó, XII). 7. “September 3,” Counselor Ayres’ Memorial, p. 92. 8. “January 10, 1888,” Counselor Ayres’ Memorial, p. 13. 9. “May 15, 1889,” Counselor Ayres’ Memorial, p. 184. 10. “Ayres não pensava nada” (Esaú e Jacó,, XII). 11. “Quando não acertava de ter a mesma opinião, e falia a pena escrever a sua, escrevia-a. Usava também guardar por escrito as descobertas, observações, reflexões, críticas e anedotas, tendo para isso uma série de cadernos, a que dava o nome de Memorial” Esaú( e Jacó, XII). 12. “gota de fel”; “malícia e riso” (Memorial, 5 de dezembro). 13. “A índole e a vida me deram o gosto e o costume de conversar. A diplomacia me ensinou a aturar com paciência uma infinidade de sujeitos intoleráveis que este mundo nutre para os seus propósitos secretos” (Memorial, 12 de novembro). 14. Helen Caldwell, Machado de Assis: The Brazilian Master and his Novels (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), p. 155. 15. Ayres’ diary is open to other genres such as the memoir, short story, allegory, or dramatic monologue, and may be considered an example of a mixed-genre text, as defined by Norman Fairclough (inMedia Discourse, 89), or hybrid genre, described by John Hartley (in Key Concepts in Communication and Cultural Studies, p. 129). Jacques Derrida in “La loi du genre” (1986, p. 249-287) considers the distance between genre and one’s perception of it to be open, neither inclusive or exclusive, such that form is not allowed to identify with itself alone, thus denied its ability to engender exclusive meaning; rather, the form becomes invisible or transparent. 16. “Se isto fosse novela” (June 15); “Se eu estivesse a escrever uma novela” (Memorial, 30 de setembro). 17. Counselor Ayres’ Memorial, 3. “Para veer meu amigo/Que talhou preyto comigo,/Alá vou madre./Para veer meu amado/Que mig’a preyto talhado,/Alá vou madre. To see my friend (lover), who promised me a tryst, I am off, mother. To see my beloved, who keeps tryst with me, I am off, mother.”Cantiga d’el-rei Dom Denis / Cantiga by King Dinis. 18. “[…] o tempo é um rato roedor das coisas, que as diminui ou altera no sentido de lhes dar outro aspecto” (Esaú e Jacó, XXI). 19. “Se eu estivesse a escrever uma novela, riscaria as páginas do dia 12 e do 22 deste mês. Uma novela não permitiria aquela paridade de sucessos. Em ambos esses dias–que então chamaria capítulos–encontrei na rua a viúva Noronha […] Riscaria os dois capítulos, ou os faria muito diversos um do outro; em todo caso diminuiria a verdade exata, que aqui me parece mais útil que na obra de imaginação […] Tudo isso repugna as composições que pedem variedade e até contradição nos termos. A vida, entretanto, é assim mesmo, uma

69 Machado’s Counselor of the Air repetição de atos e meneios, como nas recepções, comidas, visitas e outros folgares” (Memorial, 30 de setembro). 20. “Se alguém lesse achar-me-ia mau, e não se perde nada em parecer mau; ganha-se quase tanto como em sê-lo” (Memorial, 12 de abril). 21. “descobrir e encobrir” (Esaú e Jacó, XCVIII). 22. “A vida é uma ópera buffa com intervalos de música séria” Resurreição( , XX). 23. “posto que o coração seja o abismo dos abismos” (Esaú e Jacó, XII). 24. Ricardo Reis is the heteronym of Fernando Pessoa who writes fatalist odes in the Horatian style. Pessoa described him as a monarchist who left Portugal for Brazil around 1919. Saramago brings him back to Portugal in 1935, the year of Pessoa’s death. Not only did Reis never exist as a person; he now is allowed one final year after his author’s death before his own, which he was recalled to Lisbon to await. His romantic pursuit of Marcenda, parallel to the Counselor’s interest in Fidélia, is colored by approaching death. 25. “Não ponho aqui tais lágrimas, nem as promessas feitas, as lembranças dadas, os retratos trocados entre afilhado e os padrinhos” (Memorial, 4 de fevereiro). 26. “Não ponho os incidentes, nem as anedotas soltas, e até excluo os adjetivos que tinham mais interesse na boca dele do que lhes poderia dar a minha pena; vão só os precisos à compreensão de cousas e pessoas” (Memorial, 4 de fevereiro). 27. “Ayres amigo, confessa que, ouvindo ao moço Tristão a dora de não ser amado, sentiste tal ou qual prazer, que alias não foi longo nem se repetiu” (Memorial, 3 de dezembro). 28. “confessou que matara mais de um rival. Que se lembrasse trazia sete mortes às costas, com várias armas. As senhoras riam” (Esaú e Jacó, XCII). 29. “mas a hipérbole é deste mundo […] só à força de muita retórica se pode meter por elas um sopro de verdade” (Esaú e Jacó, XXXI). 30. In a chronicle, Machado comments on visits to the cemetery that color Ayres’ view of Fidélia: “Visiting the dead is a good Catholic custom; but there is no wheat without chaff and the opinion of Sr. Artur de Azevedo is that in this situation everything is chaff without wheat” (“A visitação dos defuntos é um bom costume católico; mas não há trigo sem joio [...]”) (“História de Quinze Dias,” November 1, 1877). 31. “citou a aposta entre Deus e o Diabo a propósito de Fausto, que eu lhe li aqui aqui em casa no texto de Goethe” (Memorial, 25 de fevereiro). 32. “Não se afligiu com a perda” Esaú( e Jacó, XII). 33. “A vida, mormente nos velhos, é um ofício cansativo” (Memorial, sábado). 34. “Eu tenho a mulher embaixo do chão de Viena e nenhum dos meus filhos saiu do berço do Nada. Estou só, totalmente só” (Memorial, 30 de setembro). 35. “Todos os meus dias vão contados, não há recobrar sombra do que se perder” (Memorial, 13 de fevereiro). 36. “pareço-me um coveiro” (Memorial 30 de setembro). 37. “Eu, se fosse a somar os amigos que tenho perdido por esse mundo, chegaria a algumas dúzias deles” (Memorial, 26 de fevereiro). 38. “eu via-os com estes olhos que a terra fria há de comer” (Memorial, 22 de dezembro). 39. “O drama é de todos os dias” (Memorial, 13 de março). 40. The tension between myth and political history in the novel constitutes a parallel conflict in German baroque dramas studied by Walter Benjamin in Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Berlin: E. Rowohlt, 1928). 41. Counselor Ayre’s Memorial, January 25, 1888, p. 19. 42. Caldwell finds Shelley’s prose fragment “On Love” to epitomize the theme of Machado’s novels in general: “that love is the true manifestation of life, and that lack-love or self-love must be equated with death” (1970, p. 189). 43. “Aqui estou, aqui vivo, aqui morrerei” (Memorial, 9 de janeiro). 44. In “The Grandfather Clock” [“A Pêndula”], Chapter LIV of the Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, Eros and Thanatos appear in the guise of “an old devil sitting between two .sacks, that of life and that of death, taking out the coins of life and giving them to death.” 45. “Tudo imaginações minhas” (Memorial, 9 de junho). 46. “Mas Fidélia?... […] Terá sido dado à filha do barão, como a forma feminina de Fidélio, em homenagem a Beethoven?” (Memorial, 11 de fevereiro). 47. Richard Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, Leipzig, Breitkopf & Härtel, 1872. The opera was premiered in Münich on June 10, 1864 under the direction of Hans von Bülow. 48. “Não há como a paixão do amor para fazer original o que é comum, e novo, o que more de velho. Tais são os dous noivos, a quem não me canso de ouvir por serem interessantes. Aquele drama de amor, que parece haver nascido da perfídia da serpente da desobediência do homem, ainda não deixou de dar enchentes a este mundo. Uma vez ou outra algum poeta empresta-lhe a sua língua, entre as lágrimas dos espectadores; só isso. O drama é de todos os dias e de todas as formas, e novo como o sol, que também é velho” (Memorial, 13 de março). 49. “me passou agora pela frente a figura de Fidélia, tal como a deixei a bordo, mas sem lágrimas. Sentou-se no canapé e ficamos a olhar um para o outro, ela desfeita em graça, eu desmentindo Shelley com todas as forças sexagenárias restantes” (Memorial, 18 de julho).

70 Machado’s Counselor of the Air

Kenneth David Jackson is a Professor of Portuguese at Yale University. Among his books are Machado de Assis: A Literary Life (Yale, 2015), Adverse Genres in Fernando Pessoa (Oxford, 2010), Oxford Anthology of the Brazilian Short Story (2006), Haroldo de Campos: A Dialogue with the Brazilian Concrete Poet (Oxford, 2005), Luís de Camões and the First Edition of The Lusiads (2003), and Sing Without Shame (John Benjamins, 1990). His main interests include Portuguese and Brazilian literatures, modernist movements in literature and other arts, Portuguese literature and culture in Asia, poetry, music, and ethnography.

71 Illustration by Charlotte Lee

Charlotte Lee is a New York City based visual artist and makeup artist primarily working in film and theatre. Prior to attending Make-up Designory in New York, she earned her BA in art history from Kenyon College.

Em Schwager is a Jewish, queer, poet from Pittsburgh who is currently based in Philadelphia. She recently graduated from the University of Pennsylvania majoring in nursing and minoring in creative writing. Brief Interlude

Em Schwager

Nautilus twist in their perpetual arc as tossing salt waves tumble ashore, foaming greens. A seagull hovers motionless / spearheading everything ebbing and expanding where I am surrendered on purpose floating face up in the open faced blue to the open faced blue sunbeams emitting from one solstice maypole. Where I do trust the celestial sea god who lets me breathe underwater. Where everything is made of diamonds; breaking and oxidizing beneath the coastline— their dainty shattering like an applause.

The shore drifts closer, the shadowed yellowed sand and its dull throb, it’s tangled sea mass briny and crystalizing where the tide departed. Couldn’t get my attention if you wanted; peaceful in my aphasia. Beyond the horizon, an infinite line where the waves transpire.

73 Illustrations from the 1708 edition of Traité de la peinture en miniature, an artist’s manual attributed to “C.B.” (most likely to be Claude Boutet). Public Domain.

A plump putto in idle concentration, painting under the gleaming voguish sign of contemporary science; a well-dressed lady in the gardens. What better image to convey the cheery mingling of business and polymathic pleasure among early modern Europe’s elite. Indeed, what better image — save, as you’ll soon see, Jean Siméon Chardin’s famous Soap Bubbles of 1734. Traditionally understood as a playful reminder of life’s fleeting nature, this painting has been given an exciting new perspective in Anita Hosseini’s “Colors of Light: Newton’s Observation and Chardin’s Representation.” Rethinking Soap Bubbles in the context of Newton’s theories of light and color and their popular reception across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Hosseini argues for a more robust view of the picture that accounts for its epistemic as well as allegorical qualities. As Boutet’s contemporaneous illustration demonstrates, Newton’s observations constituted a revolution in perception — a paradigm shift in the classic sense — that invited both empirical scrutiny and playful engagement. In a turn that might have pleased Newton himself, looking at Soap Bubbles in this light both imbues the painting with richer meaning and embeds it in a more accurate context.

- The Editors Colors of Light: Newton’s Observations and Chardin’s Representations

Anita Hosseini

“Uncle Wendel, Uncle Wendel! Just look at the soap bubbles, the wonderful colours! But where do the colours come from?

My young son was calling down to us from the upstairs window where he was blowing the iridescent bubbles into the garden. Uncle Wendel sat next to me in the shade of the tall trees and our cigar smoke enriched the heady fragrances of a beautiful summer’s afternoon.

Hmm… said – or, rather, rumbled – my uncle, turning towards me. Hmm… Tell him, why not? Hmm… I’d like to hear how you’d do that. Interference colours on the thin surface, yes, of course, the different wavelengths, the colour sectors don’t spread evenly, and so on. But will the boy understand, hmm?”

— Kurd Lasswitz, “On the Soap Bubble” [1887]

These are the starting lines of Kurd Lasswitz’s short story “On the Soap Bubble,” written in 1887. Lasswitz, known as the father of science fiction literature, describes in his short story how a soap bubble becomes the world of his protagonists. Through the soap bubble, they discover the system of science and the establishment of knowledge. Interference colors were common knowledge for Uncle Wendel, as well as for the average nineteenth-century reader. But they had first to be discovered in the seventeenth century and then to be established in the eighteenth. Experimental practice gave way to this physical finding, as well as its demonstration and distribution. This essay questions the role of painting in translating experimental practice from the realm of natural sciences to the realm of art. It offers a close reading of Chardin’s painting Soap Bubbles as an epistemic device in the face of Newton’s theory of light and color.1 The use of experiments to discover nature and to verify awareness was set in motion by the text Novum Organum Scientiarum. This book was written and published by Francis Bacon in 1620. In it, the author defines experimental practice as follows: focusing on the research object that leads to its persistent and exact observation;2 exerting an influence on the research object in the form of an experimental arrangement;3 as well as the willingness to great stamina and patience to approach step by step an overview over all the natural phenomena without skipping important interstages.4 After taking these steps the acquired experiences could be categorized by reason and thus become new knowledge. Opposing the conventional science of his time, which focused only on reason and imagination, Bacon advocated methods closely linked to the phenomena themselves: experiment, trial, manipulation and observation (i.e. the use of the senses) could resolve secrets of nature which reason alone could never find.5

75 Colors of Light

Newton’s Discovery of the Colors of Light

To investigate the secrets of light, Isaac Newton used the very values and skills named by Bacon. For forty years, he experimented patiently with the appearance and diversification of white light by leading a beam of light into a darkened room and breaking it down through prisms and mirrors. His instruments to manipulate the beam of light were at first prisms and mirrors, but the process of observation goes by way of the eyes. The findings of his experiment were for the first time published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in February of 1671/72. Under the title New Theory on Light and Colors, Newton summarizes his ground-breaking findings. He writes:

It can be no longer disputed whither there be colours in the dark, nor whither they be the qualityes of the objects wee see, nor perhaps whether light be a bodie. For since colours are qualityes of light, having its rayes for their entire & imediate subject, how can wee think those rayes qualityes also, unlesse one quality may be the subject of & sustain another, which in effect is to call it substance.6

Hence, light is a “Heterogeneous mixture of differently refrangible rayes.”7 This conclusion raised a great deal of criticism.8 The public discussions and rejections of the theory of light precluded Newton from issuing further publications. A year after the passing in 1703 of Robert Hooke, one of Newton’s strongest disputants, Newton published his famous book Opticks in two volumes.9 After forty years of hard work and hundreds of light experiments, he recapitulated and extended his findings about the refrangibility of white light into its colorful components. The assembled formulas, observations, and experiments in his Opticks comprised the foundation for the knowledge of interference colors, which are named in the nineteenth century by Uncle Wendel as the cause of the soap bubble’s colorful appearance. The soap bubble plays an important role in Newton’s theory. The French man of letters Voltaire, who is significantly responsible for the distribution of Newton’s theory on lights in France, wrote in his popular book Elements of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy, published in 1738, that nothing is too small for the philosopher, such that even the smallest soap bubble is a worthy subject of meditation for him.10 Thus Newton retains in his “18th Observation” in the Opticks:

Because the Colours of these Bubbles were more extended and lively than those of the Air thinn’d between two Glasses, and so more easy to be distinguish’d, I shall here give you a farther description of their order, as they were observ’d in viewing them by Reflexion of the Skies when of a white Colour, whilst a black substance was placed behind the Bubble. And they were these, red, blue; red, blue; red, blue; red, green; red, yellow, green, and so forth.11

The sequence of the colors depends on the thickness of the soap bubble film. The color value arises depending on the different refrangibility of the colors. However, Newton made another observation while experimenting with the bubble. In his “20th Observation” he writes that

the Bubble, by transmitted Light, appear’d of a contrary Colour to that, which it exhibited by Reflexion. Thus when the Bubble being look’d on by the Light of the Clouds reflected from it, seemed red at its apparent Circumference, if the Clouds at the same time, or immediately after, were view’d through it, the Colour at its Circumference would be blue. And, on the contrary, when by reflected Light it appeared blue, it would appear red by transmitted Light.12

76 Colors of Light

Hence, the bubble appears according to the time flow and in relation to the light source in the colors blue or red. This observation clarifies the variance of the colorful emergence, and proves that the colors we notice are not bound to the objects themselves, but to the light. Newton’s findings were initially subjected to much criticism, but by the beginning of the eighteenth century they established themselves as a new and true discovery. It was the implementation of experimentation as a practice of generating evidence that helped his ideas get accepted. Experimentation not only allowed Newton to investigate light, it also allowed lecturers to demonstrate scientific knowledge and better impart it to their audience.13 Newton’s findings were brought to the public not only through scientific publications, but also through popular scientific writings, through public readings and public experimental spectacles. It was in particular due to the French academic Étienne-François Geoffroy that the Opticks reached the French population.14 He was an associated member of the Royal Society and had mastered the English language; hence he could translate the Opticks in all details into French. In the time between August 1705 and January 1706, Geoffroy introduced the Opticks to the members of the Académie Royale des Sciences in Paris. Many other scholars visited his lectures, but the lay public had also the possibility to get to know Newton’s theory. Voltaire targeted the lay audience with his mentioned book. Also, the Italian Count Francesco Algarotti intended to enlighten the lay public with his text Il Newtonianismo per le dame,15 which was translated and published very quickly in French. Thus, the interference colors defined by Newton were distributed through publications by a variety of protagonists all over Europe.

The Case of Chardin’s Soap Bubble

On September 6, 1739, an exhibition opened in the Salon Carré in the Palais du Louvre. For one month, the audience was able to take a look at the works of the members of the Académie Royale des Peinture et Sculpture. Next to paintings by Jean-Baptiste Oudry, Charles André van Loo, and Nicolas Lancret, they could also see the painting Soap Bubbles by Jean Siméon Chardin (Figure 1). This painting was announced in the accompanying catalogue with the words, “Un petit Tableau, représentant l’amusement frivole d’un jeune homme, faisant des bouteilles de savon:” A small painting, representing the frivolous fun of a young man making soap bubbles. The painting recalls baroque representations of transience. In the tradition of the Homo Bulla (the human as a bubble), the painting shows the finiteness of life through the combination of childhood and the ephemeral soap bubble. Following the emblematic 1594 engraving by the Dutch artist Hendrick Goltzius Quis evadet? (Who can escape?), the motive visualizes not only transience in general but also the finiteness of the beholder’s life. That was also the contemporary interpretation of paintings showing children and soap bubbles. But if we bear in mind that Newton defines the soap bubble as a scientific device, then another way of interpreting the painting becomes possible. In the following, I shall prove the visualization of a scientific idea — the presence of interference colors — through the painting. Close observation of the painting brings one to discover two color lines (Figure 2): next to the glass of soap liquid, a red and a blue color line can be seen. They seem to have no function. They are just lying there on the stony window ledge. But these two colors are very meaningful in the context of Newtonian theory of light. They mark the highest and lowest refrangibility of the tristimulus value of the spectrum. Also, the opaque liquid in the glass itself evokes a reminiscence to Newton’s experiments in the dark room: within the glass the beholder can observe a triangular form, which is made prominent by its brighter white. This form brings to mind the triangular prisms Newton used to break the light beam, which he led into the darkened room. The same thing happens here: the white light impinges on the glass, which acts as a prism, it breaks and therefore all the colors within the white beam of light should become visible. But instead of showing

77 Colors of Light

Figure 1. Jean Siméon Chardin, Soap Bubbles, 1734, Oil on canvas, Gift of Mrs. John W. Simpson, National Gallery of Art, Public Domain.

78 Colors of Light

Figure 2. Jean Siméon Chardin, Detail of Soap Bubbles, 1734, Oil on canvas, Gift of Mrs. John W. Simpson, National Gallery of Art, Public Domain.

79 Colors of Light all different colors of the rainbow, Chardin chose to paint the highest (red) and the lowest (blue) refrangible colors, which re-mark the endings of the color spectrum and thus stand pars pro toto for all the colors of light. Above that, the colors red and blue are also very important in conjunction with the observation of soap bubbles. They appear as complementary guises of the bubble. If red, for instance, is the color of appearance in translucent light, the same bubble will turn blue when it is illuminated by reflected light and vice versa. In hisSoap Bubbles, Chardin specifically shows reflected light, accompanied by a blue coloring of the bubble. Nevertheless, he also shows the possibility that the soap bubble might turn into red coloring under translucent light. Within the meaning of the metaphor of homo bulla — man as bubble — the tear in the jacket sleeve of the bubble blower establishes a relation with the soap bubble. The tear brings out the white shirt. This representation shows a parallel with the expanding soap bubble. In addition to this, the semi- circular form of the shoulder underlines the comparability of the bubble blower’s body to the soap bubble. The shoulder joint supplements the semi-circular form so that it becomes as round as the bubble itself. Besides that, it is evident that the tear doesn’t only show an opening, but also a little end of the red lining of the jacket. The red color can be seen on the upper right side of the round form. By observing the actual soap bubble, the blue coloring can be located on the opposite side, e.g. on the upper left part of the soap bubble. In due consideration of these observations, Newton’s explanatory notes on the coloring of a soap bubble can be detected in the painting of Chardin as well. The latter shows the possibility of appearing in red or blue according to time and to the positioning of the illuminating light source. Hence the actual soap bubble gleams in blue and its complementary pendant emerges in the extract of the bubble blower’s body and clothes. This parallelization stems from a formal-aesthetic ordering: the bubble and the shoulder share the same form and perspective. But it also results from a new way of using the traditional representation of the vanitas. The temporally determined progression of the potential colorings on the soap bubble can thus be transferred into the frozen medium of painting. The soap bubble is presented in both color conditions, but not by painting two bubbles or showing both colors in one. Within the painting, red and blue are equally present: one of them on the bubble and the other one on the homo bulla. These colorful potentialities of the soap bubble are readapted in a further element of the painting: in the two lines of color mentioned before. Since these lines are positioned next to the liquid-filled glass, their presence shifts the possible coloring of the bubble before its actual genesis. Therefore, these two colors are defined as basal features of a soap bubble; it appears that the reference to Newton’s “20th Observation” can be seen in Chardin’s painting. This described connection between the history of optics and Chardin’s painting complicates the iconographic interpretation of the soap bubble as a symbol of transience. Therefore, the soap bubble does not only represent transience, but also becomes an epistemic device. Consequently, Chardin manages to place the symbol of vanitas in his painting and at the same time to invest it with another meaning: it also becomes a symbol of veritas. Visualizing a scientific awareness in a painting, in this case showing the interference colors, is the result of a combination of traditional representation and effective scientific knowledge. Hence, Chardin’s painting also participates in the diffusion of the Newtonian theory of light and colors. The same beholder who was aware of these findings would also be able to recognize Newton’s interference colors of the soap bubble within Chardin’s painting. Its scientific content was reproduced through the unity of traditional representation and the intentional use of colors, yet scientific practice itself seems to be left out. We only see a young man making a big soap bubble — how could it be an experiment? To answer this question, we need to take a look at how the experiment came into operation as a method for generating knowledge. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, in his above-mentioned study, Bacon tried to establish experimental practice as a scientific activity by stating that scientists must revoke what they already know and seek insights about their research objects solely through a correlation of observation and experimental setup.16 Reason and imagination must be complemented by experience. This new mode of producing knowledge inflects Newtonian research of light. Hence,

80 Colors of Light the use of experiments was supposed to enlighten knowledge by creating new contexts. This approach was also used for a transfer of knowledge to a lay audience. In the following we shall see how it took place and how it related to the game with soap bubbles as an experience and hence as an experiment. The Enlightenment was a time of striving for greater dissemination of knowledge beyond scientific institutions.17 Since the second half of the seventeenth century, an increasing number of publications aimed to distribute scientific problems in a witty and accessible manner. Those writings prepared their (often lay) readers and enabled them to participate in scientific conversations that were common in the salons or at social occasions.18 As a consequence, more and more scholars endeavored to spread knowledge not only by written publications but also through public experiments. In the cause of this attempt to popularize knowledge, which combined entertainment and the economic benefit of scientific findings, the formally closed doors of academies and laboratories were opened. The lay public was invited to see the wonders of nature with their own eyes. The French theologian Marin Mersenne pleaded for a new public space for scientific discourse that would exist alongside academic institutions. Mersenne organized public evening talks, the so-called Conférences, in his Parisian apartment that combined experiment and lecture.19 These Conférences were very popular, and other scientists soon followed his example. The French physicist and philosopher Jacques Rohault, for example, held his own Conférences every Wednesday, in which he visualized scientific topics like colors, light, air pressure, and the vacuum through demonstration and explanation.20 The way in which he playfully revealed the mechanisms of nature resembled a theatrical performance.21 The curiosity of the audience was met because the experiments surprised and amazed spectators without losing their educational character.22 Furthermore, the laymen should be animated to copy the seen experiments. In his Elements of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy, Voltaire points out that Newton himself would have said: “Don’t believe me; believe only your Eyes, and the Mathematicks.”23 This statement underlines the request to invite the reader to make his own experiments.24 By doing so, laymen could retrace scientific findings and understand theoretical explanations. Despite these demonstrations directly involving the audience by addressing their senses, the spectators themselves remained passive. They experienced knowledge with their perceptual apparatus, but they did not take an active part in the demonstrations. Popular scientific publications, however, constantly called upon their readers to become active themselves. Detailed descriptions and engravings were supposed to encourage readers to carry out their own experiments. Not only the readers of these publications, but also the spectators of public demonstrations of different experiments were invited to reproduce and review the findings in their everyday life, at work, in their households, and even in child’s play.25 In 1721, the German philosopher Christian Wolff, author of the educational bookAllerhand nützliche Versuche (All kinds of usefull trails), wrote that a perfect execution of experiments is based on the reconstruction and repetition of formally conducted experiments.26 He aimed at leading his readers to make their own experiments and to become able to interpret the discovered and observed findings for themselves. Thus, he highlighted experience as a fundamental approximation to the secrets of nature. In a following step, the observations and experiences should then be integrated by reason. In the same manner, Voltaire also defined the senses as a main access to the world. The senses, however, must be complemented by thought.27 Only if they are read and interpreted correctly do experiences enable people to critically review popular science publications, demonstrations, and nature itself to eventually acquire knowledge.28 In fathoming the elements and phenomena of nature, a certain sequence of four successive sections can be identified: 1.) The senses provide the data that is given to human perception; 2.) Attention enables any particular sense to be concentrated on the elements of nature; 3.) Experience helps to contextualize acquired data; and 4.) Trial enhances sensual capacities through using instruments, generating new contexts or focusing on a certain problem, thus visualizing aspects that were not perceptible before.

81 Colors of Light

Popular scientific writings for laymen, as well as scientific demonstrations, did not only serve to disseminate scientific content, but also to depict a new method: the experimental exploration of nature. Experiments became part of domestic practices and provided everyone with the possibilities to conduct trails themselves. Thus, even everyday activities and games gained epistemic potential. According to this, the soap bubble blower isn’t satisfied with the emotional aspect of the beauty of the soap bubble, but inquires into the fragile object. Just like the scholars in their experiments, laymen assumed the role of the researcher and gathered their own knowledge about nature through acting and understanding. After examining the experimental culture from which it derived, the question of the experimenter in Chardin’s painting can be positively answered: Chardin’s soap bubble blower can by all means be seen as an experimenting layman. If he does understand his activity as a trial, he does no longer consider it as a play, but as a way to gain knowledge about this object. With regard to the research of the light, the soap bubble blower is able to discover that the colors of the soap bubble’s surface vary depending on the strength of its membrane and the angle in which the light falls on it. The foundation of such awareness is the ongoing repetition of the trial that brings reference values from which general principles can be derived. This ongoing repetition becomes evident in the title chosen for the painting, Les Bouteilles des Savon,29 namely the plural form Soap Bubbles. Another hint is the compositional accordance of the soap liquid glass and the emerging soap bubble: the straw in the vessel is placed exactly in the same angle as is the straw in the hand of the soap bubble blower. This compositional parallel implies a cyclical activity, suggesting that a new soap bubble will follow after the first one inevitably bursts. Not the end of the soap bubble’s life, but the bubble’s rebirth. In this interpretation the iconographic meaning of the soap bubble as a symbol of vanitas is loosened and opposed by the potential reproduction of the soap bubble. The painting depicts not only the fugacity of life, but also the epistemic potential of the ephemeral shape in a repetitive trial. Observing this fragile object within a trial permits conjecture about its formation, its composition and its influence of the incident light. The experiment with the soap bubble provides insights about the soap bubble itself, as well as about the white light and its inherent mixture of colors, and it makes them experienceable and verifiable. But the benefit of self-conducted experiments lies above the experience of science also in an immediate self-awareness. For a successful experiment with soap bubbles it is of utmost importance that the blowing person succeeds in creating a soap bubble with the help of the straw split at one end. He must therefore take care, as evenly as possible, not to bring too much air into the bubble while a visual spectacle takes place before his eyes. Relaxed and with a concentrated expression, the blower focuses on the bubble as well as on his own activity. He must proceed calmly and attentively so that the fragile object does not burst. Therefore, he uses his left-hand to hold on to the windowsill and stabilize the body whilst the right-hand rests on top of it holding the straw in place. He has to be patient. During this experiment he has to learn to control his breathing in order to be able to produce a bubble out of the lye for subsequent observation. Hence, the experimental setting empowers the experimenter to get a glimpse behind the surface of things, but it also reflects the active subject in the process of observation and leads their view to themselves. Consequently, as Olaf Breidbach puts it: “Nicht die Natur ist uns unmittelbar: Wir, in unserem Naturerfahren, sind uns unmittelbar.”30 Nature is not itself immediate, but we ourselves rather become the object of observation in our experience of nature. To bring the previous thoughts together, it is useful to define the term experiment in its French pendant:experience . While the experiment as postulated by Bacon solely serves the research and examination of natural phenomena, experience combines the subject and the object of a set examination. The conductor of experiments is present in the experimental setting through his individual constitution, his personal anticipation and his inherent connection with the research object. In conclusion, experiments open our eyes, they show us the secrets of nature, but furthermore they reflect our perception and thus become a mirror in which we can ultimately see ourselves.

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Notes

1. This essay is based on a part of my study The Experimental Culture in a Soap Bubble, published in 2017, which, based on the painting The Soap Bubbles by Jean-Siméon Chardin, examines the relationship between knowledge, science and art in an interdisciplinary way against the backdrop of experimental culture in seventeenth and eighteenth-century France. This study is dedicated to the overarching question of how painting can convey or even generate knowledge. In doing so, it represents an attempt to establish visual art works as relevant sources in the history of knowledge and the history of science. Accordingly, different methods and forms of popularizing knowledge lie at the centre of attention here. They are examined in connection to experimental demonstrations as well as popular science publications, but also in and through art works and other pictorial media. Here, their similarities and differences in relation to aesthetics and epistemology are highlighted. 2. Francis Bacon, “Lord Bacon’s Novum Organum [1620],” Novum Organum or True Suggestions for the Interpretation of Nature by Francis Lord Verulam (London: 1850), p. 15. 3. Bacon, “Novum Organum,” p. 23. 4. Bacon, “Novum Organum,” p. 25. 5. Bacon separates two ways of scientific approach: “There are and can exist but two ways of investigating and discovering truth. The one hurries on rapidly from the senses and particulars to the most general Axioms; and from them as principles and their supposed indisputable truth derives and discovers the intermediate Axioms. This is the way now in use. The other constructs its Axioms from the senses and particulars, by ascending continually and gradually, till it finally arrives at the most general axioms, which is the true but unattempted way.” Bacon, “Novum Organum,” p. 12. 6. Isaac Newton, “A Letter of Mr. Isaac Newton containing his New Theory about Light and Colors,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 80 (1672): 3085. 7. Ibid. 3079. 8. Simon Schaffer, “Glass Works: Newton’s Prisms and the Uses of Experiment,” The Uses of Experiment: Studies in the Natural Sciences, ed. David Gooding, Trevor Pinch, Simon Schaffer (Cambridge: 1989), p. 67-104. 9. Alan E. Shapiro, “The Gradual Acceptance of Newton’s Theory of Light and Color, 1672-1727,” Perspective on Science 4, no. 1. (1996): 59-140. 10 Voltaire, The elements of Sir Isaac Newton’s philosophy. By Mr. Voltaire. Translated from the French. Revised and corrected by John Hanna, M. A. Teacher of the Mathematicks. With Explication of some Words in Alphabetical Order(London: 1738), p. 136.. 11. Isaac Newton, Opticks: Or, A Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections and Colours of Light. Third Edition, Corrected. (London: 1721), p. 189. 12. Ibid. p. 194. 13. Marie Boas Hall, Promoting Experimental Learning: Experiment and the Royal Society, 1660–1727 (Cambridge: 1991), p. 151. 14. A. Rupert Hall, All was Light. An Introduction to Newton’s Opticks (New York 1995), p. 203. 15. Francesco Algarotti, Il Newtonianismo per le dame ovvero dialoghi sopra la luce e i colori (Neapel: 1737). 16. “We have but one simple method of delivering our sentiments: namely, we must bring men to particulars, and their regular Series and Order, and they must for a while renounce their Notions and begin to form an acquaintance with things.” Bacon, “Novum Organum,” p. 16. 17. Harvey Chisick, “Popularization,” Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, ed. Alan C. Kors (Oxford 2003): 329-334. The term “popular scientific publication” seems at first anachronistic, since the attribute “popular scientific” first became established in the nineteenth century and included not only enlightenment, information, and entertainment, but also social regulation through the organs of publication. But even in the eighteenth century, scientific content became public and served the purpose of social enlightenment. Thus, the subsumption of the mediation strategies of this period makes sense under the concept of ‘popularization’ insofar as they fulfill in part the same social functions as the popular scientific activities of the nineteenth century. In addition, they represented the tool with which the consolidation and social establishment took place, which referred to the achievements of the era of the so-called scientific revolution described by the history of natural science. See: Maria Remenyi, “‘Popularisierung und Wissenschaft’ — ein Gegensatz? Die mathematischen Wissenschaften und ihre Vermittlung im 18. Jahrhundert,” Kulturen des Wissens im 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Ulrich Johannes Schneider (Berlin: 2008): 347-354. 18. Benjamin Martin, The Gentleman and the Lady’s Philosophy, in a continued survey of the Works of nature and art by Way of Dialogue (London 1781), p. 1.

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19. Andreas Gippert, “Experiment und Öffentlichkeit. Cartesianismus und Salonkultur im französischen 17. Jahrhundert,”Spektakuläre Experimente. Praktiken der Evidenzproduktion im 17. Jahrhundert, ed. Helmar Schramm, Ludger Schwarte, and Jan Lazardzig (Berlin: 2006), p. 242-259. 20. Gippert, 2006, p. 251. 21. Schramm, Helmar: Einleitung. Kunst des Experimentellen, Theater des Wissens. Spektakuläre Experimente. Praktiken der Evidenzproduktion im 17. Jahrhundert, ed. Helmar Schramm, Ludger Schwarte, Jan Lazardzig. Berlin 2006, p. XV. 22. Gippert,“Experiment und Öffentlichkeit,” p. 256. 23. Voltaire, Isaac Newton’s Philosophy, p. 96. 24. Newton describes his experimental setup at the end of his “New Theory about Light and Colors” to enable the reader to copy it. Thereby he can observe the refraction of light and investigate the resulting doctrines with his own eyes. Newton, “New Theory about Light and Colors,” p. 3086. 25. Frances Terpak, “Experiments in the home,” Devices of Wonder. From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen, ed. Frances Terpak and Barbara Maria Stafford (Los Angeles: 2001), p. 191-197. 26. Christian Freiherr von Wolff,Allerhand nützliche Versuche, dadurch zu genauer Erkäntniß der Natur und Kunst der Weg gebahnet wird (Halle 1745). 27. Voltaire, Isaac Newton’s Philosophy, p. 158. 28. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Children,” Thoughts of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, citizen of Geneva. Selected from his Writings by an Anonymous Editor, and Translated by Miss Henrietta Colebrooke. In Two Volumes. Vol. II (London 1788), p. 185-200. 29. This is and always was the title of the painting, which was given to it by an accompanying engraving by the artist Pierre Filloeul. These kind of titles of engravings were found and given by the collaboration of engravers with the painters. They were additionally added under the prints. Jörg Ebeling, “Sex sells! Moralisierende Beischriften in den Nachstichen nach Modegemälden am Beispiel von Chardin,” Druckgraphik. Zwischen Reproduktion und Invention, Markus A. Castro, Jasper Kettner, Christien Melzer, Claudia Schnitzer (Munich 2010), p. 433-447. 30. Olaf Breidbach, Bilder des Wissens. Zur Kulturgeschichte der wissenschaftlichen Wahrnehmung (Munich: 2005), p. 163.

Anita Hosseini is a scholar focusing on art history, social psychology/anthropology, and gender studies. Her research interests include visual theory, philosophy, images of nature as well as transcultural interchange, history of knowledge and visual cultures. In July 2015, she successfully defended her art historical dissertation entitled “Die Experimentalkultur in einer Seifenblase. Das epistemische Potenzial in Chardins Malerei” published in 2017 by Wilhelm Fink Verlag. Her current project “Moving ideas, images and aesthetics – Persian Interrelations with Europe and Asia in the Safavid Dynasty” (working title) examines the transcultural exchange between France/England and Persia during the late Safavid era (ca. 1650-1722), as articulated through travel reports and the circulation of objects of applied art as well as visual arts.

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85 86 Musical Interlude

This issue’s aural contribution makes sound look like a sphere with one weird edge. Its four short tracks — by New Zealand-based electronic musician Haast – Hāwea — are porous and annular: soft, silent thresholds to things we should hear. Sometimes, as at a bird’s chirped invitation, we can almost cross right into the music’s fold; at others, its slow synthetic arcing feels hermetic, like the harsh and fragile haptics of a blown bubble’s skin.

An accompanying illustration by St. Louis-based artist Lou Vinarcsik registers joyfully the odd realism of these found sounds and fractured field recordings. Beneath the hazy, ominous trail of an airplane looking to land (it seems) on a carpellary receptacle, cows graze on the venous pads of a lotus. Of this flower’s many charms, the most magical is its ability to make the photosynthetic process burblingly visible: in the hot sun, water poured onto a pad’s center begins literally to churn and bubble with all the plant’s cosmic vitality. Here, that process is hyperbolized into so many spheres casting their forms across an already oneiric scene — like this, they’re perfect analogues to the many otic orbs that bob through Haast – Hāwea’s soundscape.

venti-journal.com

87 Charles Henry Bennett and William Harry Rogers, Psalm CXIX. 37. Turn Away Mine Eyes From Beholding Vanity, 1861 engraving. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Looking at this engraving from 1861, a small figure of a court jester stands within a round frame surrounded by nat- ural decoration. Representing Psalm CXIX, “Turn away mine eyes from beholding vanity,” it declares as the young boy seems besotted with the floating orbs surrounding him. Perhaps he is caught up in a reflection of himself. Perhaps he is entranced by how the bubbles reflect the light around him. Liana Cheney examines a similar duality in a pair of Northern European self-portraits in her essay “Bubbles in Northern European Self-Portraiture: Homo est bulla est (The Individual is a Bubble).” The paintings by Clara Peeters and David Bailly mix the genres of self-portrait and still life, pairing the artists with various ephemera. With emblems of this period as a lens for these self-portraits with vanitas, Cheney examines the pictorial bubbles in these self-portraits for their multiplicity of meanings: refractors of lights; harbingers of the transitory nature of life; and reflections through which the artists can see themselves. Through examining the items on display and the bubbles that float above the scene, the artists relate attributes of their own, showing off their skill and thus their vanity. - The Editors Bubbles in Northern European Self-Portraits: Homo bulla est (The Individual as a Bubble)

Liana De Girolami Cheney

Northern European depictions of Homo bulla est (The Individual is a Bubble) derived from two emblematic and literary sources: one classical and one sixteenth century. The classical literary source refers to the moral allusion of L’Hora passa (Time Passes or The Hour Passes), a proverb about the brevity of life recorded by the Roman poet Marcus Terentius Varro in the third book of his Rerum rusticarum (On Agriculture): “Ut dicitur si est homo bullas, eo magis senex” (As they say, man [the individual] is a bubble, all the more so is an old man).1 The sixteenth-century literary source is noted by the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, in one of his Adages, Homo bulla est (Man [The Individual] is but a bubble). The lesson of this proverb, Erasmus explained, “is that there is nothing so fragile, so fleeting and so empty as the life of man [the individual]. A bubble is that round swollen empty thing which we watch in water as it grows and vanishes in a moment of time.”2 Seventeenth-century Northern European painters from the Netherlands and Flanders were visually inspired by these sources. They composed many paintings with imagery associated with the transitory nature of life — due to natural causes, plagues, wars — and with the meaninglessness of life.”3 Human folly, physical and metaphysical limitations, and moral and spiritual confusion prompted the revival of the Socratic dictum, “The unexamined life is not worth living” (Plato, Apology, 38a5-6).4 Some of these still life paintings were called vanitas paintings, referring to the evanescence of life as expressed in the biblical text: “Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas” (Vanity of vanities; all is vanity, Ecclesiastes 1:2, 12:8), to Socrates’s reflection about immortality (Plato’s Phaedo, 64a, cf. 67.e), and to the ancient Roman saying memento mori (remember death), accompanied by the motto carpe diem (seize the day).5 Art historian and iconographer Eddy de Jongh characterized Dutch artists’ preoccupation with the meaning of life as the tendency toward moralizing, as seen in vanitas portrait paintings, and a part of the mentality of the seventeenth century.6 In the use of realism and double entendres in their imageries of vanitas, Dutch and Flemish artists were assisted not only by biblical references but also by extensive emblematic compendia, which encouraged moral virtue and reminded the viewer of the brevity of life. Included in these compendia were Joannes Sambucus’s Emblemata (Antwerp 1564, into Dutch 1566), Hadrianus Junius’s Emblemata (Antwerp 1565, into Dutch 1567), Andrea Alciato’s Emblemata (translated into Dutch, Leiden 1591), Otto van Veen’s Quinti Horatii Flacci emblemata (Antwerp 1607), Amorum emblemata (Antwerp 1608), and Amoris divini Emblemata (Antwerp 1615), Roemer Visscher’s Sinnepoppen (Amsterdam 1614), Jacob Cats’s Sinne-en-Minnebeelden (Amsterdam 1627), and Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia translated into Dutch (Amsterdam 1660). Seventeenth-century depictions of Homo bulla were extensive, ranging from genre to religious visualizations and including moral allusions. In the Protestant Netherlands, the moral meaning was visualized in genre imagery, while in Catholic Flanders, the moral message was revealed in religious painting. In genre representations, the theme further expands into still life vanitas paintings and portrait paintings, including self-portraits.7 This essay focuses on the symbolism of bubbles in two self-portraits of the seventeenth century: the Flemish painter Clara Peeters’s Self-Portrait with Still Life

89 Homo Bulla Est of 1618; and the Dutch painter David Bailly’s Self-Portrait with Vanitas Symbols of 1651 (Figures 3 and 7). The first part of the essay briefly addresses the symbolism of bubbles in Netherlandish iconography, and the second part focuses on the depiction and meaning of the bubble in these two self-portraits from seventeenth-century Belgium and Holland.

Figure 1. Hendrick Goltzius (1558–11617), Quis Evadet? I, 1594. Allegory of Transience (Homo bulla est), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photo credit: ©Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1951.

Figure 2. Hadrianus Junius, (1511–75), Emblem XVI, from Medici Emblemata (Antwerp: Christophe Plantin, 1565). Public domain.

90 Homo Bulla Est

The Complex Meaning of Bubbles in Dutch Iconography

Here I will focus on a historical print by Hendrick Goltzius (1558-1617), Allegory of Transience (Homo bulla est) or Quis Evadet? (at the Metropolitan Museum of Art [51.501.4929], Figure 1).8 The engraving represents a panoramic view of a landscape, where in the background there is a cityscape and in the foreground a rustic natural setting. A nude child, a Herculean putto, ponders with a puzzling expression. He is seated on the ground, resting one arm on a skull and bones, and holding a scalloped shell with water and soap in one hand.9 With the other hand, the curly-haired putto plays with bubbles held on a wand. As he watches with trepidation the formation of the beautiful clear bubbles floating in the air, he also sees them with disappointment as they burst, evaporate, and disappear on contact with natural air. He also experiences smoke fumes emerging from a burning urn located on a marble pedestal behind him; they too vanish in midair. Metaphysically, the open sky or the air becomes a recipient of the water bubbles and smoke fumes. Goltzius’s humanistic awareness combined the physical elements of air, water, fire, and earth (the landscape, flowers, trees, and the putto), forming natural aspects of the cosmos with metaphysical notions about human life and death (memento mori). The spiral or ascending movement of the smoke refers to the axis mundi, the “path of escape from time and space.”10 The transformation of the body into ashes, like the soap and water into bubbles and the fire burning into smoke, allude to the natural transformation of life. These phenomena are considered part of the eternal and perpetual recurrence of death and rebirth, like the change of the seasons and the individual biological pattern of the ages of life — childhood, youth, adulthood, and old age.11 In the Christian religion, the human dilemma lies in accepting one’s mortality: that is, the separation of the natural body from the soul, and trusting the transformation of matter into a spiritual essence. Hence the soul traveling through air is purified through fire and water in order to arrive at the celestial realm.12 Goltzius’s print shows the putto’s extended leg pointing to a broken stone or epitaph in front of him, which bears a Latin caption: QVIS EVADET? (Who is saved [from death]? or Who evades [death]?). A biblical warning for the putto blowing bubbles alludes to vanitas and the superficiality of living as well as the brevity of human existence, just like the bubble evaporating in midair (Ecclesiastes 1:2).13 Below the broken stone, in the lower margin, there is a Latin poem at whose end is inscribed the letters F. Estius. A professional friend of Goltzius, the Catholic humanist and Neo Latinist Franco Estius (1545-94),14 from Haarlem, composed many Latin poems for Goltzius’s prints throughout his life, including this one:

Flos nouus, et verna fragrans argenteus aura Marcescit subito, perit, ali, perit illa venustas. Sic et vita hominum iam, nunc nascentibus, eheu, Instar abit bullæ vanique elapsa vaporis. F. Estius (The fresh silvery flower, fragrant with the breath of spring, Withers once its beauty wanes; Likewise the life of man, already ebbing in the newborn babe, Vanishes like a bubble or like fleeting smoke. (F. Estius)15

The symbolism of the floating bubbles also derives from emblematic books and engravings from this period, for example Hadrianus Junius’s Emblem XVI: Et Tutto Abbraccio, Et Nulla Stringo (I embrace everything, and hold nothing).16 The emblem shows many children trying to capture and hold on to floating bubbles in a hilly landscape. Some children, seated on mounds of dirt in front of trees with large fronds, are making bubbles with water and soap from a shell that they are

91 Homo Bulla Est holding and then are blowing them to the other children who attempt in vain to grasp them (Figure 2). The shell is an ancient traditional symbol of cosmic death (birth, death, and rebirth) associated with the cycle of the moon and water, and purification.17 A revival of this subject matter several decades later manifested itself in still life vanitas paintings in which artists included in their self-portraits vanitas imagery, including bubbles. The Flemish painter Clara Peeters’s Self-Portrait with Vanitas of 1629-30 (Figure 3) and the Dutch painter David Bailly’s Self- Portrait with Vanitas Symbols of 1651 (Figure 7) are emblematic of this revival. A few general remarks indicate some differences between the lives of the two painters. There is limited information about the artistic training, career, and patronage of the Flemish painter Clara Peeters (1584/1594?-1650/1657?); even her birth and death dates are not certain.18 Peeters came from a devoted Catholic family; she was baptized on May 15, 1584/94 and married to Henricus Joosen on May 31, 1639 in the Church of St. Walburga in Antwerp.19 here were no children from their marriage. Early in her artistic career, Clara was probably trained and mentored by Jean Peeters, her father, as was traditional in this era,20 and later by Antwerp painters such as Hans van Essen (1590-1643), Osias Beert (1580-1623), and Jan Breugel the Elder (1568-1625).21 She worked in Antwerp as well as in Amsterdam (1611) and The Hague (1617), but her subsequent artistic activities are confusing, as is her enrollment or participation in artists’ guilds such as the established Guild of Saint Luke in Antwerp, Amsterdam, and The Hague.22 She excelled in depicting still life paintings with flora and fauna, accompanied by fancy ceramic, glass, and metal objects. Her artistic travels were limited to Belgium and the Netherlands (Amsterdam and The Hague). By contrast, there is a plethora of biographical data about the artistic career, life, and patronage of the Dutch painter David Bailly (1584-1657).23 He was born in Leiden to Protestant Flemish parents who moved away from Antwerp, a Catholic center, to the Netherlands, a Protestant community, to achieve religious freedom. He started his artistic career with initial training in drawing from his father, then became an apprentice to prominent artists and dealers in several workshops, namely, Jacques de Gheyn II, Isaac van Swanenburgh, Adriane Verburg, and Cornelius van der Voort. In 1608, he began traveling throughout Germany (Frankfurt, Nuremburg, and Augsburg) and Italy (Venice and Rome). In 1642, he married, late in life at the age of 57, to Agneta van Swanenburgh. They had no children. His high recognition occurred in 1648 when he received admission to the prestigious Leiden Guild of Saint Luke. He died at the age of 73. Both painters, however, were fascinated with the combination of animate and inanimate objects and their portrayal in a pictorial form (in this context, their self-portraits). Furthermore, both were dedicated to capturing natural and artificial light effects in order to infuse the physical objects they depicted with a metaphysical signification about the intrinsic meaning of life and its transient nature. The following section will deal separately with each self-portrait and its intricacies, focusing on the signification of the depiction of the bubble in their self-images. At the conclusion, there will be a close paragone between their approaches of handling bubbles in their self-portraits. 92 Homo Bulla Est

Clara Peeters’s Self-Portrait with Vanitas

Figure 3. Clara Peeters (1584/1594?–1650/1657?), Self-Portrait with Vanitas, 1618.. Oil on panel, 37.2 x 50.2 cm. Private Collection. Photo credit: Public domain. Wikimedia Commons.

Clara Peeters’s Self-Portrait with Vanitas of 1629-30 is a panel painting of 37.5 cm x. 50.2 cm, now in a private collection. The painting was sold by the Hallsborough Gallery in London in October of 1969 (Figure 3).24 Throughout this painting, Peeters engaged in a pictorial dialogue between physical and metaphysical paragoni (comparisons) and conceits (emblematic meanings). Her traditional and additional disguised symbolisms enrich the meanings of the displayed objects in the painting and also reveal her ingenious creativity. In the painting, her clavis interpretandi is divided into two parts: animate and inanimate objects. On the left side of the painting we see the model and sitter as Clara, the protagonist. The scene opens in a room whose wall is decorated with a flowery tapestry or embossed leather. A large green velveteen curtain is drawn back to reveal an elegantly dressed woman, seated at a table covered with precious objects. Clara is dressed in her finest, unlike the attire she wore in previous self-portraits, e.g., Clara Peeters’s Still Life with Flowers and Gold Cups of Honor (Wunderkammer), now at the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Karlsruhe (Figure 4) where, reflected in the bubbles on the goblet, she appears in her studio dressed in working clothes, holding a palette and a brush in front of a mirror (Figure 5).25

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In the Self-Portrait with Vanitas, the sitter gazes outside the picture plane, probably at a mirror where she can see her own reflection. The self-image is not of a beautiful or idealized depiction of a female but is a realistic rendition of an accomplished painter. Her round face and wide-open eyes represent an observant person. The pupils of her eyes act as small reflective mirrors, and in them a traditional artist’s room can be seen. Similarly, the artist’s studio is reflected in the large bubble suspended at mid-point in the center of the painting.26 Peeters delighted in incorporating objects and painting details to provide for the viewer a visual feast of colors and shapes and, most of all, a myriad of light reflections as well as optical illusions. A masterful painter, she shows a wooden chair whose head arm is carved with a grim lion’s face that contrasts with the sitter’s pleasant smile. The smile may be in response to what is reflected in the mirror or may be an ironic smile about what is being painted. The sitter’s golden tresses are crowned with a jeweled band of pearls and rubies; a large brooch with a teardrop pearl placed in the center accentuates her large forehead, hazel eyes, aquiline nose, and sensual lips. Her face is round, with high cheekbones; her visible earlobe is ornamented with a dangling gold earring containing a blue stone (sapphire). She is beautifully attired in a dress composed of a bright red skirt with a blue top trimmed with golden lace. The daring cleavage reveals her voluptuous breasts and a string of large pearls. Her shoulder is covered by a fanciful, transparent lamé jacket with white and gold bands and a high lace collar that frames her neck. Golden bracelets composed of pearls, rubies, and ancient medallions accentuate the painter’s working hands. In one hand she holds a golden hairpin (an allusion to a painter’s brush), and the other holds a magnifying glass in a folding case. Peeters employed this instrument for careful observations and study in her renditions of still life designs, as shown in the many small details depicted in the vanitas painting. The reflections on each side of this opened magnifying glass or bubble locket mirror the colors of the sitter’s attire: blue and white colors. The righthand side of the painting includes only inanimate objects placed on the table. A red velvet cloth covers the table, accentuating the still life or vanitas objects displayed. This collection of props has been seen in her previous paintings, e.g., Still Life with Flowers and Gold Cups of Honor of 1612 (Figure 4);27 Table with Still Life (Dainties) of 1611, now at the Museo del Prado in Madrid;28 and Still Life with Flowers Surrounded by Insects and a Snail of 1612-18, now at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC (Figure 6).29 In the foreground of Peeters’s Self-Portrait with Vanitas, there is a large gold jeweled hairpin next to two gold rings encrusted with precious stones; these are gimmel rings (betrothal rings).30 Accompanying them are two mesh gold bracelets with exotic clasps. The smaller bracelet in the forefront is folded over on itself. Just behind it is a large gold bracelet that lies open in the shape of the letter “L,” a possible reference to the Flemish word “love” (lief or liefde, a loved one). The pearls or string of pearls that the sitter wears are associated with Venus, the Goddess of Love.31 Is the glass bubble locket preciously holding a lock of hair or locklove from her lover or husband to be, Henricus Joosen? On the table are additional vanitas objects. Next to golden bracelets are two ivory dice that together show the lucky number 7 (1+6). A large goblet decorated with intricate serpentine floral designs lies on its side. The gilt goblet separates the jewelry from various types of coins: some of gold (Spanish coins with engraved portraits and incised letters referring to King Ferdinand) and some of silver (Pope Paul III). Next to these coins there is a large floral leaf that leads the eye to a Roemer vase containing flowers such as Anemone coronaria, Helleborus orientalis or lenten rose, grape hyacinth, snakeshead fritillary, heartsease, and a monocots lily.32

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Figure 4. Clara Peeters (1584/1594?–1650/1657?), Still Life with Flowers and Gold Cups of Honor, (Wunderkammer). Signed and dated Clara P Anno 1612. Panel, 59.2 x 59 cm. Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe. Photo credit: Public domain. Wikimedia commons. Figure 5. Detail.

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Figure 6. Clara Peeters (1584/1594?–1650/1657?), Still Life with Flowers Surrounded by Insects and a Snail, 1612-1618. Signed lower center CLARA P. Oil on copper, 16.6 3.5 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Photo credit: Public domain. Wikimedia commons.

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Peeters appropriated the floral arrangement inserted in the Roemer vase from her earlier still life painting,Still Life with Flowers Surrounded by Insects and a Snail of 1612-18, signed in the lower center of the table as CLARA P. The small painting is in oil on copper, 16.6 cm x 3.5 cm., now at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC (2018.144.1) (Figure 6). In this painting, there are water bubbles on the leaves of the flowers’ stems and a couple of them have dropped on the table. They are still of round shape, holding their water by gravity, and their reflections suggest an immediate moment in time. The bubbles have just dropped onto the table and will soon become a puddle of water. In this small still life painting, Peeters also created several levels of optical illusion. On the borders of the illusionistic mat that surrounds the oval shape of the painting, she added a collection of insects, dragonflies, worms, beetles, and a snail. Curiously, a ladybug Coccinella( septempunctata) is placed just below her signature in the frame mat. This is a traditional sign for luck, a good omen for Peeters’s creative powers and wisdom, as well as an allusion to immortality.33 At times, the border of the painting becomes one level of reality, while the painted image in the oval picture is the second projected imagery, but in some other instances the reverse is perceived. Peeters played a visual pun on what is seen as real or reflective or how a painted object can be seen or not seen as a reflected image. Back to the Self Portrait with Vanitas: Some of the luscious hellebore leaves in the Roemer vase hold small drops of water, forming water bubbles just like in Peters’s Still Life with Flowers Surrounded by Insects and a Snail. The colors of the flowers — red, gold, and blue — match the color of Peeters’s outfit. Although some of the flowers are in full bloom, others bloomed earlier and now are droopy or have fallen off the stem, as seen on the table among the goblets and the coins. The transformation of the flowers parallels the transience of natural life, including the natural state of human beings. Next to the flower vase, in the background, there is a large gilt gold goblet with complex designed patterns of classical egg-dart-motif, floral and plant arrangements. At the top, as a handle, a male figure stands like a soldier, holding a lance and a shield. The image of the soldier with these attributes is a paradoxical allusion to Saint George’s kermesse, that is, this patron saint’s day celebration, which combined a carnival feast and a religious rite, well-depicted in an engraving of Hieronymus Cock, after Pieter Breughel the Elder’s The Fair of Saint George’s Day of 1559, now at the Museum of Fine Arts of Houston in Texas.34 This Saint George’s type of imagery is often depicted in Peeters’s still life paintings, e.g. at Karlsruhe, London, and Madrid. Behind this goblet there is a round green bowl filled with nuts and sweets. Two large gold coins, one with an initial “M” and the other with a fleur-de-lis, complete the background on the table’s displayed vanitas decorations. All of these objects, animate and inanimate, attest to the ambiguity of permanence and the transitoriness of life (memento mori and carpe diem). The animate objects — flowers, self — will perish through natural causes, or even accidental causes, following the cycle of life. The inanimate objects coveted during a person’s lifetime — jewelry, coins, goblets, vase — will eventually be abandoned, destroyed, or discarded even if they endure the vicissitudes of time. A giant round bubble suspended in midair between Peeters’s head and the Roemer vase of flowers further emphasizes the transitoriness of life. In the painting, Peeters composed two types of bubbles: artificial and real in a painted world. The small water bubbles, resting on and sliding down from the leaves of the flowers in the vase, are carefully designed and very real. The circular and oval shapes of the bubbles are like transparent precious stones. As water droplets, they provide immediate life to cut flowers; but as they drip away and evaporate, so will the flowers decay, as shown in the loose flowers and dead leaves on the table. The natural water bubbles are as fragile as the cut flowers: both will vanish, since they are living and natural forms. The oval-shaped glass bubbles at the base of the Roemer vase, designed by a glassmaker, are, in contrast, artificial. They will not naturally vanish. Still they may be shattered if the vase is broken, and it will inevitably decompose, even if in years or centuries. These are bubbles of an inanimate object with a possible fatal fate, but not by natural causes. With an emblematic association to vanitas, the biblical verse recalls: “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal. But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust corrupt” (Matthew 6:19-20).

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Paradoxically, the large suspended circular bubble partakes of both physical states: artificial and real. The image alludes to different sets of symbols. The air bubble is painted in midair, reflecting an interior room, perhaps the painter’s studio, just an illusory place in time and space. It is a fanciful invention and an illusionistic image artificially created by the painter. At the same time, it is real: It is a physically painted object in the form of an air bubble on a surface — the canvas of the painting. The airy, fanciful, and floating quality of this painted spherical bubble differs from that of the small water bubbles resting on the leaves of the cut flowers or the blown-glass bubbles formed in the Roemer vase. Although in all these instances the bubble is an artistic painted device, its type, size, shape, and function as well as conceit and meaning allude to another level of signification. The round air bubble is located behind the round head of the sitter, and together these round forms act as or provide an allusion to a dual face or a dual head: a Janus head, an image looking back (past) and forward (future). The past is projected with the model’s turned head facing the viewer and looking outside of the picture, while the air bubble floating away in the distance projects a future, an uncertain aspect of life, as well as the frailty of life (sitter), similar to the temporary transit of the air bubble in midair. In the division of the painting there is also a second classification: the depiction of things that are alive and will die — such as a human being, flowers, and bubbles — contrasts with human-made objects — coins, jewelry, goblets, vase, curtain, tablecloth, tapestry wall, and wooden chair — which are objects that lack metaphysical transitory qualities. The suspended single bubble in the painting suggests a transient moment. Suspended in time and space, it will pass; it will evaporate or burst, just as the flowers will wilt; indeed some are already doing so. As too the female, the sitter: her youth will pass, she will decay and pass away as part of being a mortal, thus following the natural causes of life.35 Peeters, however, provided further insight in her complex painting. Although it is a vanitas, memento mori, and still life painting — including as well some aspects of the allegory of the five senses such as touch (her hands holding objects), smell (the flowers), sight (all the various reflections in the still life objects) — it is also a ceremonial or a commemorative painting, a celebration of marriage or a wedding gift. Her elegant and formal attire, with a pearl necklace, hairdo crowned with pearls and precious jewelry, all the precious objects on the table, the large bracelet with the insignia “L” for love and, in particular, the two gimmel rings (symbols of marriage) are testimonies of her dowry and of love. In the past, other female artists had painted a celebratory picture or gifted such an offering to the spouse to be, e.g., Lavinia Fontana’s Self-Portrait at the Spinet of 1577, now at the Accademia Nazionale di San Luca in Rome.36 In Clara Peeters, Pamela Hibbs Decoteau attributed the painting to the Circle of Clara Peeters.37 Curiously, her complex argument for not attributing the painting to Clara Peeters herself provided a strong argument that the painting was, in fact, by her. The recent acquisition by the National Gallery of Art of Peeters’s Still Life with Flowers Surrounded by Insects and a Snail, signed in the lower center CLARA P, depicting the same still life of a Roemer vase with flowers seen in Peeters’s Self Portrait with Vanitas, supports in great part the argument that it is a painting by her. Another suggestion for dating the painting much later, probably around 1630 and after 1618, is based on the sitter’s physiognomy, an adult female of an approximate age of 36 or 46, and not 24, depending upon calculations of Peeters’s birth date. Hence, in view of the age of the sitter and the displayed objects depicted on the table previously seen in earlier paintings — the glass locket and gimmel rings or wedding rings — this self-portrait should be dated to around 1629 or 1630 in connection with the date of her marriage to Henri Joosen. But most of all, Peeters created the painting not just as a permanent record of herself in a special moment in real time and space but for posterity, a masterpiece of her artistic achievements in a suspended magical reality in time and space; hence challenging the ephemerality of vanitas, l’hora passa or homo bulla est.

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David Bailly’s Self-Portrait with Vanitas Symbols

Figure 7. David Bailly (1584–1657), Self-Portrait with Vanitas Symbols, 1651. Oil on panel, 65 x 97.5 cm. Museum De Lakenhal, Leiden, The Netherlands. Photo credit: Public domain. Wikimedia Commons.

David Bailly (1584-1657) completed his Self-Portrait with Vanitas Symbols in 1651, an oil on panel, 65 cm x 97.5 cm, now in the Museum De Lakenhal in Leiden, The Netherlands (Figure 7). Unlike Clara Peeters and her Self-Portrait with Vanitas, there is no dearth of scholarship on this rich and complex painting.38 This short essay cannot discuss or summarize the major eloquent iconographical descriptions of the vanitas objects and portrait identification made by recent scholars (Brusati, Bruyn, Voskuil, Wurfbain, and Martin) in Bailly’s painting. But a few iconographic observations will be briefly considered, mostly addressing relationships between Bailly’s and Peeters’s self-portraits and the inclusion of bubbles in them. Bailly’s Self-Portrait typifies Dutch vanitas allusions as noted on a piece of paper in the painting: vanitas vanitum et omnia vanitas with the signature and date of the artist: David Bailly pinxit, A. 1651. This type of self-portrait (a single portrait that depicts the painter) combines elements derived from group portraiture (with the inclusions of ancestors) with allegorical portraiture, and the fusion of memento mori, vanitas, and still life elements. Bailly, like Peeters, engaged in the duality of natural and inanimate conceits — life and death, present and past, artificial and real, solid versus liquid — as well

99 Homo Bulla Est as with the collection of paragoni in the arts — drawing versus painting; print versus picture; painting versus sculpture; ivory/stone versus silver/brass or wood; and, music versus painting. For Bailly, the vanitas self-portrait is a remembrance of his past loved ones, in particular his wife, who is depicted twice in the picture. First she is depicted in a painting in an oval frame placed on the table next to his second self-portrait as a mature man.39 In front of the portrait of his wife sits a smoking candle, whose smoke plumes guide the viewer to look into the dark background of the painting where an image emerges — a possible second portrait of his wife, but as a ghost (deceased Agneta).40 Recent X-rays41 indicate Bailly’s pentimento in pointing his maulstick (lying near the back of the table) toward a woman’s face in the background of the painting, the present ghost image that still shows. Historical and visual observations are confusing. It is unclear when Agneta died. She was very ill and composed a will in 1644. Ten years later, in the Spring of 1657, Bailly also was ill, unable to sign his will. He died shortly thereafter. There is a confusing claim that his wife was involved in compiling this will, suggesting that she was still alive.42 The pictorial fact that Bailly left part of his pentimento of a visible female’s face similar to his wife’s portrait in his final painting suggests, however, that she was deceased and that her image was a memento mori. In Bailly’s painting, the movement of the three air bubbles leads the viewer to the clavis interpretandi of the imagery. On the left side of the painting, the first bubble moves away from the self-portraits of the painter: from when he was a young artist and toward when he is an older established master. This second image appears in an oval-shaped frame. The portrait images of when Bailly was young and old are connected by the placement of his own hands: one holds a maulstick, indicating the artist’s tool as a painter, and the other rests on the frame of the older image of himself, showing the span of time in an artistic world. This first floating air bubble is gazed at by an older bearded man drawn on a piece of paper pinned to the wall. The gray drawing portrays an aging man wearing monastic clothing; perhaps it is the Apostle Paul, a converter, who addressed Philippians about the perspective on life and death (Phil. 1:18-26).43 Perhaps the image of an Evangelical figure, a converter of Catholics to Protestants? The second floating air bubble is larger. It follows the smoke plumes of the candle, rising above the portrait of Bailly’s deceased wife and leading toward the background where there is an emerging shadow with a ghost of the dead wife, her second portrait. The third gliding air bubble, of a smaller size, moves toward the bust statue of a Bacchante created by the Flemish sculptor and architect Lucas Faydhere (1627-97).44 The Bacchante’s female image contrasts with the adjacent painted female image in the portrait of Agneta. Curiously, Bailly composed a series of paragoni between the painted portrait and the bust sculpture, demonstrating the painter’s ability to capture liveliness (though the sculptor lacks this ability) while eloquently conveying the expression of inertia. Both women are portrayed tilting their heads in the same direction. The painted portrait shows a lively expression of a beautiful woman with open eyes and a gentle smile gazing toward the viewer (or the painter, in this instance her husband) while the Bacchante’s blinded or unpainted eyes show the inability to see or connect with the maker. The Bacchante’s smirk is a false gesture of a smile. Agneta in the oval painting is beautifully dressed, wearing a string of pearls around her neck, and her hairdo is decorated with a crown of pearls, contrasting with the Bacchante’s awkward himation held by a strap and revealing her undeveloped breasts. The ridge around her neckline shows a faulty anatomical connection between her shoulder and head, as if the bust combined two separate fragments of an ancient sculpture. Her hairdo is crowned with her tresses forming a taeniae or a flower placed atop her heard. This bubble travels to show the transformation of time: a living image depicted in a portrait versus the painted shadow of the image in the background, and also a comparison between the different conceptions in portraying a female beauty, a lady of stature, and loved one versus a fleeting lover, a bacchante. According to Plato’s Ion: 534 (On Poetry), a bacchante or maenad, who was a follower of Dionysus or Bacchus, the God of Wine, carried a thyrsus (a staff with wine leaves) to strike the streams of the earth so that springs of wine would bubble up.45 In Bailly’s painting, next to the Bacchante is a glass flute containing white wine… and a bubble. Or is it a reflection of the bubble floating about the Bacchante’s head? With the inclusion of the Bacchante and its association with Platonic refences (Symposium 197a, Phaedrus 244)46 about the frenzied action, divine mania, or poetical

100 Homo Bulla Est inspirations during the feasts or Dionysiac reveries, Bailly parallels the furor poeticus with the furor artisticus in a painter when creating and composing a painting, as in his Self-Portrait with Vanitas Symbols. The third floating bubble transits toward the ivory sculpture ofThe Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian of 1650 (Figure 8), attributed to Artus Quellinus I (1609-68), a well-established Flemish sculptor from Antwerp who worked as well in the Netherlands. During 1646 and 1657, his noted sculptural program was for the City Hall (Stadhuis) in Amsterdam.47 The selection of this saint, Sebastian (256-88), is based on his traditional Christian popularity as healer of maladies and plagues in seventeenth-century northern Europe. Hence the saint’s association with Agneta, who was believed to have survived or died during a plague.48

Figure 8. Artus Quellinus I (1609–1680), attr. The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, 1650. Ivory, h. 42.5cm. Private Collection. Photo credit: © Courtesy of Sotheby’s London, July 2, 2013.

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Bailly’s Self-Portrait with Vanitas Symbols is a masterful depiction of physical and metaphysical conceits, like Peeters’s. His inventive juxtapositions of chroma — brilliant and varied color versus grisaille techniques — creates an illusory metaphysical space for his autobiographical reference and artistic mastery.49 The dominant purple coloration (roses, curtains, tablecloth) and silvery shades and tints (silver jewelry, prints, shadows, and sculpture) suggest an uncanny material reality, perhaps an illusion of a séance, where the artist performs as medium, partaking with viewers in a session with the past. Unlike Peeters’s Self-Portrait with Vanitas that contains only one large floating bubble, Bailly expanded the number of air bubbles from one to three. All are floating almost at the top of the painting, while one additional bubble emerges from the white wine contained in the tall fluted glass, a clevertrompe l’oeil effect. Peeters also engaged in this playful technique when she painted the small water bubbles dripping from the foliage. The element of smoke does not appear in Peeters’s painting, perhaps because women did not have a habit of smoking pipes in public. In Bailly’s painting, smoke is paralleled to the evanescence and transience of an air bubble. In a previous small vanitas drawing, Quis evadet of 1624, from Album amicorum van Cornelis de Glarges (f. 1161r) at the Royal Library of The Hague (Figure 9), Bailly designed a skull accompanied by an hour glass, a smoking pipe, and a rolled-up parchment with the Latin inscription, “Quis Evadet”50 and a personal notation: “Ter liefden en t’sijnen versoecken van mijnen groten vriendt / Jonckheer Cornelis D. Glarges heb ick t’sijner ghedachtenisse / dit alhier ghestelt den 16. giulii A.° 1624” (Out of love and on the request of my close friend Jonckheer Cornelis D. Glarges I have made this [drawing] for his remembrance on 16 July 1624).51 The handwritten inscription above the drawing provides a human touch. For the viewer, it provides an insight into the gentle personality of this painter. The skull in Bailly’s drawing, like in Goltzius’s Homo bulla, alludes to the ancient memento mori motto: “Today me, tomorrow you”; the smoking pipe suggests the biblical reference of “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” (Genesis 3:19, 18:27; and Ecclesiastes 3:20). As well, as the smoke plume recalls the biblical warning: “My days are consumed like smoke” (Psalms CII:3). The smoke plume recalls the smoking action from the Dutch emblematic motif of the humanist and poet Roemer Visscher in his book Sinnepoppen, with the motto “X: Veel tijds wat nieuws, selden wat goets” (Often something new, seldom anything good). The emblem illustrates a seated man smoking tobacco while puffing a large clay pipe.52

Figure 9. David Bailly (1584–1657), Quis evadet, 1624. Drawing from Album amicorum van Cornelis de Glarges, f. 161r. Royal Library (Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague) Photo credit: Public domain. Wikimedia commons.

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Summary

Both painters, Peeters and Bailly, were fascinated with still life and vanitas paintings, which provided them an artistic challenge in depicting animate and inanimate objects in their self-portraits, as a collection of personal memorabilia. In addition, both painters strove to capture natural and artificial light effects in order to bestow upon the objects’ physicality a metaphysical signification about the transitoriness of life. In their self-portraits, both Peeters and Bailly used the bubble to communicate the frailty and ephemerality of human essence. There are two ways in which this object, the bubble, is depicted in both of these artists’ self-portraits: naturally, as a water bubble or as an air bubble; and artificially, as bubbles formed in the design of glass and metal objects.53 Water bubbles rest on foliage or drip from the leaves of flowers in a Roemer vase, as seen in Peeters’s Self-Portrait with Vanitas. The air bubble or air bubbles in these painters’ compositions float in midair: in Bailly’s Self-Portrait with Vanitas Symbol, three air bubbles provide the transitory movement through the painting; but in her painting, Peeters only depicts one air bubble, suspended next to her head. These types of bubbles are created to form trompe l’oeil effects of reflective and refractive illuminations. The painted air bubble is portrayed to show the light effect of refraction as the light passes through the object and then bends inside the object, e.g., the floating air bubble that shows inside its sphere the artist’s studio with windows. This type of light effect is seen in the air bubbles of both self-portraits. Perhaps the most intriguing metaphorical and pictorial aspect of the bubble design is found in the artist’s eyes. The round eye (iris and pupil) designed in the shape of a bubble experiences the two light effects as well.54 As the painter gazes into a mirror to visualize the self, the eye physically responds to the light indications. At the same time that each artist captures the image with the eye, they apply it or depict it on a surface, drawing paper, or canvas, as seen in these Self- Portraits. However, these artists may have taken liberties in capturing what they saw, perhaps even distorted a perceived image as the reflective image inside the bubble. In these Self-Portraits, the image inside the bubble is an imprecise view of the painter’s studio: in Bailly’s there are no human figures, just a sketchy, vacant room with large windows; while Peeters depicted a furnished area with windows, perhaps with a figure seated at an easel. Other circumstances may have also created distortions, e.g., the employment of another reflecting instrument such as a mirror or a camera obscura or the time when the picture was painted — during the day with natural light or in the evening by candlelight. Hence, the lack of or intended distortion in the painted bubble.55 These painters, Bailly and Peeters, in their different artistic milieu, experienced the same creative spirit or furor poeticus that led them to invent a complex imagery for posterity about art and love. Ingeniously, Peeters composed a painting honoring and celebrating a special moment in real time and space in her life, her betrothal, while Bailly celebrated perhaps an anniversary with (or at least a remembrance of) his great love, Agneta. In their Self-Portraits, both painters considered metaphysical conceits about artistic quests, the historical impact of their pictorial image, and family recollections as well as the mutability of life. Although the human desire for immorality is conveyed in their self-imaging, so too is the knowledge that their actions and depictions are all but vanitas. These self- portraits with vanitas conceits are suspended magical realities, just like the bubbles. They challenge the natural formation of time and space and triumph over the mortality of l’hora passa, quis evadet or homo bulla est. Bubbles that float and burst in midair will be the past, but cultural conceits in a painting will be suspended in time and space for the future, granting immortality to the painter, l’hora non passa … ma continua… Artists as human beings are aware of their own mortality and transience of life, metaphorically similar to the nature of a bubble. Yet they hope through their endeavors to add culture and historical continuity. Their paintings, as inanimate objects, need physical care and preservation as well. Their historicity needs to be cultivated through time; if not, they will perish like painters or evaporate like bubbles. ______

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Notes

1. W. Stechow, “Homo bulla,” Art Bulletin 20, no. 2 (1938): 227-28, esp. 227; H.W. Janson, “Putto with Death’s Head,” Art Bulletin 19, no. 3 (1937): 423-49; 432, n. 37; and 438, for an image of an anonymous German woodcut of 1530s representing a putto resting on a skull in a pictorial landscape. See also J. Seznec, “Youth, Innocence and Death,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 1, no. 4 (1938): 298-303; and Jeannie Labno, Commemorating the Polish Renaissance Child: Funeral Moments and Their European Context (New York: Routledge, 2016), Section on “Reframing the Putto-and-Skull Motif: Derivation, Dissemination and Formative Influences,” np. For images, see: https://www.akgimages.co.uk/Docs/AKG/Media/TR3_WATERMARKED/1/2/6/2/AKG286325.jpg. (accessed July 15, 2020); Liana De Girolami Cheney, “Dutch Vanitas Paintings: The Skull,” in The Symbolism of ‘Vanitas’ in the Arts, Literature, and Music: Comparative and Historical Studies, ed. Liana De Girolami Cheney (New York/London: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1992), 113-76; and Liana De Girolami Cheney, “The Symbolism of the Skull in Vanitas: Homo bulla est,” Journal of Cultural and Religious Studies 6, no. 5 (May 2018): 267-84. 2. William Watson Baker, ed., The Adages of Erasmus (Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 2001), II.iii.48. See also Naomi Popper Voskuil, “Selfportraiture and Vanitas Still Life Painting in 17th Century Holland in Reference to David Bailly’s Vanitas Oeuvre,” Pantheon 31 (January 1973): 58-74; Wayne M. Martin, “Bubbles and Skulls: The Phenomenological Structure of Self-Consciousness in Dutch Still Life Painting” (2005), esp. n. 3, for a discussion on a Cartesian approach to Dutch still life paintings and what is not seen the painter’s self-consciousness; see text online: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.405.2460&rep=rep1&type=pdf (accessed July 5, 2020) and expanded in Wayne M. Martin, “Bubbles and Skulls: The Phenomenology of Self-Consciousness in Dutch Still Life Painting,” in A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism, ed. Hurber L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathal (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 559-84. 3. Karolien De Clippel, “Dutch Art in Relation to Seventeenth-Century Flemish Art,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Dutch Art of the Seventeenth Century, ed. Wayne Frantis (London: Routledge, 2016), 390-405. 4. See Plato in Twelve Volumes, trans. Harold North Fowler, intro. W.R.M. Lamb, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press/ London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1966). 5. See Plato’s Phaedo (64a, cf. 67.e) on the trial and death of Socrates, who commented about the concept of immortality and the proper practice of philosophy: “Those who truly grasp philosophy pursue the study of nothing else but dying and being dead”; see Matthew Dillon, “Dialogues with Death: The Last Days of Socrates and Buddha,” Philosophy East and West 50, no. 4 (October 2020): 525-58. And the anecdotal event about a servant commenting on the successful parade of his general with these Latin words: “Respice post te! Hominem te esse memento! Memento mori!” (Look behind you! Remember that you are but a man! Remember that you will die!). The Latin term carpe diem was first employed by the lyric poet Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65-8 BCE) inOdes , Book I. 6. Eddy De Jongh, “Iconographical Approach to Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting,” in The Golden Age of Dutch Painting in Historical Perspective, ed. F. Grijzenhout and H. Van Veen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Eddy De Jongh, “The Interpretation of Still Life Paintings: Possibilities and Limitations,” in Questions of Meaning: Theme and Motif in Dutch Seventeenth- Century Painting, ed. Michael Hoyle (Leiden: Primavera, 2000), 129-48; Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987; pbk. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 214; and Rukshana Edwards, “Portraits as Objects within Seventeenth-Century Dutch Vanitas Still Life” (MA Thesis, University of Amsterdam, 2015), esp. 48-51. 7. It is not the intention of this short essay to address the polemics about the classification, meaning, and origin of termsstill life, trompe l’oeil, vanitas, memento mori or dance macabre. See Julie Berger Hochstrasser, “Still Lively: Recent Scholarship on Still Life Painting,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Dutch Art of the Seventeenth Century, ed. Wayne Frantis (London: Routledge, 2016), 43-72; Celeste Brusati, “Stilled Lives: Self-Portraiture and Self-Reflection in Seventeenth-Century Netherlandish Still Life Painting,”Simiolus 20, no. 2/3 (1990): 168-82; Ingvar Bergström, Dutch Still Life Painting in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Yoseloff, 1956); Ingvar Bergström, Still Lifes of the Golden Age (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Washington, 1989); Sam Segal, A Prosperous Past: The Sumptuous Still Life in the Netherlands 1600--1700 (Cambridge, MA: Fogg Art Museum, 1989); Sam Segal, Flowers and Nature: Netherlandish Flower Painting of Four Centuries (Amstelveen: Hinjk International, 1990); Alan Chong, Wouter Kloek, and Celeste Brusati, Still Life Paintings from the Netherlands 1550--1720 (Zwolle: Waanders Publishers, 1999); and above note for further literature on these complex topics. 8. Some of these concepts were considered in Cheney, “The Symbolism of the Skull in Vanitas.” Engraving on laid paper. For image, see: https://www.metmuseum.org-/art/collection/search/363640 (accessed July 5, 2020). See also The New Hollstein Dutch & Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts, 1450--1700 (Rotterdam: Sound & Vision Interactive, 1996), no. 128; and Walter L. Strauss, Hendrik Goltzius, 1558--1617: The Complete Engravings and Woodcuts, 2 vols. (Amsterdam:

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Abaris Books, 1977). Many of Goltzius’s prints were copied by himself or other artists in painting, e.g., Hans von Aachen’s Homo bulla est of 1628 (Christie’s Lot Finder: entry 5309550), for the image, see: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kreis_des_ Hans-_von_Aachen_-_Homo-_bulla_est.jpg (accessed July 15, 2020); after Otto Octavius van Veen’s Homo bulla est of the 1630s (Artnet Auction), for image, see: http://www.artnet.com/artists/otto-octavius-van-veen/homo-bulla-est-a-vanitas-still-life-with-a-child- PWMqVj0l9y4zMacx95emkg2; and after Goltzius’s Homo bulla est, for the image, see: http://www.artnet.com/artists/hendrik- goltzius/homo-bulla-est-0PGuHtqlng1KRlOAi9E1ZA2 (accessed July 15, 2020). 9. The scallop shell is also a symbol of pilgrimage referring to the journey of the human soul to achieve eternal salvation while traveling on Earth. See J.C. Cooper, An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Traditional Symbols (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), p. 152. 10. Cooper, An Illustrated Encyclopedia, p. 154. 11. Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, A Dictionary of Symbols (London: Blackwell, 1994), p. 841. 12. Edward Grant, Science and Religion 400 B.C. to A.D. 1550 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); and Cooper, An Illustrated Encyclopedia, p. 154 and 188. 13. Translated according to the King James Bible as “Vanity of vanities, said the Preacher, Vanity of vanities! All is vanity”; or in the Jerusalem Bible as “Vanity of vanities, said Ecclesiastes: vanity of vanities and all is vanity.” See Schama, Embarrassment of Riches, 430- 80, about Dutch living habits and wordily temptations. 14. The collaboration between poet and artist was established when Estius composed poems and Latin inscriptions for Goltzius’s engravings in several publications. For example, in 1583, Estius and Goltzius started their teamwork with the publication of Remertus Dodonaeus and Godelscalus Stewechius in Leiden. In this volume, Goltzius contributed a portrait of Stewechius and Estius with an inscription. See Julie L. McGee, Cornelius Corneliszoom Van Haarlem (1562-1638): Patrons, Friends, and Dutch Humanists (Niewekoop: De Graaf Publishers, 1991), 229 and 301. In 1585, with the publication of Flavi Vegei Renati De re militari libri quattour, they connected again. See Walter L. Strauss, Hendrik Goltzius (1558-1617): The Complete Engravings and Woodcuts (New York: Abaris Books, 1977), no. 178. Their association continued in 1586 with the publication of The Roman Heroes, a volume dedicated to the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II (1552-1612). See A. J. van der Aa, “Franco Estius,” Biographisch Woordenboek Der Nederlanden (Haarlem: J. J. van Brederode 1859), entry. 15. Goltzius’s motto derived from Franco Estius’s poem as noted by the initials at the end of the inscription. See Rudiger Klessmann, Die Sprache der Bilder (Braunschweig: Aco Druck GMBH, 1978), 127, 175-77; and Elizabeth A. Sutton, Early Modern Dutch Prints of Africa (London/New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2016), p. 139. 16. Hadrianus Junius, Medici Emblemata (Antwerp: Christophe Plantin, 1565), for the image see: https://www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/ french/books.php (accessed July 25, 2020). In Emblem XVI there two mottoes: the motto in the title says: “Cuncta complecti velle, stultum” (To want to be master of every subject is folly), while the motto in the pictura says: “E tutto abbraccio et nulla stringo” (I embrace everything, and hold nothing). 17. See Pamela Hibbs Decoteau, Clara Peeters: 1594--ca. 1640: And the Development of Still Life Painting in Northern Europe (Lingen: Luca Verlag, 1992), 7--11; Chevalier and Gheerbrant, A Dictionary of Symbols, 871; and J.C.J. Metford, Dictionary of Christian Lore and Legend (London: Thames and Hudson, 1983), p. 226. 18. Alejandro Vergara, The Art of Clara Peeters (Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 2017), exhibition catalogue; Decoteau, Clara Peeters, 7-11; esp. 7, nn. 3 and 4, discussing the uncovering of two important documents; however, there are questions about the recording of some of the dates. The two records are about her baptism May 15, 1594? by her father Jean Peeters, cited in Edith Greindl, Les peintres flamands de nature morte au XVIIe siècle (Brussels: Elsevier, 1956), 37 n. 40. Perhaps the date should read 1584, a possible error in document citation or transcription at the Church of St. Walburga in Antwerp. The second record is about her late marriage to Henricus Joosen (thought to be a fellow artist) on May 31, 1639, in the same church, citation from Greindl, Les Peintres Flamands, 37 n. 42. Perhaps an error in recording date 1639 instead of 1629? 19. Vergara, El Arte de Clara Peeters, 13-17; and 461, n. 62. 20. For example, Catharina van Hemessen by Jan Sanders van Hemessen, Barbara Longhi by Luca Longhi, Lavinia Fontana by Prospero Fontana, Artemisia Gentileschi by Orazio Gentileschi; and Fede Galizia by Annunzio Galizia. 21. Laura Fraganillo Lobara, “Clara Peeters, una artista por descubrir,” MITO Revista Cultural, p. 46 (May 2014): np. 22. Decoteau, Clara Peeters, 8-10. 23. Voskuil, “Self-Portrait and Vanitas Still Life Painting,” 58-74; Brusati, “Still-Lives,” 168-82; J. Bruyn, “David Bailly,” Oud Holland 66 (1951): 212-27; M. Wurfbain, “David Bailly’s Vanitas of 1651,” in The Age of Rembrandt-Studies in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting, ed. Roland Fleischer and Susan Scot Munshower (Papers in Art History from the Pennsylvania State University, 1988), 47-69; Michele Emmer, “Soap Bubbles in Art and Science: From the Past to the Future of Math Art,” Leonardo 20, no. 4 (1987): 327-34, unclear why Bailly’s image has been reversed, see Fig. 1. 24. Liana De Girolami Cheney, “The Baroque Power, Vision and The Self,” in Self Portraits by Women Painters, ed. Liana De

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Girolami Cheney, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: New Academia, 2009), Chapter 5, esp. 88-89; Martha Moffitt Peacock, “Mirrors of Skill and Renown: Women and Self-Fashioning in Early-Modern Dutch Art,” Mediaevistik 28 (2015): 325-52, esp. 328-29; and Decoteau, Clara Peeters, 51, attributed the painting to a Circle of Clara Peeters. 25. Brusati, “Still-Lives,” 172. This noted self-portrait is reflected in the globular surface of the second gilt goblet in the painting. 26. Peacock, “Mirrors of Skill and Renown,” 329, suggests that another self-portrait is included in the painting, “a dark-haired young woman found in the vessels at the right of the painting … which represents the virtues of industry and skills.” 27. See Decoteau, Clara Peeters, 20-21; and Brusati, “Still-Lives,” 168-82, esp. p. 172-73 n. 8. 28. Signed and dated CLARA P. A. 1611, oil on panel, 52 cm x 73 cm. See Decoteau, Clara Peeters, 20-21; and Brusati, “Still-Lives,” 168 n. 1. For the image at the Prado Museum, see: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Clara_Peeters_-_Mesa_(Prado)_01.jpg (accessed July 24, 2020). 29. Signed lower center CLARA P, in oil on copper, 16.6 cm x 3.5 cm, now at the National Gallery of Art (2018.144.1), Washington, DC, sold by Sotheby’s London on July 4, 2018. 30. Diana Scarisbrick, Rings, Symbols of Wealth Power and Affection (New York: Abrams, Inc., 1993). 31. Hans Biedermann, Dictionary of Symbolism: Cultural Icons and the Meaning Behind Them (New York: Meridian Books, 1994), p. 260. 32. I am grateful to Dr. Brendan Cole, Independent Scholar from South Africa, for his assistance in accurately identifying this bouquet of flowers. See also Susan Donahue Kuretsky, “Het schilderen van bloemen in de 17de eeuw,” inFlora & Pictura, Kunstschrift Openbaar Kunstbezit (1987): 84-87; Segal, Flowers and Nature, and Paul Taylor, Dutch Flower Painting, 1600-1750 (London: Dulwich Picture Gallery, 1969). 33. Cooper, An Illustrated Encyclopedia, 145, the ladybug is traditionally associated with the ancient Egyptian scarab, symbol of self- creating powers. 34. For image, see: https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/the-fair-of-saint-george-s-day-after-pieter-bruegel-the-elder/eQGde- E7qu1Cyg?hl=en (accessed July 24, 2020). 35. Richard A. Etlin, “Aesthetics and the Spatial Sense of Self,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56, no. 1 (Winter 1998): 1-19. 36. Cheney, Self-Portraits by Women Painters, 58, where I wrote about the iconography of the coral knot as a symbol of a love and betrothal. In her Self-Portrait at the Spinet, Fontana embellished herself with many coral love-knots in her hair, necklace, and earrings; one is even placed next to the keyboard of the spinet. She painted this self-portrait with all these love signs as a gift to her husband to be, Gian Paolo Zappi of Imola. 37. Decoteau, Clara Peeters, p. 51. 38. See n. 23. (repletion here: )Voskuil, “Self-Portrait and Vanitas Still Life Painting,” 58-74; Brusati, “Still-Lives,” 168-82; J. Bruyn, “David Bailly,” Oud Holland 66 (1951): 212-27; M. Wurfbain, “David Bailly’s Vanitas of 1651,” in The Age of Rembrandt-Studies in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting, ed. Roland Fleischer and Susan Scot Munshower (Papers in Art History from the Pennsylvania State University, 1988), 47-69; Michele Emmer, “Soap Bubbles in Art and Science: From the Past to the Future of Math Art,” Leonardo 20, no. 4 (1987): 327-34, unclear why Bailly’s image has been reversed, see Figure 1. 39. Martin, “Bubbles and Skulls,” 559-84, esp. 581 n. 25, citing the different theories about the identification of Bailly’s self-portraits and his wife’s portraits. The most convincing views are postulated by Bruyn and Voskuil: the two self-portraits are Bailly’s idealized self- portraits, and there are two portraits of his wife—on the table and in the background of the painting. 40. Martin, “Bubbles and Skulls,” 581 n. 27. The identification of Agneta, Bailly’s wife, in the painting has also been disputed. I follow Bruyn’s argument that Bailly’s wife died before him. Because of her illness, she composed a will in 1644. As noted by scholars (Martin, Voskuil, and Chong and Kloek), the vanitas objects such as the bezoir, a Dutch medical device for containing medicines, and the flute wine glass employed at funeral allude to the death of Bailly’s wife and his remembrance of her in the painting. 41. Douwe Draaisma, Why Life Speeds Up as You Get Older: How Memory Shapes Our Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 270; Martin, “Bubbles and Skulls, 559-84, esp. p. 575. 42. Draaisma, Why Life Speeds Up, 269. 43. For a comparative image of the Apostle Paul, see the 1620 engraving Portrait of Saint Paul with Bible and Sword by the Swiss/Dutch artist Christoffel van Sichem the Younger (1581-1658). For the image, see: http://cultured.com/image/9012/Christoffel_van_Sichem_ II_Portrait_of_St_Paul/#.XyH3YC3Mxyo (accessed July 30, 2020). See also Irwin A. Busenitz, “The Reformers’ Understanding of Paul and The Law,” The Master’s Seminary Journal 16, no. 2 (Fall 2005): 242-59, on Luther’s reception of Paul and the Protestant Reformation interpretation of his laws. 44. Voskuil, “Self-Portrait and Vanitas Still Life Painting,” 67 n. 37; Bruyn, “David Bailly,” p. 217. 45. C.K. Ogden, Possession: Demoniacal and Other (London: Routledge, 1999), 341 n. 8. 46. E.N. Tigerstedt, “Furor Poeticus: Poetic Inspiration in Greek Literature Before Democritus and Plato,” Journal of History of Ideas

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31, no. 2 (April-June 1970): 163-78. 47. Voskuil, “Self-Portrait and Vanitas Still Life Painting,” 67 n. 38, claimed that Bailly was inspired by the sculpture of the Venetian Alessandro Vittoria. But at home in the Netherlands, Artus Quellinus was a famous local sculptor. The ivory statue of Saint Sebastian was auctioned by Sotheby’s London, on July 2, 2013, for the image, see: http://www.alaintruong.com/archives/2013/06/29/27532163.html (accessed July 20, 2020). For the Amsterdam City Hall sculptural program, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artus_Quellinus_the_ Elder (accessed July 20, 2020). 48. Sheila Barker, “The Making of a Plague Saint,” in Piety and Plague, ed. Franco Normando and Thomas Worcester (Worcester, MA: Truman State University Press, 2007), Chapter 4. 49. Richard A. Etlin, “Aesthetics and the Spatial Sense of Self,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56, no. 1 (Winter, 1998): 1-19; esp. p. 2-3. 50. Bergström, Dutch Still Life Painting in the Seventeenth Century, 159-61, 173-74; Voskuil, “Self-Portrait and Vanitas Still Life Painting,” 73 n. 35. 51. I want to express my gratitude for the assistance of Dennis van Dijk, Service and Public Department at the Royal Library of The Hague, and Dr. Brendan Cole, Independent Scholar in South Africa. In particular, I am very grateful for the translation and personal interpretation of Yvonne Bleyerveld, PhD, Senior Curator Drawings and Prints at the Royal Library of The Hague. Dr. Bleyerveld also suggested an ambiguity in the translation of “ter Liefden”; hence the passage could be interpreted in two ways: “Bailly made his drawing out of love for his friend,” or “because his friend Cornelis asked him to do so out of his (Cornelis’s) love for the art.” 52. Willem Iansz published the book in Amsterdam in 1614. The engraver of the etchings for the book was Claes Jansz Visscher. Digitized by the Bibliotheek voor de Nederlandse letteren (Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1949), p. 132. 53. F. Behroozi, “Soap Bubbles in Paintings: Art and Science,” American Journal of Physics 76, 1087 (2008); https://doi. org/10.1119/1.2973049 (accessed August 25, 2020). 54. Leonard Shlain, Art and Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light (New York: William Morrow, 1993); Martin Kemp, The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990); and Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr. “Carel Fabritius: Perspective and Optics in Delft,” Nederlands Kunsthisorisch Jaarboek 24 (1973): 63-83. 55. It is not part of this study to examine, even if in a non-scientific manner, these artists’ self-portraits with respect to visual reflections and distortions caused by employing a mirror or a camera obscura. For a scientific study, see Patrick Cavanagh, Jessica Chao, and Dina Wang, “Reflections in Art,” Spat Vis 21, no. 3-5 (2008): 261-70; https://dx.doi.org/10.1163%2F156856808784532581 (Accessed August 25, 2020). This article, written by neuroscientists, focuses on some artists depicting a mirror in a painting and distorted reflections. They concluded: “No matter how talented an artist is, a reflection can never be perfectly portrayed because a painting is flat, the images on a canvas cannot move with us, and any reflecting surface, parallel to the front plane of the picture, must show us, the viewers, as we stand before the painting itself. However, depictions of reflection in art are often very convincing… even glaring optical errors are ignored.”

Liana De Girolami Cheney is a Professor of Art History emerita from UMASS Lowell, visiting researcher at the University of Bari, Italy and SIELAE, University of Coruña, Spain. She has written several books and articles on Italian Renaissance, Mannerism, Pre-Raphaelite Art, and Women’s Art, notably, Symbolism of ‘Vanitas’ in the Arts, Literature, and Music; Neoplatonic Aesthetics: Music, Literature and the Visual Arts; Giorgio Vasari’s Teachers: Sacred and Profane Art; Giuseppe Arcimboldo: Magical Paintings (translation in French and German); Edward Burne-Jones’ Mythical Themes; Self-Portraits by Women Painters.” Her article on “Leonardo da Vinci’s Annunciation: The Holy Spirit,” in Artibus et Historiae (2011), 1-16, received an Award for Excellence in Scholarly Research and Publication from SECAC in 2013.

107 Tunnels

Petra Kuppers

‘Each movement of respiration encodes terror.’ - Stacy Doris

\

Muscle tunnel locomotive round, inmates held at psychiatric institutions

Martín Ramírez sings rip-like architectures of invasion invagination holey fantasy scene in the mountain’s side Jesus’ wound lay your finger here Thomas does as he is bidden Thomasina runs for the hills

\ \ \

Underwater cave. Mask sound. Breath beat. Cave snake beneath earth, stone slick with underwater aquifer teaser testers held at bay but glide right into the next nest, one hollow beneath swallows of giant gullet, vocal chords tight against neoprene black

\

Dinosaur bone sticks out of desert cave wall high up in the dry. Silicate old clay body sedimented fern. Skin bird balances on hot wind. Giant stalagmites bite into swampy dry sun parch heat death dinosaur rattle roar tongue sail breath dust fall decay I salt you here I bless you here I compress you here till you reach up in wide arc Tunnels

jubilation

\\

The train comes round the mountain spews a cigar is not a cigar my muscles anchor themselves on bio-bones that stamp me a woman osteoporosis work jumps up jumps up jumps strength cunt into elephant’s maw penile tusks the lioness’ bloody fur clumps matted dirty to the ochre ground

\ \

Breathing apparatus bangs noisily yank clank funk till it stops. Caught lengthwise, anchored. Muscles seize with ceiling at nose. Beneath the axle sharp arrowtips fillet skin fat cushion. Sight blurs red and silt and silt caught in fin swirl. Stuck.

\\

Shark senses blood ampullae cruises into cave bung hole fin delicacy convulses impale scar tumor tail and upper fin stick out of sand till time falls away skeleton time drip a mantle moan of liquid alabaster soapy skin.

Cave breath vibrates animate

holes in the universe

109 Tunnels

\\\

Fire scars pink into her flank she screams tunnel fills with water till it pops teeth strain out plant matter and old silt Explodes downward, hummingbird diaphragm lily-stems in the blood pool blossom heavy ovary

\\\

Shallow breath louder in the inner ear, orchestra corpuscles beat it beat it. Flippers still. Neoprene shifts slightly with movement side to side. Rock clasps harder as lung refuses to let go. \\\

She falls apart, memory of her, silk skin water hole wedding dance, heavy pink feathers. Lake water open, cool, each sucking wave. Deck dance against desert dry alkaline water hole. Flames up, petrol

blue a hot suck

gone.

110 Tunnels

\\\\

Ball drops tunnel takes glottal stop all the way to bottom impact wave silver ball bearing high arc moon-wise Luna moth night call bounces echo cone

\\\\\\\\\\

The next breath. Bubbles in the aqueous humor of your eye, death’s sequins, mermaid companion animals sprint across retina, reflex shutter, Morse code SOS.

\\\\

She rattles hollow spirit anchor arms wide. Low quake tsunami fire press granite grind bones contort till they flare rips into cathedral ship. In the dry, dust falls moth peacock scales.

Flame out giant turtle.

111 Tunnels

Farewell cave bear.

112 Tunnels

\\\\\

\ \To source. \

\ \Stilled. \

\ \Perfume molecules perform

memory leaps.\

\

\

113 Tunnels

The nuggets of Tunnel’s three interwoven strands emerged in an Amoeba Dance session I led in Turtle Disco. We use sounds to tunnel through our bodies, listen to the echoes and waves that travel through us, and eventually distill these signals into writing.

Petra Kuppers is a disability culture activist, a community performance artist, a Professor at the University of Michigan and an advisor on Goddard College’s MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts. She leads The Olimpias, an international disability performance research collective. Her academic books engage disability performance; medicine and contemporary arts; somatics and writing; and community performance. She is also the author of a dark fantasy collection, Ice Bar (2018). Her most recent poetry collection is the ecosomatic Gut Botany (2020). She lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan, where she co-creates Turtle Disco, a somatic writing space, with her wife and collaborator, Stephanie Heit. Petra is a Black Earth Institute fellow.

114 Tunnels

115 Agnes Catlow, “Drop II,” Drops of Water: Their Marvelous and Beautiful Inhabitants Displayed by the Microscope (London: Reeve and Benham, 1851) Courtesy of University of Toronto Libraries and the Public Domain Review.

What is an air bubble? Perhaps, a mixture of soap, water and air; but we do not normally consider where a bubble’s water comes from or what might be contained in a single droplet. Agnes Catlow’s "Drop II" from her book Drops of Water exposes unseen organisms that are microscopically set in the enclosed bubble-like world. We forget that life flourishes in the places that we take for granted, or on such small scales, and this realization greets us with enchantment of marvelous worlds and the fear of the pathogenic and molecular unknown. In her essay "Death in the Air: Exploring tension, threat, and (in)visibility in Teresa Margolles’ En el aire," Julia Banwell explores the darker-side of bubbles, in which the unseen, dead, and unknowable take life. Focusing on a contemporary Mexican artist’s 2003 installation of bubbles floating in the air, Banwell uncovers the associated meanings behind the origin of Margolles’ water, which formerly served to wash bodies in a morgue. Microcosms of beauty and violence, the bubbles drift around the room, allowing dead matter to come into contact with the viewer’s living body. Rather than seeing bubbles or water as a simple, clean entity, Banwell demonstrates the power of unknown traces in reminding us that death and life are closely intertwined and together form an integral aspect of the elemental. - The Editors Death in the Air: Exploring Tension, Threat, and (In)visibility in Teresa Margolles’ En el aire

Julia Banwell

The notion that air, which is so fundamental for our survival, may also be a bringer of death, is deeply threatening. At the beginning of this year, our attention turned to the air we breathe as double agent, simultaneously life-giver and plague vector. Within this context of a pandemic, art that deals in air and death takes on new resonance. The Mexican neo-conceptual artist Teresa Margolles (b.1963) has devoted her career to the forensic examination of the aftermath of trauma. She has worked since the 1990s with the living and the dead, forging relationships that blur and transcend the boundaries between interior and exterior, presence and absence, death and life. The artist’s actions and interventions are threads that connect dead and living bodies, and link disparate locations across the globe. Participants in her works, and viewers of them, are positioned as witnesses, present to the reality of death and post-mortem processes such as decay, dismemberment, and burial. All of her work is concerned with traces — that which is left behind following the death of the material body. By uncovering fragments and remains, she mines the relationship between violence and apparent absence, revealing the ways in which multiple forms of violence are enacted on the bodies of individuals and, by extension, the social body of the collective. Working with the materia of bodily death and decay, Margolles’ art has consistently employed visually confrontational tactics, unflinchingly showing the bodies of people who have died violently. She has worked directly with corpses, body parts, and also with substances such as blood and fat. Lengua (Tongue, 2000) is the pierced tongue of a young man who was killed in a street fight and is displayed with the permission of his next-of-kin. Grumos sobre la piel (Lumps of Grease on the Skin, 2001) is a short video in which the artist smears fat, collected from barrels used to boil bones prior to medical study, onto the skin of a living person who gave informed consent to the action. These and other Margolles works are not unproblematic; uneasy questions around the nuanced ethics of agency and power are posed. Nevertheless, the directness of the contact between the substances of death and the living body exposes the fragility and porousness of our own bodily boundaries — and of the boundary between life and death — and forces us to witness that which we would perhaps rather ignore. The early part of Margolles’ career was intensely (but not exclusively) focused on the morgue, and she coined the term “la vida del cadaver” (“the life of the corpse”) as a descriptor of a secular life-after-death. Her use of the morgue as workshop invited us into this usually restricted space, where we saw exposed the fallacy of death-as-leveler. The artist revealed and confronted us with inequities in the way that corpses are handled and the forgetting which is done to the un-commemorated dead. She drew our attention to the dead who were unidentified, whose families could not afford to bury them, who had slipped through the cracks and been erased. In this way, Margolles highlighted unpalatable truths about the invisibility that disproportionately affects people who are poor and people in marginalized and vulnerable communities. Over the past fifteen years or so, the loci within which the majority of Margolles’ works are created have shifted from the enclosed space of the morgue into the public realm. We tend to think of our own body as private and essentially ours; bodily pollution by unseen particles poses a direct threat to this privacy. Inhalation of droplets, or absorption of fluid through the pores, are movements from exterior to interior that invade the sanctity of our insides. Dead matter becomes

117 Death in the Air dynamic, takes on a defiant kind of life that unsettles our consciousness of space and materiality. As artist-mourner, artist- activist, and forensic investigator, Margolles continues to trouble the boundaries between public and private — the living and the dead — by the inhabiting of and presence within and alongside corporeal spaces; the inter and the intra. Employing a minimal aesthetic language that plays with awareness, visibility, and invisibility, the artist makes it impossible to regard her work from a safe distance. She calls on multiple senses, undermining the primacy of the visual in the gallery space. Vaporización (Vaporization, 2000) is a room filled with mist made using water that has washed bodies in the morgue. The mist touches skin; it is inhaled, incorporated. 127 cuerpos (127 Bodies, 2006) consists of short sections of autopsy thread that are knotted together and suspended at waist height. The thread is bloodstained and emits a faint odor. Sin título (Untitled, 2006) uses smell and sound: a noise reminiscent of a gunshot occurs when drops of morgue water fall onto a hotplate, and a burning smell hangs in the air. The hotplate itself conjures mental images of an operating table, a morgue trolley, or equipment in an industrial kitchen. In many of her works which use water that has washed bodies in the morgue (as well as other vectors, particularly air), these dissolved or suspended substances are brought into direct contact with the body of anyone who enters the exhibition space, carrying traces of the dead onto and into the living. The “waste” produced by postmortem dismemberment, disintegration, and decay is thus recycled, even resurrected, via the artist’s transgressive collapsing of any notion we may have clung to that death and life are separate. With En el aire (In the Air, 2003), soap bubbles float in the air and burst upon contact with skin. The gallery space is bright, high-ceilinged, and open. People move about it freely. The bubbles are visible; therefore, contact can be avoided, and the threat of contamination evaded by simply sidestepping them. In the gallery space, there is no wind to blow them, only the faint current produced by people moving sedately around the room. They seem harmless, pretty, playful. Bubbles may bring up memories of childhood — of blowing bubbles made from soapy water, competing with siblings and peers to see who could make the most or the largest, the most impressive of which would inspire awe as it floated and trembled to its inevitable bursting on the ground or on skin. The fragility of a bubble floating in a breeze, the beauty of the patterns in its flexing surface as the light hits it, the awareness of its death, contrast with the sense of its being contained, the wrapping of air inside it, the surface tension that maintains its shape. This tension makes the soap bubble as a microcosm both simple and compelling, a delicate miniature body without the ugly, slip-slide mess of organs and the leakiness of skin. En el aire gives an aesthetically pleasing nod to vanitas while simultaneously transporting traces of matter — of bodily death — into an encounter with living, breathing individuals. The innocuousness of these bubbles reveals an inherent violence that uncomfortably exposes the impossibility of our separation from death. Unlike Vaporización’s cloying and inescapable mist, En el aire’s bubbles are not tiny, atomized particles that fill the entire space; rather, they are discrete and self-contained. This apparent separateness gives an illusory sense of safety. As gently as they appear, these bubbles still pose a threat, and this is not diminished for all their seeming pleasantness. Their beauty invites curiosity and touch, but they are still death in the air. If one of these bubbles should burst on the skin of the face or the tip of a finger, a residue would be left behind and absorbed into the pores. Threat and beauty are juxtaposed. In looking at En el aire through the lens of the present, to what extent can we say that the balance between play and danger is shifted or upset by the intensity of the current threat of death in the air? Being faced with such a widespread, destabilizing presence (which at the time of writing shows no sign of definitive resolution) has brought air to the forefront of individual and collective consciousness. From the early days of lockdown — with the usual traffic disappeared and the air smelling so clean, our lungs granted a temporary reprieve from choking on exhaust fumes while we learned to fear the new threat to our bodies’ vulnerable interiors — to the gradual re-emergence into shared public spaces with (or without) masks, we are all breathing less easily. Death feels closer, but the reality is that in the current moment it is demanding our attention in a more palpable sense, both visibly and invisibly asserting itself.

118 Death in the Air

______

Julia Banwell is a Lecturer in Hispanic Studies at the University of Sheffield, UK. Her principal area of research focuses on encounters with death via its depiction and representation in photography and contemporary art.

119 Figure 1. Asco and Harry Gamboa Jr., American, 1972-1987 (Asco) b. 1951 (Gamboa), Skyscraper Skin, negative 1980; printed 2012, Gelatin silver print, 16 x 20 in. (40.6 x 50.8 cm), Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA: Museum purchase, Kathryn Hurd Fund (M.2012.7.10).

Air, and what it carries, is dangerous: a notion Mariana Fernández examines as she looks at the “in-betweenness” of Los Angeles’ late twentieth-century Chicano artist network, Asco. Asco’s liminality was threatening to the Los Angeles status quo, evoking convergence among Chicano artists as they collaborated to produce pieces hybrid in language, body, and experience. This also bubbled their already marginalized presence within Los Angeles, denoting further separation in identity and artistic temporality. Looking toward Asco’s temporary public intervention, Skyscraper Skin, as a mode of example, Fernández argues that the intrinsically bubble-like quality of Asco as both Chicano community and artist group challenged the privatization of Los Angeles’ airspace and allowed minorities to take up space — transforming photography, performance, and muralism from static mediums into a uniquely dynamic entity that sifted through the air enacting movement, action, and change.

- The Editors Bubble Murals & Muralist Jokes: Asco’s Skyscraper Skin

Mariana Fernández

The day that Harry Gamboa Jr., Willie Herrón III, and Gronk shot Skyscraper Skin, 1980, was a particularly unsafe day to be breathing outside in Los Angeles. Congestion and smog in the city was so bad between the 1950s and late 1970s that newspaper articles called the air “choking,” “agonizing,” and “strangling.”1 Parents would keep their children home from school, courthouses would close early. Especially in the lower-income inland communities, people were known to drop dead from asthma attacks. In 1978, Mets shortstop José Oquendo left a game at Dodger Stadium because he started hyperventilating during a Stage One Alert.2 It was also a day of Santa Ana winds, one of the twenty or so days of the year during which Southern California is overcome by the hot, dry, incendiary winds that blow down from the northeast through to Los Angeles. “It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles,” Joan Didion once wrote, “to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination.”3 On these few scattered days of the year when the heat rises and the threat of fire increases, the Santa Ana bring a bitter reminder of the reality Chicanos reckon with every day: life in Los Angeles is violent, impermanent, and unreliable. In their 1980 photograph, Herrón and Gronk (along with Gamboa and Patssi Valdéz, two of the four founding members of the Chicano artist network, Asco), extend a sheet of plastic in a deserted downtown Los Angeles street. They each wear a face mask, an eerily timely reminder that the air — what it carries — is dangerous. In the wind, the plastic sheet blows like a sail, a lone bubble amidst towering skyscrapers. The work belongs to Asco’s signature invented medium of No Movies, or film stills created for non-existent movies. By invoking cinematic language for the still camera, their staged events, or conceptual performances, “filmed” throughout Los Angeles, called upon and perverted a range of tropes from Hollywood cinema and Chicano media (like the telenovela). The resulting images were disseminated and advertised as stills from “authentic” Chicano movies, allowing the artists to envision the possibility of Chicanos starring in and producing Hollywood films while critiquing their invisibility from them.4 “I’ve watched a million movies,” Gamboa said, “and I came to the understanding that when I leave the movies I usually only walk away with a single frame in mind. I realized I could afford to take that single frame without having to produce the rest of the movie.”5 In replacing the expensive 16 or 35mm motion picture camera with the more affordable 35mm still camera, Asco’s make-do integration of performance and photography not only circumvented the exclusion of Chicanos from cinema, but expanded the possibilities of storytelling through cinematic language. The hybrid medium of No Movies, which were neither movies, photographs, nor documents of performances, are what scholar Amelia Jones calls quintessential examples of Asco’s “in-between practice.”6 Defined by their own marginal status, Asco artists conceptually as much as politically worked in between spaces, relying on the fusion of media to provide dynamic, often contradictory, Chicano imagery and representation to what they perceived as an essentialist identity- based Chicano Civil Rights Movement. What makes Skyscraper Skin unique is the work’s material use of the in-between, confronting the viewer head-on with the presence of the air and all its toxicity. In staking out the liminal territory of the air, both literally and visually, Los Angeles and its weather function not only as the site of the performance, but as the very materials for the conceptual work.

121 Bubble Murals & Muralist Jokes

Gamboa self-identifies as belonging to the second wave of Chicano artists, the age group that grew up influenced by the Chicano Civil Rights Movement — of which Gamboa was a student leader — and critical of that very movement’s static iconography and nationalist political rhetoric. Beginning in the early 1970s, Asco intervened in situations overdetermined by displacement, police violence, surveillance, and military recruitment through guerilla-style street performances and “media hoaxes” often set against a backdrop of Hollywood glitter and excess.7 As with Instant Mural, 1974, in which Gronk temporarily taped Valdéz and frequent Asco contributor Humberto Sandoval to a wall facing Arizona Street, or Walking Mural, 1972, where Asco members performed as characters from a mural who had become so bored with being affixed to a wall that they took to walking down Whittier Boulevard, Asco’s early works often used the language of muralism — then perceived as the dominant mode of Chicano art — and perverted, expanded, and revamped it. Their responses to urban alienation and institutional disregard were humorous, dramatic, and directly influenced by the glamorously sardonic attitude of 1930s and 1940s Pachuco culture. Skyscraper Skin, though one of their later works, is a testament to the group’s continued rage at the notion that Chicanos had to make affirmative murals. By replacing static imagery with live bodies and transitory materials, the performance quite literally inserted the lived experiences of Chicanos into the movement’s political rhetoric. With their wide stances and face masks, Herrón and Gronk transformed the air itself into an artistically rendered mural, one that, like a bubble in high winds, was dynamic, unexpected, and short-lived. In a recent article, C. Ondine Chavoya points to the persistent practice in recent literature of misidentifying Asco as a collective. Chavoya refers to Asco instead as a “collaborative artists’ group,” pointing to the ways in which they operated as “a platform for collaboration and experimentation rather than a static entity.”8 In many ways, the artist group functioned like a bubble, with a constantly expanding and contracting roster of artists staging public performances and interventions characterized by their impermanence. From 1975, the four original members continued to engage in project- specific collaborations while simultaneously contributing to the Eastside punk scene, to the emerging performance scene at gay bars, and to the development of alternative arts spaces.9 However, even as Asco’s works continued to be marked by the regional and cultural specificity of East Los Angeles, they took place in dialogue with the wider underground art scene of the 1960s and 1970s. It was their cross-roads between these two histories — Chicano art, on the one hand, and the post- 1968 avant-garde, on the other — that Chon A. Noriega states made their work “at once unique and difficult for either side to accept.”10 Their chosen name, Asco (Spanish for disgust or revulsion), was both a reference to the reaction their work produced (within the Chicano movement and the wider art world) and a response to the conditions they found “disgusting” about their Eastside surroundings. At the same time that the city was undergoing a new wave of transformation and “urban renewal” in the mid-1970s, downtown Los Angeles began emerging as a frequent backdrop for Asco projects.11 In a 1975 color photograph, Herrón, Sandoval, Valdez, Gronk, and Gamboa contort their bodies to spell out the word ASCO on a deserted downtown city street. The performance represents what Chavoya calls “a convergence of language, body, and city.”12 Here, like in all their No Movies, the artists are performing their bodies — their affirmative, steadfast postures staking a claim in an environment that continuously erased and denied Chicano cultural presence. The city’s plans for a new wave of urban renewal in the Eastside, finalized in 1974, was to eliminate the historic Bunker Hill neighborhood and engrave its “creative-destructive achievement” on the landscape in the form of the new Music Center complex, the Department of Water and Power headquarters, and the “first generation of trophy-building skyscrapers” that figure so prominently in Skyscraper Skin.13 A newly-built monumental freeway system cut directly through the land in East Los Angeles, displacing approximately 10 percent of its predominantly black and brown population and creating segregational bubbles that, like “a social cordon around the barrios,” set the limits of mobility for many of its residents.14 This industrial expansion marked a key moment in the transformation of what Raúl Homero Villa calls “Los Angeles’ twentieth-

122 Bubble Murals & Muralist Jokes century dominant spatial odyssey from boomtown to wonder city and into the supercity future.”15 Despite impaired day-to-day mobility in a rapidly changing Los Angeles, movement, as Chavoya mentions, was both a significant theme and a method in Asco’s work.16 The group consistently moved between genres (film, photography, performance art, muralism, public art, mail art), between labels (Chicano art, Happenings, activism, conceptualism), and across time, setting their bodies in motion to create diachronic narratives that oscillated temporally between past references, present circumstances, and future possibilities for social change. Though frozen in their fake movie stills, Asco members traded the static celluloid format of cinema for hyperdynamic imagery that utilized the landscape of Los Angeles, a Hollywood movie set at all times, to manufacture the appearance of freedom and possibility. Movement also had to do with how No Movies were distributed. Though the works advertised films that essentially did not exist beyond the images that were being circulated, No Movies reached international audiences through mail art networks and local and national news outlets. Skyscraper Skin, Gamboa’s play on the notion of banks and legal firms “skinning people alive,” was originally published in the Downtown News and wound up distributed in the very banks and legal offices Asco was taking aim at.17 While circumventing traditional art institutions, the artists were putting forth a critique of marginalized peoples’ limited access to the capital, technology, and social networks required to participate in (and have access to) mass media. The members of Asco insert themselves in the frame of the image, utilizing their own uneasy status of abjection in order to enact a monument, however short-lived, to the underbelly of urban infrastructure. Artist David Avalos had written about how, in California, there exists a situation in which “the Mexican worker as a group seems to exist in a public realm, is in fact a media celebrity, while, actually, little, if any, opportunity exists for social interaction of dialogue between them and those of us comfortably occupied in front of our television sets.”18 Skyscraper Skin challenged the privatization of public space and minorities’ abilities to exist within it while toying with the existence of the thin plastic covering — the “skin,” as Gamboa called it — that was used to protect the trophy marble structures in the city’s new civic center from damage. Coupled with heightened Cold War paranoia during the Reagan years, Skyscraper Skin’s wavering bubble conveyed that physically, as much as ideologically, Los Angeles’s hegemonic infrastructure was susceptible to pop. Gamboa once said that “Chicanos are… viewed as a phantom culture. We’re like a rumor in this country.”19 Like other Asco No Movies shot throughout downtown Los Angeles, Skyscraper Skin captured the city devoid of its commuter populace. In dawn’s light and through Gamboa’s dystopic lens, Los Angeles is a ghost town filled with the oppressive phantom presences of urban displacement, cultural erasure, surveillance, suppression, and discrimination. The bubble jiggling in the wind makes unavoidable all those inconspicuous things floating in the Los Angeles air at the same time that it functions as a symbol of both denial and affirmation — a denial of the multiple forms of public invisibility imposed on Chicanos, and an affirmation, despite that invisibility, of the barriological attitude “aquí estamos y no nos vamos” (“we are here and we’re not leaving”). And still, the bubble’s most magical quality is its disappearance. The entire event lasted less than a minute, collapsing into itself in the fluctuating weather conditions and leaving no permanent mark on the Los Angeles landscape. Gamboa, writing about the futile attempt to sift through the rubble of Asco’s performances, warns that the “works of Asco were often created in transitory or easily degradable materials that crumble at the slightest prodding and fade quickly upon exposure to any glimmer of hope. It is unlikely that the objects, historical accuracy, or spirit of Asco will ever be recovered.”20 Asco’s performances are lost works, but they continue to circulate and evolve in the public imagination precisely because of their evanescence. It was the fleeting nature of those public interventions, their impermanence and unreliability, which allowed them to flourish in Los Angeles’s weather — to transform muralism from a static medium into oneof movement, action, and change.

123 Bubble Murals & Muralist Jokes

Figure 2. Harry Gamboa Jr., Asco, 1975, ©1975, Harry Gamboa Jr., 20 inches x 24 inches, FujiFlex Lightjet Print, Edition of ten. Performed by Willie Herrón, Humberto Sandoval, Patssi Valdez, Gronk, and Harry Gamboa Jr.

124 Bubble Murals & Muralist Jokes

In a 1976 interview, a little over a decade before the fatal burst of Asco in 1987, Gronk was asked, “What’s in the future for Asco?”

“Bubble murals. More muralist jokes.”21 ______

notes

1. Daniel Nussbaum, “Bad Air Days,” Los Angeles Times (July 19, 1998). 2. Ibid. 3. Joan Didion, “Los Angeles Notebook,” in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (New York: Noonday Press, 1990), 220. 4. C. Ondine Chavoya, “Pseudographic Cinema: Asco’s No-Movies,” in Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), p. 292. 5. Harry Gamboa Jr., conversation with the author, July 16, 2020. 6. Amelia Jones, “Traitor Prophets:’ Asco’s Art as a Politics of the In-Between,” in Asco: Elite of the Obscure : A Retrospective, 1972- 1987, eds. C. Ondine Chavoya and Rita Gonzalez (Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2011), p. 108. 7. Some of these performances included Stations of the Cross (1971), Spray Paint LACMA (1972), First Supper (After a Major Riot) (1974), and Decoy War Victim (1975). Chon A. Noriega, “Your Art Disgusts Me: Early Asco 1971-75,” east of borneo (November 18, 2010). 8. C. Ondine Chavoya, “Fleeting Inscriptions: Asco, Ephemera, and Intergroup Exchange in LA,” in Side by Side: Collaborative Artistic Practices in the United States, 1960s–1980s (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2020). 9. Noriega, “Your Art Disgusts Me.” 10. Chon A. Noriega, “No Introduction,” in Urban Exile: Collected Writings of Harry Gamboa Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p. 7 11. Raúl Homero Villa, Barrio-Logos Space and Place in Urban Chicano Literature and Culture (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2000), p. 98. 12. C. Ondine Chavoya, introduction to Asco : Elite of the Obscure : A Retrospective, 1972-1987, eds. C. Ondine Chavoya and Rita Gonzalez (Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2011), p. 45. 13. Homero Villa, Barrio-Logos, 98 14. Ibid., 82, p. 137. 15. Ibid. 16. Chavoya, introduction to Asco: Elite of the Obscure, p. 72. 17. Gamboa added that another reference was the popular myth of Aztecs “ripping people’s skins off and wearing them.” Harry Gamboa Jr., conversation with the author, July 16, 2020. 18. David Avalos, “The Donkey Cart Caper: Some Thoughts on Socially Conscious Art in Antisocial Public Space,” in Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), p. 316. 19. Harry Gamboa Jr., “Harry Gamboa, Jr., No Movie Maker.” Interview by Marisela Norte. El Tecolote Literary Magazine (July, 1983), 3, p. 12. 20. Harry Gamboa Jr., “Light at the End of Tunnel Vision,” in Urban Exile: Collected Writings of Harry Gamboa Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p. 101. 21. Gronk and Willie Herrón, “Three Interviews,” in Urban Exile: Collected Writings of Harry Gamboa Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p. 43

Mariana Fernández is a Mexican writer and curator. She has a degree in journalism and cultural studies from New York University and is currently a graduate student in the Williams Graduate Program in the History of Art at the Clark Art Institute. Her work focuses on the entwinements of race, gender, and labor in contemporary art, with emphases on performance studies and intermedia art from Latin America. She currently works as a curatorial intern in contemporary projects at the Clark Art Institute.

125 Wayne Kpestenbaum, Self-Portrait with Stripes, 2020, acrylic on paper, 18 x 24 inches. Three Poems

Wayne Koestenbaum

[blue tape-seam dividing] blue tape-seam dividing debased sidewalk:

piss there, despite

sworn perv-abstinence? stop mentioning lifelong tropism toward swollen

Stollen Swiss Miss

misbegotten Hello, Dolly! a literary version of jazz hands he asked me

if I had: liquor

cardboard boxes flattened,

stacked, rope-tied. wrapped nuptial mattress dead on street: green

gaffer’s tape upholding

spring’s Dylan-Thomas-

promised bog-surge.

her hennaed Frühlingsnacht hospice hair, a Bon

Ami scouring to undo

Napoli hostel boy-

teen flipflop-shuffle. passing you, St. Vincent de Paul boarded up,

incorrigible fire truck

alarm ear-slashing

my zither opportunism.

127 Wayne Koestenbaum

hydrant water cock-plunges my sneaker-mesh:

beggar mouth and tyrant

mouth gagged by dialectic. brutally Fitbit-interpellated, I fight bootless

back by fool-misplacing

wrist toy: reclaim it,

re-smooch w/ my

Fitbit jizz-interpellatee.

coveting your metallic sneakers, svelte flood-

trousered Puck outpacing

my origins-of-

totalitarianism lech-amble.

Stanley Tucci lookalike, veer away from me, IV

not finding its vein. in pj’s she street-squats on milk crate, doyenning

over the auto-frigging

moi-daveners.

noli me tangere anti-Semitism’s mule-gait

a tapioca bubble I’ll gum. radio’s Ella Fitzgerald Santa Claus is coming to town quashing

(or simply syntagm-

bumping) my kindred’s

Botox stigmata, Yuletide

Juvéderm, AZT

joy-enwrapt $-pubis. or Richard Tauber’s daffodils frost-seared:

128 Wayne Koestenbaum

geliebt ermordet Stars

and Stripes grave-kilt montage.

[regret’s a clod]

regret’s a clod—pebble impurity—in soul-mesh:

rinse scrim, render it

deathbed-transparent. is idyll idle or iddle? non-anti-Semitic lute-

pluck’d lake we

tremolo-pass. dance tune: “love the gefilte fish you’re with.”

rock it. aunt Brünnhilde, I wake thee from fire-circle—

incest-lust-heft pumping

heldentenor reparative

durational duress.

mensch of you in my turkey stuffing slays—

perineum’s suspension

bridge, resolved. dreamt he returned, fat-faced oiled prof

at moribund school

mailbox—dead letters,

dessicated wife, schizo son. round mushroom-head of my heart you chop

death you subdivide

into half-moon minion-filets. we break ourselves apart to make new vision-

biscuits out of

129 Wayne Koestenbaum

nothingness: the circle wept

to hear itself described as rhomboid, square—

sever thought from action,

let circling reverie

unhinge itself from deed.

I made gouache shapes on Thanksgiving be-

cause I needed to re-

member I was reputedly alive. imagining Hannah Arendt crooning Brahms

lullaby over my Jason

Gould pseudo-incest cradle.

lemon zabaglione curve of me creating

a nonsensical

reason to dream backward. faux pas to ask for a blurber’s copy: they dropped

my blurb from the book:

no shame to be an

omitted mouthpiece. why shouldn’t messianic time fill me, as if yr

cock in the bathroom were

messianic time’s momentary

emissary cracking me open?

130 Wayne Koestenbaum

[upload to private] upload to private album the yellow baseball

shirt photo wherein

I look Botoxed. ladybug sentient yet stationary on Marimekko

shower curtain’s blue

calyx flame. dreamt a gay literary critic reviled me, tore

up my dorm room’s

paltry wall-to-wall carpet

in Trilling rage-fit. hordes of like-minded Wayne-haters gathered in amphitheater

to watch the slow

unpiecing—sleep cure

in snow-Alps a coddled Gulag.

nutty obscene tonic OCD Joan Crawford’s

My Way of Life’s

stomach gurgles from

unwise imaginary emetics. strange unallegorical withies moving between a white

triangle overlap

an unevenly contoured

square (it won’t forgive you). osculum underwater wanting my participation

in immoral acts—tongue-

drama, “always up

for getting blown, mister.”

131 Wayne Koestenbaum

“how thick is it?” thick enough to depopulate

Middlemarch—white

window-frame reflection

on black-jacketed Merleau-Ponty.

drapes acknowledging the slant “H” they bear,

flashback swastika

siphoned into

Mondrian eyelid-specter— eye’s lid inside contains Mondrian

swastika condensation—paper

bag pleats echoing

crucifix or nude Raphael

Soyer limbs cut by horizon-line.

Lascaux butt, where human and antelope

converge—glute muscle

you’ll scapegoat (“she

let the ball drop”—

career condemners):

what was the ball? where did it drop?

Carolee held the ball—

j’accuse the male

old fart, moi, toi—

trois contes uncountable. furry neighboring rejector, actor, dancer, mustache,

always a “th” in

your name to the-

132 Wayne Koestenbaum

atricalize its Irma Vep

(Vilna?) Ludlow-plush. ghetto theater, curtain rod plunged into orifice

named “me” for

shorthand, explanatory

ease—to lube the theorem.

______

Wayne Koestenbaum — poet, critic, novelist, artist, performer — has published twenty books, including Figure It Out, Camp Marmalade, My 1980s & Other Essays, The Anatomy of Harpo Marx, Humiliation, Hotel Theory, Circus, Andy Warhol, Jackie Under My Skin, and The Queen’s Throat (nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award). His first book of short fiction, The Cheerful Scapegoat, will be published by Semiotext[e] in April 2021. This year he received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. His literary archive is in the Yale Collection of American Literature at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. He is a Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Find him at www.waynekoestenbaum.com.

Illustration by Sarah Dailey

133 Bubble Planets

Melanie King Melanie King

My 2013 Masters thesis at Central Saint Martins, London was focused on the subject of the bubble as a metaphor for the brevity of life. In seventeenth-century Dutch vanitas paintings, the soap bubble was used as a visual metaphor to remind the viewer of the transient nature of life. The soap bubble exists for just a couple of seconds, a perfect sphere, reflecting and refracting its surroundings beautifully. Due to the dryness of the air surrounding the soap bubble, and the pull of gravity, the bubble eventually bursts. It was almost as if the bubble had never existed. The Dutch vanitas artists of the Golden Age, likened the existence of life to the everyday phenomena of the soap bubble, and now with superior more knowledge of the universe we can draw more comparisons. From looking at the universe, we have discovered that life has only inhabited a tiny portion of the entirety of time and space, and is therefore incredibly precious. Alike the soap bubble, life exists for a (relatively) short amount of time, before it ‘pops’ out of existence. The idea of ‘life as a bubble’ holds weight in contemporary cosmological theory, scientists often compare cosmological happenings to bubbles and foam. This idea spans from inflation theory, to multiverse theory — the idea that the universe exists as one bubble amongst a sea of cosmic foam. In the constellation Cassiopeia, there sits a Bubble Nebula which measures over six light-years across, having been blown by cosmic winds. This idea extends to quantum science relating to the birth of the universe, as some scientists believe that the universe exists as a quantum fluctuation from nothing, something that can be compared to the act of watching the soap bubble emerge and then disappear within a matter of seconds.

135 Melanie King

136 Melanie King

137 Melanie King

138 Melanie King

139 Melanie King

140 Melanie King

Melanie King is an artist and curator with a specific focus on astronomy. Melanie King’s studio is based in Ramsgate, Kent, UK. She is co-Director of super/collider, Lumen Studios and founder of the London Alternative Photography Collective. She is a lecturer at the MA program at the Royal College of Art, and at the BA Photography course at University of West London. She is represented by the Land Art Agency. Melanie is a PhD Candidate at the Royal College of Art. She is a graduate of the MA in Art and Science at Central Saint Martins, and the BA Fine Art at Leeds Art University.

Melanie’s solo exhibitions include Argentea Gallery (2020), Leeds Art University (2017, 2020), Bloomsbury Festival (2019), the Blyth Gallery, Imperial College London (2018). Melanie has exhibited in a wide range of international galleries, such as The Photographers’ Gallery, UK, the Hasselblad Foundation, Sweden, BOZAR Brussels, Unseen Amsterdam, the Williamson Gallery in Los Angeles, and CAS Gallery in Japan. Melanie has attended residencies organized by Lay of the Land Ireland, Joya Arte and Ecologica, Spain, Bow Arts, Grizedale Forest, BioArtSociety, Finland, and SIM Reykjavik, Iceland.

Melanie has been involved in a number of large scale commissions, including the European Commission, Museum of Freemasonry, Bow Arts, Green Man Festival, Vivid Projects, Bompas and Parr X Citizen M Hotel, Mayes Creative, Design Miami x COS Stores, Chelsea Flower Fringe, and the Wellcome Trust.

141 Der Becker (The Baker) from Panoplia omnium illiberalium mechanicarum ... (Book of Trades), 1568, British Museum.

A bubble is just gas trapped in liquid, and bread is just bacterial farts trapped in gluten; yet both represent the intersection of Charles Keiffer’s perspective on the airborne pandemic currently affecting us all. In this inventive essay, Keiffer muses upon the social implications of the bread-making trend that, like the COVID-19 virus, spread throughout the word.

- The Editors Leavening Agents: Some Meditations on Baking Bread under Lockdown

Charles Keiffer

Bubbles are a sign of life. Everyone who made or used sourdough starter in the past few months learned this, as did everyone who made bread using store-bought yeast and watched it rest. “Dough is ready when surface is dotted with bubbles,” wrote Mark Bittman in one of New York Times Cooking’s most popular recipes, “No Knead Bread.”1 In each case, the bubbles represent bacterial farts, trapped in gluten and causing the dough to expand and rise. A bubble is, after all, just gas trapped in liquid, with borders discerned by the surroundings which keep it closed — until it pops. A loaf of bread is mostly bubbles, trapped in an arrested state by the heat of the (Dutch) oven and popped as we chew, releasing flavor into the back of our throat for satisfaction via retronasal olfaction. Bubbles “live towards their bursting,”2 as Peter Sloterdijk writes, and in baking bread we harness and tailor this bursting towards nourishing ends. Food scientist Bruce German notes that eating only flour and water in their raw form will not sustain life past a few weeks, while eating bread can sustain it indefinitely.3 In Egyptian Arabic, the words for bread and life are the same: aish, as is noted widely every time there are “bread riots,” or famine caused by economic crisis in the Middle East, such as in 2008 or 1977).4 However, the life-giving part of bread is not exactly the bubbles, though the bubbles make the bread possible. The life-giving part is borne of the interaction between gas and solid, an immaculate conception by the trinity of flour, water, and the right kind of air. From this, the single-celled organism called yeast is activated and the bread grows. Predating written history, bread was the gas before gastronomy. I agree with Pliny when he writes in his Natural History, “It seems to me quite unnecessary to enter into an account of the various types of bread that are made.”5 Suffice it to say that air is a key ingredient. Even the unleavened flatbread of the Old Testament that lives on in the Passover Story would have had some air trapped in it, but the bubble-dotted surface Mark Bittman’s readers look for would have taken more time than the Israelites had. Daniel Defoe’s Journals of the Plague Year: Being Observations or Memorials of the Most Remarkable Occurrences as well Publick as Private which Happened in London During the Great Visitation in 1665, published in 1722, contains 23 mentions of bread. The text’s narrator, H.F., (likely Defoe’s uncle, Henry Foe, who lived in London during the 1665 outbreak)6 notes repeatedly the crucial role of bread in sustaining the populace as “the plague raged so violently among the butchers and slaughter-houses.”7 H.F. estimates that about 200,000 Londoners fled to countryside retreats at the onset of the outbreak, abandoning the classes that depended on them for commerce and employment and leaving the city at risk of “being entirely deserted of its inhabitants except the poor.”8 In addition to distributing charitable donations, the Mayor of London ordered the Baker’s Guild to “keep their oven going constantly,” so that “bread was always to be had in plenty, and as cheap as usual”9 — a seventeenth-century version of a stimulus bill. Throughout, H.F.’s tone is empathetic but detached, observing from within his own economic and personal bubble. Himself a successful and connected tradesman, he is advised by a doctor to avoid public places altogether. “I went and bought two sacks of meal, and for several weeks, having an oven, we baked all our own bread.”10

143 Leavening Agents

my bread journey

144 Leavening Agents

The year that Defoe chronicled saw the last outbreak of bubonic plague in England. The death toll began to decline starting in Autumn, and the monarchy and gentry returned from the countryside early the following year. The city they returned to had been kept alive in large part by, in the words of Julian Yates, “the baked or dried-out paste that captures the exhalations of yeast, a microbiopolitical actor just as mysterious as the plague, but more benevolently so.”11 The advice of H.F.’s doctor endures, as do the economic bubbles that determine who can follow it. In the Spring of 2020, an inestimably large number of people around the world with the luxury of time, kitchen-space, and money for extra flour made homemade bread while adjusting to life under lockdown.12 I was not immune to this trend, producing several disappointing iterations before fathering a loaf that was not too dense, flat, or dry. Like many, I documented much of this journey on social media. The hours spent comparing my loaves to those on my Instagram feed, researching the various ways to combine flour, water, and yeast, and obsessing over the proofing process broke up days that would otherwise bleed into each other, and provided a tactile, sensory experience that took my mind off the deeply disturbing reality of a global pandemic. While the air outside posed a threat whose modus operandi was still largely mysterious, rising dough yielded bubbles of air within my jurisdiction. Pregnant with the possibility of satisfaction, my dough prescribed a future of at least a few more hours where it would bake, cool, and be eaten. A popular Twitter thread that I consulted frequently, by Emily Hoven, was titled “How to Make Sourdough at the End of the World,” from March 21, 2020. Hoven, a Ph.D. student in English Literature, demystified the biologically complex process of making sourdough starter with a series of methodical steps that required only the future-oriented virtues of patience and focus, an antidote to apocalyptic thinking. In a shrewd and subtle call to bread’s potential beyond nutrition, Hoven deliberately titled her thread after art- historian Natalie Loveless’s book, How to Make Art at the End of the World (2019).13 Positioned between the genre of scholarly monograph and manifesto, Loveless’s project argues for artistic practice, or “research-creation,” as “a site of generative recrafting: a touchstone and orienting point that might help render daily life in the academy more pedagogically, politically, and affectively sustainable.”14 In other words, for the use of creative and artistic methods to rethink what counts as research, productive output, and learning, within the increasingly stifling neoliberal university and the late-capitalist society outside of it. Loveless’s title is itself a knowing reference to Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World (2013), which shows global warming’s effects on the ontology behind big concepts like World and Nature, and their ramifications for thinking futurity. The end of the world for both Loveless and Morton is the certainty of looming environmental crises and the unsustainable growth of neoliberalism. Hoven, tweeting 10 days after the World Health Organization declared a pandemic, was facing a much more immediate apocalypse in the form of mass deaths and the collapse of the global economy. In this context, she and her followers made sourdough starter, a 7-12 day endeavor that, through fermentation, yields a hungry colony of yeast that require more attention, care, and feeding than most small pets. From what I could see, those who succeeded in gestating the starter went on to partition their colonies among friends and others in their “quarantine bubble.” The adage had been rewritten: Give someone bread and they will eat it in a day; Give them a bit of starter and they will be entertained for a week or more. At this time it felt like a kinder gift to receive a (sanitized) ziploc bag of bubbly beige goo than a loaf of homemade bread. Meanwhile, those in power continued to behave as they always had, allowing COVID-19 to infect the most vulnerable at disproportionate rates. The numbers of rapidly rising reported deaths obscured these inequalities at the same time that the decimated economy compounded the sense that, even if one survived, there would be no future to look forward to. This sudden intimacy with apocalyptic dread drove a significant number of those with the means to bowls of warm sticky dough seeking comfort, connection through social media, or a fantasy of rustic authenticity and self-reliance. As it turned out, March 2020 was not the end of the world, and the sharp dry humor in the title of Hoven’s Twitter thread has come to feel dated. The start of summer brought a jolting reminder that many aspects of the world, or at least

145 Leavening Agents the United States, were still solidly rooted. The police murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, and the belated attention given to the murder of Breonna Taylor 73 days prior, popped the solipsistic and hazy bubble that privileged Americans had been living in since the start of the pandemic. The movement that gained national attention with the police murders of Eric Garner and Michael Brown in 2014 and Freddie Gray in 2015, among several others, resurfaced urgently unfinished. Crowds gathered publicly for the first time since February in protests of unprecedented number and size15 across the United States, which at the time of writing this (July 2020), are continuing daily in some parts of the country, and have successfully prompted budget cuts and reallocated funding from police departments in multiple states, and faced disturbing backlash in others.16 Many used social media platforms to raise awareness about causes like prison abolition and police reform, movements that will demand continued and sustained engagement in the years to come. As poet Ariana Reines wrote in the July installment of her monthly Artforum column “Confinement led to masses of people finally catching the thought: human beings should not be put in cages. Instagram became a pedagogical tool, rather than merely the matrix of DIY propaganda.”17 “DIY propaganda” undoubtedly refers to the bread-baking phenomenon of the prior months, which, by June, could not have felt less relevant. We were newly incentivized to confront an inheritance of 300 years of institutionalized racism. Reines’s snark towards the baking posts likely expresses the way many people felt about the craze. Workers deemed essential or otherwise too busy, those with dietary restrictions, disdain for trends, or simple disinterest, and those who were caring for or grieving a loved one or experiencing deteriorating health during lockdown would have likely found the onslaught of baking content on social media obnoxious if not insensitive. I am sympathetic to these reasons and am in no way lamenting the end of the baking-era of 2020 nor the prioritizing of questions of justice and inequality. But where does bread stand now? We might suppose an extra-titular connection between Hoven’s Twitter thread, “How to Make Sourdough at the End of the World,” and the Loveless text that inspired it. Where Loveless advocates for artistic or embodied creation as a generative tool for pedagogical, political, and affective possibilities, Hoven’s readers underwent a similar process when baking bread in quarantine. The most obvious of these is the affective, with the future-oriented engagement in fantasy, possibility, and hope that drives a 20+ hour baking project along with the meditative process of kneading and the temporal rhythms of proofing, all of which offset the despair that is a natural reaction to current realities. Then there is the pedagogical. The bread recipe that ended up producing my ideal loaf came from the economies of knowledge sharing that characterize many online cooking communities. I achieved success through a combination of Mark Bittman’s no-knead recipe and modifications gathered from the comments section; I do all the rises inside the same bowl and add slightly more water for a crispier crust, which worked best considering my oven and the temperature in my kitchen. In spaces such as recipe-sharing Facebook groups, Twitter threads, comments sections, and kitchen conversations between friends sharing a meal, no one inhabits the role of “expert,” and many will have unique tips to share that are seen as equally valuable. This is not to say that these spaces cannot be toxic in other ways, but that they do not reinforce traditional pedagogical models where an expert bestows knowledge onto passive students. Professional chefs or those with advanced culinary training typically do not occupy these spaces. Those who enjoy cooking know that no recipe is immune to improvement, and that food allergies and specific tastes (disliking cilantro, for example), are not personal flaws to be corrected according to externally imposed standards but opportunities for experimentation and improvisation. While what is traditionally considered “knowledge” — historical narratives, scientific findings — can only be questioned by those with the proper qualifications, taste is innate and uniquely personal, and cooking is learned through muscle memory and clumsy experimentation. This pedagogical model that produces knowledge through improvisation and constant tweaking lends itself to a more just politics as it can accommodate a much greater set of needs and abilities than traditional utilitarian politics and is by nature less hierarchical. “Liberation,” wrote Paulo Freire, “is a praxis: the action and reflection of men and women upon their world in order to transform it.”18 To bake bread is to witness transformation, and often experience failure, disappointment,

146 Leavening Agents

147 Leavening Agents and frustration along the way. “It is not a predictable process; it must be undergone,”19 writes Judith Butler, in a similar vein to Friere, on democracy, though anyone who has tried to make bread would say the same about the experience. To be clear, I am playing with baking bread as a metaphor for political change here as a strategy for retaining hope and resilience in the face of discouraging and overwhelming developments in the struggle against white supremacy and necrocapitalism, when the virus that drove people to bread in the first place has now become as much a political issue as a public health one. While the experience of living through the coronavirus pandemic has been fractured and dramatically variegated across racial and economic lines, it has still been shared — in the sense that references to it are intelligible, if not relatable — across these lines. And there is still our national pre-existing condition of burnout. Metaphor aside, the flavor of yeasty exhalations can continue to provide sustenance beyond the nutritious. As Vallery Lomas, the first black winner of ABC’s The Great American Baking Show, wrote on Instagram on June 1, 2020: “This no-knead rustic loaf is the product of my anger and frustration. Humble as it is, it’s all I could fix my hands to make yesterday. Its crusty existence feels like a victory.” ______

Notes

1. Mark Bittman, “No-Knead Bread,” The New York Times, n.d., https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/11376-no-knead-bread. 2. Peter Sloterdijk, Bubbles: Spheres Volume I: Microspherology, Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2011), 64. 3. Alex Gibney and Michael Pollan, “Air,” Cooked (Netflix, 2016). 4. Krista Mahr, “Bread Is Life: Food and Protest in Egypt,” Time, January 31, 2011, https://science.time.com/2011/01/31/bread-is-life- food-and-protest-in-egypt/; Rami Zurayk, “Use Your Loaf: Why Food Prices Were Crucial in the Arab Spring,” The Guardian, July 16, 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2011/jul/17/bread-food-arab-spring; “Thousands in Egypt Riot Over Price Rise,” The New York Times, January 19, 1977, https://www.nytimes.com/1977/01/19/archives/thousands-in-egypt-riot-over-price-rise-students-and- workers.html. 5. Pliny the Elder, “The Method of Making Bread: Origin of the Art,” in The Natural History (London: Taylor and Francis, 1855), http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=urn:cts:latinLit:phi0978.phi001.perseus-eng1:18.27. 6. F. Bastian, “Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year Reconsidered,” The Review of English Studies 16, no. 62 (1965): 151–73. 7. Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year (London: Project Gutenberg EBook, 1722), https://www.gutenberg.org/files/376/376- h/376-h.htm. 8. Defoe. 9. Defoe. 10. Defoe. 11. Julian Yates, Of Sheep, Oranges, and Yeast A Multispecies Impression, 2017, p. 256. 12. Michelle Ghoussoub, “Here’s Why Everyone You Know Is Baking Bread in Quarantine,” CBC: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, April 5, 2020, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/here-s-why-everyone-you-know-is-baking-bread-in- quarantine-1.5518248; Raul Dias, “Lockdown Loaves: The Rise of Sourdough,” The Hindu, June 5, 2020, https://www.thehindu. com/life-and-style/food/lockdown-loaves-the-rise-of-sourdough/article31756457.ece; Zoe Williams, “Grains of Truth: What the Flour Shortage Tells Us about Who We Are,” The Guardian, April 14, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/food/2020/apr/14/grains-flour- shortage-tells-us-about-who-we-are; Richard Collings, “King Arthur’s Flour Sales Rise More Than 2,000% in March,” Ad Week, April 21, 2020, https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/king-arthur-flour-sales-up-over-2000-percent-march-coronavirus-baking/. 13. Emily Hoven, “HOW TO MAKE SOURDOUGH AT THE END OF THE WORLD: A THREAD,” Twitter, March 21, 2020, https://twitter.com/emilyhoven/status/1241567363251589120. 14. Natalie Loveless, How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research-Creation (Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2019), p. 3. 15. Larry Buchanan, Quoctrung Bui, and Jugal K. Patel, “Black Lives Matter May Be the Largest Movement in U.S. History,” The New York Times, July 3, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us/george-floyd-protests-crowd-size.html. 16. Austa Somvichian-Clausen, “What the 2020 Black Lives Matter Protests Have Achieved so Far,” The Hill, June 10, 2020, https://

148 Leavening Agents thehill.com/changing-america/respect/equality/502121-what-the-2020-black-lives-matter-protests-have-achieved-so. 17. Ariana Reines, “Poppy and Recollection,” Artforum, July 20, 2020, https://www.artforum.com/slant/ariana-reines-s-new-moon- report-83604. 18. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 30th anniversary ed (New York: Continuum, 2000), p. 79. 19. Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York ; London: Routledge, 2004), p. 39.

Charles Keiffer is an MA candidate in the Williams Graduate Program in the History of Art at the Clark Art Institute. He focuses on the development of the classificatory imagination in England, France, and the Americas from the eighteenth century to the present. He is particularly interested in the role of desire, consumption, and intoxication in articulating the category of the human. Recent research has considered the use of landscape photography to understand the contemporary opioid crisis.

149 Sink Paintings

Sink Paintings

Amanda Rothschild

Amanda Rothschild’s watercolor and gauche paintings call to mind the millions of brief, delicate worlds within our domestic space, and the shapes that they make and that we create for them. Sink drains offer an ideal meditation on these worlds, with their reliably consistent geometry in the face of a gushing faucet and the manifold chemicals that pass through. In this series, a cluster of bubbles or sometimes a thin film of soap hang suspended and glistening in a drain hole while the configurations around them merge and morph. This is a precarious moment in the life cycle of a soap bubble, suggesting a “before” and a very, very long “after” that awaits at the bottom of the drain.

Amanda Rothschild is an artist based in New York.

150 Sink Paintings

151 After James Gillray, The Theatrical Bubble; being a new Specimen of the Astonishing Powers of the Great Politiico-Punchinello in the Art of Dramatic Puffing, after January 7, 1805, Hand-colored etching. Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1917. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Public Domain.

Cartoons and caricature, by nature, use their visual and textual elements to deliver a message from a particular point of view. In this etching from the early 1800s, James Gillray critiques playwright, theater manager and politician, Richard Brinsley Sheridan. On stage, in front of a generous, overly-crowded audience of common folk, an unlikable Sheridan (dressed as Punch from the popular puppet show Punch and Judy) puffs soap bubbles out of a pipe, the most prominent of which hangs in the air. Within the bubble, a famous Roman actor stands triumphantly over a stage direction telling Garrick, Kemble, and Cooke — all revered actors of Sheridan's time — to “Exit.” Though these are detailed and obscure references, consider the Apollo statue in the background who also frowns upon Sheridan's perversion of theater and general greediness: the etching uses its bubbles to illuminate a singular point. Not so with Esther Leslie. In her article "Like my dreams, they fade and die…" Leslie explores innumerable possibilities and interpretations of the bubble. Fluidly moving between diverging comparisons, it’s as though her many thought bubbles have burst open for us to read. Leslie paints vivid, contrasting pictures of bubbles with her use of language and shows us that however innocent we think bubbles might be, they can still pack a punch. - The Editors “Like my dreams, they fade and die...”

Esther Leslie

2020 is the year of the bubble. This means it has been the year of the Plague that could be collectively outwitted only by ensconcing ourselves in the bubbles of our homes. We have had to swath ourselves in a bubble-wrap of domesticity — if we are afforded that luxury — have had to make a barrier between us and others, between us and the world and its viruses, themselves floating through the air, unseen, unfathomably, in tiny bubbles, ejected from mouths in coughs, or in words, or even in an exhalation, and bobbing on the air for perhaps hours, ever ready to be inhaled, absorbed into the body, given new cells to colonize, this spiky bubble of oily lipid molecules, a vulnerable bubble, for this encasing is what is dissolved by soap bubbles. This has been the year of inhabiting the microcosm, the shrunk-down environs of delimited risk. This is the year of the bubble or bubbles, but what this means for the following reflections is not pinned — it is liable to wander. Bubbles by their very nature meander, free-float, pop, and disappear, leaving only a vague sense of having been somewhere, or even of being real. This essay follows the bubbles of our time — actual and metaphorical — and those that exceed them, in an act of poetic-political accounting. We reside in our bubbles. We share bubbles with some. Other bubbles mix together only at their peril — if the bubble bursts, what is released? Bubbles connect some of us and they split some of us apart. The government in the United Kingdom, under Boris Johnson, began to speak of bubbles in its policy announcements, hitched to a strategy of public health management. At first it was the announcement that adults who lived alone or with just their children should form bubbles. Some adults were allowed to create a “support bubble” with one other household. These microcosmic entities could cavort and bob around together as an expanded bubble. The “bubble” of virus insulation is one that draws on the associations of bubble wrap and polystyrene foam, a substance into which gases are blown to expand it into many stiffened bubbles — coverings, barriers that cushion and protect. And then the bubble idea floated its way into more and more people’s minds. Bubbles became a way of protecting ourselves — held in bubbles, but regaining lost freedoms, we were allowed to drift and glide a little. The government mandated that people stay in bubbles of six or eight people. And it was proposed that small groups of young children return to the schools they had not set foot in for four months; to welcome their return, to make the building they had not seen for so long a time seem friendlier, colorful plastic bubble-maker machines pumped hundreds of soapy bubbles into the air and all was to be well. As economic concerns began to surface, the utopian sense of possible other-living amidst a horror abated; our bubbles disaggregated and the term itself was stretched pragmatically to signify massive aggregations of 180 or 200 or more older school pupils, so that a school return could happen. For workers to return to workplaces from the bubbles of their home offices or from their furloughs, in order to reignite economic activity, it was necessary for schools to take charge of the children’s education again. But all this opening up, this encouragement out into the world again, was to take place in the absence of any vaccines or certainty about what had happened and how it might be prevented from happening again. The bubbles expand. The bubbles become microcosms. In Cardiff, a restaurant installed diner bubbles, cleaned thoroughly after each use by a fogging machine — for bubbles to dine inside bubbles — and so we inhabit our own little worlds. We dine in microcosms. We turn away from the whole. That the bubble should become a new item, a matter of public policy, a word on everyone’s lips, was strange for

153 "Like my dreams, they fade and die..." me. Since developing a fascination with the history and theory of clouds (which became an MA course that I taught at my university in 2014) I had kept an eye out for nebulous entities: things that were almost qualities rather than definite objects, things comprised of soft matter, especially all that was defined as fog, froth, or foam. These interstitial, fuzzy, indeterminate entities — gas suffused with particulates; gases trapped in bubbles, either pliable, breakable or solid; a mass of bubbles on the surface of liquid, caused by agitation or fermentation — these airy suspensions kept nagging at me. Their social presence seemed to swell: in data cloud infrastructure, fog computing in the Internet of Things, fire-retardant foams after headline- grabbing major fires, speculative froth in markets, and the dense particulate air of tear gas that has saturated frequent protests. A bubble or a collection of bubbles is a beautiful thing. A bubble is a delightful thing, a floating loveliness. It bobs on the air, drifting this way and that, as the wind nudges it. A soap bubble, the most beautiful, playful, childlike bubble, mirrors parts of the world around it, merging itself with its environment — bubbles are microcosms, whole worlds, like snow globes, entire to themselves. A bubble may also reflect prismatically an oily smear of ever-changing rainbow colors that are made by light but only sometimes, under very specific conditions, revealed. Such light and airy beings are the very emblems of a world in which high-street design has been pulsing with rainbows, unicorns, and sparkles. That the bubble appears to represent a projected miniaturized form of our cosmos can be attributed to our new technologies of vision. We see better, smaller, more fine-grained into our cosmos and discover how the grains — the teeming, rumbling, fizzing universe — how bubbling it is. A video from NASA on Quantum or Spacetime foam proposes that spacetime is a bubbling froth of tiny effervescent bubbles. “These regions blink in and out of existence like the bubbles in the foam of a freshly poured beer. There is no such thing as empty space; there is only ‘quantum foam,’ everywhere.”1 Another NASA communique notes that there are blustery irregularities in the Earth’s plasmatic ionosphere, the boundary between earth and space, where energetic electron and ion particles crashing in from the protective bubble that surrounds Earth (the magnetosphere) create dazzling auroras: in different regions, there are bubbly clumps of different intensities of ionization. These clusters form a “froth” that interferes with radio signals, such as GPS, radio telescopes, and aircraft radio, especially in the higher latitudes. If it is possible to calculate at what size froth begins to distort signals in the near-Earth plasma, then the precision of GPS and other radio systems might be enhanced. A fault — the bubbling turbulence that garbles the signal — could be recaptured for utilization as a remedy, once its cause is established, meaning it could be brought into the grid to augment orientation. To err within spacetime is to find oneself within the bubbles of our universe.2 And we find our own selves in bubble form too. In 2016, scientists observed through their powerful microscopes that skin is itself a foam.3 As each keratinocyte (our most common epidermal cells) ascends from the stratum basale to the stratum granulosum, where it flattens, releases its fats, loses its nucleus, and dies, it adopts a fourteen-faced shape. This process is one that was already described by Scottish mathematician and physicist Lord Kelvin in 1887. He sought the perfect formula for foam, as part of a long-standing quest for the ideal shape to allow objects of equal volume to occupy a space while taking up the smallest amount of surface area. His calculations led him eventually to a three-dimensional fourteen-faced shape, formed by truncated octahedrons (tetra- decahedrons with six square faces and eight hexagonal faces) which built a honeycomb structure.4 The cells of foam that form skin maintain a barrier against water. We have bubbles. We are of them. The bubble would not be in and of this world if it did not possess another side, a dark side, a malevolent air, a heaviness, a longevity that counteracts its practicality, joyfulness, its transient presence that is vulnerable to pop at any moment. Life might have begun in bubbles. There is a theory that billions of years ago, small air bubbles in water, produced in tiny volcanoes in the depths of the sea, settled on porous volcanic rocks and attracted biomolecules from the primordial soup around them. The air-water interface that the bubbles introduced — a modicum of order in the chaotic ocean world — concentrated these biomolecules and chemical reactions that took place, out of which grew life in crystals, chains, structures, and cells.5 There are old bubbles, the ones that brought and bring life into being. There are fragile transitory bubbles that

154 "Like my dreams, they fade and die..." drift up for a moment and burst. Bubbles condense contradiction. In contradiction, there are politics and argument and a jostling around the terms of life and the limits of death. Life may also end in the bubbles produced in the present. The bubbly forms of today’s social environs include foggy pollution and the thick urban atmospheres produced by particulates hovering in the air, as well as toxic foams and froths of chemically polluted streams and oceans, a toxic waste produced by chemical effluence and climate change. In open-air laundries in India, detergents mingle with sewage and industrial effluent, and the turbulence of the barrages that control the amount of water passing through agitates this mixture into foam. In Hyderabad, toxic foam made by the reaction of sodium salts with sewage water entered homes. In Oscoda, Michigan, foam derived from per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, congregates along a lake’s shoreline and elsewhere, following its abandonment in landfill or seepage into the ground after being used in firefighting. It pollutes groundwater and drinking water, causes cancer and organ damage. In Catalonia, the streets of a town were carpeted with sea foam, flooding farms and knocking out power. Seafoam is a natural product, a result of reactions in sea water, but it enters into a historical bond with climate change. Seafoam has a similar chemistry to soap bubbles. Planktonic algae decompose and their fats and proteins act as surfactants (surface active agents) which are amphiphilic molecules: one part of these is hydrophobic, aligning itself with the air; the other part, hydrophilic, is in the water. Stabilized bubbles form — thin layers of water trapped between molecules of surfactants, stretched into spheres, the smallest volume that the bubble-layer can make — and they break through the liquid-gas interface and exist for a while. With seafoam, the more plankton and nutrients in the water, the more bubbles form, and the longer these take to burst. Seafoam is white and light and it feeds the small creatures that exist intertidally. Seafoam in recent years has become harmful, causing asthma attacks in Florida and killing fish, turtles, dolphins, and manatees on the US Gulf Coast, as well as red-necked loons, Western grebes, and common murres on the West Coast, where the surfactants strip the waterproofing from their feathers. The seafoam comes in such quantity as a result of anomalous ocean warming and acidification. Algal blooms thrive in a changing, warming climate. All this foam is the foam of a world in turbulence, one in which there is untrammelled industrial activity and its aftereffects of runoff, in the context of a not-unrelated global warming and its own aftereffects of excessive organic productivity. Is it facetious to see this dynamic’s complement in the foams and froths that sit on top of the beverages of capitalist worker-consumers in the cities, dashing to work — “but first coffee,” as a sign near me now admonishes — or on a break, as a post-work pick-me-up to continue doing and being and acting at full capacity into the night? Coffee foam and froth is a symbol and a fuel of our networked economy, the one that takes place in every coffee bar, the networker with a microfoam-topped latte in one hand, smartphone in the other. Milk, assailed by hot air or steam (which produces microbubbles) is made foamy, as in the topping of a cappuccino, or it settles on a latte macchiato as froth. To make foam, water vapour and air are injected into milk while it is heated. Becoming denatured, the proteins in milk — the casein, which holds its structure, and the whey, which unfolds — create spheres around the air and stabilize into bubbles. Milk’s protein chains are polar. At one end, they draw water to themselves; at the other, water is repelled, just as in all foams. There is commotion in the cup. The hydrophobic ends of the protein chain turn towards the bubble’s water-free center. The hydrophilic ends poke into a milky environment. The structure holds, but precariously. Foam is a bundle of bubbles in a comparatively small amount of liquid or solid. Gas is coarsely dispersed through liquid, its volume fractionally larger. Bubbles concentrate in the cup, and they exist to give the consumer a momentary pleasure, sinking into a pillow of foam, a cloudlike cushion, but they should also give a boost as the drinker moves through the world of work. Each consumer is a bubble of flexible labor, part of a post-world-recession economy in which jobs for life are of the past, a world of reskilling, zero-hour contracts, precarious conditions. Each bubble of labor may be caught up with on broader economic bubbles, inflations of sectors of the economy, with rapidly increasing asset prices bringing sudden rushes of confidence for investors and consumers alike (such as the Dot-Com bubble or the Japanese

155 "Like my dreams, they fade and die..."

Illustration by Sarah Dailey

156 "Like my dreams, they fade and die..." bubble economy of 1986-1991) until it bursts. Markets can be frothy too: froth refers to the market conditions which precede an actual market bubble, where asset prices become detached from their underlying intrinsic values as the demand for those assets drives their prices to unsustainable levels. Bubbly froth is the very sign of transience, a trivial lather that pops and passes — its movements and rates, its dissipations are hard to map, tricky to model. Froth is a difficult entity. It has multiple flow scales, exhibiting significant, rapid physical changes. It has a tendency to coalesce. Its particles are of different sizes and densities, and they possess varying attractions to water. Froth is too lively. It foments. If it is the case that froth translates difficultly into measurement, it is also the case that it inflates all too easily as a concept. Froth lends itself to metaphor. Froth is a nothing that can be anything. I see bubbles in the frothy coffees that hiss into being in every cafe. I see them in the high definition images from telescopes aimed at distant nebulae. I see them in the air, thick with pollution — airs so thick you could cut them with a knife. Fogs, foams, and froths are there in the world, but also as metaphors, emanations — ideological phantasms of our political and social condition. What is our environment, what bubble of world envelopes us, whoever we are and wherever we are? Do we exist in our technological — or maybe medial — bubbles, muffled by a metaphorical foam that bars from us diverse inputs, allows to settle only those that are native to each particular bubble? What bubble of atmosphere do we carry with us? Are we bound together in the same collectivity, or are we in many bubbles, proximate, joined but also closed to each other, only existing side by side, though as one vulnerable, as many perhaps aerated enough to persist? Peter Sloterdijk has written on bubbles, globes, and foams in a trilogy of books about spheres, through which the history of humanity is retold, through which this macrocosm of the universe is described in relation to its modes of habitation, its community structures, its connections, proximities, and severances. These books follow humans who have been thrown-into-the-cosmos and the dyads — the self and the spheres — that they construct. Within the cosmos, what interiors, actual and imagined, have humans created or found? Sloterdijk’s volume on bubbles explores the intimacy of small spaces, microspheres, including the womb, and the placenta within that, conceived as models for all secluded, enveloped spaces that humans seek in their lives. His speculations on the globe allow for a narrative of globalization to be related and assessed, but also for the conveyance of thoughts on other things that might be conceived of as macrospheres: skyscrapers and nation states and cities; villages or systems of belief. There have been times when life-forms, gathered within a single sphere, under one horizon, are unified with a globe and a concept unto themselves, a circle of humans in communion, immune to all that is external. The bubble that is the globe, Sloterdijk observes, is now too vast, contains too much uninhabitable boundless space, for we know too much of endless galaxies and have traveled too far from home. Foam turns to islands and greenhouses, space stations and submarines, shopping centers and air-conditioned offices, insular places that are atmospherically complete in themselves. Foam, for Sloterdijk, is an aggregation of bubbles, and that constitutes human social worlds or networks. Society is

an aggregate of microspheres (couples, households, businesses, associations) of different formats that, like the individual bubbles in a mountain of foam, border on one another and are layered over and under one another, yet without truly being accessible or effectively separable from one another.6

Foam is proximate humans without solidarity, without the capacity to exchange anything meaningful between them; and yet they exist cheek by jowl. They are bubbles existing separately together. It is the city, the skyscraper, and the apartment block that are the most prevalent modern forms of foam. While there is little social solidarity and justice at work in this thinking, it has a lightness, an airiness that wants thought, like life, to float free from convention or to meander like a floating bubble. In an interview with the Harvard Design Magazine, in 2009, Sloterdijk was asked why he considers contemporary architecture to be foam. His answer offers an image of typical modern city living, set within a metaphysics of a divided, fractured worldview: 157 "Like my dreams, they fade and die..."

The simple answer is: because since the Enlightenment we have no longer needed a universal house in order to find the world a place worthy of inhabiting. What suffices isunité a d’habitation, a stackable number of inhabitable cells. Through the motif of the inhabited cell I can uphold the spherical imperative that applies to all forms of human life but does not presuppose cosmic totalization. The stacking of cells in an apartment block, for instance, no longer generates the classical world/house entity but an architectural foam, a multi-chambered system made up of relatively stabilized personal worlds.7

The idea of proximate but unshared worlds is extrapolated by Sloterdijk from Jakob von Uexküll’s 1920s concepts of theoretical biology, which dislodged all living creatures from a shared stage in order to imagine specific life-worlds, environments or surrounding worlds (umwelte) for each alone.8

This insight offers us a completely new view of the universe as something that does not consist of a single soap bubble which we have blown up so large as to go well beyond our horizons and assume infinite proportions, and is instead made up of millions of closely demarcated soap bubbles that overlap and intersect everywhere.9

These separate worlds, the bubble for each, are relatively stabilized, notes Sloterdijk, but that lasts only until they are upended; the bubbles collapse, the life contained within them enters into freefall or extinguishment, as occurred, for example, so fatefully at the Grenfell Tower apartment block in London on June 14, 2017. Foam is indistinct conceptually — there is the foam that cushions us (or our devices) as we fall, a protective foam that might be a symbol of care. And yet foam, the foam that is meant to insulate — to protect by encasing and supporting — was precisely the agent of death in the inferno at Grenfell Tower, where an inner polystyrene foam, a 50mm-thick layer of Celotex RS5000 thermal insulation of polyisocyanurate, caught fire, sending flaming droplets onto floors below while aiding flames in spreading higher up the tower block and releasing toxic gas into the atmosphere. The horror, however, has not stopped. The atmosphere remains poisoned. A recent newspaper report states of the scene, many months after the fire:

Independent research from Prof Anna Stec at the University of Central Lancashire, released on Thursday, shows heightened levels of cancer-causing chemicals in the area around Grenfell Tower. Phosphorous flame retardants, toxic to the nervous system, were found in soil samples 50 metres from the tower. Dust and oily deposits were wiped from the blinds of homes close to the tower 17 months later. Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons were found at 160 times the level of reference samples 140m from Grenfell, along with chemicals that can cause asthma with a single exposure. These are not at naturally occurring levels in most urban environments.10

An atmosphere is made here by humans, and it is one that is hostile to the individual. It is an atmosphere that penetrates the body — not to speak of the sickening mind — and forms a toxic bubble within which the most disadvantaged are compelled to continue breathing as they move closer to death. It is a real atmosphere through which people move, a microcosm of harm in a locality of London, but it also floats out of sight, or rather, it lingers, albeit invisible to public view and social discourse. Sometimes it will be mobilized by politicians to make or score a point. Mostly it is left to a cluster of campaigners to keep it in view. We must learn to separate the froth, the media bubbles that puff and pop, from the substance of things, to turn the foam into protection, not suffocation. We must find accords with bubbles, with matter newly present, with new metaphorical echoes in what is so unsubstantial but so fatal. ______

158 "Like my dreams, they fade and die..."

Notes

1. ScienceAtNasa, “ScienceCasts: Quantum Foam,” Youtube video, 4:03. December 31, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_ continue=12&v=q-1Zcwt5AsE&feature=emb_title 2. Elizabeth Landau. “Study of Atmospheric ‘Froth’ May Help GPS Communications,” ed. Tony Greicius, NASA, NASA (March 4, 2015), https://www.nasa.gov/jpl/study-of-atmospheric-froth-may-help-gps-communications 3. Monty Lyman, The Remarkable Life of the Skin: An Intimate Journey Across Our Surface (London: Random House, 2019). 4. D. Weaire, “Kelvin’s Foam Structure: A Commentary,” Philosophical Magazine Letters 88, no. 2 (2008): 91-102. 5. Natural Chemistry, 2019 DOI: 10.1038/s41557-019-0299-5 6. Peter Sloterdijk, Foams: Spheres III (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2016), p. 56. 7. Peter Sloterdijk, “Talking to Myself about the Poetics of Space,” Harvard Design Magazine 30 (2009). 8. Jakob von Uexküll, Theoretical Biology (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1926). 9. Sloterdijk, “Talking to Myself.” 10. Seraphima Kennedy, “Toxins in the air, toxins in the soil — still ministers won’t act on Grenfell,” The Guardian (March 29, 2019).

Esther Leslie is Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London. Her books include various studies and translations of Walter Benjamin, as well as Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde (Verso, 2002); Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry (Reaktion, 2005); Derelicts: Thought Worms from the Wreckage (Unkant, 2014), Liquid Crystals: The Science and Art of a Fluid Form (Reaktion, 2016), and a number of works on the military-mythical-industrial complex of dairy.

159 Appendix

On Air: A Venti Podcast

Episode Two: “Air Bubbles”

Sarah Dailey in conversation with Esther Leslie

Listen now at venti-journal.com

Esther Leslie asks us to consider the contradictory nature of bubbles. They are both light and ephemeral but also ancient sources of life. The contradiction is essential to how they are deployed in modern parlance, from “support bubbles” to the isolation of our personal bubbles in quarantine.

Logo design by Avery Alperin

160 Appendix

Up in the Air

Submit a response to [email protected]

By now we have all written and read the phrase: we are living in uncertain times. Designed as a short forum for critical and creative discussion, ‘Up in the Air’ solicits three to five contributors to write a short response to a question. All members of the Venti community are welcome to participate.

These questions inevitably reflect the changing course of our daily experience and how we understand the world and its aerial surroundings. As such, we hope to ground this ever-changing, ephemeral conversation in airy matters.

Select responses will be posted below. All responses should be between 150-500 words. We welcome scholarly, personal, and imaginative approaches. Please email your response and a short bio to: [email protected]. You may include up to two images. All citations should be hyperlinked or in parenthetical notes with a short Works Cited, footnotes and endnotes are not permitted.

Please email your responses to [email protected] along with a short bio.

Question One

Responses accepted on a rolling basis between now and October 15, 2020.

What does it mean to have things “up in the air,” or to understand air primarily as a carrier rather than as a pure element? What does it mean when the air is not just composed of air, but of other elements, like seasons (snow, rain, dandelion flakes), or more dangerous particles, like viruses or toxins? How does air, and everything it carries, dictate the way life is lived, and in turn, establish quality of life?

Question Two

Responses accepted on a rolling basis between now and November 15, 2020.

How do we know the air?

Question Three

Responses accepted on a rolling basis between now and December 15, 2020.

How do we feel the air? How does the air feel us?

161 Appendix

Suggested Reading

The Editors

The work of German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk looms large over this subject. The first volume of his Spheres trilogy, Bubbles (2011), rigorously theorized the globular form to consider the spatial dimensions of western thought, while Foams (2016), the third volume, extended this into a poetics of plurality. Any philosophical investigation into bubbles today inevitably brushes up against this work, although it is still not the only way to think of the bubble. As a result, this bibliography is broken up into sections to give respect to the importance of Sloterdijk’s work, alongside other approaches that can be taken and scientific texts that may prove useful.

The Sloterdijk Effect

Bergthaller, Hannes. “Living in Bubbles: Peter Sloterdijk’s Spherology and the Environmental Humanities.” In Spaces In-Between. Edited by Mark Luccarelli and Sigurd Bergmann, 163–75. Leiden and Amsterdam, the Netherlands: Brill Rodopi, 2015.

Couture, Jean-Pierre. Sloterdijk: Key Contemporary Thinkers. Key Contemporary Thinkers. Cambridge; Malden, MA: Polity, 2016.

Ernste, Huib. “The Geography of Spheres: An Introduction and Critical Assessment of Peter Sloterdijk’s Concept of Spheres.” Geographica Helvetica 73, no. 4 (October 18, 2018): 273–84.

Kaji-O’Grady, Sandra. “Privatized Atmospheres, Personal Bubbles.” Architecture and Culture 3, no. 2 (May 4, 2015): 175–95.

Kirksey, Eben. “Bubbles.” In Emergent Ecologies, 72–85. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015.

Nogueira, Luis Castro. “Bubbles, Globes, Wrappings, and Plektopoi : Minimal Notes to Rethink Metaphysics from the Standpoint of the Social Sciences.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27, no. 1 (February 2009): 87–104.

Rashof, Sascha. “Spheres: Towards a Techno-Social Ontology of Place/s.” Theory, Culture & Society 35, no. 6 (November 2018): 131–52.

Sloterdijk, Peter. Bubbles: Spheres Volume I: Microspherology. Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2011.

———. Foams: Spheres Volume III: Plural Spherology. Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2016.

———. Globes: Spheres Volume II: Macrospherology. Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2014.

162 Appendix

A Century of Popular Science

Barber, Jacqueline. Bubble-Ology. Great Explorations in Math and Science. Berkeley, CA: Lawrence Hall of Science, University of California, 1992.

Boys, Charles Vernon. Soap Bubbles: Their Colours and the Forces Which Mould Them. Being the Substance of Many Lectures Delivered to Juvenile and Popular Audiences, with the Addition of Several New and Original Sections. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1890.

“Bubbles: A Fascinating Little Experiment Reveals a Surprise and Later May Lead to Some Utilitarian Purpose.” Scientific American 160, no. 2 (1939): 75–75.

Clift, Roland, John R. Grace, and Martin E. Weber. Bubbles, Drops, and Particles. New York, NY Acad. Press, 1978.

Epstein, Irving R. “Can Droplets and Bubbles Think?” Science 315, no. 5813 (2007): 775–76.

Finkbeiner, Douglas, Meng Su, and Dmitry Malyshev. “Giant Bubbles of the Milky Way.” Scientific American 311, no. 1 (2014): 42–47.

Gardner, Robert, and Robert Gardner. Experiments with Bubbles. Getting Started in Science. Springfield, NJ: Enslow Publishers, 1995.

Rosenberg, Benjamin. The Drag and Shape of Air Bubbles Moving in Liquids. David W. Taylor Model Basin. Washington, D.C.: Navy Dept., 1950.

Art/Historical Approaches

Baudot, Laura. “An Air of History: Joseph Wright’s and Robert Boyle’s Air Pump Narratives,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 46, no. 1 (Fall 2012): 1-28.

Conisbee, Philip, and Joseph Fronek. Soap Bubbles by Jean-Siméon Chardin. Masterpiece in Focus. Los Angeles, CA: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1990.

Emmer, Michele. “Soap Bubbles in Art and Science: From the Past to the Future of Math Art.” Leonardo 20, no. 4 (1987): 327–34. https://doi.org/10.2307/1578527.

Hovig, Kristen A. “The Surreal Science of Soap: Joseph Cornell’s First Soap Bubble Set.” American Art 20, no. 1 (2006).

Kareem, Sarah Tindal. “Enlightenment Bubbles, Romantic Worlds.” The Eighteenth Century 56, no. 1 (2015): 85–104.

Rousseau, Theodore. “A Boy Blowing Bubbles by Chardin.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 8, no. 8 (1950): 221–27. https://doi.org/10.2307/3257493.

163 Appendix

Beyond the Bubble: Culture, Capital, Form, Metaphor

McClanahan, Annie. Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twentieth-Century Culture. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017.

McKeon, Michael. “Mediation as Primal Word: The Arts, the Sciences, and the Origins of the Aesthetic.” InThis Is Enlightenment. Edited by Clifford Siskin and William Warner. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010. 384-412.

Ngai, Sianne. Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgement and Capitalist Form. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020.

———. Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012.

Poovey, Mary. Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008.

Pop, Andrei. A Forest of Symbols: Art, Science, and Truth in the Long Nineteenth-Century. New York, NY: Zone Books, 2019.

Tompkins, Kyla Wazana. Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th-Century. New York, NY: NYU Press, 2012.

164 Appendix

Vilhelm Pedersen, Eventyr og Historier vol. 1 Frontispiece. Copenhagen: Gyldenal, 1913, Wood engraving, Robarts Library. Public Domain.

165 ATMOSPHERE

Volume One, Issue One

Fall 2020

AIR BUBBLES

Volume One, Issue Two

Fall 2020

PLEIN AIR

Volume One, Issue Three

Fall 2020 Contribute to Venti

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All articles should be between 1500 - 6000 words, title and endnotes are not included. Beginning with our fourth issue (“Inhale/Exhale”), we will accept three types of essays:

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