a quarterly of art and culture Issue 24 SHADOWS CABINET US $10 Canada $12 UK £7
inside this issue the creepy season winter 2006-07 Jonathan Allen • Jonathan Beller • Julia Bryan-Wilson • Anne Chaka • Colby Chamberlain • Beatriz Colomina • Steve Featherstone • Daniel Handler • Cathy Haynes • Laura Helms • Jochem Hendricks • Greg Jones • Louis Kaplan • Byron Kim • Glenn Ligon • Piper Marshall • Jeannine Mosely • Tim Noble and Sue Webster • Celeste Olalquiaga • Sally O'Reilly • Trevor Paglen • George Pendle • Frances Richard • Lytle Shaw • Katrín Sigurðardóttir • Victor I. Stoichita • Christopher Turner • Marina Warner • Allen S. Weiss • Margaret Wertheim • Jocko Weyland • Tony Wood • That'd be it! cabinet Cabinet is a non-profit 501 (c) (3) magazine published by Immaterial Incorporated. 55 Washington St, # 327 Our survival is dependent on support from foundations and generous individuals, Brooklyn NY 11201 USA such as you (flattery is apparently a very good tactic for this sort of thing). Please tel + 1 718 222 8434 consider supporting us at whatever level you can. Contributions to Cabinet are fax + 1 718 222 3700 fully tax-deductible for those who pay taxes to Uncle Sam. Donations of $25 or email [email protected] more will be acknowledged in the next possible issue, and those above $100 will www.cabinetmagazine.org be acknowledged for four consecutive issues. Checks should be made out to “Cabi- net” and sent to our office address. Please mark the envelope, “From the shadows, Winter 2006–2007, issue 24 a ray of light.”
Editor-in-chief Sina Najafi Cabinet wishes to thank the following visionary foundations and individuals for Senior editor Jeffrey Kastner their support of our activities during 2007. Additionally, we will forever be indebted Editors Jennifer Liese, Christopher Turner to the extraordinary contribution of the Flora Family Foundation from 1999 to UK editor Brian Dillon 2004; without their generous support, this publication would not exist. We would Managing editor Colby Chamberlain also like to acknowledge David Walentas/Two Trees for their generous donation of Associate editor Ryo Manabe an editorial office in DUMBO, Brooklyn. Art director Jessica Green Graphic designer Leah Beeferman $100,000 Website directors Luke Murphy, Kristofer Widholm The Annenberg Foundation Editors-at-large Saul Anton, Mats Bigert, Brian Conley, Christoph Cox, Jesse Lerner, Frances Richard, Daniel Rosenberg, David Serlin, Debra Singer, Margaret $50,000 Sundell, Allen S. Weiss, Eyal Weizman, Margaret Wertheim, Gregory Williams, The Flora Family Foundation Jay Worthington Contributing editors Joe Amrhein, Molly Bleiden, Eric Bunge, Pip Day, Charles $30,000 Green, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss, Dejan Krsic, Roxana The National Endowment for the Arts Marcoci, Phillip Scher, Lytle Shaw, Cecilia Sjöholm, Sven-Olov Wallenstein Assistant editor Courtney Stephens $20,000 Editorial assistants Laura Hutson, Ned Kihn, Jonathan Nedeau, Colin Sonner The Starry Night Fund of Tides Foundation Cabinet National Librarian Matthew Passmore Prepress Zvi Lanz @ Digital Ink $15,000 Founding editors Brian Conley & Sina Najafi The Greenwall Foundation
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Contents © 2007 Immaterial Incorporated and the authors and artists. All rights Page 4: Laura Helms, Menlo, Alabama, 2005. in the magazine reserved by Immaterial Incorporated, and rights in the works contained herein reserved by their owners. Fair users are of course free to do their Back cover: Patch from the US Air Force’s 509th Bomb Wing commemorating a thing. The views published here are not necessarily those of the writers and artists, secret flight test of a B-2 “Spirit” stealth bomber. For a reading of the iconography let alone the umbrageous editors of Cabinet. in this patch, see Trevor Paglen’s article in this issue. COLUMNS MAIN
7 Inventory / School of Rocks 19 Bodies at Rest Piper Marshall Tony Wood Selling Mrs. Stanford’s jewels Konstantin Melnikov’s Sonata of Sleep
10 oBject Lesson / Objet de lux 23 Dead Troops Salute Celeste Olalquiaga Louis Kaplan The passions of Madame Du Châtelet Arthur Mole’s living photographs
12 Colors / Violet 27 Menger’s Spongiform Encephalopathy: Daniel Handler An Interview with Jeannine Mosely Your name is a color Margaret Wertheim Building a fractal house of cards 15 Ingestion / Fear of Flesh Allen S. Weiss 32 Salt and Pepper The garden of earthy delights Implicasphere Season to taste
35 Measure for Measure: An Interview with Anne Chaka Frances Richard A visit to the National Institute of Standards and Technology
38 Square Watermelons and Leg Art Jocko Weyland Exploring the Associated Press Photo Library
44 Artist Project: Make Model Mark Greg Jones
48 Plotto’s Pharmacy Lytle Shaw The wiseguys and the Farmer Con
52 Artist project: eye drawings jochem hendricks
53 Paying Attention Jonathan Beller The commodification of the sensorium
59 jESus Kills Steve Featherstone Do unto others, before they do unto you Shadows AND
61 SHADES OF BLACK postcard: Hand exercise for Trevor Paglen ShadowgraphY (ballerina) Symbolic language and covert military programs Félicien Trewey
65 A Short History of the Shadow: Bookmark: Clip, Stamp, Fold (1977–1979) An Interview with Victor I. Stoichita Beatriz Colomina et al. Christopher Turner From Plato’s cave to Duchamp’s widow
71 Artist project: Cabinet Shadows Byron Kim
73 otto Neurath’s Universal Silhouettes George Pendle The father of the Isotype
75 Darkness Visible Marina Warner The view from the shadows
81 Artist Project: Stage Katrín Sigurðardóttir
89 Artist Project: Carte de visite Glenn Ligon
90 Mirror, Mirror Julia Bryan-Wilson An Austrian town tries to step out of the shadows
93 Artist Project: Spin Shadow Heads Tim Noble & Sue Webster
97 Sleight of Light Jonathan Allen Magic in the shadows
101 fIve O’Clock Shadows Colby Chamberlain Losing by a razor-thin margin
Contributors
Jonathan Allen is a London–based visual artist, writer, and sometimes stage Piper Marshall is earning her B.A. at Barnard College in art history and French magician. His performance alter-ego, narcissistic gospel magician Tommy translation. She is currently writing her thesis on the sculptural aspects of text Angel, has performed recently at Tate Britain, the De La Warr Pavilion, and in in Alain Robbe-Grillet’s nouveau roman and Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. Southeast Asia as part of Allen’s contribution to the first Singapore Biennale. See
Anne Chaka is Chief of the Physical and Chemical Properties Division at the Trevor Paglen is an artist and geographer based in Berkeley, California. His work National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland. can be seen at
Colby Chamberlain is managing editor of Cabinet. George Pendle has written for The Times, The Financial Times, The Sunday Times, and the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. He is the Beatriz Colomina is Director of the Ph.D. Program in Architecture and Founding author of Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John White- Director of the Program in Media and Modernity at Princeton University. Her side Parsons (Harcourt, 2005), and the forthcoming The Remarkable Millard books include Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (MIT Fillmore: The Unbelievable Life of a Forgotten President (Crown, 2007). He lives Press, 1994), Sexuality and Space (Princeton Architectural Press, 1992), and in New York. Domesticity at War (ACTAR and MIT Press, 2006). Frances Richard’s book of poems, See Through, was published by Four Way Steve Featherstone is a writer and photographer from Syracuse, New York. His Books in 2003. She writes frequently about contemporary art, teaches at work has appeared in Harper’s, Granta, and the Baffler, among others. A book Barnard College and the Rhode Island School of Design, and lives in Brooklyn. of his photographs, along with an essay by his colleague Paul Maliszewski, is forthcoming from Princeton Architectural Press. Lytle Shaw’s publications include the poetry books Cable Factory 20 (Atelos, 1999) and The Lobe (Roof, 2002), as well as the critical study, Frank O’Hara: Daniel Handler is the author of the novels The Basic Eight, Watch Your Mouth, The Poetics of Coterie (Iowa University Press, 2006). Shaw, a contributing editor and Adverbs, and serves as the legal, literary, and social representative of at Cabinet, teaches American literature at New York University. Lemony Snicket, whose sequence of books for children, known collectively as A Series Of Unfortunate Events, have allegedly sold more than 48 million Katrín Sigurðardóttir is an Icelandic artist based in New York. Her sculptures, copies. An adjunct accordionist for the pop group The Magnetic Fields, Handler installations, and drawings have been exhibited at the Renaissance Society, lives in San Francisco with his wife, the illustrator Lisa Brown, and a child. Chicago; Fondazione Sandretto, Turin; Sala Siqueiros, Mexico City; and The National Gallery of Iceland, among other venues. Her installation, High Plane Cathy Haynes is researching a Ph.D. at Goldsmiths University of London on V, is on view at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City through April the limits of the animal and the human in Franz Kafka, Max Ernst, and Georges 2007. For more information visit
Jochem Hendricks is an artist based in Frankfurt. His work has been exhibited Christopher Turner is an editor at Cabinet and is currently writing a book, at Gropiusbau Berlin; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; and the San Fran- Adventures in the Orgasmatron: How the Sexual Revolution Came To America, cisco Museum of Modern Art, among other venues. For more information, visit to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Louis Kaplan is Associate Professor of History and Theory of Photography and Allen S. Weiss is an editor-at-large at Cabinet. New Media at the University of Toronto and Director of the Institute of Com- munication and Culture at the University of Toronto at Mississauga. He is the Margaret Wertheim is founder and director of the Institute For Figuring, a Los author of American Exposures: Photography and Community in the Twentieth Angeles-based organization dedicated to the aesthetic and poetic dimensions Century (University of Minnesota Press, 2005), Laszlo Moholy-Nagy: Biographi- of science and mathematics. She is currently working on a book about outsider cal Writings (Duke University Press, 1995), and co-author of a book on Gumby. physics and the role of imagination in theoretical science. He is currently working on projects devoted to the inventor of spirit photog- raphy William Mumler (with the University of Minnesota Press) and on the Jocko Weyland is the author of The Answer is Never: A Skateboarder’s History of California countercultural artist, Wallace Berman. For more information, visit the World (Grove Press, 2002) and has written for Thrasher, The New York Times,
Glenn Ligon is a artist based in New York. A survey exhibition “Glenn Ligon: Some Changes,” organized by Wayne Baerwaldt and Thelma Golden, is currently touring the United States and will open at Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg, in October 2007. COLUMNS
“Inventory” is a column that examines a list, catalogue, or register. Inventory / School of Rocks / “Object Lesson,” a column by Celeste Olalquiaga, reads culture Piper Marshall against the grain to identify striking illustrations of a historical pro- cess or principle. / “Colors” is a column in which a writer responds At first glance, the image on the following pages suggests to a specific color assigned by the editors of Cabinet. / “Ingestion“ nothing so much as a glossy photograph in a modern-day is a column that explores food within a framework informed by aes- auction catalogue. In fact, it’s a four-by-six foot painting thetics, history, and philosophy. from 1898 titled Mrs. Stanford’s Jewel Collection, currently hanging in Stanford University’s Cantor Arts Center. Called “one of the most extraordinary still-lives of our time” by the art historian Alfred Frankenstein, the painting presents an unlikely subject—a jewelry drawer in which an array of trinkets, brooches, necklaces, and pins is assembled across
a swath of maroon velvet.1 The viewer’s position is that of a bidder peering directly into a jewelry case, its contents inventoried so as to offer themselves for documentation, delectation, and eventual acquisition. The painting’s origins lie in financial troubles. With the assets of her deceased husband—Leland Stanford, founder of the university that bears his name—tied up in legal battles, Mrs. Stanford decided to secure funding for the nascent university’s library book fund by auctioning her jewels in London, a sale timed to take advantage of Queen
Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee.2 Mrs. Stanford wanted a photo- graph of the jewels, both to commemorate the precious gifts her husband had given her and to remind the students of the institution’s “benefactors”—Tiffany, Patek Philippe, and
Cartier.3 Photographed in her San Francisco residence by the renowned Taber Studio, the jewels were arranged by Stan- ford herself on a velvet piano cover to ensure each stone’s visibility and prominence. Enamored of the black-and-white photographic representation, Mrs. Stanford then hired A. D. M. Cooper, a saloon painter, to create a color reproduction. Cooper, who boasted to his patron that he would “put a little fire into the sapphire,” was at best an intermittent worker, starting and stopping at least three times; on at least
one occasion, he was sent home in a drunken state.4 During his period of official inactivity, however, Cooper managed to find the time to paint a duplicate of the original on a redwood panel, which he hung in a San Jose gambling saloon. When a policeman informed Mrs. Stanford of this duplicity, she had
the copy removed (its final disposition remains a mystery).5 All these preparations for the eventual sale of her collec- tion notwithstanding, a poor market for jewelry in London at the time ultimately undermined Mrs. Stanford’s philanthropic efforts. While in London, she managed to sell only the Tiffany pearls and a few other small pieces. The disappointed widow had the remaining jewels returned to San Francisco, while
she continued her European tour.6
1 Bertha Berner, Mrs. Leland Stanford (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1934). 2 Carol M. Osborne, Museum Builders in the West: The Stanfords as Collectors and Patrons of Art 1870–1906 (Stanford: Stanford University Art Museum,1986), p. 67. 3 Berner, p. 105. 4 Ibid., p. 106. 5 Ibid. Berner is unclear about the fate of the second painting, merely noting that it was overleaf: Astley D. M. Cooper, Mrs. Stanford’s Jewel Collection, 1898. “put out of sight.” Courtesy Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University. 6 Ibid, p. 107.
Object Lesson / Objet de lux Celeste Olalquiaga
Glory of her sex and of the century we live in, the goal of her work is to enlighten men. —Voltaire
Acclaimed in the Décade d’Augsbourg, a German “Who’s Who” produced between 1741 and 1755, as one of the out- standing erudites of her time, Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise Du Châtelet (1706–49), considered one of the first women scientists, was relegated after her death to the Enlightenment’s shadows, from which she has emerged only recently. Brilliant and passionate, as fun-lov- ing as she was hard-working, “la divine Émilie” was both admired and loathed by her peers, stunned as they were by the nerve of an eighteenth-century female who was as capa- ble of debating men on the laws of physics as she was of performing the role typically assigned to her gender. She left in her wake a series of lovers in the best tradition of intrigue among French royals—or rather among intellectuals, long before the Existentialists and the French avant-garde. Born to what is known as the “noblesse de robe” (the haute bourgeoisie who held high public office), Émilie was surrounded by men who not only admired her talents but enabled her to develop them. Starting with her father, who gave her the same education as her two brothers (with the exception of mathematics and metaphysics, for which only the girl demonstrated special aptitude), continuing with her husband, a military man who allowed Madame Du Châtelet to pursue her studies (and parties) once she had given him children, and culminating with her life-long companion, the philosopher Voltaire (1694–1778), who wrote public tributes was fundamentally wrong. Aligning herself with Leibniz’s to her genius, la Marquise knew the rare privilege of intellec- proposal of vis viva as the multiplication of mass by the tual entitlement at a time when this territory was definitely square of velocity, she almost heretically opposed French off-limits to women, no matter their social rank. scientists as well as Newton in her early apprehension of And benefit from this privilege she did. She was the the principles that would eventually lead to Einstein’s theory first woman to be published by the Académie Royale des of relativity. Sciences with her 1739 Dissertation sur la nature du feu, Having initially espoused the Newtonian position in a and dedicated a good part of her life to producing the only footnote to her important manuscript written in 1737 on French translation of Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia Math- the nature of fire, by the time this text was going to press ematica (1687) accompanied by her commentary (Principes two years later she requested that the Academy strike out mathématiques de la philosophie naturelle), published posthu- the note or include an erratum at the end. Since neither mously in 1759, a text used well into the twentieth century. request was honored, “milady Newton,” as an antagonist Her Institutions de physique (1740) explained the doctrines of called her, proceeded to argue her position in the Institutions Descartes (1596–1650), Leibniz, Newton so clearly that she de physique of 1740, where she explains and critiques New- was named member of the Academy of Sciences in Bolo- ton’s complex principles for her son. The book, published gna (1746). She even dared change her mind (understood anonymously, was at the root of not one but two debates, by some to be a woman’s prerogative) in the crucial debate since her tutor, the German mathematician Samuel Koenig over the laws governing the conservation of vis viva (Latin (1712–1757), claimed it as his own. for “living force”), switching allegiance from Newton to the While this claim was quickly refuted, the debate around German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716). vis viva gained momentum, becoming the first public scien- Despite her profound dedication to the work of both tific debate between a man and a woman. The man was the Descartes and Newton, Breteuil Duchastellet, as she occa- Permanent Secretary of the Académie Royale des Sciences, sionally signed her name, believed that the Newtonian Jean-Jacques Dortous de Mairan, whom Madame Du Châte- equation, whereby the vis viva of a moving object is let had praised in the infamous Newton footnote only to later 10 calculated to be its mass multiplied by its velocity, criticize in her Institutions de physique. His response and her counter-response, as well as the intellectual alignments studies and experiments. The “philosophes voluptueux” also that they triggered, are illustrative of the fiction and realities staged theatrical pieces for amusement, often dragging their of gender disparity. Mairan’s “Lettre à Madame **** sur la infrequent visitors, including Émilie’s husband, to endless question des forces vives” (1741) starts with a long, incredu- theatrical marathons. This intense period strengthened the lous wail at her shift from admiration to criticism. Claiming bonds between them to such a point that even when their that she could not possibly have read closely enough his sexual interests shifted, both of them moving on to new Dissertation sur l’estimation et la mesure des forces motrices partners, they still lived together to the end. du corps (1728), Mairan reiterates the thesis of the book, Passionate to a fault, Madame Du Châtelet’s love life which he has expressly reprinted and sent to her. started with drama and ended with tragedy, her relation- Basing his attack on the presumption of Madame Du ship with Voltaire happily marking the time in between. As Châtelet’s misunderstanding, or rather lack of understand- a young woman, she attempted to commit suicide when ing, of the principles expounded in his tome, Mairan’s attack scorned by her first lover; in her forties, and in the midst of is couched in layers of formality and ironic politeness: “I the translation that would grant her a lasting place among flatter myself, Madame, that you will take all these thoughts the scientists of the Enlightenment, she became pregnant as proof of the esteem in which I hold your illuminated by a young officer. Intuiting that her days were numbered, thoughts and your good understanding, which would she hastened to finish her manuscript, working around the not allow you to resist truth when it is presented to you clock and dying the very night she sent it off to the Biblio- unclouded.” thèque Nationale, only six days after giving birth. Châtelet’s response was as prompt as it was sharp Authoritative and demanding, Madame Du Châte- and definitive. She not only mimicked his false politeness, let made many enemies among both men and women, but raised the stakes with a scalding sarcasm that left although she also maintained several lifelong friends and no part of his letter untouched: “I have read and reread correspondents, most of whom were outstanding in their your thesis, and cannot find anything different from what fields. Besides her scientific publications, she wrote about I’ve expounded. Maybe we should define clearly what religion and distinguished herself as a linguist and a musi- reading means.” Literally positioning his writing and her cian. She managed to combine worldly frivolities with paraphrasing side by side, she counters his accusations of intellectual abstraction, a combination which she articu- misquotation, arguing her position with such clarity, force, lately advocates in her Discours sur le bonheur (written in and wit that his is rendered ridiculous. 1746 and published in 1779), where she defends her love Mairan further insulted Madame Du Châtelet by imply- of sex and gambling in the same breath as learning and ing that she had been influenced by a third person, an studying, the latter being the only areas, she argues, where accusation that still found echoes in the early twentieth cen- women could find independence and relief from the restric- tury when she was described as little more than “Voltaire’s tions imposed upon them: “Of all the passions, the love of friend,” a horseback-riding beauty intruding on men’s intel- learning contributes the most to our happiness. [Therein lectual havens for inspiration. Her debate with Mairan forced is] a passion from which an elevated soul is never entirely everyone to choose sides, the most ironic allegiance turning exempt, that of glory; learning is the only way to acquire out to be Voltaire’s support of Mairan, to whom he wrote: “I glory for half of humanity, yet it is precisely this half which don’t know what fatality makes ladies prefer Leibniz. You are is deprived of the means of education, rendering impossible like Hercules fighting bravely against the Amazons; and I am such a taste of glory.” but a harmless volunteer in your army.” As for love, Madame Du Châtelet, a committed Voltaire should talk: it was in order to help him that defender of illusion, without which she claims there is no Madame Du Châtelet took up again her studies of meta- possible joy, is extremely pragmatic: “Let us … never allow physics after having abandoned them for many years, our heart to keep the slightest flicker for someone whose collaborating on and writing the introduction to his Elémens interest diminishes and who has stopped loving us. You de la philosophie de Neuton of 1738. “She dictated and I need to abandon your love some day, even if you haven’t wrote,” Volatire supposedly told a friend. Considered a more aged, and that day must be when such love has stopped capable scientist than Voltaire, who was more of a philoso- making you happy.” Voltaire, her husband, and her lover pher, “Madame Pompon Newton,” as he jokingly called were all at Madame Du Châtelet’s deathbed. her in reference to her excessive love of clothes, earned his unending respect and admiration, as his many paeans to “la divine Émilie, Minerve de France,” attest. The couple spent the first ten years of their intense relationship working in isolation in her husband’s chateau in Champagne, among unusual luxuries such as the bathtub Voltaire installed for Émilie’s daily baths. A tenacious and disciplined scholar, she would sleep only two hours a day opposite: Frontispiece to Voltaire’s Elémens de la philosophie de Neuton and leave another two for spartan meals and some (1738) shows Du Châtelet shining the light of truth emanating from Newton 11 conversation, dedicating the rest of her time to onto Volatire at his desk. Courtesy Syndics of Cambridge University Library. Colors / Violet of whom is named Violet. Accordingly, I decided to spend a Daniel Handler bit of time with another young girl named Violet. This Violet is the daughter of prominent Kansas City booksellers. I’ve Upon receiving this publication’s instructions to write on always liked her, but as with people I like who live in Kansas the color violet, I had just completed the thirteenth and final City, I never got to talk to her much. Via regular mail, I was volume of “A Series Of Unfortunate Events,” a sequence of able to ask her a great number of questions, selections from novels chronicling the lives of three hapless orphans, one which are reprinted here.
12 13 COLUMNS 14 ingestion / Fear of Flesh There are many degrees of vegetarianism, beginning Allen S. Weiss with that of Paradise, for the Garden of Eden is a funda- mentally vegetarian domain, due to the biblical injunction And then there’s the joke about the tribe of cannibals who against killing any living creature (Genesis 1:29). In terms of have decided to become vegetarians: for the moment, degrees of strictness, one passes from macrobiotic or vegan they’re only eating fishermen. This dark humor sums up the cuisine (which excludes not only slaughtered animals, but ambiguity and resistance that vegetarian cuisine faces in all animal products whatsoever, such as milk, butter, cream, France. Consider a cautionary recipe. Several years ago, in eggs, and cheese) to the less strict meatless cuisines that autumn, I arrived at a superb restaurant famed for its use of nevertheless utilize dairy products. Vegetarianism spans the wild ingredients, with great expectations regarding a dish range from an ineluctable ethical or religious imperative to featuring six varieties of wild mushrooms. But the results a categorical aesthetic proclivity, often being nothing more were disappointing because, the dish being a main course, than a figure of gastronomic style. In this context, how does the chef felt obliged to serve the mushrooms adorned it make sense to experience the hybrid form of a restaurant with fish or fowl or flesh. Consequently he used six sea such as Arpège, that highly visible experiment on the French scallops—for both decorative and gustatory reasons—as gastronomic scene, where vegetarianism is celebrated, miniature edible pedestals for the succulent mushrooms in where one may compose an entirely vegetarian meal, but question. While many surf-and-turf combinations—such as where broader fleshed-out possibilities nevertheless exist? Portuguese clams and pork, or Bordelais oysters and sau- Perhaps Passard’s distinction, that his is a cuisine végétale sage—are excellent, this one failed as the scallops and the and not a cuisine végétarienne, might help clarify the matter, mushrooms resisted each others’ charms. How much better such that his “vegetarianism” need be understood as an ori- the dish would have been if the fundament had been tiny entation rather than an imperative. Whether this is just a first blinis soaked in butter and studded with garlic and chives! cautious step toward an audacious embrace of pure vegetar- Or even graced with parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme, as ianism, or the definition of a hybrid genre, or a mere figure the song goes. of culinary style, it has caused an interesting polemic and In a country where the Potager du Roi (the King’s inspired further explorations in the meatless Gallic domain. vegetable garden at Versailles) is a national institution, the That said, we must wonder at the continued and general- aesthetics of vegetarianism would appear both logical and ized resistance to vegetarianism. Perhaps Carol J. Adams’s likely. However, it remains unseemly in France to serve a brilliant and impassioned polemic is to the point: “Since veg- vegetarian main course. We should note that no entry on etarianism is not a part of the dominant culture, it is more vegetarianism is to be found in the famed Dictionnaire de likely, however, that the vegetarian revelations, terse as they l’Académie des Gastronomes (1962), and perhaps even more are, are silenced because we have no framework into which emblematic of the degree to which French culture disre- we can assimilate them.”1 That her discussion takes place in gards vegetarianism is the fact that throughout the nearly the context of the vegetarianism of the Frankenstein mon- 600 tightly printed pages of Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat’s ster—for despite received opinion, this creature was indeed Histoire naturelle & morale de la nourriture (1987), there are a vegetarian and not a murderous carnivore, like most of his only two (!) references, in passing, to the subject—a most detractors—might not, in the eyes of the greater public, help curious and ironic omission in what purports to be a moral the vegetarian cause! history of food! This explains certain criticisms suffered by If in regard to matters of taste one were to consider Alain Passard at his restaurant Arpège (at the summit of the effects of images along with the influence of words (and French cuisine, with its three Michelin stars), when several we must, if we are to believe in the use-value of the infinite years ago, upon profound reflection following the Mad Cow production of coffee-table cookbooks, destined for the eye Disease scare, he decided to eliminate all red meat from his rather than the mouth), the current discussion takes an menus, though he still serves fish, shellfish, and poultry, interesting turn. For one should note that the first foray such as the Bavarois d’avocat au caviar osciètre royal d’Iran into publishing of Alain Passard (the rare three-star chef— (huile de pistache citronné) [Bavarois of avocado and royal and an eloquent one at that—who had long resisted publi- Iranian osciotr caviar (lemon-flavored pistachio oil)] and cation) is the curiosity of a vegetarian children’s cookbook, the Antique poulet du Haut-Maine au foin (herbes de prairie Les recettes des Drôles de Petites Bêtes [The Recipes of the naturelles) [Heirloom chicken from Haut-Maine cooked in Strange Little Creatures], illustrated by Antoon Krings. hay (wild herbs)], as well as his many strictly vegetarian “Illustrated” is in fact not quite the word, for this book is dishes, including the Blanc de poireau et pomme de terre a true collaboration, where two parallel universes merge. fumée au bois de hêtre (beurre à la muscade) [Leek whites One world is that of Passard, whose great passion is his and potatoes smoked over beech wood (nutmeg butter)] and eight-acre vegetable garden (which supplies all of his res- the Betterave au sel gris de Guérande (vinaigre balsamique) taurant’s vegetables) at Fillé-sur-Sarthe near Le Mans, about [Beet cooked in a crust of Guérande salt (balsamic vinager)]. 220 kilometers from Paris, where heirloom vegetables are The result: criticized by the French for being too vegetarian, cultivated through traditional planting, small-plot rotation, criticized by the Americans for not being vegetarian horse-drawn plow, and hand-picked crops. His gardener, 15 enough. Mohamadou, explains that “it is an organic garden, but not 16 merely an organic garden. It’s a vegetable garden controlled Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (One shudders to think of the by the beasts.”2 One wonders whether Passard—whose havoc that Roger would wreak in Passard’s garden!) motto might well be his claim that “one sincere action from And then there was the Charles Addams joke, a drawing the garden is worth six skilled actions in the kitchen”— of a witch stirring a steaming cauldron full of rather suspi- dreams of moving his restaurant from the city to the country, cious fixings as she addresses two other witches: “It’s going or whether he wishes to maintain his garden as a private, to be great. All natural ingredients.”9 We should remember hidden site of wonder and inspiration.3 Adam Gopnik, in that in matters of cuisine, all words and images and ideas, an article on the vegetarian debate, reminds us that “Pas- however enticing, must be taken with a grain of salt. sard had said that a single gesture on a plate was the right direction for the future of cooking, that one properly sliced 1 Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory tomato was a higher accomplishment than a tomato confit, (New York: Continuum, 1990), p. 119. that to get the single gesture right was harder than to 2 Adam Gopnik, “Two Cooks,” The New Yorker, 5 September 2005, p. 95. make a set of gestures on a plate.”4 Need we revisit Joseph 3 Ibid., p. 96. Delteil’s La cuisine paléolithique, where the author offers 4 Ibid. only fourteen recipes, “just for one week, but all the weeks 5 Joseph Delteil, La cuisine paléolithique (Paris & Montpellier: Arléa & Presses du of the world resemble each other, and here is a breviary for Languedoc, 1990), p. 19. 6 Having spent many a summer evening last year relishing the miniature heirloom toma- your entire life.”?5 We might extrapolate and suggest that, in this contemporary Eden, a bite into a perfectly ripe heirloom toes from Makinajian Farms near where I live on Long Island, I can attest to their great culinary, historical, and nostalgic interest. In terms of issues of freshness and quality, most tomato just off the vine be the summit of haute cuisine?6 The other world in question is that of Krings, whose vegetables are best if eaten immediately after being picked. The joke about corn is that a famed and marvelous children’s tales feature forty-some- pot of boiling water should be brought to the field, and the corn plunged into it by bending over the stalk. odd enchanting insect personages, including a firefly, louse, 7 Antoon Krings & Alain Passard, Les recettes des Drôles de Petites Bêtes (Paris: spider, bumblebee, slug, and mosquito: Carole la Luciole, Gallimard Jeunesse / Giboulées, 2005), p. 37. Lulu le Pou, Chloé l’Araignée, Léon le Bourdon, Grace la 8 Ibid., p. 61. Limace, Frédéric le Moustique ….7 While gardens are often 9 Charles Addams, Half-Baked Cookbook (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), p. 51. experienced as imaginary, closed, utopian worlds, eminently analyzable according to the ontologies of fictive “small worlds” (as linguistic philosophers would call such limited but rich imaginative spaces), it is rare to analyze either cook- books or children’s books from that perspective. However, both genres reveal, in their own manner, true interpretations of our world: cookbooks by proffering, discretely yet dis- tinctly, albeit often unconsciously, an aesthetic and an ethic; and children’s books by offering an emblematic and con- densed version of the broader world, so brilliantly analyzed in Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment. In the inter- view with Passard and Krings that closes their book, Chantal Thomas touches upon the essential dynamism that connects their two worlds, culinary and literary, real and imaginary: “One of the great novelties of this book is that it introduces fire into the garden of the Drôles de Petites Bêtes.”8 And, knowing full well Passard’s passion for huge, archaic fire- places as the archetype of the culinary stage, Krings makes a slight correction: “A fire and a chef.” Here, in an intuition that would have pleased the Bachelard of The Psychoanalysis of Fire, is revealed the secret of a Promethean imperative, such that both worlds are greatly enriched: that of the chef by an active reflection on the childhood origins of taste; and that of the artist through consideration of the adult world of gastronomic invention. But even more intriguing is the ontological conundrum posed by the book, that of a real fire in an imaginary garden, around which carouse beasts opposite: Illustration by Antoon Krings, from Les recettes des Drôles de Petites both real and imaginary. This hybrid genre recalls the radical Bêtes, 2005. The drawing of Léon the Bumblebee accompanies a recipe for a aesthetic possibility that so fascinated certain early theorists corn and popcorn soup consisting of canned corn warmed on butter to which is of cinema such as Marcel Gromaire: the technique of utiliz- added milk, cream, and salt, and then finished with caramelized popcorn. One ing both photography and drawing in the same film, might wish to note the visual relation between the popcorn and the form of 17 a device so brilliantly materialized in, for example, Léon, the very image of the satisfied gourmand. Courtesy Gallimard Jeunesse. MAIN
18 bodies at rest In 1929, the Soviet authorities announced a competition Tony Wood to design a garden suburb outside Moscow, where workers could be sent to recuperate from the strains of factory labor. In 1928, the USSR implemented its First Five-Year Plan, a The “Green City” was to house 100,000 workers at a time, program of forced-pace industrialization that brought about and provide a range of recreational and cultural activities. a frenzy of construction, mass migration, and propaganda. Many of Russia’s architects and planners, long preoccupied Posters announced ever more dizzying production statistics, with questions of how socialist communities could avoid more staggering work quotas being fulfilled. But this all came the defects of the capitalist metropolis—dirt, overcrowding, at considerable cost to the laboring population: the working exploitation, alienation—seized the opportunity to project day had also been extended that year, rationing was intro- their ideal visions. Among the strangest of the schemes put duced in 1929, and living conditions remained for the most part poor, overcrowded, and unsanitary. The shock-troops of above: Melnikov’s scheme for the 1929 “Green City” competition. The plan is Communism were edging perilously close to physical divided into six sectors: forest, farmland, garden, zoo, nursery, and—in the “pie- 19 and mental exhaustion: what they needed was rest. slice”—his laboratory of sleep. Courtesy Melnikov Family Archive. forward, however, was one by Konstantin Melnikov, who unflinching faith in technology that place it squarely in the had won worldwide renown for the bold geometry of his territory of 1920s Russia, a period rife with utopian schemes USSR pavilion at the International Exhibition of the and futurological speculation; it also has dystopian echoes, Decorative Arts in Paris in 1925. Along with large tracts of calling to mind the benumbed citizens of Huxley’s Brave parkland in which workers could commune with nature, New World or of Zamiatin’s We. Melnikov also envisaged electric trains to shuttle them The fantasy was not, however, particular to the com- across the city, and designed light and airy rooms in which munist world—as Melnikov’s project itself illustrates. The they could unwind. The crucial component of the proletari- immediate inspiration was in fact American: Melnikov had at’s stay in the Green City, however, was not how they filled read about cadets being taught languages while asleep at their waking hours, but how they slept. the US Naval Air School at Pensacola, Florida. It was also in “Without sleep,” Melnikov argued, “fresh air will do America that his ideas were first put into practice: though little for our health.” He devised a building in which hun- none of the Green City schemes was ever built, Melnikov’s dreds of workers could partake of its benefits at the same did attract the attention of Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel, a New time. Named “Sonata of Sleep”—a pun on son, the Russian York showman who visited Russia in 1931 gathering ideas word for sleep or dream—the building consisted of two large for the Radio City Music Hall that he and John D. Rockefeller dormitories either side of a central block containing wash- proposed to build. The control booths, it seemed, were just rooms. The dormitories had sloping floors, to obviate the the thing: “Within months, [Rothafel’s] publicity department need for pillows, and the beds were to be built-in “like labo- was bombarding the American public with the Melnikovian ratory tables,” in the words of Frederick Starr, author of the claim that ‘two hours in the washed, ionized, ozoned, ultra- standard monograph on Melnikov. Starr goes on to describe solarized air [of Radio City Music Hall] are worth a month in the further pains Melnikov took over the ambiance: the country.’”2 While Rothafel’s enthusiasm stemmed from a desire At either end of the long buildings were to be situated to manipulate consumers, Melnikov’s original impulse had control booths, where technicians would command instru- been much more far-reaching. For the Green City project ments to regulate the temperature, humidity, and air pressure, contains at its center a structure whose ambitions, though as well as to waft salubrious scents and “rarefied condensed ill-defined in their particulars, were resonantly clear: the air” through the halls. Nor would sound be left unorganized. Institute for Changing the Form of Man. Melnikov was not Specialists working “according to scientific facts” would alone in this dream of transcending man’s corporeal limits. transmit from the control centre a range of sounds gauged In the mid-1920s, Dziga Vertov proclaimed the superiority of to intensify the process of slumber. The rustle of leaves, the the “Kino-eye” over human vision, while actors in Vsevolod cooing of nightingales, or the soft murmur of waves would Meyerhold’s theater evoked the rhythms of machinery in instantly relax the most overwrought veteran of the metropo- their “biomechanical” movements. In the new world being lis. Should these fail, the mechanized beds would then begin created by Soviet power, it surely would not be possible for gently to rock until consciousness was lost.1 people themselves to remain the same. Communism, then, was to be not simply a shift in property relations, but a The fantasy of control over the entire sensory experi- frontal assault on the confines of human nature. ence shows, as Starr puts it, “how fine is the line between Even the ultimate boundary of life was not immune benevolent fantasy and sinister Prometheanism.” Melnikov’s to attack. Among the many esoteric currents that flowed technologized sleep-cure combines an emphasis into twentieth-century Russian modernism, the ideas of 20 on the collective, a bold visionary element, and an Nikolai Fedorov stand out both for their eccentricity and their degree of influence. A librarian by profession, Fedo- which the human body would rest in dust-free purity and be rov insisted at the close of the nineteenth century that the restored by the effects of fresh air.” Starr observes that these ultimate goal of human progress was to overcome mortal- beds “resembled nothing so much as biers.”9 ity and, through scientific advance, physically resurrect For Melnikov, there does seem to have been something the dead. Well into the 1920s, a small but energetic group distinctly otherworldly about sleep: having calculated that continued to propound his ideas, and the theme of resurrec- man spends a third of his life asleep, he referred in his pro- tion recurs in Soviet literature, notably in the work of Andrei spectus for the Sonata of Sleep to: Platonov. Such thinking even gained a foothold in official circles: in 1921, Leonid Krasin, the Commissar of Foreign twenty years of lying down without consciousness, with- Trade, wrote, “I am certain the time will come when one will out guidance as one journeys into the sphere of mysterious be able to use the elements of a person’s life to recreate the worlds to touch the unexplored depths of the sources of cura- person … [and] resurrect great historical figures.”3 tive sacraments, and perhaps of miracles. Yes, everything is
Krasin is in fact responsible for arguably the most vis- possible, even miracles.10 ible legacy of Fedorov’s ideas, which stands in Red Square. In February 1924, Krasin was put in charge of the effort to Sadly for Melnikov, very little proved possible after the mid- preserve the body of Lenin, who died on 25 January. Scien- 1930s, when the Union of Architects was brought to heel tists worked feverishly to devise an embalming method that by a new generation eager to stamp out unorthodox talents would prevent Lenin’s body from decaying: simple refrigera- such as his. Starved of work and completely isolated, Mel- tion had actually accelerated the deterioration, so after much nikov completed no more buildings before his death in 1974. argument it was agreed to “balsamize” the Leader in a liquid The rest of his career unfolded solely on paper, while all containing glycerin and potassium acetate.4 Krasin, mean- around him the eclectic architecture of Stalinism was taking while, organized the construction of a mausoleum in which on ever more monumental form. it could be displayed permanently—or, perhaps, until sci- It would be a mistake, however, to think that Melnikov ence permitted revivification. A range of proposals were put entirely abstained from the Socialist Realist idiom form- forward for the tomb, ranging from the outlandish (a giant ing around him. Among his unbuilt projects from the early screw with two nuts) to the minimal (Kasimir Malevich sug- 1930s are a number that adopt the delirious scale and over- gested a cube), before the Party eventually settled on a stone bearing symbolism of his more successful contemporaries. version of the temporary wooden ziggurat that had been put Indeed, his 1934 designs for the Commissariat of Heavy up immediately after Lenin’s death. Industry are as fantastical as anything Stalin approved, if not The competition to design the sarcophagus was won by more so: an M-shaped building, made of two V’s for the two none other than Melnikov, whom Starr convincingly portrays Five-Year Plans thus far fulfilled, towers over Red Square, as much influenced by Fedorov’s ideas. In an oblique antici- dwarfing a passing plane; two giant stairways fan out from pation of his Sonata of Sleep, Melnikov described the glass the building’s center, at the end of which pedestrians pass that would encase the late Ulyanov as “crystal with a radiant through portals in the shape of outsize roller bearings. play of interior light, alluding to the tale of the sleeping Tsar- The gargantuan proportions and literalized imagery have evna.”5 There were further, coincidental portents of things something of dream logic about them, as if Melnikov had to come: Melnikov was hard pushed to meet the deadline recombined industrial iconography into a series of spatial Krasin had imposed, and when the work was completed, adventures. “due to his utter exhaustion” he had to accept Krasin’s con- Melnikov’s trajectory, from the no-frills wooden market gratulations “while asleep in his chair.”6 booths with which he began his career to a delirium of Sleep and death were also subliminally intertwined in gigantic stairways and roller bearings, seems to parallel the house Melnikov built for himself in Moscow in 1927-29, the overall progression of Soviet architecture from austere and which has been the object of a legal wrangle between geometry to florid monumentalism. The pivot of this transfor- his heirs, the Russian state, and a property tycoon.7 Accord- mation would lie in the late 1920s, at precisely the moment ing to Melnikov’s son, who died in February 2006, the entire when Melnikov was devising his Sonata of Sleep. One might family slept in the same room—anticipating Melnikov’s col- be tempted to take this coincidence as somehow expressing lective sleep-cure—the parents separated from the children a deeper metaphorical truth—that Stalinism was a form of only by partition walls cutting diagonally across one of the sleep into which Soviet society was forcibly lulled. building’s two cylindrical volumes. While the rest of the The model for this would be Walter Benjamin’s ideas house was bathed in natural light from numerous hexagonal about nineteeenth-century Paris, whose architecture he saw windows, the bedroom had an additional source of illumina- as the expression of an ensemble of shared myths that might tion: the walls, floor, and ceiling were originally painted gold, be likened to a collective dream. Capitalism, for Benjamin, and the bed linen was the same color. “When we woke up in was “a natural phenomenon with which a new dream-filled the morning,” as Melnikov’s son put it, “we felt as if we were floating in thick golden air.”8 The beds themselves were built opposite: Model of the “Sonata of Sleep.” Courtesy Melnikov Family Archive. into the floor—as would be those in the Sonata of overleaf: The gilt communal bedroom in the Melnikov House, painted in 1932 21 Sleep—and took the form of “stone pedestals on by the architect’s son, Victor Melnikov. sleep came over Europe, and, through it, a reactivation of One could even imagine an Arcades Project for Stalin’s mythic forces.”11 Elsewhere Benjamin spoke of World War I Moscow, cataloguing the city’s phantasmagoria of pilasters as a convulsion taking hold of the body politic: and plasterwork, the modern catacombs of the Metro, even the Exhibition of National Economic Achievements, a kitsch In the nights of annihilation of the last war the frame of theme park which Fellini once described as “the hallucina- mankind was shaken by a feeling that resembled the bliss of tion of a drunken pastry chef.” Such an undertaking, the epileptic. And the revolts that followed it were the first however, would be largely shorn of the hope underpinning attempt of mankind to bring the new body under its control. Benjamin’s uncompleted labors—that full consciousness lay The power of the proletariat is the measure of its convales- on the other side of the dream. For Russians have awoken cence.12 from one dream only to plunge into another, the market- based liberal capitalism of Putin’s “managed democracy.” In this metaphoric scheme, then, capitalism is sleep Far from sharing Melnikov’s enthusiasm for the curative and revolution the onset of lucidity following a traumatic powers of sleep, their sentiments now might be closer to awakening. those expressed by Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses: “History … In revolutionary Russia, however, the sequence went is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” into reverse: capitalism was overthrown only to be replaced with a bureaucratic dictatorship that produced buildings 1 S. Frederick Starr, Melnikov: Solo Architect in a Mass Society (Princeton: Princeton and images every bit as dream-filled as the arcades of University Press, 1978), p. 179. Paris. Socialist Realism has often been dismissed simply as 2 Starr, Melnikov, op. cit., p. 181. totalitarian kitsch or an aesthetic regression. But if we were 3 Quoted in Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass to apply to it Benjamin’s conception of architecture as col- Utopia in East and West (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), p. 76. lective dream, we could see the 1920s, when transparency 4 See Ilya Zbarsky and Samuel Hutchinson, Lenin’s Embalmers (London: Harvill Press, of function and clean lines were dominant, as a moment of 1998), p. 25. wakefulness, a shaking off of the illusions of the old regime 5 Quoted in Starr, Melnikov, op. cit., p. 81. in favor of a sober, geometric world devoid of ambiguities. 6 Starr, Melnikov, op. cit., p. 83. The subsequent turn towards pseudo-classical forms in 7 See Christopher Mason, “In Moscow, a Battle for a Modernist Landmark,”The New York the 1930s, and the arrival of an eclectic, overblown style Times, 17 August 2006. 8 Aleksandra Shatskikh, “A House without Right Angles,” Artnews, October 2005. laden with symbols—hammers, sickles, wheatsheaves, 9 Starr, Melnikov, op. cit., pp. 123–4, 252. stars—marks the onset of another dream-state, in which 10 Quoted in Starr, Melnikov, op. cit., p. 177. buildings once more condense the collective’s experience 11 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1999), p. into architectonic form, much as the individual’s 391. mind reconfigures the day’s events into dreams. 22 12 Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings (London: Verso 1979), p. 104. Dead Troops Salute Louis Kaplan
Almost a century ago and without the aid of any pixel-gener- ating computer software, the itinerant photographer Arthur Mole (1889-1983) used his 11 x 14-inch view camera to stage a series of extraordinary mass photographic spectacles that choreographed living bodies into symbolic formations of religious and national community. In these mass ornaments, thousands of military troops and other groups were arranged artfully to form American patriotic symbols, emblems, and military insignia visible from a bird’s eye perspective. During World War I, these military formations came to serve as ral- lying points to support American involvement in the war and to ward off isolationist tendencies. Arthur Mole’s formative religious ties in part explain what drew him to this spectacular type of photographic activity. Born in England, Mole immigrated to the United States at age twelve because his family followed the teachings of Dr. John Alexander Dowie, a Scottish-born Christian communal utopian who had established the city
23 of Zion, Illinois, in 1901 in answer to the call of “Salvation, totality to a degree. To call this image a portrait would be Holy Living, and Divine Healing.” If Dowie is credited with misleading because the subject of the representation is not converting Arthur Mole to his way of Christian living, then so much the countenance of Woodrow Wilson as what he Mole is responsible for converting Dowie into a living represents and symbolizes. As a literal figurehead, Wilson portrait in one of his first large-scale group productions. represents the paternal function of the Fatherland, includ- In this singular image, Mole’s mise-en-scène provides the ing the power that accrues to the Presidential office and to faith-healer with a nimbus in the shape of the circular walk- the commander of the armed forces. Wilson has signed the ing path of Zion Park. image with the personal salutation “Sincerely Yours,” the The Moles arrived in 1901, around the time when Zion’s flourish of this personal “signature effect” working to mask Christian Catholic Tabernacle—able to seat a Mole-like crowd the status of Wilson as the impersonal representative of the of up to 10,000 people—was being built. The church was American symbolic order. where Mole met John Thomas, the director of the choir, and The most intriguing thing about these images is that later Mole’s choreographic collaborator. Thomas’s white- Mole called them “living photographs.” From the photog- robed choirboys and the church congregation provided a rapher’s perspective, the emblems are brought to life by readymade resource for the many religious bodies required means of the living soldiers who embody them. But one to stage the first group portraits. Mole and Thomas would can also look at these images from the opposite perspec- later return to their hometown in July 1920 to compose tive: we deaden the human beings into form and formation The Zion Shield. This image, in which the ranks have closed by making them into emblems. The emblem only comes around the sword and shield of an emblematic warrior figure into focus when the living element drops out of the group constituted out of the religious faithful, foregrounds the portrait in these spectacular optical illusions. This total sub- militant and militaristic impulse embedded in this photo- jection of the individual to the symbolic order also exposes practice, emerging as it does from a religious community the fascistic tendency inherent in such images. Mole’s grounded in fighting spirit and missionary zealotry. “living photographs” thinly disguise the forces of death that It was a short step from a militaristic image in the in fact adhere to all community. service of the Christian communal to spectacular images In The Inoperative Community, the French philosopher such as Human U.S. Shield, Living American Flag, and Living Jean-Luc Nancy designates World War I as a turning point Statue of Liberty, each using the American military to affirm in the thinking of community in Western societies, as a time the bonds of national community. Mole and Thomas would when the meaning of community became inscribed in terms spend a week or more on preparations for each photograph. of the “community of death.” From this perspective, Mole’s This began by tracing the desired image on a ground-glass images are realized at a critical historical juncture. His living plate mounted on Mole’s camera. Using a megaphone, body photographs expose this community of death and seek to language, and a long pole with a white flag tied to the end to make meaning out of it via patriotism’s proud symbols and point to the more remote areas where the bulk of the troops grand gestures. But Nancy also suggests that there is some- had to be stationed, Mole would then position his helpers on thing absurd in this enterprise—of constructing meaning out the field as they nailed the pattern to the ground with miles of death, out of that which delimits the death of meaning. of lace edging. In this way, Mole also figured out the exact Arthur Mole’s living photographs remain compelling records number of troops required. These steps were preliminary to of this paradoxical enterprise. the many hours required to assemble and position the troops on the day of shooting. For The Human Liberty Bell, Mole and Thomas traveled to Camp Dix, New Jersey (not far from the City of Brotherly Love), to assemble 25,000 troops in the shape of this national icon. The photo stages the Liberty Bell replete with its famous crack to increase its mimetic likeness and symbolic power. The human inscription of the word “LIBERTY” at the top of the bell signals an advance over the cue cards used in earlier images, such as the Zion Shield. Given that this patriotic symbol is composed of troops, the image delivers the platitude that American military involve- ment is always undertaken in defense of liberty. Living Portrait of President Woodrow Wilson, for which 21,000 troops assembled at Camp Sherman in Chillicothe, Ohio, in 1918, is the best-known of Mole’s photographs. The image is characteristic of Mole’s work in that it wavers between the compositional effect of the whole (i.e. a por- previous: Arthur Mole, The Zion Shield, 1920. All images courtesy Chicago trait of Woodrow Wilson) and the desire to focus upon the Historical Society. obscured individuals who constitute the image, opposite: Arthur Mole & John Thomas, The Human Liberty Bell, 1918. 25 thereby undermining the optical illusion of the overleaf: Arthur Mole, Living Portrait of President Woodrow Wilson, 1919.
Menger’s Spongiform Encephalopathy: It’s a pretty quixotic project: How did you come to be doing An Interview with Jeannine Mosely this? Margaret Wertheim I’ve been doing origami most of my life. And in the 1980s, Menger’s Sponge—named for its inventor Karl Menger and I got interested in modular origami, where you make lots of sometimes wrongly called Sierpinski’s Sponge—was the units that are all the same, called “modules,” and link them first three-dimensional fractal that mathematicians became together to make something bigger and more complicated. aware of. In 1995, Dr. Jeannine Mosely, a software engineer, I had learned a traditional modular design—an interesting set out to build a level three Menger Sponge from business little design for making cubes—and I showed it to a lot of cards. After nine years of effort, involving hundreds of origa- people and they said, “Oh, that’s cute.” But then one day, I mists all over America, the Business Card Menger Sponge realized it was possible to link the cubes together and so you was completed. The resulting object is comprised of 66,048 could go from having a module to a meta-module that can cards folded into 8,000 interlinked sub-cubes, with the entire be linked to make even larger structures. I began to think surface paneled to reveal the level one and level two fractal about what kinds of shapes I could build with those mod- iterations. The classical Menger Sponge is constructed in ules—what would be interesting to make with a lot of these three dimensions, but analogous objects can be embodied cubes? I’d also been interested in fractals and I thought in any number of higher dimensions, and, according to theo- about the Menger Sponge, and I thought it might be fun to ries of loop quantum gravity, the structure of spacetime may try to make one out of those cubes. be allied with this foam-like form. As one of the pioneers in the emerging field of com- How would you describe this particular fractal? putational origami, Mosely is an expert on the subfields of business card origami and minimalist origami, in which one There are two ways of thinking about it: one of them is is restricted to no more than four folds. She also conducts additive and the other is subtractive. In the subtractive research on curved crease origami, exploring the poten- model, you start with a cube and let’s imagine that you tialities of non-linear foldings. Moseley was trained as an sub-divide it into a block of twenty-seven smaller cubes. electrical engineer at MIT and has worked in the computer- That is, you divide the original cube into thirds in each aided design (CAD) industry writing three-dimensional direction, so it becomes a block of three by three by three modeling software. In August 2006, the Business Card little cubes. You then remove the little cube at the center Menger Sponge was exhibited by the Institute For Figuring of each face and also the one in the center of the whole at Machine Project gallery in Los Angeles. IFF Director and
exhibition curator, Margaret Wertheim, talked with above, left to right: Level one, level two, and level three Menger sponges. 27 Mosely on the eve of the show. Courtesy Jeannine Mosely. block, so that you are taking away seven of the little cubes, the area, or in three dimensions to find out volume. But with leaving twenty in place. What you are left with is some- objects like the Cantor Set and the Menger Sponge, with lots thing that looks like your starting cube with a square hole of infinitesimal pieces, it’s difficult to measure them. They drilled through each major axis, and so it creates an open have strange properties, and when mathematicians tried to framework. That’s what I call a level one Sponge. You can measure them, they discovered some interesting things. repeat this whole process with each of the twenty remaining cubes. At the end of that you’ll be left with 400 even smaller One of the strange properties is that fractals don’t have a cubes, to get what I call a level two Sponge. Repeating that discrete dimensionality—that is to say, they are not clearly process again, you go to 8,000 even tinier cubes. If you one-dimensional or two-dimensional or three-dimensional, keep on drilling down and down, you get to these smaller like most objects we are familiar with, but have something in and smaller units until there is essentially nothing left—and between. What does it mean to have a fractional dimension? that’s the Menger Sponge. The other way of looking at it—which is how I actually In some sense, a Menger Sponge is a three-dimensional built my Sponge—is the additive view. Here you start with object. Clearly it exists in a three-dimensional space. But twenty small cubes and build them up to a structure that when you try to measure its volume, it turns out that it has looks like the cube I described above with the square holes no volume at all so it can’t be a fully three-dimensional thing. drilled in it. It’s got eight of the little cubes in each of the This is a difficult concept to explain. One way of understand- corners and twelve along the edges connecting the ing it goes like this: suppose we draw a line and we measure corners—that’s a level one. You make twenty of these level it with a ruler and it’s one foot long. Suppose now that we ones and connect them together in the same pattern to expand our line by a factor of three—so we have a line that make a level two (that’s 400 of the smallest cube units). is three feet long. Imagine now that we draw a square with Then, to make a level three Sponge, you make twenty level each side being one foot, so it has an area that’s one square twos and link them together, so now you have twenty by foot. If we expand the square by a factor of three so that twenty by twenty cubes. If you can keep on going, it just we have a square that measures three feet on each side, grows and grows. it has an area of nine square feet—that’s three squared. Imagine now that we draw a cube, whose sides are each What are the properties that make something like this a one foot. This time, if we expand in all directions by a fac- fractal? tor of three, we get a volume that is twenty-seven cubic feet—that’s three cubed. From this, we discovered that with There isn’t a strict mathematical definition, but there are a the line, its measure increased by three to the first power; number of properties fractals share. One of them is that it with the square, its measure grew by three to the power should be self-similar. What this means is that when you of two, because the square is two-dimensional; and when zoom in on one little spot, it should look exactly like the we expanded our cube, it grew by a factor of three cubed, larger structure of the whole thing. A good simple example because it’s a three-dimensional object. But if you look at the of a fractal is the Cantor Set, which is a famous mathemati- Menger Sponge, what you see is that each time you expand cal object that’s closely related to the Menger Sponge. it by a factor of three, its volume only goes up by a factor of It’s named after the mathematician Georg Cantor, who twenty—not by twenty-seven, as we would expect with a discovered it—but here instead of starting with a cube and normal cube. So we can define a kind of fractional dimen- subtracting little cubes, you start with a line segment and sion here which is more than two but not quite three. remove the center third of it. Then you keep on removing In fact for the Menger Sponge, its dimension is 2.7268 the center third from each of the remaining two pieces, (there’s actually an infinite number of decimal places here). and so on and so on. The resulting form is a type of “fractal dust,” and no matter how closely you look at it, every little The Sponge has no volume, so in some sense it is actually a part of it exactly mimics the whole structure. It’s actually a linear object. Menger proved that it is the “universal curve,” one-dimensional version of the Menger Sponge. which means that all possible curves are embedded in it. So does that mean my name is written somewhere in there? Historically speaking, fractals were a radical mathematical concept that was only understood in the very late nineteenth I’ve never really thought about that, but I guess that’s right. and early twentieth centuries. What was so important about the discovery of these objects? I’d like to come back to how you built your Sponge. Why did you decide to make it out of business cards? Well, it led mathematicians to questions about the concept of measure. There’s an entire theory called Measure Theory, The design for the basic cube module I used is pretty old. related to measuring things. How big is something? We all When I learned how to make it, someone suggested I use have a kind of intuitive understanding of measuring things— playing cards. But, I didn’t have any playing cards I wanted you can plot a ruler to see how long something is 28 or you can use a ruler in two dimensions to find out opposite: Jeannine Mosely’s level three Menger Sponge. Photo Al Herrmann. to ruin and I looked around my desk and saw a box of old a cube and stacked one-pound weights on it, to see how business cards I wasn’t using. So I started folding with them. much weight a cube could bear before it collapsed. It turns After I had been folding for a while, I came up with my own out that a box of standard American business cards weighs designs, not just for a cube, but a great many other things, about a pound (roughly half a kilogram) and, surprisingly, and so people kept giving me their old business cards. a business card cube can carry close to a ten-pound load. Then the company I worked for changed its name and I got I calculated the number of cards I needed and I determined everyone’s old business cards. I began to have a ridiculous that a level three business card Sponge would weigh 160 amount of cards laying about—around 50,000—and people pounds. That is distributed over 8,000 cubes. Some cubes were teasing me about what I was going to do with all these bear a heavier load than others, but none of them was going business cards. So I made a little joke that maybe I’d make to bear a load of more than a couple of pounds, so I was a big Menger Sponge—a level three Menger Sponge. I was pretty sure it was going to hold up under its own weight. really kind of kidding at first. I didn’t know if it would be Another calculation that was important was how big possible, because I didn’t know how long it would take and would this thing be? American business cards measure I didn’t know if it could bear its own weight. And so these 2 x 3.5 inches, so when you make a cube out of them, the were questions I had to answer before I could even proceed cubes are 2 inches on each side. A level one Sponge is three with the project. by three by three cubes, so it’s only six inches on each side. A level two Sponge is three times as big, so it’s eighteen You’re an engineer. Once you had the idea, did you sit down inches on each side. A level three Sponge is fifty-four inches and do a lot of calculations about whether it was possible on a side—though not outrageous, that’s getting pretty and what it might take? big. It was apparent that it was not going to fit through a doorway and that was a problem, because either I needed Oh yes. I had conversations on the Internet with friends who a space where I could build it and it could stay there per- were also origamists and I did a lot of calculations. I also manently, or I needed to find a way to build it in pieces so it did some early structural tests. One thing was that I made could be moved from place to place. -BZPOFCVTJOFTTDBSE 'PMEUIFGMBQTEPXO 4FQBSBUFUIFDBSET "TTFNCMFUIFDBSETTPBMM BDSPTTBOPUIFS DFOUFSFEBOE .BLFTJYGPSFBDIDVCF UIFGMBQTBSFPOUIFPVUTJEF BUSJHIUBOHMFTUPUIFGJSTU
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:PVDBODPWFSUIFFYQPTFEGMBQTXJUIFYUSBDBSET That’s the option you chose. And that required a whole other I worked on this project for close to ten years, and, set of logistical challenges about how to decompose it into frankly, one of the reasons it took so long was because it pieces that could easily be moved and assembled. Can you was a community project. If I’d decided to build it alone in tell us about that process? my garage, I could have built it much quicker!
At first glance, it seems that the obvious thing to do would Now you’ve built a level three Sponge, would you consider just be to build 400 level one Sponges or twenty level two doing a level four? Sponges and then link them together. But it turns out that won’t work. The way you link the individual little cubes I’ve thought quite a bit about the level four Sponge and there together is that each cube has flaps on its surface that have are a number of technical problems. If I were to try to make to be hooked under the flaps of adjacent cubes. When you one, it would need more than a million business cards and it take two level one Sponges and try to link them together, would measure fourteen feet on each side. But the biggest you would need to be able to get at all these flaps and it problem with a level four Sponge is that it would weigh a ton isn’t possible mechanically. So you just can’t build a bunch and a half and it probably would not support its own weight. of smaller Sponges and link them together. Instead, I had I’ve done the calculations and the load on the cubes in the to come up with a whole different way of decomposing the middle plane would be too great. Sponge into subunits that I call Tripods. These can then be assembled together into groups that can in turn be assem- So the one you’ve made is the biggest business card Sponge bled into the whole Sponge. It’s actually pretty complicated, we could hope to realize—it’s the apex of physical possibility? and working this out was one of the more tricky parts. I think so. Did you calculate all that before you started building, or did you only realize that you’d have to do this subdivision once You’ve put in many thousands of hours into this project over you got into it? almost a decade. Some people might see that as a form of madness. I worked all this out in advance. I used software to help me with some of the calculations and I made computer models Yes, I have to say it has been a long process. My husband as well. One of the reasons I did it this way was that I want- Allan is a wicked punster and he told me early on that I was ed to build it as a community project. I wanted to involve suffering from Mad Card Disease, which is known scientifi- other people and teach them about origami and fractals and cally as Menger’s Spongiform Encephalopathy! My family engineering and mathematics. So I wanted to be able to has been amazingly supportive. break it up into smaller pieces that other people could build. Because of that, it was necessary to work out the details So is it a form of madness? of exactly where every tripod would be located in the final Sponge. There are 448 tripod module groups in all, and I had I guess I would like to point out that lots of people have to give very explicit instructions to my volunteers to make done similar things—people who have woven an oriental sure that all these pieces would fit together properly. rug or a tapestry, or crocheted an afghan, or made a com- plex needlepoint project. Many people do things like this What kind of people contributed? and sometimes it’s the joy of working with your hands and sometimes it’s the joy of seeing things grow and watching I gave classes for several years at MIT in what they call the the structure unfold in front of you. The Sponge doesn’t independent activities period. I also lectured on the Sponge actually unfold, but in a way, it does. As I fold it, the interior to a group that would meet regularly at Harvard called the takes on amazing strange symmetries that only the person Philomorphs. They were a group that liked to get together who builds it really has the privilege of seeing. Then there and talk about shapes. All these people contributed cubes. I is the issue that as it grew, I also felt a responsibility to all also taught classes at origami conventions like Origami USA, the volunteers who’d contributed. If I felt discouraged and and in schools, mostly in the Boston area where I live, and in thought “Why bother?,” I’d look at it and say, “What are you Charlotte, North Carolina, in association with the South East going to do with it? Throw it out? What are you going to Origami Festival. Children and origamists in those places say to all those people who helped?” Once you start some- also contributed cubes. Then there’s a conference that’s held thing like this and you get other people involved, you have a every couple of years called the Gathering for Gardner in responsibility to finish it. And now that I have and I’ve seen honor of Martin Gardner, a very important recreational what it looks like, I’m really glad because it’s an amazing mathematician who wrote a column for Scientific American object—more amazing than I thought it would be. for many years. Some of the world’s greatest mathemati- cians attend—I taught a class there once and I collected cubes from some really brilliant minds and incorpo- 31 rated them into the Sponge as well. opposite: How to make a level one Menger Sponge out of business cards. Salt and Pepper Implicasphere
We are happy to present the second installment of the ongoing collaboration between Cabinet and the London- based Implicasphere, a unique theme-based periodical created by Cathy Haynes and Sally O’Reilly. Past topics have included Mice, Folly, and String—the Nose was the theme of the first issue to be included in Cabinet’s pages (see issue 22). Here, Implicasphere turns its attention to the most ubiquitous of seasonings—salt and pepper.
For information and to purchase back issues of Implicasphere, email [email protected] or visit
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Measure for Measure: For example, we are working with Newton’s Second An interview with Anne Chaka Law, which states that force equals mass times acceleration, Frances Richard or f = ma. You have to measure the mass, and you have to measure the acceleration. If your mass is a brass kilogram, On a wooded, 578-acre campus outside of Washington, and it’s oxidized, or somebody’s left fingerprints on it, or it D.C., the National Institute of Standards and Technology got scratched, it’ll change a little bit. Over time, somebody’s (NIST) measures what can be measured. From neutron- using a scratched one, and somebody’s using an oxidized beam experiments to the weathering patterns of sandstone one, and that leads to small differences that have an impact to forensic examination of wreckage from the World Trade on calculations and the application of those calculations. Center, NIST determines and maintains standard reference So we’re exploring a fundamental force constant, which materials (SRMs) for use in medicine, industry, engineer- consists of actually taking a strand of DNA and pulling on ing, agriculture, telecommunications, law enforcement, it. You pull and nothing happens, and then all of a sudden it and environmental conservation. SRMs are samples of doubles in length. The force required is on the order of sixty substances—from river sediment to carbon steel to human piconewtons—which is 1 x 10-12 newtons, named in honor of liver tissue—whose chemical and physical properties have Sir Isaac, of course. been analyzed according to a government-certified standard. Manufacturers use SRMs to test their own analytic methods Newtons are measures of gravitational force? and apparatus to be sure their measurements meet the stan- dards. Anne Chaka is Chief of NIST’s Physical and Chemical Of any force. Gravitational force, electromagnetic force, Properties Division. She spoke at her office with Frances positive or negative. Richard about everything from the vibrations of cesium-123 to absolute cranberry juice. So a newton is a unit used to determine how much oomph is exerted on A by B, no matter what kind of oomph it is? How did there come to be a National Institute of Standards and Technology? Right. We’re exploring, as a baseline, a DNA molecule that has a defined structure, so that at any time, anybody in the NIST was founded in 1901, to ensure, basically, that a pound world can pull on this DNA molecule and it will take the in Philadelphia was equal to a pound in New York. Then, same amount of force to double its length. in 1904, there was a terrible fire in Baltimore. Fire trucks came from communities all around, but their hose couplings It’s impossible that DNA would mutate to a different force- didn’t fit the hydrants. This alerted the federal government capacity, or that the cesium atom measuring the second to the fact that hose and hydrant couplings had to be stan- would break down? dardized. This also had to be done with railroad tracks, so that a train crossing a state border didn’t derail—because A cesium-123 atom is always going to be a cesium-123 everybody might have thought they were measuring to the atom. Period. If it breaks down, then it becomes something same gauge, but they weren’t. This was what NIST did early else. Genes can mutate, of course. But there are four letters on, and is why it belongs to the Commerce Department. in the DNA alphabet. All the richness of life comes from how But we’ve evolved, especially over the last fifty years, to we arrange those four letters in their pairs—G with C; A with focus on fundamental measurements enabling fundamental T. We are looking at how much you can reshuffle the letters, science. or mutate the DNA molecule, and still require the same force to double the molecule’s length. You were telling me, as we walked through the display of his- torical artifacts in the lobby, that there’s a movement away What you’re saying is that NIST encompasses micro- from keeping the standard, say, meter, in physical form in a measured, almost fantastical levels of precision, and then vault towards deriving constant formulae? very tangible, real-world, macro forms, like how big a pound or a kilogram is, or whether a train jumps a misaligned track. We are interested now in measurements geared to funda- mental properties of matter. So, for example, to guarantee We work on force and measurement for all relevant scales. the length of a second, rather than having a clock that So we’re experimenting on this nano-scale with the DNA ticks—that produces “a second” by mechanical reference— it’s now measured via the vibrational frequency associated opposite: A pack of Standard Reference Material cigarettes, ignition strength. with transitions of a cesium atom kept at temperatures very Cartons available through the National Institute of Standards and Technology close to absolute zero. That measure will never change, no for a bargain price of $126. Additional SRMs include Brick Clay (75 g, $282), matter what phase of the moon we’re in, or how humidity Titanium Alloy (50 g, $356), Carbon Dioxide in Air (cylinder, $1,794), Baby levels fluctuate, or according to any other external factor. Food Composite (4 x 70 g, $402), Organics in Whale Blubber (2 x 15 g, $381), You measure that frequency now, or a billion years and Peanut Butter (3 x 170 g, $545). For the full listing of available SRMs, visit 35 from now, and it will be the same.
Do agencies like the National Institutes of Health provide you with lists of things to test for?
Yes. There are regulatory standards, and research standards. For example, infant formula is the most highly regulated food on the market. That’s why we have what’s called the Baby Food Composite SRM. The Infant Formula Act was passed in 1980, so there’s been SRM formula and baby food around for many years. Then came the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1990, followed by the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994—that started the testing on the gingkos.
What’s in Baby Food Composite?
It’s a mix of meat, vegetable, and fruit. It’s all mushed into one. We also have SRM infant formula that’s milk-based. We come out with new ones every so often. We have SRM Spinach Slurry, which measures, in addition to nutritional information, trace pesticides. We have SRM Spam, supplied courtesy of the Hormel Company—other suppliers don’t want to have their brand names associated with the samples that they’ve given us. We have SRM trout. SRM beta-carotene and Square Watermelons and Leg Art photos have been transmitted digitally, and today the AP’s Jocko Weyland website posts upwards of 1,000 photographs a day. The Associated Press Photo Library serves thousands (For D.B.) of newspaper, television network, and magazine mem- bers whose editors call the library to ask for a photo that When I started working at the Associated Press in 1991, is not currently available on the AP website. Today, virtu- the organization—founded in 1848 when six New York ally all material, including a small fraction of the library’s City papers agreed to pool efforts in collecting interna- “historical” images, is available digitally. Negatives are tional news—bore little resemblance to the one that began no longer admitted to the library, though requests are still with a single office in Halifax, Nova Scotia, located there made for older negatives that have not yet been digitized. to telegraph to New York incoming news brought by ship The photographs shown here come from the bygone from Europe. In 1900, the modern AP was incorporated as era when negatives still flooded into the sixth floor of 50 a not-for-profit cooperative. Mailed photo service began in Rockefeller Center, before the AP left for its current home 1927; this was followed eight years later by wire photos, on Manhattan’s far west side in 2002. When I first started thus enabling papers to publish pictures the same day they working as a photo researcher at 50 Rock, the Library was were taken. In 1938, the AP moved into its own building at a room about 200 feet long by 60 feet wide crammed full of Rockefeller Center decorated with Isamu Noguchi’s News forty-year-old steel file cabinets, temporary cardboard files, sculpture above its entrance, and concurrently the photo miscellaneous boxes, manual and electric typewriters, pho- library was established to store negatives coming to head- tocopiers, phones, many and sundry inscrutable scraps of quarters from around the world. News photos were first transmitted by satellite in 1967 and by 1982 transmission above: The Associated Press Photo Library, 1993. Photo Jocko Weyland. by phone line was replaced by a satellite color photo opposite: Square watermelons, 1978. All photos except above courtesy AP / 38 network called Laser Photo II. Since 1996, all AP Wide World Photos. paper covered in scribbled requests, and roughly thirty mil- unwanted cast-offs, and that’s when the Library really got lion negatives and prints. The floor literally sagged from the interesting. Delving deeper into the dusty cardboard Oxford weight of the file cabinets that stood a little under six feet files with their faded pink labels, my first eureka moment high, with approximately ten rows stretching to the back of occurred when I came upon a picture of a woman holding the room, each row about twenty-five feet long emanating two square watermelons. The photo was odd, intriguing, from a central aisle. On one side were “Personality” files a little unsettling, and also funny. I don’t remember how and on the other were “Subjects.” In the back were boxes of or why I stumbled onto the “Fruits: Watermelons” file, but discarded film, the “Old Color” files (separated from the rest when I found that picture, the Library took on a whole new before papers were printed in color), and an anteroom over- meaning and was transformed into an unfathomably deep flowing with millions of images from World War II and other well of eccentric people and outmoded ideas. I was hooked, twentieth-century conflicts. and ended up spending much of the next five years mining During that diluvian age before email, the phones would those chemically odiferous files for pictures that, for pure ring, sometimes off the hook like a clichéd scene of a busy visual thrill, might match the excitement I felt when I first newsroom in the movies, and a librarian would answer. An saw those square watermelons. AP editor on a different floor or someone calling from the Honolulu Advertiser or the Des Moines Register (or Newsweek or 60 Minutes) would ask for a photograph to be transmit- ted or a print mailed to them. It could be any photo in the library, and the requests ran the gamut from the comically ludicrous and/or vague (“Do you have any actual negatives from the Revolutionary War?” or “A nice scene setter, like maybe someone in a canoe on a lake in the spring”) to the exactingly precise. In the latter case, the editor had a subject or a name, a date, a trans-reference number (such as LA102 of 10/21/1988, which denoted the second color photo sent out by the Los Angeles Bureau on that particular date), and maybe a photographer’s name. My job as a librarian was to find those photos, often in little or no time. (“When’s your deadline?” “Yesterday!”) Considering the multiple possibili- ties of human error, unreliability, misinformation, theft, loss, misplacement, or the negative being in someone else’s possession at that instant, it borders on the miraculous that eight times out of ten the pictures were found. Since the AP is an organization devoted to the news, the majority of pictures were news photos—photojournal- ism depicting wars, crime, elections, mudslides, football games, and award ceremonies. That is, the News. When I started, I was mostly retrieving either mundane news-of- the-day photos or what could be considered the “hits”—the Iwo Jima flag raising, the girl running from the napalm strike in Vietnam, Ronald Reagan being shoved into the limou- sine after John Hinckley’s assassination attempt, Michael Jordan flying through the air to dunk. These “Free Birds” of news photography were pictures with an undeniable news component, broad appeal, and a literal relation to generally agreed-upon history. After a few months of working within this rather narrow spectrum, however, I discovered an entirely differ- Ostensibly, the Library was about news and his- ent layer of imagery that didn’t have much to do with the tory—Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill at Yalta, that kind of news and nobody ever requested. The members didn’t know thing. Parallel to that official “image-world,” there existed an these gems existed, and even if they did, they wouldn’t alternative picture made up of untold numbers of singular have wanted them. It started with a co-worker saying, photographs representing a less-examined outside world, “Check this out,” and showing me something that made all resting peacefully inside yellowing manila envelopes in us laugh or go, “Whoa!” Pictures resplendent with a wide the form of black-and-white negatives, mostly glorious range of “human interest”—all beguilingly esoteric, and all 4 x 5s. After 10 pm, when the phone rang less frequently, completely not newsworthy. Spurred on by these the real exploring commenced. I dove headlong into every 39 examples, I started looking for more oddities and envelope of interest, which was then sent down to the darkroom to come back the next day via dumbwaiter from might be part of my other, secret archive, that larger family two floors below as a non-archival 8 x 10 inch print. The of images that didn’t fit? A woman’s leg, standing on a bare guys in the darkroom jokingly called this “G-work” and it platform, with odd bands like watches around her calves. was understood that it didn’t pertain to regular AP business. An eldritch, disturbing picture. Then came the caption, As I started amassing these images, a photographic map which was at least half the fun. “Foot ‘Lights,’” read the emerged of what had been momentarily seized upon and headline, and an explanation: “Leg art for safety’s sake. ‘Cats then dropped from public consciousness and the generally eyes’ for pedestrians to make them visible in the headlights accepted version of history. Almost every weird, foolhardy, of automobiles and motorcycles were shown by an inventor visionary, misguided, quietly heroic, or insane manifesta- at the German Inventors’ Fair in Recklinghausen.” The pic- tion of human nature was commemorated by a photograph ture is dated “12/21/56.” Decorative jewelry-like reflectors somewhere in that room. that never really caught on, a piece of history—perhaps not Rolling open with a satisfying whoosh, the solid over- significant, but who’s to judge?—gone missing. stuffed drawers would reveal upright cardboard files whose “To possess the fundamental curiosity of the real condition ranged from crispy brand new to disintegrating explorer, who does not necessarily want to arrive at some scraps. “Schauffler, Jr; William G. Col. Airforce D E A D goal but who is driven on and on, always eager to see the 10/22/51,” for instance, on the Personality side; or, more other side of the next hill, and only infinity is the end.” The desirable and in sync with my tastes, on the Subject side: quote, from the eighteenth-century adventurer Captain “Toys: Historical,” “Models: Ships and Submarines,” or James Cook about exploring the far-off territories of the “Portugal: Industry: Misc.” There were “Hands,” “Magi- South Seas, is equally applicable to the Library, where the cians and Mind Readers,” “Brushes,” and “Monocycles.” terra incognita is composed from the forgotten fragments of Everything was broken down into a thousand, a hundred history. The examples depicted on these pages are just a tiny thousand, a million different categories, subgroups, subsets, opening on a vast universe as seen by one besotted photo and variations. There were wild unfulfilled notions that had librarian under the spell of shorthand instructors, violins been photographed in the planning, the making, the testing, fashioned from Lumarith, monocycles américains, leg art, or the aftermath; curious pursuits, causes, philosophies, and square watermelons. social issues, ideas, and adventures I had never dreamed of. Unlike most libraries, there wasn’t an official methodol- ogy, no Dewey Decimal System under which to organize these fragments. Instead, my research was governed by an accumulation of personal, unscientific categorizations devised by individual librarians that over the years had become the archive’s de facto filing, cataloging, and naming system. And therein lay the Library’s charm, a vagueness and lack of specificity perfectly appropriate to a reality full of messiness and confusion. Some of these ad hoc systems made sense and some were incomprehensible. For example, “Birds” had their own files as opposed to being included in “Animals.” “Fish” were separate too. Aren’t birds and fish animals? Why did there need to be a file for “Monocycles?” Couldn’t it have been included in the “Bicycles” file? Some seemed commonsensical, at least to me: “Storms: Hur- ricanes: Foreign: 1970” or “Movies: Props.” But “Sleep”? “Beauty Culture”? What did those mean? Pictures of people sleeping? And what, exactly, is “Beauty Culture”? I wasn’t finding out about the World exactly, but it was certainly an education in how we act and present ourselves in the world (often with a lag of several decades, since the photos I liked were mostly drawn from the period between the 1940s and the early 1960s—the Golden Age). Running my fingers over the tops of files, I would stop at one like “Inventions and Inventors.” Jackpot. I was seduced time and again by the allure of that typewritten Courier font on those brownish yellow envelopes, the cryptic handwritten date and subject heading rendered in a cursive style no longer opposite and overleaf: A sampling of photographs from the Associated Press practiced except by retired librarians in old age homes. Photo Library, with their accompanying official descriptions on the following I would hold the negative up to the fluorescent light page. 40 between thumb and forefinger: did it look like it page 43: A 1967 photograph of a miniature monocycle made in the US in 1880.
Make Model Mark Greg Jones
The subtle contours of our cars broadcast an entire set of socio-economic messages about wealth, class, and taste. What is captured and presented in this series of photo- graphs is this system of differentiation, one that is readable today by anyone living in the West. Oddly, this semiotic system operates today against a backdrop of an automotive industry that manufactures products of increasing homoge- neity, both in terms of form and color. In 2004, for example, roughly a third of all cars produced in North America, South America, Europe, and Asia were silver or gray. These colors, reminiscent of the stainless steel and the utilitarian gray paint of industrial machines, evoke the idea of utility, as in the de rigueur stainless steel kitchen appliances of luxury homes. Yet, in both cases, this gesture toward functionality remains at heart an aesthetic one. Within these theatrics of utility, the smallest differen- tiating details are imbued with ever greater meaning—the work once done by exaggerated fins and extravagant colors is now accomplished with the merest curve of metal and rubber. It is possible to imagine a genuinely utilitarian approach to designing cars in the future, but this would mean not only transcending our current consumer atti- tudes but in fact a wholesale reassessment of our modes of organization and production. To a viewer living in this hypothetical future, the images from my 2005 series “Make Model Mark” would be illegible, except as historical artifacts of a society in which such minor differences once held enormous significance.
opposite: 406 overleaf left: Lupo overleaf right: CLK320
44
Plotto’s Pharmacy and finally, “a resentful person.” “Stricken with fever in a wil- Lytle Shaw derness country,” we come to know all of the variant flavors of B-Clause 267—“Misfortune”—while pining for the elusive There is always a surprise in store for the anatomy or physi- C-Clause conclusions: emerging “happily from a serious ology of any criticism that might think it had mastered the entanglement” or, better, “foiling a guilty plotter and defeat- game, surveyed all the threads at once. ing a subtle plot.” —Jacques Derrida The infinite versions of misfortune offered by Plotto to its would-be users may have been the cause of Wycliffe In 1928, William Wallace Cook (1867–1933), author of sev- A. Hill’s attempt, three years later, to convert Plotto into a eral hundred works of fiction, published Plotto: The Master more practical how-to manual, reducing Cook’s plots down Book of All Plots, a would-be exhaustive anatomy of narrative to the rounder, more logical, thirty-one. It is no accident, structures designed as a practical guide for aspiring novel- then, that Hill chose the title Plot Robot for this new book, ists. Cook’s own plots tended to stretch verisimilitude in which “enabled its users,” as historian of science-fiction proto-science fictional displacements of time and space: The Sam Moskowitz tells us, “simply by turning a disc, to come Blue Peter Troglodyte (1904) involves an eight-foot prehistor- up with numbers in the book that comprised arbitrary plot ic man found preserved in a mine and revived; in The Eighth elements he could fit together into a total plot pattern.”1 Wonder (1907) the earth’s rotation stops; Marooned in 1492 But forget about the inevitable popularizers of the Master’s (1905) is a bleaker version of Twain’s Connecticut Yankee; work. We have not exhumed Plotto merely to inform readers and A Round Trip to the Year 2000 (1903) is an early example in 2007 that the 1928 plot manual made perhaps over-exact- of a novel imagining time travel to a future dystopian society ing demands on its users, nor to laugh at the restricted and where work is done by robot slaves. Especially fascinated oddly domestic nature of imaginable plots for Cook. No, by robots, Cook not only narrated their exploits but made we are pleased with its exuberance and incoherence. We it possible with Plotto for the narrator too to become a propose, rather, to inspect the foaming beakers, boiling kind of unconscious android, following distant narrative pots, and half-finished androids of Cook’s plot pharmacy, prescriptions and dictates. These emerge from Plotto’s where the master plot-maker cooks up an exhaustive list of Frankensteinian laboratory (or is it a pharmacy?) where combinable scenarios, dispensed to narrative-challenged Cook—with the android rationality of a master of all narra- apprentices that we might imagine in line at the counter, tive threads—first quickly scans the full panoply of human picking up their prescriptions. We will help Cook stir. We will desires and scenarios (and science fiction additions and monitor his simmering scenarios. And, if we are lucky, we amendments to both) and then reduces this “data” into a may even be able to trace one or two as they move through series of clauses that can be combined readily into narratives the extended and airless time of Cook’s own novels. and dispensed—imagine it coming out on a prescription Let us therefore try our Plotto-generated novel not with pad—to bumbling, all-too-human would-be narrators. the twitchy impatience of the blinkered novel-maker who Reducing the world to thirty-six master plots, Cook’s ventures into Cook’s netherworld hoping only to emerge hard-boiled structuralism treats each as a sentence with rapidly on the other side, workable story in hand, but rather three interchangeable clauses: “An initial Clause defining with the calm enthusiasm of an Atget of Plotto’s mysterious the protagonist in general terms, a middle Clause initiating plot cul-de-sacs, its baffling cross-reference canals, its enig- and carrying on the action, and a final Clause … terminat- matic dead-end walls. The plight of the Plotto user teaches ing the action.” Within this larger taxonomy, Cook sees plot us that we need far more than the manual’s proposed three as driven by the desire for three kinds of happiness: in love clauses to get anything close to a complete narrative. We and courtship, in married life, or in enterprise. “All that is will therefore supplement Cook’s directions. Let us begin, possible to a mortal craftsman,” Cook advises, channeling then, by selecting the natural and in a sense archetypal Ecclesiastes, “is the combining of old material into some- character within Cook’s inventory of ready-to-use narrative thing new and different.” manikins: A5—“a male criminal.” What could drive this as- Even within this tiny horizon of recycled desires, how- yet-unmoved mover, what could activate all of his criminality ever, Plotto’s user, attempting to follow Cook’s procedures into the most entertaining of scenarios? We pause on B- through a plot sentence’s three clauses, is immediately thrust into a morass of numbered plot fragments, an endless opposite: Photographs of wiseguys, originally published to accompany an inventory of floating motivations and gratuitous (or unreach- article in Cabinet no. 19. In the spirit of narrative malleability that informs able) conclusions. Parenthetical possibilities impinge on “Plotto’s Pharmacy,” we’ve stripped these ruffians of their real identities our progress, opening bureaucratic vortices of impossible and reinvented them as characters in the story of the Farmer Con. Austin, plot-strand management, while holding out the lure of dis- Thompson, Blotto, Socrates, and Wycliffe are all there, as are three unidenti- tant sentence completion—which always vanishes or folds fied cronies from Austin’s gang. Can you tell who is who? Clue: The authorities inward upon closer inspection. Like the prototypical charac- removed Wycliffe’s batteries for his muglugshot. ters offered by Plotto, the novelist-apprentice is cast in rapid Send your guesses to [email protected]. Correct entries received succession, too, as “a person of ideals,” “an erring before April 1 win a free one-year subscription. Answer will be posted online at 48 person,” “a person subjected to adverse conditions,”
Clause 46: “seeking retaliation for a grievous wrong that is above all else to become a novelist. But the members of either real or fancied.” Perfect. We’ll make him a mob boss the first gang (we’ll call their boss Austin) hook Blotto on who’d previously controlled a lucrative city block, and now methamphetamines and then force him to spend counterfeit wishes to challenge the incursion of a rival gang member bills in the fake pharmacy (controlled by a character we’ll call who has set up a “pharmacy”—in reality a cover for dealing Thompson), with the eventual plan (I think) of having these heroin and speed and running numbers behind a façade of bills discovered through a sting operation run by Austin’s respectability. cousin, a shady government inspector (we’ll call him Levon, (I’m combining a couple of categories now, but you like the murderer in The Zebra Stripes) who works at a don’t have to know that—you can’t even see the book municipal office capable of that kind of activity (don’t bother anyway; it’s rare and expensive, unavailable in most libraries. me with questions about its name). (Perhaps at the same I just happen to be borrowing a friend’s copy, let’s call him time Blotto should, on the side, be perfecting an android, Rocco, best described as A12 (“a subtle person”), who had named Wycliffe, that could either supply his drug habit set out to write a Ph.D. dissertation on speech act theory or release him from bondage to the mob, or both?) In any and crime fiction, especially J. L. Austin and Jim Thompson, case, desiring to cover the tracks of his money, the farmer which was going to be called How to Kill People with Words, pretends to view writing as an instrument of duplicity—a but after completing his preliminary examinations, which he philter of forgetfulness harmful and benumbing to the invis- might describe as an instance of B22 (“following a wrong ible interior of the soul—and conducts all of his business course through mistaken judgment”), grew disenchanted transactions by verbal agreements in person. This appears and became involved in a puzzling complication that had to to the druggist as C12 (“rescuing integrity from a serious do with an “object possessing mysterious powers” (B54), entanglement”) but is in reality B50 (“being impelled by an eventually jettisoning his speech act/crime fiction manu- unusual motive to engage in a crafty enterprise”). In lieu of script—whose critical plot itself had begun to splinter into receipts, the farmer thus has in-depth conversations about two competing directions, the first a combination of Frank- storytelling with the fraudulent Greek druggist (we’ll call furt School and Pragmatism, the second having more to do him Socrates) set up by Thompson, who initially finds this with the so-called popular address of the best rock criticism practice both hilarious and useful, since (in addition to show- (with a dash of crime fiction thrown in), so that when Rocco casing Blotto’s awkward idiolects and appealing to Socrates’ began to write, he first had to make peace between these innate human desire for narrative) it absolves the pharmacy warring tonalities—in order to concentrate on a novel to be of any record of the speed-freak farmer’s purchases. [Why, called The Zebra Stripes, which was about a murderer named you wonder, is a mob-run fake pharmacy in the habit of Levon at once A3 (“a lawless person”) and A7 (“a person of giving receipts for methamphetamines? Let’s just bracket ideals”) who sought to obtain an exhaustive collection of the that enigma with a new kind of extra solid square bracket, “work” of a particularly accomplished and famous Japanese sometimes called a Husserlian Bracket, and move on.] But tattoo artist (named Moskowitz), pursuing the epidermises then suppose that Socrates “becomes involved” (following of the artist’s subjects like pelts, though when the novel B-Clause 55) “in a mysterious complication and seeks to got bogged down in plot concerns, stemming largely from make the utmost of a bizarre experience”; Socrates notices the difficulty of reconciling the technical lexicon of tattoo that the banknotes are fake but destroys them himself in language (and its attendant asides on the philosophy of skin order to continue his heart-to-heart conversations about that update and expand Melville) with the noirish unfolding narrative with Blotto. At the same moment Blotto becomes of a series of grisly murders, Rocco became aware of “an ambivalent. He considers abandoning both his imposed important secret that called for decisive action” (B61) and scam and his side labors on Wycliffe, his android (not began patiently scoping out a series of ancient though pris- to mention the novels), and working instead as a tailor’s tine restaurants around a major city, eventually renovating dummy for a young millionaire (B1028). But before Blotto a 1920s-era ice-cream parlor into a hipster breakfast nook, can extricate himself from the hoods, gang one (which, while retaining the old-world soda-fountain charm, and under the direction of Austin, calls this sting “The Farmer introducing a candy counter with difficult-to-find sweets and Con”) brings in Levon on the scheme, tipping him off about gum, perhaps leading, this time, to one of the more positive the counterfeit bills. Levon discovers that the pharmacy that C-Clause conclusions, though I won’t predict one yet—you Blotto has been frequenting (all the while avoiding writing can certainly decide for yourselves if you ever get your as a dangerous supplement) resembles nothing so much as hands on a copy of Plotto, or meet Rocco). a favorite childhood soda fountain and becomes fascinated, But Rocco’s soda fountain should not be confused with nay entranced, with the various beakers, viles, curative the pharmacy of about the same period in the hypothetical powders (and Blotto’s android, Wycliffe, which has inexpli- Plotto novel we began before the last parenthetical interlude, cably wandered into the building) which resemble, for him, for which we’ll now need to introduce a second character: a collection of containers, confectionary substances and A4, “an erring person” (whom we’ll call Blotto), bound in manikins with all of the evocative force of a certain French B38 (“committing a grievous mistake and seeking in secret cookie famous for its latent narrative powers, though not to live down its evil results”). We’ll make Blotto an sold in Levon’s childhood soda fountain. Emerging from a 50 Amish farmer with bizarre phrasing who desires thorough examination of the contents of the pharmacy, front to back (ostensibly conducted for bills, but in reality a mne- eager as this reader was to put down A Round Trip). But we monic exercise that might generate another piece of writing) will leave them stranded now and begin our own search for Levon muses privately on the Farmer Con, focusing not so escape from the Byzantine metropolis of nested (and for- much on its moral implications, but rather on the power ever expanding) plots in which the cursed reader of Plotto is of its setting, which he locates, quite literally, “in the back fated, ever after, to pace out his days. room, in the shadows of the pharmacy, prior to the opposi- tions between conscious and unconscious, freedom and 1 Later revisions were called Plot Genie and Plot Scientific. restraint, voluntary and involuntary, speech and language.” 2 A Round Trip to the Year 2000: Or a Flight Through Time was first serialized in The This discourse (of which I include only the tiniest part) points Argosy between July and November 1903. It was then republished as a paperback in to C13, in which a searcher comes finally to the blank wall 1925. In his unpaginated introduction to the hardback reissue of the novel (Westport, CT: of enigma. And yet from behind this wall something pres- Hyperion Press, 1974), Sam Moskowitz notes that Cook was influenced by H. G. Wells’s ently begins to stir. Levon calls and there emerges a man The Time Machine and Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward. (whom we will call Genette) who, on a small blackboard that 3 “To all intents and purposes, Kinch, I was a muglug on that fatal night” (A Round Trip, had hitherto remained unnoticed, draws a long sequence of op. cit., p. 225). numbers and letters: B267 (A5 [B46] C12 (B22, A3+A7, B61, 4 “Not one of them was over five feet six in height, and they were all slender, beardless, C?), B38, [?], C12, B50, B55, [[1028]] C13]). The equation is and effeminate. They wore absurdly small hats tied under the chin with a colored ribbon” still accumulating as the narrative curtain closes. (A Round Trip, op. cit., p. 48); “When a lady becomes enamored of a man, she proceeds You see, then, how this crossed connection-making forthwith to woo him and to ‘pop the question’ just as though it was the other way ‘round.” (A Round Trip, p. 181). can, with Plotto’s help, emerge into a novel of great clarity and success—one that, moreover, allows plot-generation to take on the robotic quality that Wycliffe Hill noted in retitling Cook’s manual Plot Robot. The term robot was first used in 1920 in Karel Capek’s novel RUR—seventeen years, that is, after Cook’s A Round Trip to the Year 2000; or a Flight Through Time (1903) where what we now call robots were known as
“muglugs.”2 In Cook’s novel, a character named Lumley is chased into the future. Hounded by a detective named Kinch (who has been pursuing Lumley in order to receive a reward offered by a bank Lumley robbed while under hypnosis— that is, operating as robot, as the novel is careful to point out),3 Lumley is on the point of casting himself off a pier when a “mysterious dwarf” (Doctor Kelpie) approaches and shuffles him into his house where a time machine awaits to convey Lumley to the year 2000. But just as the machine is set to take off, Kinch breaks in and wedges himself in as well. When the two arrive in 2000, they discover not only a bummer dystopian culture (where an Air Trust controls and charges for access to oxygen, food is a tasteless vapor, men are effeminate, and, horror of horror, women hit on them)4 but also, more disturbingly, that Lumley’s utopian books The Possibilities of the Subconscious Ego (which sold 36 copies in his day) and Time and Space and their Limitations are the basis for this society. It is through them that the population controls their robots, which are “seven feet tall, apparently constructed of steel and heavily shod with brass.” And it is through them, too, that nomenclature has been reduced to an unambiguous system: “There are one billion people in the United States and her colonies, and no two of them have the same name.” (Would that Cook had sketched, too, the principles of this system in a parallel work to Plotto!) What happens in the year 2000 would take too long to narrate (and you are doubtless a little fatigued by plot summaries at this point); suffice to say that A Round Trip presents a hell of unfinished dilemmas—deployed with an oddly mechanical, combinatory flair—in which humans and androids continually change places, and the 51 time travelers are soon eager to return to 1900 (as
Paying Attention previous if still extant labor markets, the commodity being Jonathan Beller sold in capitalist media is productive power itself. Not too surprisingly, this (counter-)revolution in the With the increasing banality of globalization, a new expropriation of human “sensual labor” (Marx again) has attention to attention is emergent. Networks and film pro- a history. The gathering and organization of attention by duction companies dream up new ways to sell eyeballs mechanized, standardized media, which is visible in early, to advertisers (as industry parlance has it), internetworks though still persisting forms, including coinage, printing, reconceive themselves as the media companies that they and lithography, really becomes a thing unto itself with the are (Yahoo!, Google), and “angel” investors pour hundreds advent of cinema—the open book of the industrialization of millions into social networking platforms (MySpace, of the senses. Phenomena such as the cult of the celebrity Friendster). This is the attention economy, built upon the or the fetish for the painted masterpiece are revealing—the premise becoming conviction, becoming fact, that human celebrity is not an individual but a social relation character- attention is productive of value. How has it happened that ized by the accumulation of attention, and similarly the whether conceived of as informal workers, content provid- masterpiece accumulates the value of all of the gazes that ers, gamers, consumers, prosumers, or audiences, we, the have fallen upon it—inasmuch as they illustrate an important people of Earth, still have something that corporations want? aspect of the attention economy. The productive value of Like clean air, attention is something that once could be had the gaze accretes in the organization of social being, i.e., for free but is now being encroached upon as the next and publicity. This visual economy, the attention of spectators, perhaps final frontier. Attention is now a commodity, and a produces the value, which is to say, the fact of both the special kind of commodity at that. painted masterpiece and the media icon. From the practical That’s a theory, at least. In the realeconomik, as distinct function of cinema and allied visual technologies we may from a theoretical analysis that would correlate a radical derive a mediatic model for the extraction of surplus value— transformation of perception and the senses with histori- one in which spectators work in deterritorialized factories cally unprecedented levels of global immiseration, Seth (museums, newspapers, cinemas, televisions, computers) to Goldstein, an entrepreneur, has lucidly formalized the new produce value for media companies and those investors who relationship between attention and capitalist production have a stake in the fourth estate. The cinematic century pos- by starting an attention business that has two sides. These ited that looking could be treated as value-producing labor; sides are economically as well as dialectically linked. On the the digital age presupposes it. one side, there is the Attention Trust, dedicated, it is said Since the early 1990s, pre-internet, I have been argu- on the Trust’s website, to the protection of online users’ ing that during the last century in and as cinema and other attention. To protect our right to our own attention, the Trust media technologies, capital, that is, leveraged exchange with offers free downloadable software that tracks and records productive labor for the purpose of profit, has undergone a registered users’ web usage in order to make us aware of metamorphosis—not just imperialism or globalization, but the value we create as we move through cyberspace (as data cinematicization.1 By the last decade of the twentieth century, trail and as human time interfacing with machinery). Later, it was possible to see that Marx’s labor theory of value, in perhaps, the Trust will arrange to sell our attention for us. On which workers gave capital more labor time than they were the other side, there is Root Markets—an effort to securitize paid for (for Marx, this dissymmetrical exchange with capital attention, that is, to bundle and sell attention on secondary was the source of all profit), was being superceded not by markets. For this side of the business, Goldstein has teamed marginal utility theory (which comfortingly suggests that up with Lewis Ranieri, the principal innovator in the 1980s profit does not inhere in exploitation but from differentials of “revolution” that brought about the securitization of home supply and demand) but by what I call “the attention theory mortgages. Through the institutionalization of standardized of value.” By abstracting the assembly line form (in French, lending practices via statistical measures including income, the chaine de montage), and introjecting that form itself into debt, and credit score, securitization allowed for massive the visual realm such that spectators’ practice of connecting numbers of home loans to be bundled in large packages and a montage of images moving in front of them was not just then sold on secondary markets as low-risk securities. analogous but homologous to workers in a factory assembly Like Google’s “Adsense,” which auctions searchable line producing a commodity, cinema brought the industrial terms to the highest advertising bids, Root Markets’ busi- ness plan to securitize attention is among the emerging Pages 52, 55, and 56: All images from artist Jochem Hendricks’s “Eye Draw- strategies for the computerized parsing, bundling, and ings” series, 1992-1993. Page 52; Receipt; page 55; Nothing; page 56; Bill. re-marketing of attention—taken together, these various These apparently frenetic drawings were in fact made by Hendricks directly strategies for the capture of attention mark a significant with his eyes as he read or examined a bill, receipt, or, in one case, a blank sheet mutation in the conceptualization, character, and moneti- of paper. Hendricks tracks the movements of his eyes by wearing a special zation of what Marx called “productive” labor (labor that helmet equipped with infra-red sensors that follow the movements of each produces capital for its capitalist). The rise of the internet eye. The location of any point on which the eye rests for at least a hundredth of along with the market valuation of internet com- a second is recorded sequentially as a coordinate on the X and Y axes. These 53 panies allows us to grasp this simple fact: as with points are then connected by straight lines, each eye yielding a drawing. revolution to the eye. In an emerging interpenetration of the with a hyphen, Reality-TV, if for no other reason than the economic and the visual (in which the filmstrip became the fact that this nomenclature signals the historically achieved assembly line of the visible world), spectators “assembled” inseparability of one term from the other. Today, it is pos- the image-commodities, at once valorizing the cinema and sible to discern that media transformations not only affect producing continuously revised versions of the world and the organization of perception, production, literary form, of themselves within a matrix of industry and profit. This affect, subjective interiority, monetization, state power, the new machine-body interface known as the cinema acted built environment (down to the molecular-genetic), and directly on the imagination to harness attention as a force of war, but also that, when taken together, this thoroughgo- social production. The visible world and the Imaginary (the ing reorganization of social relations on a planetary scale unconscious) became technologically linked and constantly constitutes nothing less than a world-media system. Among retooled to create an industrial technologization of the Imagi- other things, this system signals that we have entered into a nary that today has become generalized. Moving images, the period characterized by the full incorporation of the sensual utilization of which valorizes their media as well as modifies by the economic. This incorporation of the senses along spectators, result in the continuous modification of a collec- with the dismantling of the word emerges through the visual tive, variegated operating platform that images the world and pathway as new orders of machine-body interface vis-à-vis its relations in exchange for pleasure, social “know-how,” the image. All evidence points in this direction: that in the what-have-you. Thus “the image” creates the techno-social twentieth century, capital first posited and now presupposes modifications necessary to engineer the adaptive forms of looking as productive labor, and, more generally, posited social cooperation that have become the pre-requisites for attention as productive of value. the preservation of capital and capitalist hierarchy. While the above paragraphs cram one hundred years One should emphasize that as with assembly line pro- of cinema history, political economy, and mediatic transfor- duction, in the cinema and mass media both raw materials mation into a few sentences, the following paragraphs set and worker/spectators are modified in the process of making themselves a more difficult task—to describe the present a commodity-image. People and their objects/images are situation of labor in relation to capital, of bodies in relation to modified along with everything else, from the bank accounts capitalized ambient social machinery, and to point towards of capitalists, the economic scale of production, and the some possibilities for the next ten years or so: economic, built environment, to behavior, the sensorium, and cognition cultural, aesthetic, and political. Attention has become indis- itself. Without the screen, there would be no globalization. If, pensable to production, both as a conceit and a practice. with respect to the dissolution of traditional societies under While some commentators sound cautionary notes, others the onslaught of industrialization, all that is solid once melted speak of the Goldrush. Internet theorists such as Michael into air, as The Communist Manifesto put it, in the twentieth H. Goldhaber and Georg Frank note that the competition century all that is solid melted into film … or more gener- for attention is the defining aspect of an increasing number ally, into images, television, computers. Hence, “the society of business practices. Goldhaber, while cautionary when it of the spectacle,” as Guy Debord called late capitalism, comes to issues concerning the proprietary rights to words hence “simulation,” as Jean Baudrillard characterized the being accorded to corporations and the unscrupulous hyperreality-effect of the ecstasy of communication, hence, mining of attention by email spam and the manipulation “cyberspace” and “virtual reality.” of hyper-links to alter search result hierarchies, notes the Because the increasing penetration of the image into decline of the material economy and the emergence of the life-world poses huge problems for language function a “new natural economy”—the attention economy.2 This (ultimately demoting and even short-circuiting its processes economy, it should be noted in passing, is about as natural of making the world intelligible), one could (and should) as the nature depicted in Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, link the techno-capitalist intensification of visuality to the in which every human emotion as well as all aspects of the intellectual history of discourse analysis that begins with built environment, again down to the molecular level, have linguistics, through to psychoanalysis, structuralism, semiot- passed through a media-program economy. (Think: geneti- ics, deconstruction, post-structuralism, and post-modernism cally engineered fruits, grains, vegetables, pesticides along and culminates, as it were, with the famous disappearance with the public consent to utilize them as capitalist bio- of the referent (“being”) from representation and the near- software, i.e., programming, i.e. mediation, i.e., not nature.) simultaneous decline of master narratives. These intellectual Frank has an idea of “mental capitalism” and understands movements, all really within the province demarcated by that mass media has always traded information for atten- the field of linguistics (which itself came into being with the tion. He observes a primary economy in which eyeballs are advent of cinema, very likely as a result of the suspicion that sold to advertisers, and a secondary economy that is not language was simply one medium among others), are thus directly monetized that he calls social crediting (in effect to be understood as representing various inflection points of when attention is paid to others by peers, colleagues, fans, the increasing failure of language (and therefore humanism) etc.).3 Both thinkers understand, as do I, that the emergence laboring under the intensive onslaught of visuality. of the attention economy has its origins in prior modes of Most recently we have the inflection point called “Real- economic and perceptual organization and that it marks ity TV,” which for accuracy’s sake should be written properly a monumental transformation in the production of value.
However, what drops out of these accounts both here and and that of the radically disenfranchised, who must attend to in the blogosphere which is all abuzz with attention to atten- this dissymmetrical order of representation through a con- tion, is the question of the Third World, of the Global South, tinuous and lifelong struggle for sheer survival as they make of the “planet of slums” as Mike Davis calls it, of the more their way through a life in which they count for next to noth- than 2 billion people who live on less than two dollars a day. ing. Like the more familiar relationship to the image of the Planet of slums, an apt appellation. Right about now, first-world spectator, this latter relationship too must prop- we are crossing a planetary threshold: half of the world’s erly be cast as a new form of work: just being there, staying population lives in cities. This number, more than 3.2 billion, alive to be counted in the spectacle or not, to be constructed
“is larger than the total population of the world in 1960.”4 in the world-media system as an infinitesimally small bit of By 2020, the number of people living in slums will be more the reasons required to build walls around countries, fund than 2 billion. A single mega-city like Mexico City or Mumbai new weapons programs and surveillance technologies, will soon have a larger population than the estimated urban institute new adjustment programs, and launch political population of Earth at the time of the French Revolution. Not campaigns and wars in the high-intensity illumination of the only those who occasionally allow themselves to wonder spectacle. This is work, mere survival beyond the frame of about the fate of this emerging world of near starvation, representation, to become a standing reserve of information, bare-life, and effective non-existence with respect to rep- just as it is also work for the global spectator who must be resentation and political economy, but even almost all of constantly enjoined to see and therefore produce the world those who passionately warn of the horror that exists and and itself in accord with capital’s accounting. The human the horror to come, believe that the existence of these has become the medium for information; put another way, huge masses of people is somehow extra-economic. While the medium is human, despite the fact that human potential massive poverty is at times acknowledged to be caused by is foreclosed by its function. the contradictions of capitalism (particularly the structural While the labor of looking and the labor of survival adjustment imposed by the World Bank and the IMF in are represented above as being split between first and third coordination with Euro-American foreign policy and military worlds, or between the West and the Global South, the power in order to service debt), even most radical critics of relationship is dialectical, a lived abstraction, and also per- capitalism believe that the existence of the slum dwellers, tains within single individuals. Aspects of the history and what Davis calls “the informal proletariat,” is really outside community that constitute us are flattered into activation of and external to capital’s productive base. The slum people by the spectacle, while subaltern aspects of our historical in Karachi, Jakarta, Maputo, Kinshasa, among hundreds legacy (our affiliations, our subterranean histories, politics, of other cities, along with the rural poor whose traditional and potentials) are repressed. The informatics machine that ways of life have been demolished by agribusiness and the powers the spectacle correlates data through the transaction money-system and who provide, as it were, the raw materi- that is the image: who—that is, what parts of us (considered als for slums (in the form of those who migrate to cities), as the species we are)—will become the bits that run the are, from the prevailing economic point of view across the program and what parts the bits that the program runs on? political spectrum, extra people—so much slag thrown off Think of it this way: there is a little human inside the screen by the world-system. Economists are fond of pointing out after all, billions of us actually, human bodies captured in the that the entire African continent only accounts for about 1% vast network of capital that exist only to be signified upon. of the world’s economic activity. How many times have we This abstract, visibly invisible problem is, not so surprisingly, heard that Africa could cease to exist and it wouldn’t make a particularly material economic problem, even if few people any difference to capitalism? But, and here we must pause are paying attention to that fact. But many are paying with to wonder, what kind of economic operation is it when their lives, caught as they are in the crush of the global data- people’s (indeed a continent’s) sole function is to be ren- sphere as it machines its images and concepts, along with dered as data, statistics, information, that can be rendered the very “globe” of globalization. as “meaningless” or as “a potential threat to stability?” Isn’t And it is no secret that in the production of instrumen- this a new moment of planetary organization when humans tal images, a production within which the world’s poor are can, from an economic and representational point of view, not so gainfully employed, there is simultaneously a mass be reduced only to the bodies that underlie information or a production of ignorance. There is an economics to this igno- set of concepts or images—a new order of accounting? This rance as well. The Bush administration has provided ample data-crunching reduction and/or mantel of sheer invisibility, evidence about the profits that can be made with socially this brutal calculus that renders human biomass into a mere produced stupidity: Americans are stupid by design. Never substrate for information, is symptomatic of the qualitative perhaps have forms of ignorance that include carefully cali- transformation of the cinematic mode of production into the brated racism, historical, economic and political blindness, world-media system, now organizing attention on a global and a sheer inability to analyze or even retain the simplest scale in two distinct registers: that of the enfranchised, facts been turned to such productive ends. This essential who are to “understand” and/or dismiss huge swaths of ignorance marks a deeper failure (which pays those who fail the planet in a few lines of symbols or in a couple of with the coin of success) on the part of our political, eco- 57 isolated images as they make their daily movements, nomic, and media theorist-practitioners to conceptualize the economic parameters of the media-environment. Philosophi- the web when it was still a Pentagon project, but because cally speaking, it represents a higher level of intellectual the collectivity has built the screen/society and the web failure, one that leaves the question of social justice conve- through our utilization of it, even if most of us do not own a niently on the side of the unconceptualizable. Here we have single share of Google. Prudhoun’s great dictum, “Property the philosophical and political consequence of the mediatic is theft,” might find its current expression in this cry for the capture and incorporation of understanding and imagina- expropriation of the expropriators: “Google belongs to us.” tion. As one of my own teachers once remarked, “Today we The generalized gathering of human productive capaci- can more easily imagine the death of the planet than we can ties under the complex regulation of the matrix of relations the end of capitalism.” This formulation is not merely a rumi- that constitute spectacular society simultaneously extract nation on politics or aesthetics, nor a simple refashioning of profit and manufacture “consent.” With the rise of visual- Walter Benjamin’s analysis of the aesthetic under fascism ity comes the erosion of language and therefore of certain in which we can experience our own destruction as an aes- kinds of reason. As I have suggested, “consent” includes thetic pleasure of the highest order; it is the outline of the both the organization of mass desire and sensibility, as well social imaginary fundamental to the regime of production as the rendering invisible, and thus effectively unconscious characteristic of and indeed constitutive of postmodernity. for the society of the spectacle, the situation and indeed Let it be registered then that the media have not just existence of a huge portion of the global population. A third been organizing human attention; they are the practical element in the paying of/for attention, an element implied organization of attention just as factories, agribusiness, the by the economic and social capture of corporeal practice by military-industrial complex, and the service sector are the vast networks of structured attention, has perhaps received practical organization of labor. Attention is channeled in its strongest formulation in the recent work of Paolo Virno. media pathways that traverse both hardware and wetware. In A Grammar of the Multitude, Virno claims, more or less These pathways are themselves the historical compilation correctly I think, that capital has captured the cognitive- of body-machine interfaces: cinematization also means linguistic capacities of humanity.5 These capacities, what cyberneticization. Readers here will have internalized the Marx once called “the general intellect” and which were protocols of mass media (shot, countershot; turn on the once part of the commons, have been subsumed for radio, drive; jack in; check your email) and what to do when capitalist production. We speak, act, think, behave, and they interface. Indeed all of us are attuned to their constant micro-manage ourselves and others according to the developments. Moreover, such developments are further “score” that is the general intellect—in short, the protocols expressions of our productive capacities. Today, labor and or grammar of capital. For Virno, each of our acts becomes a attention are inexorably intertwined—indeed attention may kind of virtuoso performance of the score that orchestrates be grasped as the superset of human productive activity contemporary life under the regime of capital accumulation. that contains traditional labor as one of its forms. All of This final subsumption of our cognitive-linguistic capaci- the historically sedimented “dead” labor that has become ties by capital (and its huge industries dedicated to the capital accumulation must be constantly serviced if it is to production of signs) is the mark of the real subsumption of remain profitable. Therefore the evolving matrix of human society by capital and the full economicization not only of productive relations must be continuously reconfigured. This culture but of what was once called “human.” That human- means that we invent the media; it is our needs, our desires, ity, whether dancing and wailing on our screens, repressed our practices, or rather as perfect an expression of these as beyond their frames, or stammering in our heads is the is possible within a near-totalitarian matrix of capitalization specter haunting the society of the spectacle—in the world that carve out the social space of each new form of media- of paying attention, humanity has become its own ghost. tion in advance of its arrival. These “advances” are captured by capital’s always profitable self-transformation and ren- This article is published as part of Cabinet’s contribution to documenta 12 magazines, dered productive of intensifying inequality—they are the viral a worldwide editorial project linking over seventy periodicals as well as other media. See penetration of the logistics of capital into the life-world that
Masses (thousands) Others
1. Love & Care for Others 70 Disciples -Taught -Fed, Healed -Kind to the Unlovely Other 9 -Defined & Fought for his Apostles People -Died on the Cross 3. Servant Leader Top 3 -Last First, First Last Peter, -Humble James, 2. Teacher & Mentor John -Like a Child -Recruit/Top Team -Washed Feet -Communicator -Hung on Cross -Build Trust & Candor -Empower & Go See -Build Commitment
4. Personal Example -Character -Humility Jesus -Integrity
God the 5. Self-Development Father & Care -Scripture -Prayer 7. Purpose 6. Commitment -Vision -Energy -Strategy -Dedication
Figure 1. “Pyramid Model” of Jesus the Strategic Leader
This chart was conceived by Lieutenant Colonel Gregg F. Martin, US Army, and thousands,” I Samuel 29:5), Jesus is a curious choice: the New Testament included as part of a research paper entitled “Jesus the Strategic Leader.” doesn’t record a single death attributable to Jesus or his disciples. Martin, who wrote the text as a student at the Army War College in 2000, How can Jesus’ mission of love and sacrifice be reconciled with military defines seven key elements of Jesus’ leadership style and presents them as a goals, which are defined by the controlled application of violence? Martin model for military officers. provides this example, among others: when Jesus takes his disciples up a The top, inverted pyramid outlines Jesus’ “outputs” or actions, culled mountain, he separates out Peter, James, and John and reveals his divine iden- from Martin’s reading of the Gospel According to Mark. The bottom pyra- tity to them, an episode commonly known as the Transfiguration. The average mid describes the heavenly “inputs” from which Jesus drew “purpose and military officer probably lacks the ability to channel the voice of God, but that strength.” Given all the examples of successful military leaders in the Old shouldn’t stop him, Martin insists, from recruiting a “top team” of subalterns Testament ( for example, “Saul hath slain his thousands, and David his ten to whom he can pass on the army’s “inner secrets” and “keys to the kingdom.” SHADOWS
60 Shades of black Trevor Paglen
Military culture is filled with symbols and insignia, a rich visual language that signifies everything from various unit and command affiliations to significant events and note- worthy programs. There are memorial coins, flags, and t-shirts to commemorate significant events, patches to desig- nate one’s affiliation with different military units, and totemic mascots for different weapons systems and job descriptions. This symbolic regime extends to the world of classified military operations, activities, locations, and endeavors—a world that defense industry and military insiders refer to as the “black world.” The black world is composed of military activities that are officially unacknowledged—programs, people, and places that (for official purposes) “do not exist.” Thus, the black world’s symbolic regime instantiates a pecu- liar set of variations on the visual language of less obscure military activities. The symbols and insignia shown here provide a glimpse into how classified military units answer questions that have historically been the purview of mystery cults, secret soci- eties, religions, and mystics: how does one represent that which, by definition, may not be represented?
• • •
1. This is a program patch from the National Reconnaissance Office, the United States’ “black” space agency whose existence was a secret until the early 1990s (the agency was formed in the early 1960s). DRAGON is an old code name within the BYEMAN information compartment for the infrared imaging capa- bilities on CRYSTAL (advanced KH-11) reconnaissance
1 satellites.
2. A National Reconnaissance Office program patch, whose referent remains entirely obscure. The Latin inscription translates as “Never before, never again.”
3. TENCAP is an acronym for Tactical Exploitation of National Capabilities, a collection of programs that involve developing tactical (battlefield) applications out of reconnaissance satel- lite capabilities (which are normally thought of as strategic). “Special” almost invariably means “black” or highly classified. The phrase Oderint Dum Metuant is usually asso- ciated with Caligula, the first-century Roman emperor whose name became synonymous with depravity, madness, and tyranny. It translates as “Let them hate so long as they fear.”
4. The text of this patch roughly translates as “A Secret Squadron / From Deep in the Night / Don’t Ask Any Questions.” This patch is or was probably worn by an obscure unit, operating out of a secret Air Force Base near
2 Groom Lake, Nevada, called the “Ghost Squadron.” The single star in the southwest United States presumably designates the group’s operating location. 3 6
4 7
5 8 The Ghost Squadron may be a helicopter support and systems. The Latin phrase Si Ego Certiorem Faciam … Mihi search-and-rescue team for test squadrons flying classified Tu Delendus Eris roughly translates into a cliché commonly aircraft. heard in the vicinity of “black” programs: “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”
5. Also based at Groom Lake, the Special Projects Flight Test But the phrasing here is unusual because it is writ- Squadron is the Air Force’s premier “black” squadron for ten in the passive voice: a more accurate translation of the testing classified prototype aircraft. The squadron’s mascot is Latin would be “I could tell you, but then you would have to a wizard. A collection of six stars (five plus one) on the patch be destroyed by me.” By employing the passive voice, the is a reference to the unit’s operating location: the secret base patch’s designer makes two references that would not exist known as Area 51. The sigma symbol in the wizard’s right in other phrasings. The first reference is to the Greek god of hand is a reference to the ideal radar signature of a stealth Chaos, Eris, about whom Homer wrote in Book Four of the aircraft: zero. On the right side of the patch, the falling globe Iliad: “[Eris] whose wrath is relentless … is the sister and references aluminum balls dropped from the sky to calibrate companion of murderous Ares, she who is only a little thing radar equipment. Lightning bolts, such as the one emanat- at the first, but thereafter grows until she strides on the earth ing from the wizard’s staff, often refer to electronic warfare. with her head striking heaven. She then hurled down bitter- The aircraft in the lower right is probably a generic symbol ness equally between both sides as she walked through the representing flight testing. The sword at the bottom of the onslaught making men’s pain heavier.” image refers to a recently declassified Boeing stealth demon- The passive phrasing of the Latin also echoes the words strator known as the “Bird of Prey”: the handle on the sword of the second-century BCE Roman senator Cato the Elder, approximates the shape of this prototype. who roamed the Senate repeating the words Carthago delenda est—“Carthage must be destroyed.” In 149 BCE,
6. This commemorative patch for a classified flight test of Cato got his way and Rome attacked the North African city, an F-22 Raptor aircraft at Groom Lake shares many symbols located near present-day Tunis. Three years after begin- with the Special Projects Flight Test Squadron. The mascot ning their assault, the Roman army overran Carthage, tore here is a Raptor clothed in the garments of a wizard, with a down its walls, and sold its inhabitants into slavery. After the sigma symbol hanging from the figure’s neck. The collection Roman Senate declared that no one would ever again live of six stars is again a reference to Area 51. The phrase “1dB” where the city had stood, legend holds that Rome salted the may reference either the intended or actual radar cross- earth around the city in order to ensure that Carthage would section measurement of the aircraft. remain a wasteland.
7. This was the original version of a patch commemorat- ing a flight test of a B-2 “Spirit” stealth bomber. The sigma symbol on the test shape’s outline signifies invisibility. The number “509” refers to the 509th Bomb Wing, which oper- ates the United States’ stealth bombers from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri. The alien is probably a refer- ence to the 509th’s lineage. In 1947, the 509th was based at Roswell, New Mexico, home of the infamous “Roswell incident,” which ensued after the 509th’s commander, Col. William Blanchard, issued a press release whose headline stated: “Roswell Army Airfield Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region.” The dog-Latin phrase Gustatus Similis Pullus translates as “Tastes like chicken.” The shapes on either side of the alien head seem to signify a fork and knife, which would be consistent with the patch’s theme of eating. This patch was eventually modified when Air Force officials insisted that the phrase “Classified Flight Test” could not appear on the design. In an updated version of this patch, that phrase has been replaced with the words
“To Serve Man.” As the eight of its Unlimited Edition series, Cabinet is pleased to present with Trevor Paglen the revised patch commemorating the test flight of the B-2 8. This patch signifies a “black” project conducted by the Bomber. Shown at actual size on the back cover of the magazine, this patch, Navy’s VX-9 Air Test and Evaluation Unit, based at Point modified by the Air Force, reads “To Serve Man” rather than the original “Clas- Mugu, California. VX-9’s mission is to test strike aircraft, sified Flight Test.” The reproduction, available for $10 (with free shipping in the conventional weapons, electronic warfare equip- US), can be ordered through cabinetmagazine.org/shop or by calling + 1 718 63 ment, and to develop tactics involving said weapons 222-8434.
A Short History of the Shadow: An Interview with Victor I. Stoichita Christopher Turner
Victor I. Stoichita, Professor of the History of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, is the author of A Short History of the Shadow (Reaktion, 1997). In exploring the writings of Plato, Pliny, Leonardo, and Piaget, Stoichita explains how the shadow has always been integral to theories of art and knowledge, and investi- gates the complex psychological meanings we project into shadows. Christopher Turner spoke to him by phone.
Your book is the first study of its kind. Why do you think the subject was previously so overlooked?
I actually started my research with that very question. Just before the publication of my book, an exhibition on shadows was organized at the National Gallery in London, I was struck by the strange parallels between the Platonic accompanied by a short but interesting text by the late Ernst story of the origins of knowledge and Pliny’s story about the Gombrich. But previously art historians took a long time in origin of painting. Maybe one of the most important differ- paying attention to shadows because shadows are, so to ences between them is that, in Pliny’s story about the origin speak, heavy, dark, and ugly. Perhaps this is because for the of representation, the shadow wasn’t charged with a nega- Greeks, the shadow was one of the metaphors for the psyche, tive aspect: the story of the maid of Corinth tracing her lover’s the soul. A dead person’s soul was compared to a shadow, shadow on a wall and thereby giving birth to painting is a and Hades was the land of shadows, the land of death. wonderful story, a love story, and not at all negative, unlike Plato’s story about the origin of knowledge. But interestingly, In Plato’s story about the origin of knowledge, which contrib- despite the positive approach to the shadow in Pliny’s story, uted to this negative validation, you have to renounce the world the myth was slowly forgotten. of shadows before you can accede to true understanding. I think for the western mentality, accepting that repre- sentation originated in the absence of light, in a dark spot, The prisoners in Plato’s cave were incapable of gazing was difficult to accept. directly into the light of knowledge. They had their backs to this bright light and saw only the shadows cast on the In Masaccio’s frescoes in Santa Maria del Carmine in Flor- cave walls. Plato’s point was that they saw only the shadow ence—one of the earliest examples of the use of perspec- of reality, not reality itself. The image had a tremendously tive—shadows not only function to give a sense of space and negative charge for Plato and he linked the image with the volume but are also used as symbols. Can you explain the role shadow—both were copies of reality. And so, from the shadows played in the iconography of the Renaissance? beginning on, to attain true knowledge one had to renounce the shadow stage and progress out of the cave, into the sun. To represent a cast shadow correctly signifies a good knowl- edge of perspective, of three-dimensional space—this was Why do you dub Plato’s origin myth a “sadistic scene”? one of the most important features of Renaissance painting, beginning with Alberti, Leonardo, and beyond. However, Plato’s story is so well-known—apparently well-known— despite the importance of perspective, shadows don’t fea- that I tried to read it with fresh eyes and fresh thinking. It ture very frequently in the paintings of the Renaissance and seemed to me that it was unnecessarily cruel to imagine, as I asked myself, “Why?” Probably one reason was that shad- he did, the people in the cave as bound, their legs and necks ows were dark and therefore considered ugly. Leonardo, and fastened. They were unable to move, forced to stare only at others after him, said that the representation of shadows the projection of the world on the cave walls. It seemed to had to be correct but was not obligatory in painting. The me that the philosopher was being blatantly sadistic. He has painter was free to choose whether to represent them or not, the perverse vision of a philosopher who enjoys the spectacle because to represent all cast shadows would be too much. of ignorance as much as he enjoys the quest for knowledge.
opposite: Komar & Melamid, The Origin of Socialist Realism, 1982–83.Collection If, for Plato, the shadow is at the origin of duplication, of the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts. imagined in a negative way, why are myths about the origin above: Illustration from Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae, Athanasius Kircher’s semi- of painting so invested in the shadow? nal 1646 treatise on light and shadow. In explaining the principle of the camera 65 obscura, the illustration associates the image and the shadow with the devil. Masaccio, one of the pioneers of Renaissance paint- ing, was one of the first painters to explore the symbolism of the shadow. In his frescos in Santa Maria del Carmine he not only dealt with cast shadow in the frame of good, cor- rect, and new perspectival representation, but he painted an actual story about cast shadow. It is the story of St. Peter healing the sick with his shadow, an old story told in the Acts of the Apostles. In the painting this miracle seems to be taking place before our very eyes. Two sick men that the apostle has already passed are now on their feet and another is in the process of standing. Masaccio fused the visual representation of an ancient myth about the healing shadow with the newly acquired capacity of painting to correctly represent cast shadow. I found this very striking, very interesting. Through an extremely refined process, he brings together the two origins (sacred and scientific) in this mise-en-scène of the shadow’s power.
In Piaget’s 1927 study of children’s responses to shadows, it is only at a surprisingly late age that a child can understand that the child only recognized his shadow at a late age, that them, in the sense of predicting where they will fall. Can you doesn’t mean the child doesn’t have a relationship with his describe the evolution in the understanding of shadows for shadow, but that the relationship, I think, is not one of iden- the child? tification but more of otherness, of alterity. As Lacan has stated, the mirror stage involves primar- Well, Piaget discovered four stages. In the first stage, experi- ily the identification of the I, whereas the shadow stage enced at around the age of five, a child can understand that involves mainly the identification of the other. In light of this, a shadow is cast by an object, for instance his own hand, but we can understand why Narcissus fell in love with his specu- he also considers it as the result of the confluence of two lar image and not with his shadow. And we also understand causes, one internal (the shadow emanates from the object, why, to Pliny, the object of the young woman’s love is the it is part of the object), the other external (the shadow comes shadow of the other (the lover). from the night, from a dark corner of the room etc.). Piaget pointed at a five-year-old’s shadow and asked him, “What In early emblem books, such as Johannes Sambucus’s is this?” The boy responded, “It’s the shadow of the chair.” Emblemata (1564), the image of the guilty conscience is Actually, he was sitting on the chair but he wasn’t able to often portrayed as a shadow being cast by the sun, with God say, “That’s my own shadow, sitting on the chair” because at its center. The guilty party is shown fighting his shadow, it was too difficult to recognize himself or his own double, locked in an impossible battle. Does Piaget connect the his own projection, in the black spot. child’s concept of the shadow with guilt? The ability to recognize one’s own shadow is actually a very difficult process, one that is only mastered at the age of The representations of the battle with one’s shadow shows eight or nine. That’s when the child realizes that the shadow once more that in the West’s old symbolic culture, the is not a substance behind the object that is driven away by shadow was the enemy and the other. The text that accom- light, and finally learns to predict where a shadow will fall. panies the Sambucus emblem explains the strange behavior It’s at this age that the shadow finally becomes synonymous of turning against one’s own shadow: with the absence of light. “Armed with a sword, his chest still heaving from the crime he has committed, the man wants to continue on In your book, you counterpose a shadow phase with Jacques his way. Occasionally he stops to stare in fear at his own Lacan’s idea of the mirror phase. What’s the difference? shadow. He strikes it and orders it to go away. But when he Does the child have a similar narcissistic identification with sees the identical wounds, he shouts, ‘Here is the one who his or her shadow? betrayed my crime!!’ Oh, how many times have murderers made of their remorse insane illusions, and fate armed them Well, yes and no. First of all, the mirror phase is a very early against themselves.” one; for Lacan the child has a narcissistic relationship to his double as a mirror projection at a very young age, from six above: Masaccio, St. Peter Healing the Sick with His Shadow, 1427-1428. Fres- to eighteen months. Unfortunately, Lacan didn’t speak of co at the Brancacci Chapel, Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence. the relationship of a child to his own shadow, but opposite: Machine for drawing silhouettes. From the 1792 English edition of 66 only with his reflection. Although Piaget discovered Johann Kaspar Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy. It’s an interesting question about Piaget and guilt, Christ he was always represented en face, in his majesty, because actually the result of Piaget’s experience was to not in profile. The representation of Christ’s profile is not point to the shadow as the representation of otherness but completely nonexistent in the Western tradition, but without going a step further and saying, “The otherness is it is a case in point. Lavater also discusses the profile of charged with negative psychological value.” For Piaget, Apollo Belvedere in a very critical mode: Apollo’s profile is the relationship of the child with the shadow hasn’t that too perfect and his nose too small. In Lavater’s mind this psychological charge because Piaget’s psychology was was a sign of lack of intelligence. It is also significant that in Gestalt psychology and not a Freudian psychoanalytic one. Lavater’s book, Apollo’s profile was represented as a black So, for Piaget, the psychoanalytical charge of the shadow shadow, whereas Christ’s silhouette is given a white interior. and its relation to guilt wasn’t so important. It would have been too much to represent Christ as a dark stain. In the Enlightenment, interpreting people’s shadows became a sort of pseudo-science. You draw an interesting Shadows often seem to have something primitive about parallel between the Catholic confessional and the machine them, appealing to primal fears. In fact, in your book you used by the eighteenth-century Swiss pastor Johann Kaspar say that it was from anthropologists that you learned most Lavater for making silhouettes. Can you describe how in about shadows. Can you elaborate on that? physiognomy the soul revealed its sins? I sought out not the newer anthropology but the old In his four-volume Essays on Physiognomy (1775-8), Lavater one. For example, James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1922) tried to convince his readers that the soul of the person can was most interesting to me, despite its age. I was impressed be decoded in the interpretation of their profile. This seemed by the capacity of Frazer to link the shadow with animism, to me a very symptomatic process. The topic of the face as with thinking about the soul and with the topic of the double. a mirror of the soul is an old one, and Lavater sought to capture a symbolic projection of the soul of the person through his face. What was new in Lavater was that the face was interpreted not as a surface of signs but as a line, spe- cifically as profile line, or in order to be more even precise, as the profile line of the cast shadow. It wasn’t necessary for Lavater to reproduce the shadow. Lavater exploits—probably unconsciously—another ancient tradition: the one which recognized man’s soul in his shadow, and a shadow in his soul. To analyze the shadow is tantamount to a sui generis psychoanalysis. To Lavater, the outlined profile is a hieroglyph that has to be deciphered. The aim of Lavater’s “shadow-analysis” is that it should be a new “cure for the soul.” It sets off with a notion of Man that takes his divine origins into account. Man was made in God’s image and likeness, but sin drove him to lose his divine likeness. His relationship with the divinity was overshadowed by flesh. In my view, Lavater identified the devil within, not without. A contemporaneous work, On the Non-existence of the Devil (1776), instructed: “Do not see the devil outside, do not seek him in the Bible, he is in your heart.” The devil within was visualized in Lavater’s science of physiognomy, projected in the shadow.
As you point out, Lavater didn’t conform to the Greek Ideal—the noble profile of the Apollo Belvedere—but held up Christ’s profile as the prototype of physiognomic perfection. How did he know what Christ looked like?
That’s a good question. Obviously, he couldn’t actually know, but there was a tradition of the visual representation Can you describe the story of Peter Schlemihl, which illus- of Christ. There are many legends about Veronica’s veil, trates many of those features? I was wondering why being where Christ left an imprint of his face on a piece of cloth. robbed of one’s shadow is akin to, I suppose not death, but What is different in Lavater’s approach is his atten- eternal life, which is perhaps a sort of ghostly living death, 67 tion to the profile, because in the old stories about as in the case of Peter Pan.
Peter Schlemihl sold his shadow to a stranger—the devil—and thus became rich, but at the same time he lost something. He was incredibly wealthy but also incred- ibly unhappy because people were now suspicious of and repulsed by him. Well, the question is what exactly did he lose? The shadow is only a metaphor for something; it’s a story about selling one’s soul for advantage and for money and so on, but I think that the accent is more on his identity rather than his soul. Peter Schlemihl continues to live, to exist, but robbed of his identity. The second part of the tale is the story of his quest to regain it. Peter Schlemihl travels around the world in pursuit of his shadow, hoping to find himself once more. It always eludes him. In frustration he throws his purse, with all the money he got from the sale of his shadow, into an abyss, hoping for his shadow back, but that doesn’t happen. It is too late.
German Expressionist film is obviously famous for its use of crooked, distorted shadows that often play a narrative role as indicators of evil.
In the famous still from Robert Wiene and Willy Hammeister’s The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, we see a gigantic projec- tion of the character’s shadow. Larger than the person, its dimensions are significant. It is the externalization of the person’s inner self. It is as though the camera has first of all been able to plunge into the person’s mind through the shadow, so that it could then project their inner self onto the wall. The shadow, an external image, reveals what is taking place inside the character: the profile looks vaguely anthropoidic, the fist unclenches to reveal shriveled fingers. The poetic message of the shadow is unequivocal: it is a I loved the symmetry of your book—how you started with the metaphor, or more precisely, a hyperbole of the key medium origin of painting and end with the death of painting. Many of of Expressionist cinema—the “close up.” the self-portraits by Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp that you analyze in the final chapter play on the profile, on the In your book you quote the artist Christian Boltanski, who idea of the origin of art, but they might be better titled “the says that shadows are essentially early photographs, and deconstruction of art.” you compare Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square to a fogged photograph. I was wondering whether you could say how Marcel Duchamp was the greatest deconstructor of tradi- the shadow haunts photography or writing about photogra- tion, and in Duchamp’s painting we have many important phy. How does the shadow relate to photography? moments in which he’s dealing with shadows. Tu m’ (1918), for example, is almost entirely composed of the shadows Etymologically, photography means “writing or drawing cast by his famous ready-mades. Another of Duchamp’s with light.” But we can also call photography a writing anti-paintings is Fresh Widow, made two years later. Fresh with shadow, or a writing with light and shadow. The early Widow is, in a sense, a later parallel to Malevich’s Black photographer, William Henry Fox Talbot, spoke of “shad- Square, only with the difference that Duchamp’s painting owgraphy.” With his “a-logical” painting, Black Square was also a dialogue with the whole tradition of the painting, (1915), Malevich wittily illustrated this fact. When I tried to of the tableau as an open window. For Leon Baptiste Alberti, reconstruct the story of the hidden origins of the painting in the painting was to be imagined as an open window. It is terms of the Futurist courting of anti-representation, I was very typical of Duchamp to play with the words “widow/win- happy to discover an 1839 cartoon by “Cham” (Amédée de dow,” a pun illustrating the death of tableau painting and Noë) that represented a misphotograph. In this cartoon, an the Albertian tradition. Duchamp’s black panes symbolically accident in the taking of a photograph has caused the print close the entire history of representation. taken from the fogged negative to develop as nothing but a black square. It was a pre-Malevich intuition of the death of opposite: A page of profiles from Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy. representation in photography, in a representation of above: Illustration to accompany a 1918 Danish edition of Adelbert von 69 a deep shadow without light. Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl, originally written in 1814. Shadowplay: Four Artist Projects
The “Shadows” section of this issue features specially com- missioned projects by Byron Kim, Glenn Ligon, Tim Noble & Sue Webster, and Katrín Sigurðardóttir.
Opposite Byron Kim, Cabinet Shadows, 2006
Page 81 Katrín Sigurðardóttir, Stage, 2006
Page 89 Glenn Ligon, Carte de visite, 2006
Page 93 Tim Noble & Sue Webster, Spin Shadow Heads, 2006
70 top row: Pottery Barn Catalogue, Holiday 2006 (left to right): p. 127, 143, 166, 113, 82, and 114. bottom71 row: Cabinet (left to right): issue 21, p. 42; issue 15, p. 35; issue 21, p. 39; issue 16, p. 19; issue 16, p. 4; issue 16, p. 21; issue 16, p. 21; issue 15, p. 26; issue 15, p. 107.
Otto Neurath’s Universal Silhouettes and merchants. They seemed aloof and remote from every- George Pendle day life and only surrendered factual information about their cultures by chance. Sniffed a disapproving Otto, “Their true We are all familiar with them: the accommodating couple role was merely to be beautiful.” found on public lavatory doors, the deer frozen in mid-leap This distinction between informative images and art alongside country roads, the car that forever swerves and was to imbue the rest of his life’s work with a humanistic regains its course, the rocks tumbling unceasingly down visual austerity. “Orthodox perspective is anti-symbolic and the slope of a mountain. Variations on these signs, and puts the onlooker into a privileged position,” he wrote. thousands of others like them, can be seen across the globe: “Any picture in perspective fixes the point from which you warning, informing, and sometimes just adorning. Yet look. I wanted to be free to look from wherever I chose.” despite their universality, the creator of this shadow-world As his views began to harden into shape, he sought freedom of silhouettes is little known; a sad fate, considering that no from the museum itself, whose pretentious curators with other modern philosopher has had such an impact on our their abstract talk of artistic transcendence he despised. day-to-day lives. “They were full of their own importance,” he wrote, “and Born in Austria in 1882, Otto Neurath would live a did not understand their public or what it wanted.” more colorful and contrary life than most philosophers, Shunning elitism and searching for a new universality economists, or social scientists, of which he happened to in art, Neurath’s art criticism began to coalesce with his be all three. He studied in fin-de-siècle Berlin, but was so political views. He came to regard “those who drew edu- wretchedly poor that he suffered from malnutrition. The cational pictures as servants of the public and not as its experience prompted in him a life-long disapproval of mon- masters,” for in his view, art for art’s sake was an abomina- etary and credit systems, and, thus chastened, he became tion against utility. He disdained rare and priceless artifacts an expert in the ancient barter economies of his favorite as fetishes that were obsessed with spectacle instead of the tribe—the Egyptians. socially informative. Forthwith, he avowed, he would seek a Returning to Vienna, he embraced Marxism but on his visual expression that was both universal, and useful. own terms, being sufficiently enamored of the eugenicist Neurath’s ascetic aesthetic was echoed in his career Francis Galton’s distinctly uncommunistic treatise—Heredi- as a philosopher. In the early 1920s, he was a co-founder of tary Genius—to translate it into German. When not studying the rigorously empirical Vienna Circle. Neurath and his col- economics, he dabbled in literature, writing an extraordi- leagues—known as the Logical Positivists—declared that nary 500-page preface to the Faust penned by the obscure metaphysics, religion, and ethics were devoid of cognitive German Romantic, Ludwig Hermann Wolfram, that doubled sense, being only expressions of feelings or desires. Only the size of an already interminable book and declared Neur- mathematics, logic, and natural sciences, they declared, ath’s Romantic, yet prosaic, tastes. In 1910, he established a had any definite meaning. When, during meetings, another school of “war economics” in which he suggested that war member of the Circle made what Neurath considered a would increase the prosperity of a population under attack, scientifically empty claim, Neurath would interrupt by bel- an eccentric view that was conclusively rebuffed by the lowing, “Metaphysics!” With his red beard, bald head, and eruption of World War I. In 1918, he became involved with “combative” attitude—some preferred to call him “rude”— the short-lived Bavarian Republic and was placed in charge Neurath was a larger-than-life figure. of socializing the breakaway country’s entire economy. Yet he was also absolutely sincere in his beliefs. By When the uprising was suppressed, however, Neurath was creating an international picture language as an alternative accused of high treason, although he was eventually par- to written script, Neurath hoped he could satisfy his philo- doned for being politically inscrutable. sophical, political, and aesthetic views all at once. Not only The one constant throughout Neurath’s polymathic life would it help educate the common Viennese man, but he was his interest in visual innovation. As a boy, his father had also believed it might widen the sphere of peaceful coopera- taken him on regular trips to Vienna’s Museum of Art His- tion across the world. “The more cooperative man is,” he tory. Each time he had visited, the young Otto would hurry declared, “the more ‘modern’ he is.” to the Egyptian exhibition and marvel at the detail and the In this declaration he was not alone, for a curious strand color of the hieroglyphs on display. In their pictorial course, of linguistic utopianism was flooding through Europe at the Otto could see fish being caught, fields being ploughed, time. The universal language of Volapük had been created slaves being sold, battles being fought, and the spoils of war by a Roman Catholic priest in Germany in 1879, following being carried home in triumph. Here in these wall paintings, a religious vision he had experienced in his sleep. In 1887, ancient Egypt was alive in all its drudgery and glory, clear to a Polish ophthalmologist had published the first textbook the eye and easy to understand. of Esperanto in the hope that it would spread ideas on the By comparison, the Greek and Roman antiquities next peaceful coexistence of different peoples and cultures door displeased the young Otto. The red clay vases and (“Esperanto” translates as “hopeful”). Ido, a variation on marble bas-reliefs seemed inordinately concerned with the
actions of gods, warriors, and mythical heroes, not opposite: Chart from Neurath’s International Picture Language (1936) depicting 73 the day-to-day activities of fishermen, ploughmen, a newer alternative symbolization of the different human races. Esperanto, was developed in the early 1900s to be a uni- long skirt, was depicted. Neurath had created a Bauhaus of versal second language to aid in communication between language—functional, formulaic, and, most importantly, for different cultures; Basic English (1930) and Interglossa the proletariat. (1943) were soon to follow. All preached that only communi- It was as if a long-forgotten part of the human brain had cation could prevent war and help mankind progress as one. suddenly been switched on. Within months of Neurath’s first This belief in the power of language to both pacify and isotype exhibition, the world was awakened to the power instigate was not just confined to amateurs. Ford Madox of visuals to transfer information. Newspapers across the Ford had persuasively argued that World War I had largely globe were soon inventing isotypes of their own and begin- arisen as the result of both sides’ misuse, and misunder- ning to illustrate their pages with them. Like stones buffeted standing, of each other’s language, Germany’s militaristic and rounded in the sea, Neurath’s original isotypes were allegory being completely at odds with England’s evasive becoming ever simpler, and thus ever more recognizable. understatement. Meanwhile, Ezra Pound was working Indeed, the isotypes that we see today on lavatory doors are feverishly on his own pictorial language of ideograms, so uncomplicated in their depiction of “male” and “female” scattering them throughout his Cantos as he attempted to that they seem just one step removed from being totally prompt political action through a poetic discourse that was abstract. unmediated by the restraints of language. With such great Neurath himself would eventually be chased from the stakes in play, all agreed that miscommunication was to be continent by a symbol more powerful than any he had cre- avoided at any cost. But while Neurath shared the idealistic ated—the Swastika—and would die an exile in England in aims of the constructed languages in his wish to create “a 1945. Curiously enough, it was only late in his life that he commonwealth of men united in a human brotherhood,” realized the Egyptian hieroglyphs that had excited him as a only he was willing to shake free from language’s settled child and started him on his quest for a universal language verbal structures and attempt something entirely new. Or had been taken from the inside of an Egyptian tomb. They rather old. For in fact he wished to create something akin were not meant to be a language for the living, he mused, to a hieroglyphic renaissance. “Words separate,” declared but rather one for the dead. Suddenly the afterlife seemed Neurath, “pictures unite.” slightly less incomprehensible. Following his brush with the firing squad, Neurath had settled into an innocuous job as the secretary-general of the Austrian Association of Cooperative Housing and Garden Allotment Societies. Nevertheless, his zeal for creating a new political and aesthetic language was undiminished. Intent on informing the uneducated Viennese proletariat how the association was improving their living condi- tions—and perhaps desperate to inject some life into the grim organization—Neurath created giant colored diagrams of the increases in poultry-breeding and vegetable produc- tion. Using simple pictures of chickens and carrots, scaled in proportion to the statistics, Neurath discovered a way to popularize statistics, ripping them free from the dusty text of the dour school primer. (That Neurath’s pictograms are intractably associated with today’s school primers shows both our ability to rapidly adopt innovative ideas, and, at the same time, quickly become bored by them). “A silhouette compels us to look at essential details and sharp lines; there are no indefinite backgrounds or superfluities,” Neurath wrote. By using non-realistic symbols as units of represen- tation, visitors to the show could, at a glance, immediately understand complex information regardless of their edu- cation. The International System of Typographic Picture Education, or “Isotype,” had been born. To maintain visual consistency—a crucial factor if the isotype was to be successful—Neurath made print blocks for hundreds of identical symbols. He had soon created a 30 vocabulary of some two thousand isotypes. Units of steel production were depicted by I-beams; strikes were depicted Above: The contemporary isotype: a warning against tilting vending machines by rows of fists; whenever statistics on workers needed to to dislodge stuck merchandise. Courtesy Mark Batty Publishing. Thanks to be shown, the simple silhouette of a man in a flat Nicole Recchia. 74 cap and waistcoat, or a woman in a headscarf and Opposite: Still from Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s Nosferatu (1919). DARKNESS VISIBLE With a true impresario’s flair for catching the mood of the Marina Warner public, Robertson deliberately excited screams and squeals. He—and his contemporary rivals and imitators—set the
The Phantasmagoria scene for the coming of the horror video, its ghouls, ghosts, and vampire-infested suburbs.1 All those large dreams by which men long live well The phantasmagoria derived directly from camera Are magic-lanterned on the smoke of hell; obscura and magic lantern shows, and many displays had This then is real, I have implied been staged before Robertson’s struck a chord with the A painted, small, transparent slide. public, but Robertson’s Gothic horror spectacular, with its —William Empson many brilliant twists and devices, turned any spectator from a cool observer into a willing, excitable victim. Whereas the In Paris soon after the Revolution, the showman and inventor panorama concentrated on battles, modern cityscapes, or Etienne-Gaspard Robertson staged a son-et-lumière Gothic exotic scenery, customs, and people—it is the forerunner moving picture show, under the name of “Fantasmagorie”; of the widescreen epic film—the phantasmagoria shadows coined from Greek, phantasmagoria means an “assembly of forth great silent classics such as F. W. Murnau’s vampire phantasms.” Robertson used a projector, the Fantascope, movie Nosferatu (1919) or Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. dispensed with the conventional theater’s raised stage, Caligari (1919/1920). The uncanny took a turn away from the puppet show box, and the proscenium arch, and con- external, supernatural, and mysterious causes of fear and centrated his lighting sources and effects in the projector trembling, earthed to a common religious faith, and began itself by placing it behind a large flat screen, like a theatri- to inhabit instead unstable, internal hallucinations, seeth- cal scrim. He also mounted his newfangled magic lantern ing with personal, idiosyncratic monsters extruded from the on rollers, so that when, concealed behind the screen, he overheated brain by the force of vehement imagination, or, pulled back from the audience, the image swelled as Goya would famously write on the opening Capricho, with 75 and appeared to plunge forward into their ranks. monsters generated by “the dream of reason.”2 Even supposedly natural wonders, rather than infernal hallucinations, take on a fantastic appearance: icebergs, crags, volcanoes, geysers, and alpine ranges fill the cabinets of the traveling showmen.3 The linguistic and visual imagery that the new model applied was, however, very ancient: phantamagorists were populating their entertainments with the plots and cast of characters of past beliefs, and conjugat- ing a series of symbolic equivalences between imagination and shadowplay, mystery and darkness, suggestiveness and fear, and evanescence and smoke that have their origins in Neoplatonism and its play with the metaphor of shadows. The intrinsic subject matter of phantasmagoria was spectral illusion—morbid, frequently macabre, supernatural, fit to inspire terror and dread, those qualities of the sublime. It foreshadows the function of cinema as stimulant, and prepared the ground for the medium’s entanglement with hauntings, possession, and spirit visions. Above all, phantas- magorias gave an impression of vitality far more beguiling than even the miniaturized intricacies of panoramas and peepshows. Magic lantern slides, pricked transparencies, and other illusions flickered and fluttered in the candlelight, and conveyed a feeling of time passing—the daylight castle changed into a haunted ruin by the snuffing of a lamp—but the images projected by phantasmagorias grew and shrank, as well as shifting with tricks of the light, and so created an illusion that they possessed the quality of conscious life: animation.4 Robertson was born in 1763 in Liège, Belgium, and became a keen balloonist as well as pioneering impresario. the devil refused to communicate to me the science of creat- He refined many features of the popular magic lantern show ing prodigies, I would apply myself to creating devils, and when he used an Argand oil lamp for the first time; being I would have only to wave my wand to force all the infernal so much brighter than candles, it allowed him to put on cortège to be seen in the light. My habitation became a true public shows to a crowded hall. In this way, he brought the Pandemonium.”5 In 1799, for his most successful séances, shared passion of religious festivals to mass entertainment Robertson rented an abandoned Gothic convent—the Cou- and demonstrated the huge power of such spectacles and vent des Capucines—dressed it in antique bric-à-brac and illusions over crowds. As well as moving the projector, he black drapes, painted it with hieroglyphs which, he wrote, experimented with arrangements of lenses, and the play seemed “to announce the entrance to the mysteries of Isis,” of shadows and the superimposition of one picture upon lit it weakly with “a sepulchral lamp,” and maintained before another to create certain special effects: ghosts rolling the spectacle began “an absolute silence.” The show began their eyes, the flickering flames of hell, a ghostly dance of with a speech: “Citizens and gentlemen,” he declared, “It is witches. He introduced Benjamin Franklin’s glass harmonica … a useful spectacle for a man to discover the bizarre effects to create appropriately eerie and fairyland accompaniment, of the imagination when it combines force and disorder; I as well as a Chinese gong which he struck at climactic wish to speak of the terror which shadows, symbols, spells, moments. The apparition of a horrifying Medusa head, for the occult works of magic inspire.” He then ended with a example (a painted slide survives), wittily reproduced the flourish: “I have promised that I will raise the dead and I will petrifying effect of his spectacle on his audience. Robert- raise them.”6 son also realized that if the images were painted on black The recent Terror furnished him with the inspiration for backgrounds, they would appear to float free in space. His some deadly special effects: the severed head of Danton, screens were thin gauzes, saturated in wax, so that his phan- adapted from his death mask, eerily materialized in fumes toms were further dematerialized by the diaphanousness rising from his casket, and then gradually faded away, and translucency of the material on which they appeared. changing into a skull as it did so. The show was even closed He was a skilful and sensitive painter as well, but he also down by the police for a spell because the fear spread that employed artists who could interpret his ideas. Sometimes Robertson could bring Louis XVI back to life.7 he projected onto smoke. Teeming with devils, ghosts, witches, succubi, skel- In his engaging memoirs, Robertson described his early etons, mad women in white, stigmatic nuns, and what he attempts to conjure devils for real. After these failed, 76 he wrote: “I finally adopted a very wise policy: since above: From Charles H. Bennett’s Shadow and Substance, 1860. termed “ambulant phantoms,” Robertson’s repertoire offers doors of the exit, when the operator, either not understanding a vivid census of the population deemed native to the imagi- the meaning of the cry, or mistaking the temper and feeling of nation. His sources reached back into pagan and heterodox an English audience, at this unlucky crisis once more dashed mythologies of metamorphosis and metempsychosis as forward the Red Woman. The confusion was instantly at a well as contemporary sublime Gothic motifs. He showed the height which was alarming to the stoutest; the indiscriminate shades of the dead in the Underworld where Proserpina and rush to the doors was prevented only by the deplorable state Pluto presided as judges, and he conjured Orpheus losing of most of the ladies; the stage was scaled by an adventurous Eurydice, Venus seducing a hermit, and the story of Cupid. few, the Red Woman’s sanctuary violated, the unlucky oper- Christianity also supplied him with subject matter of the for- ator’s cavern of death profaned, and some of his machinery bidden and the transgressive: the temptation of St. Anthony overturned, before light restored order and something like an by alluring hoydens, witches preparing for the Sabbath and harmonious understanding with the cause of alarm.9 flying off on broomsticks while the moon turned the color of blood. One slide even depicted “Mahomet,” inscribed with Robertson, Philidor, and other lanternists toured during the surprising words, “Pleasure is my Law.” a period of brilliant innovation, when the latest scientific The “Bleeding Nun,” Death with his scythe, the “Red discoveries fuelled the business of amusing a public which Woman,” as well as various recent agents and victims of was growing increasingly affluent and pleasure-loving. In the Terror—Robertson’s characters rushed at the spectators an era of expanding urban pleasures, when waxworks also from the screen as if to grab them; Banquo’s ghost and the transferred from the religious to the secular realm and the three witches were summoned, among figures from con- diorama opened in Paris, the panorama was invented in temporary artists like Henry Fuseli and William Blake who Edinburgh by the Irish painter Robert Barker in 1785, giving had illustrated Shakespeare. “The Dream or The Nightmare: a 360-degree command of the field of vision. Barker’s view A Young Woman Dreams of Fantastic Pictures”—a tableau of the city was the first example of this particular optical that owes a clear debt to Fuseli’s famous painting, much dis- enterprise, and it inspired feats of heroic illusionism.10 In seminated in a variety of prints—was provided by Robertson 1821, for example, the Hull-born artist Thomas Hornor with a happy ending: the demon of jealousy first crushed climbed to the apex of the cross on the pinnacle that crowns her breast with an anvil, held a dagger over her heart, while, the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London. There, he built above, a hand of fate cut a cord with a pair of scissors. “But himself a crow’s nest, a fantastic platform of lashed timbers
Love then arrives and cures the wounds with rose leaves.”8 with a cabin secured to it by overhead ropes, themselves The dramatic effect on the public of such spectacles tied to a teepee-like superstructure, and from this, where he anticipates very closely the excitement—and panic—that roosted during the time it took, he assembled, from sketches greeted the first screenings of films proper, as in the famous mounted on a rotating frame, an image of the city in 360 case of the Lumière Brothers’ advancing train. Robertson’s degrees. He used a telescope to examine details of the spectacular assaults on his suggestible audience can be cityscape and calculated the perspective not only to unfold gauged from contemporaneous engravings: the phantoms the vista in panorama but also to position the viewer con- towered larger and closer as the projector rolled back, vincingly in the scene.11 manifested themselves wreathed in smoke and floating on This feat brings up the distinction between the sight clouds or, even, as in the case of Death, appeared to lunge and its image, for by this prodigious feat of daring, engi- headfirst, scythe at the ready, into the throng. neering, and survival, Hornor did indeed command a stable The phantasmagoria spread through Europe with view of London unobtainable from the first Montgolfier traveling entertainers, many of whom were Italian. But when balloons or, later, airplane. The crow’s-nest, the telescope, it adapted conventional imagery of spirits, it did so with a and the geometry all enhanced the field of vision that lay difference, turning such scenes—and attendant beliefs—into around him. But the picture he made turned his experience secular entertainment. into a rich illusion for the audience who later flocked to One Londoner gave a lively account of “The Red this truly popular, classless wonder of late eighteenth– and Woman of Berlin,” who was summoned at the climax of the nineteenth-century ingenuity. Artist-showmen, like Robert- show put on by Robertson’s rival, Paul de Philipsthal, also son and Hornor, were moving on all fronts to expand the known as Philidor, in 1825: knowledge and scope of human faculties. With waxworks, they took spectators into anatomical theaters, to banquets in The effect was electrical, and scarcely not to be imagined palaces, and to clandestine deeds of darkness; with models from the effect of a written description. I was myself one of of the world, such as Hornor’s Panorama or Wyld’s Monster an audience during the first week of its exhibition, when the Globe, a relief map installed in a special rotunda in Leices- hysterical scream of a few ladies in the first seats of the pit ter Square, they opened up vistas of trade, discovery, and induced a cry of “lights” from their immediate friends, which adventure. Inside the Globe, a great staircase led up to view- it not being possible instantly to comply with, increased into ing platforms—the world was mapped on the inner walls of an universal panic, in which the male portion of the audi- the sphere, turned inside out to fit the convexity of the build- ence, who were ludicrously the most vociferous, were ing. The spectacle drew vast crowds from 1851 until it was 77 actually commencing a scrambling rush to reach the demolished in 1862.
These early enterprises of optical researchers and double mirror trick later dubbed “Dr. Pepper’s Ghost”: by instrument makers and their users aimed at enhancing angling panes of glass under and above the stage, a specter visual experience of the world as it offers itself to human can be beamed to hover in the air as large as life. Brewster eyes. But as with Athanasius Kircher’s magic slide shows, also attended phantasmagorias and gave highly detailed such spectacular entertainments often played into a further descriptions of the moving eyes and lips of the specters, of enterprise—expressing fantasy and communicating inward the dissolves, fades, and other proto-cinematic effects; eyes vision—wittingly or unwittingly. Haunted modernity was rolling in an effigy’s head gave the eerie impression that the made by optics: Robertson’s key predecessor is the artist- head was following the viewer’s gaze.15 designer Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg (1740–1812), Lewis Carroll, who was an indefatigable theater-goer the French-born Romantic painter who worked in England with a special taste for pantomime and spectacle, also and brought a Turneresque dedication to shipwrecks, water- dabbled in inventions and was later inspired by these optical spouts, and other storm-tossed scenes. He was a vigorous illusions to stage in the Alice books the transformation of a impresario of spectacular theater over a very long London baby into a pig and the apparition of the Cheshire Cat. Alice career and a pioneer of animation techniques, a veritable protests: model of Hoffman’s figure of Dr. Coppelius, the automatist. In extravaganzas staged at Drury Lane, Loutherbourg “… I wish you wouldn’t keep appearing and vanishing so sud- plunged the audience into darkness for the first time, to denly: you make me feel quite giddy!” intensify the impact of his spectacular magic shows, such “All right,” said the Cat; and this time it vanished quite as A Christmas Tale (1772) and, later, the patriotic pageant, slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the
Omai. He projected painted lantern slides in his productions grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone.16 and invented the “Eidophusicon,” which drew delighted crowds to see “Various Imitations of Natural Phenomena, With dissolves and fades and metamorphoses of this sort, represented by Moving Pictures.”12 A stage set was fur- Carroll the photographer introduced proto-cinematic tech- nished with banks of rollers turned by many hands, and niques into storytelling. numerous light sources, prickings, and cut-outs raked the The characteristic material of the phantasmagoria thus scene with shadows and dappled it with moiré effects and occupies a transitional zone between the sublime and the dancing firelight to show London bursting into flames in gothic, between the solemn and the comic, and between a tableau of The Great Fire, and to conjure Milton’s “dark- seriously intended fears and sly mockery of such beliefs. ness visible,” with Satan and his minions “on the Banks Although it bears a sharp flavor of its times, its aftertaste of the Fiery Lake” in the pit of hell.13 At the end of his life, lingers in much of today’s popular entertainment, with its Loutherbourg acquired an extremely wealthy patron, the cast of specters and bogeys. Yet Robertson protested that young aesthete William Beckford, and was commissioned his “illusions were designed as an antidote to superstition by him to stage his notorious Christmas revels at Fonthill and credulity” and claimed that he was staging a rational in 1782. Beckford later recalled “that strange, necromantic exhibition in order to expose the mechanism behind such light which Loutherbourg had thrown over what absolutely specters of the mind.17 Hence the pseudo-learning displayed appeared a realm of Fairy, or rather, perhaps, a Demon in the names of optical devices: Robertson’s imitators and Temple deep beneath the earth set apart for tremendous mys- followers among showmen drew heavily on Greek terms teries. … The glorious haze investing every object, the mystic to coin high-sounding words—“Eidophusicon,” “Eidothau- look, the vastness, the intricacy of the vaulted labyrinth occa- mata,” “Ergascopia,” and “Phantascopia”—to describe their sioned so bewildering an effect that it became impossible for instruments of uncanny illusion. anyone to define at the moment, where he stood, where he The lanternist Philidor also toured to great success had been, or to whether he was wandering.”14 all over Europe from 1801 onwards, becoming a friend The appetite for enchantments led far more sober char- of Madame Tussaud’s. The Scottish writer James Hogg acters than Beckford to create fantastic devices: the Scottish scientist David Brewster, friend of Walter Scott, invented opposite: The sketches Hornor made from the top of St. Paul’s Cathedral the kaleidoscope (1819), which he named after the Greek formed the basis for a panorama that was later painted on the curved internal for beautiful. He also analyzed binocularity, establishing its walls of the Colosseum, an enormous building Hornor commissioned to be importance to human perception of depth, and accordingly built in Regent’s Park specifically for that purpose. At the center of the building applied it to another ingenious design—the stereopticon. stood a tower atop which was a replica of the dome of St. Paul’s, replete with It too became a hugely popular toy of the Victorian middle a model of Hornor’s crow’s nest. The panoramic view offered from the tower’s class, and helped popularize photography in the home. public observation platforms, one of which is visible in this aquatint from 1829, Brewster was curious about legends of fairies, wonders, was, of course, London as seen from St. Paul’s cathedral; the two trompe l’oeil and superstitions and collected examples in an anthropologi- white towers are architectural elements from the cathedral itself. To complete cal spirit, publishing in 1832 an important series of public the illusion, the Colosseum—the very building the viewer was in—was painted letters to Scott, engaging that great exponent of ballads and into the panorama. As a result of financial difficulties, the panorama opened fairytale in a rational discussion of the supernatural. before being fully finished; this explains why the scaffolding used by the paint- 79 In these, Brewster sets out, among other things, the ers is still visible in the foreground. may have been present at his show in Edinburgh.18 Hogg’s in which the portent was even more colossal. In 1812, he metaphysical spine-chiller, Private Memoirs and Confes- was frustrated in his plans, writing, “How one might, per- sions of a Justified Sinner (1824), one of the master works haps with flaming hair and beard, to some extent approach in the extensive literature of doppelgangers, conjures the the modern idea of the supernatural, on this we had come hauntings and doublings of his protagonists through optical to no agreement.”20 But a decade later, Goethe invoked the metaphors that evoke the dark and looming shadowplay of phantasmagoria as the model to be followed: “That is, in the phantasmagoria.19 Meanwhile, the vogue for magic lan- a darkened theater an illuminated head is projected from tern shows grew strongly throughout Europe and the United the rear upon a screen stretched across the background, States, where several showmen, including Robertson’s sons first as a small image, then gradually increasing in size, so as well as former assistants, enjoyed wide popular success that it seems to be coming closer and closer. This artistic from 1803 to around 1825 with their displays of optical illu- illusion was apparently conjured with a kind of Lanterna sions, ghosts, giants, and various apparitions. The surviving Magica. Could you please find out, as soon as possible, who materials from this early cinema include exquisitely painted constructs such an apparatus, how could WE obtain it, and
Gothic scenes, on two or sometimes three overlapping glass what preparations must be made for it?”21 Goethe made laminae, such that when the moon became overcast, lights more drawings, suggesting that the devil’s initial appear- came on in a turreted castle and a phantom would appear on ance in the form of a poodle, and the vision of Helen of Troy, the battlements. The effects of gloom are in fact inkier than should also be patterned on optical illusions, with two-way a slide projector can achieve and certainly richer in depths mirrors and changing lighting bringing her image suddenly than computer imaging. into focus in the glass. For the spectacular staging of Faust James Hogg’s demonic alter ego consciously harks put on in London in 1824, Mephistopheles carried Faustus back to Marlowe’s Mephistopheles, and the conjurations of through the air by means of a reflection projected into the specters and delusions in the novel also echo the damned air along the lines devised by Brewster and adapted by enchantments of that play. Faust was a popular subject for Pepper’s Ghost trick (or so the historian Frederick Burwick phantasmagoria and magic shows, and when Goethe’s ver- has deduced). 22 sion was performed, first in part in 1812, and then, in the This production of Faust in 1828 took place eleven first full production, in 1829 at Weimar, the poet expressed years before Daguerre announced his fleeting silvered special interest in conjuring effects with a magic lantern and proposed that the Earth Spirit should appear in Faust’s study above: Frontispiece from Robertson’s Mémoires récréatifs depicting a phantas- like the dazzling pentagram in Rembrandt’s engrav- magoria lantern projection. 80 ing of the scholar in his study. Goethe made a sketch opposite and overleaf: artist project Stage by Katrín Sigurðardóttir.
wraiths, but it foreshadows vividly the possibilities that pho- Special effects—from magically seeing through clothes tographic projections would explore: that a fugitive moment to flying through the air—would become abiding passions could be stilled and the animated motion of living things in the cinema. But even more critically, the magic lantern captured, and both be repeated over and over. shows revealed a link between the medium, images of The magic lantern mimicked the operations of the desire, and the power of the artist who makes these fanta- mind in another crucial way, besides its original affinity with sies visible. interior phantasms: it attempted to represent movement. Robertson and his peers were exploring shadow-play Significantly, it did not begin by showing moving objects as to delight audiences with thrills and terrors. But the feelings beheld in the world but gorgeous kaleidoscopic geometries, shadow-play could prompt were also melancholy and reflec- achieved by ingenious slides and double or “biunial” lenses. tive, and it happened that, at the same time as showmen Slides with turning handles and “rack and pinion” gearing were expanding their ingenuity in devising new illusions, entered the entertainer’s repertory. These proto-cinematic artists were turning to shadow as a prime vehicle of ideas for devices were given more imposing names: the Cycloidotrope absence, loss, and memory. projected whirling patterns etched onto layers of smoked glass; the Choreutoscope produced the illusion of the earlier The Origin of Painting; or, The Corinthian Maid flip books and could make dead men dance or a ghost rise Shadow is the stuff that art is made on, according to one from the grave—or a girl take off her clothes.23 legend about the origin of painting. The first portrait was The showmen operating the lantern were magicians, created when “the Corinthian maid,” called Dibutades, and they circulated through the same entertainment chan- saw the shadow of her young man’s profile cast on the wall nels as conjurors and circus artistes; many of them came by a lamp; she then traced it because he was going away from that background, and like mediums, either adopted on a journey and she wanted it for a memento during his exotic names or were born with them. By the late nineteenth absence. Her father, a potter, finding her drawing later, century, the lantern illuminated dreams and fantasies, not “pressed clay on this and made a relief, which he hardened only supernatural, ghastly and spectral, but naughty fulfill- by exposure to fire with the rest of his pottery.”24 ments of desire. The earliest “trick” films borrow seaside The story was transmitted in manuals of painting that pier scripts, including “What the butler saw” jokes and key- harked back to the antique, including Pliny the Elder’s widely hole glimpses of girls undressing. For the ebullient series of enjoyed Natural History, but legends are found beyond optical illusions in his pioneering films of the 1890s, Georges classical culture and earlier. It is however Pliny’s story that Méliès conjured fairies, goblins, and demons; flew to the for a while—mainly in the seventeenth and eighteenth moon; inflated his own head and blew it up; capered about centuries—captivated western artists’ imagination,25 and in the guise of the Devil; and set a lighted fuse to himself and so exploded on camera in full motion to the hilarity of all below: Engraving showing the illusion “Dr. Pepper’s Ghost.” From Theodor who were watching. Eckardt, Die Physik in Bildern Eßlingen, 1881. Courtesy Werner Nekes Collection. Dibutades’ act of loving representation inspired several profiles are closely related to silhouettes: both play with works known as “The Origin of Painting”: the French painter inverted light and shade, relief and contour, and explore the Joseph Suvée and the Scotsman David Allan both explored inherent recognizability of an outline. The onlooker supplies the potential for high drama in the single light source and features from memory, so that the act of looking and fill- the looming shadows thrown against the wall.26 In England, ing in the shadow activates his or her memories. The mind Joseph Wright of Derby further developed the romantic engages strongly with the “unfinished thing”: the aesthetic mood of the fantasy when he imagined the lover sleeping principle of non finito. Lord Kames in Elements of Criticism while his likeness was taken.27 This aspect of the tale suited (1762) analyzed three stages in this process: the first takes the era’s taste for sentimentalité, and Dibutades inspired place in front of the object, the second when it is later called poems and songs in which she represents a faithful and true to mind (“recollected”), and the third when memory and maiden who wished to recollect her beloved in tranquility imagination act in synthesis to inspire reflection, which he during his absence. considered more psychologically potent. When John Ruskin An odd thing among many about this legend is that of returned to the theme, he emphasized how the power of course it does not describe painting at all—the Corinthian imagination enhances aesthetic response through associa- Maid never touches pigment or brush, and a silhouette of tion. Interestingly, Ruskin called the faculty at work in this its essence does not describe anything but outline. (Some mental act of visualizing, “Second Sight.”28 artists noticed this inconsistency, and amended their titles to The white marble bust and the black silhouette, in their “The Origin of Drawing.”) As for Dibutades’ father, it could aesthetic austerity, present a counterweight to the informa- be said he invented bas-relief: Wright of Derby’s picture was tion overload of the polychrome and bedizened waxwork, commissioned by Josiah Wedgwood, another potter, and yet the legend of Dibutades reveals the genealogy linking the great producer of fired classical cameos, who conse- the death mask to the photograph: both copy directly from quently had strong reason to identify with the story. Cameo the real thing. For above all, the heroine of Pliny’s story clearly came near to wielding “the pencil of nature,” as Fox Talbot called light in his famous account of the invention of photography in 1844. Life and death masks, waxworks, and other contact relics had continued in the eighteenth century the tradi- tional struggle to represent the distinctiveness of a person: a “life-like,” outer physical presence rendered in profuse and realistic detail seemed to promise entry to the subject’s essence, their inner spirit. Photography does not inaugurate this trust in a person’s countenance as the seat of the individ- ual, or this identification of image and person, but it did—and does—offer a ready new technology to continue and deepen the illusion of contact with an absent or dead subject and to summon their presence in the mind of the living. Exact depiction of outer characteristics opened the way towards capturing individual quiddity. This at least was the highly rational ambition, expressed in scientific physi- ognomy, realist novels, and living likenesses in portraiture. loving, even erotic; the fantasy or memory of maker and Techniques such as mapping the idiosyncrasies of the skull beholder can later play on the gaps and fill in what is miss- as in phrenology, and forensic approaches such as finger- ing—like color. Such accounts of portraits often presuppose printing, taking copious measurements, and systematic that the purpose of making such a likeness of a face, the analysis of criminal features developed in the course of the most individual part of the human form, would be personal. nineteenth century alongside photography.29 Early forms In at least one of the depictions inspired by Pliny, Dibu- of photography were frequently involved in these now dis- tades’ lover reaches out towards her, while she turns to his credited attempts to pin down human variety: the Parisian reflection on the wall. The very absences and inadequacies police chief Alphonse Bertillon (1853–1914) created a spe- of the “skiagram” create psychological space, where the cial system of measuring features and skeletons and then experience of the image grows so intense as to surpass its diagnosed criminal tendencies from this evidence;30 a similar subject. Dibutades was not the first person to discover that method was used by C. and F. W. Damman to classify “Vari- the living likeness of her beloved, however flat and mono- ous Races of Man” (1875).31 Photography matched the new chrome a silhouette may be, spoke with surprising vividness hunger for proof of personal distinctiveness, and its nine- to her feelings. teenth-century users treated it as a scientific, analytical tool. Domestically, making silhouettes caught on in the nine- Its powers of visual portraiture set the pace for literary real- teenth century as a parlor game in society both in Europe ism and then surpassed literature’s ambitious naturalism. and America and played the part that photography would The idea of art as the play of light and shade was not later fill. A shadow, preserved on paper, acted as an epitome itself new when Pliny told the legend of Dibutades. Plato’s of the subject’s character. For all their schematic stillness, use of the image of flickering reflections in the cave is silhouettes can present the liveliest studies of family groups famous, and the Greek word skiagraphia, “painting with and friends. For example, the Schattenreise in the Beethoven shadow,” recurs in his writing to express illusion, both visual House in Bonn truly capture the Beethoven family’s gather- and intellectual. In the second century, Philostratus, who ings, their pastimes, gestures, and demeanor, and entice the was interested in the power of magic, challenged Plato’s viewer into filling in the gaps.33 The blackness, emptiness, negative view, writing that even when an image is made and simplicity demand work, but, as if by a miracle, the only of skia (shadow) and phos (light) and has no color or shadow figures appear to possess clear features: the shade substance, it can still convey likeness and possess form, summons the person. It is striking that this kind of informal, intelligence, and—interestingly—modesty and bravery. He intimate, often affectionately comic portraiture, depicting went on to make the startlingly modern comment that “the children playing, young people at their music, older women mimetic faculty” is needed when looking at pictures and sewing and reading, men at cards or other tasks, were made that skiagraphia plays upon this power: the beholder fleshes and framed in upper bourgeois and aristocratic households out the image in the light of personal knowledge and fan- where busts also provided favorite interior décor and souve- tasy—akin to Ruskin’s “Second Sight.”32 nirs. Indeed, silhouette profiles are often displayed as if they This perception illuminates the growing presence of the were cameos carved in relief in marble. love motif in Dibutades’ story and the increasingly romantic appeal of the later retellings. The record of a face needs emo- opposite: Engraving by Dutch painter Samuel von Hoogstraten for his 1675 tional engagement as a stimulus to a perception of accuracy, publication, Inleyding tot de Hooge Schoole der Schilderkonst. The scene shows to resemblance leading to recognition. Some of the earli- apprentice painters in a studio carrying out experiments with light and shadow. est ideas about portraiture assume the relationship above: Film still from The Adventures of Prince Achmed, directed by Lotte Reini- 85 between the subject and the artist is intimate and ger, 1926. Courtesy of Milestone Film & Video. Drawing silhouettes also became a popular pastime as an amateur means of diagnosing character. Like phrenology and palmistry, and even short-lived fads for metoposcopy (reading the lines on the forehead), it offered a key to the inner man or woman through their outer features. In 1820, the influential physiognomist Johann Kaspar Lavater repro- duced Dibutades’s experiment in a rational rather than tender spirit.34 He placed himself on the other side of the screen from the light source and analyzed his subjects’ characters from the silhouette: in one case, he decided his sitter was “full of great goodness, with much fineness of character.” He admitted that the silhouette did not reveal the gaiety of the original, as the nose dominated more, but it did convey more of her finesse. In both domestic settings and public auditoria, these pre- photographic forms of portraiture played a part in building a Furthermore, daguerreotype images, imprinted onto new sense of equal distinctiveness and individuality for every- highly polished silver-coated copper sheets, require tilting body. The urban working people who gathered in London’s this way and that to bring the image in the surface into view, Egyptian Hall and other venues across the United States and so the person in the image troublingly appears to hover and Europe had their profiles drawn, their bumps felt, and their fade. This spectral effect, intrinsic to the medium, provoked palms read, and they developed through these means height- frissons from its first appearance, so much so that many ened psychological self-awareness mediated through their early examples are hand-tinted to give bloom to the sitter’s physical differences.35 And this modern sense of self, as an cheeks and lips, or gilded to enliven a cushion, a fob, a pair external being of unique traits operating in the world, grew of earrings. in pace with the emancipation movements of the century. Daguerre had first invented the diorama in Paris in 1822; “Photographic looking” existed before the appear- his later move to invent the daguerreotype follows the logic ance of the camera, as several critics have pointed out, of the contemporary quest to capture particularity with sci- and the new medium responded to desires which were entific realism. In some of the earliest photographic images articulated in other ways: to order, analyze, and store data; ever made, Daguerre himself, his associates, and followers to measure and inventory phenomena; to make memorials chose to picture bas-reliefs and busts and other casts. They of the past.36 (It is interesting, I think, that the story of Dibu- were exhibiting the fine-grained vision of the new process, tades, as a topos of art, fades in popularity after the 1840s, its heightened powers of scrutiny (the buttons on the uni- just as appearances began to be created and fixed by the form of the microscopic guard standing to attention outside new instrument of light, the camera.37) At the same time, the Louvre in one image), its quiveringly alert sensitivity to it responded to and amplified a growing realization that different textural gleam and luster (on marble, on plaster, on human vision was limited, discriminating, and linked to the gilt and on ormolu, on plants’ foliage, on damask upholstery vagaries of memory, and that a machine might be able in an interior study ).38 But the later medium also possessed, to see more, and more clearly. subliminally, a kinship with “peelings off life,” as the novel- Early photography’s muted color palette helped stir asso- ist Honoré de Balzac expressed it after having his portrait ciations with intimacy, even eroticism; its use for sentimental taken by the new process. He confided in 1841 to the pho- record was enhanced by its modest tonal range. Nineteenth- tographer Félix Nadar that he felt that “each body in nature century processes made possible a subtle chronicle of consists of a series of ghosts, in an infinity of superimposed light and shade: a scrupulous registry of subtle gradations layers, foliated in infinitesimal films, in all the directions in enhanced the lifelikeness of its subjects and could animate which optics perceive this body.” Balzac felt in consequence the inanimate, often to an uncanny degree. The rich variety that every daguerreotype “was … going to surprise, detach, of different methods of printing deepened the colors in the and retain one of the layers of the body on which it focused. palette, with whites, grays, silver, saffron, russet, maroon, … From then onwards, and every time the operation was indigo, and smoky blacks. (The best books about the early repeated, the subject in question evidently suffered the loss decades use color reproduction.) Despite these nuances, of one of its ghosts, that is to say, the very essence of which the absence of natural color in these photographs evoked it was composed.” The new medium possessed the accuracy the absence of the subject who had been there in full color of lost wax casting, combined with the illusory shadowy before one’s eyes when the image was made. (After the worlds of silhouette and reflections in mirrors. general spread of color photographs, the nostalgic potency Balzac’s fantasy echoes closely a once highly influen- of black-and-white imagery became even sharper. Indeed tial theory of vision, “intromission,” which was eloquently monochrome became deeply identified with acts of memory;
Steven Spielberg, for instance, used it for the “docu- opposite: A trick lithograph based on Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare (1781). The 86 mentary” scenes about the ghetto in Schindler’s List.) creature appears only when the lithograph is lit from behind. Paris, ca. 1830. evoked by Lucretius and then developed by Roger Bacon to the viewer or are figures of fantasy. When the brilliant in the thirteenth century; according to Lucretius’s model of silhouette-maker and puppeteer Lotte Reiniger adapted the perception, every object beams out images “like a skin, or German tradition to the new art of the movies and began film, / Peeled from the body’s surface … keep[ing] the look, creating silhouette films, she also relied on the power of the the shape / Of what it held before its wandering … the way audience’s imagination to supplement the dazzling sleight
/ Cicadas cast their brittle summer jackets.”40 These eerie, of hand of her scissor art with depth and color and emotion. flying sheddings from physical phenomena, called eidola in Her masterpiece, The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), a Greek and simulacra in Latin, were also known as “radiant full-length Arabian Night fantasia entirely composed of cut- species.” Like a photograph made of light, they both retain out silhouettes, conveys subtle nuance of humor and pathos material substance of their origin but also reproduce it, as as well as sharply drawn personalities and settings through with an “idol,” an effigy, or a copy.41 illusion of light and shadow executed often in delicate fili-
This theory of vision survives with an uneven pulse in gree.45 Prince Achmed has a dreamy mood with touches of the history of science,42 and Balzac may be referring to it melancholy, and some extended sinister passages bristling directly. But the anecdote captures more immediately the with demons and monsters, which the basic black of Rei- uncanny aura hanging around daguerreotypes from the niger’s craft of course matches perfectly. But on the whole very beginning and which then began to emanate from the film dances with delight, and does not plunge the viewer photographs too. Images made of light and shadow cast into the nocturnal range of early still photography. by people, things, and places seem to preserve action at a The power of such images—the silhouette, and the distance: the transmission of the person through time. The black-and-white portrait photograph—arises from their metaphors adopted for the medium—including the word pel- origin in the light that once played on their subjects and licola, little skin, for film itself in Italian—present a powerful formed their image. They are emanations, captured and instance of a figure of speech materializing into substance. stilled. Is that a figure of speech? They are copies of the Some early printing processes, such as calotype (1840 originals, and, in that sense, their character ceases to be to ca. 1855), salted paper prints (1839 to ca. 1855, and metaphorical. It is here, on this edge where the figurative 1890s to 1900), and platinum prints (1873 to ca. 1890), soak touches the actual and the image becomes reality, that into the fabric of the paper, giving the image velvety depths. shadow eerily communicates individual presence; this effect This bonding deepens the impression of presence imma- grows when a shadow becomes a shade, and that shade a nent in the material; for this reason, contemporary artists reflection; then the projected image of a person brushes the have revived these processes.43 By contrast, when the print condition of spirit. medium is metal, paper, glass, or other shiny surface—such as created by the later emulsions pasted onto a coated sur- This material has been adapted from Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and face—the materials themselves add more play with light and Media (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). shadow, glistening and reflection (a problem, sometimes, in displaying photographs). This stuff of light and shade 1 For background reading, see Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Cen- dissolves the substance in which the image is caught more tury Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (New York and Oxford: Oxford University convincingly than ever a stretched canvas or fresco wall Press, 1995); Simon During, Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular dematerializes when painted. All these intrinsic properties of Magic (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2002); and Jeffrey the photographic print lent it peculiarly well to rendering the Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham: vivid products of the mind’s eye. Duke University Press, 2000). Julia Margaret Cameron, making calotype portraits in 2 Castle, The Female Thermometer, op. cit., p. 17. See also Marina Warner, No Go the the 1860s and 1870s, worked purposefully with the emotive Bogeyman: On Scaring, Lulling, and Making Mock (London: Chatto & Windus; New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), pp. 40 ff. range of non finito shadowplay: she plunged her subjects 3 For example the painted slides Icebergs, ca. 1860, and Aurora Borealis, ca. 1900, into deep chiaroscuro, or posed them against the light to made by the London-based firm of Carpenter and Wesley, now in the collection of the create a haloed head, or luminously outlined the edge of the Whipple Museum of Science, Cambridge University. profile. Her portrait of Carlyle looked like “a rough block by 4 Eyes, Lies and Illusions (from the Werner Nekes Collection), exh. cat. (London: Hayward Michelangelo,” commented Herschel approvingly. Carlyle Gallery, 2004); Barbara Maria Stafford, “Revealing/Technologies/Magical Domains,” in himself praised the “high relief” of The Mountain Nymph Barbara Maria Stafford and Frances Terpak, eds., Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Sweet Liberty.44 Cameron also deliberately overexposed Box to Images on the Screen (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2001). the prints so that the photographs look like silhouettes in 5 Etienne-Gaspard Robertson, Mémoires récréatifs,scientifiques et anecdotiques d’un reverse—white on black—as in numerous images posed by physicien-aéronaute, vol. 1 (Paris: 1830–1834), pp. 144–145. Quoted in David Robin- her favorite, Mary Hillier, including the famous Call, I Follow, son, “Robinson on Robertson,” New Magic Lantern Journal, vol. 4, no. 1 (1986), p. 5. I Follow, Let Me Die, and The Angel at the Tomb. Bowing to 6 See Robertson, Mémoires récréatifs, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 272–310; Laurent Mannoni, the same aesthetic traditions of the preceding century, she The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema, trans. Richard Crangle also cut out a profile of Julia Jackson—the future mother of (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000), pp. 32–33; David Robinson, “Robinson on Virginia Woolf—to create a kind of cameo. Robertson,” op. cit., pp. 4–13; David Robinson, “Shows and Slides,” in Dennis Crompton Shadows can evoke likeness with startling et al., eds., Servants of Light: The Book of the Lantern (Kirk by Malgcard: The Magic 87 acuteness even when the originals are not known Lantern Society, 1997); Tom Ruffles, “Phantasmagoria Ghost Shows,” Udolpho, no. 30 (Autumn 1997), pp. 21–23; Mervyn Heard, “Paul de Philipsthal & the Phantasmagoria Imagination,” paper for symposium “On a Portrait: The Aesthetic and Social Worlds of in England, Scotland and Ireland,” Part One, “Boo!,” New Magic Lantern Journal, vol. 8, Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–79),” National Museum of Photography, Film and Televi- no. 1 (October 1996), pp. 2–7, Part Two, “Shoo!,” New Magic Lantern Journal, vol. 8, no. sion, Bradford, England (June 2003). 2 (October 1997), pp. 11–16; Mike Bartley, “In Search of Robertson’s Fantasmagorie,” 29 Alphonse Bertillon, La Photographie judiciare (Paris: Gauthier Villars, 1890). See Optical Lantern Journal, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 1–5. Jean Clair, ed., L’ame au corps, exh. cat. (Paris: Gallimard / Electa, 1993), pp. 400, 402. 7 X. Theodore Barber, “Phantasmagorical Wonders: The Magic Lantern Ghost Show 30 His notorious “anthropometry” was officially adopted in 1888 in France. in Nineteenth-century America,” Film History, vol. 3, no. 2 (1989), pp. 73–86; Hauke 31 Similar educational aids were also disseminated, using photographs as primary Lange-Fuchs, “On the Origin of Moving Slides,” Optical Lantern Journal, vol. 7, no. 3. evidence: for example, “Dr. Rud. Martin’s Wall Illustrations of all types in the most perfect 8 Robertson, Mémoires récréatifs, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 294–295. style of photochrome ... intended to serve as help to teachers in primary and middle 9 Anon., “Conversation No 4: ‘The Red Woman of Berlin,’” The Portfolio, 5 February schools,” reads an English advertisement issued by the Institute Orell Fussli in Zurich. 1825. Pitt Rivers Museum Photographic Collection, Oxford; see also Martin Kemp and Marina 10 See Evelyn J. Fruitema and Paul A. Zoetmulder, eds., The Panorama Phenomenon, Wallace, Spectacular Bodies: The Art and Science of the Human Body from Leonardo to exh. cat. (The Hague: Foundation for the Preservation of the Centenarian Mesdag Pan- Now, exh. cat. (London: Hayward Gallery, 2000–2001). orama, 1981). 32 Plato, The Republic, trans. Walter Hamilton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), pp. 11 “Dioramas” file, John Johnson Collection, Bodleian Library, Oxford University. See 602 d, 523 b, 365 c, 583b; Flavius Philostratus, The Life of Apollonius of Tyana, trans. Ralph Hyde, “Thomas Hornor: Pictural Land Surveyor,” Imago Mundi, vol. 29 (1977), pp. Christopher P. Jones (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1912), Book II, p. 22; 23–34. see Ruth Padel, “Making Space Speak,” in Froma Zeitlin and J. Winkler, eds., Nothing to 12 Frederick Burwick, “Romantic Drama: From Optics to Illusion,” in Stuart Peterfreud, Do with Dionysus? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 350–351. ed., Literature and Society: Theory and Practice (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 33 Heinrich Philipp Bossler, from Speyer, made Schattenrisse, or silhouette portraits, 1990), p. 169. of the Von Breuning family in 1782, and, two years later, of Mozart, Schubert, et al.; 13 Richard Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press, 1978). I saw Beethoven House, Bonn; the Goethe House in Weimar displays silhouette portraits of the a working life-size replica of this device at the exhibition “Clouds Images: The Discovery of poet and his circle, as well as “Scenes from Faust,” in this form. Heaven,” Jenisch Haus Museum, Hamburg, 2004. It is now permanently installed in the 34 See Kaspar Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy, 4th edition, trans. Thomas Holcroft Landesmuseum, Altona. (London: Thomas Tegg, 1844), pl. XXV, pp. 176–179. A digital version of this book is 14 Letter to Louisa Beckford, 1838, quoted in John Walter Oliver, The Life of William available at
Mirror, Mirror stats—specially designed, computer-operated, rotating Julia Bryan-Wilson mirrors—in an open field about a quarter of a mile outside of town. Mounted on poles and measuring about six feet Nestled in an Alpine valley, the northern Austrian village of in diameter, the heliostats’ mobile panels will track the Rattenberg is known for its glass factories and hand-blown movement of the sun, like giant, motorized metal sunflowers crystal figurines. Travelers come to browse the stores that turning their faces to the light. line its medieval streets, but their numbers dwindle as winter The heliostats will reflect the sun’s rays onto a tall, nears. In November, the sun slides out of Rattenberg’s view, mirror-covered tower to be set in the center of town. In turn, never quite arcing high enough to rise over the surrounding the tower will deflect the light onto other mirrors mounted mountains that for centuries provided it protection against on building facades, diffusing the beams to prevent danger- invasion. Darkness descends, and the village, cloaked by the ously focused, scorching rays. The mirrors will not drench long shadows cast by the nearby peaks, remains sunless the town in an even, blinding glare; this is no movie set until February. where, with the flip of a switch and a dozen flood bulbs, Rattenberg’s lack of sunshine for about a third of the night dazzlingly becomes day. (Such broad, total illumina- year is considered by its inhabitants to be the single most tion would require impossibly enormous mirrors.) Instead, difficult thing about living there. Many tire of winter’s dim light will cascade down to create areas of illumination, or and chilly noons and its perpetual nights lit only by the “hotspots.” Preliminary sketches reveal a pleasantly dappled feeble glow of the moon. Not even the town’s annual candle- effect, not unlike the sun-speckled lanes of Thomas Kinkade light Advent festival can compensate for this long stretch paintings. These bright spots, however, will be about “lawn devoid of daylight. Sunshine is tantalizingly just out of reach; size,” large enough for people to cluster inside, like fish rays bathe Kramsach, a neighboring village ten minutes schooling in shimmering pools of sunshine.2 away, for a few hours a day even in the dead of winter. Bartenbach LichtLabor (BLL), the Austrian design firm Rattenberg’s tiny population (home to 600 people, it is the behind Rattenberg’s mirror strategy, specializes in engineer- smallest town in Austria) is ever-diminishing, as more and ing and architectural applications of natural light. Creating more residents depart in search of brighter prospects. corporate office environments that reduce eyestrain and These grim winters are not unique—about sixty vil- maximize energy efficiency, BLL also has designed the lages in this region of the Alps alone go dark in the winter lighting in airports, railway stations, and shopping centers, months—but the dwindling citizenry of Rattenberg has harnessing the sun’s invigorating powers to “stimulate the come up with an original solution to its collective seasonal customers’ willingness to buy.”3 Thus the BLL proposal for doldrums.1 With financial help from the European Union, Rattenberg is doubly canny. The heliostats will have salutary Rattenberg will soon capture the sun that streams to physical and psychological effects on the residents; they nearby Kramsach to illuminate its own dim streets. Plans will also boost tourism (and tourist spending) year-round. announced in fall 2005 call for the erection of fifteen helio- Additionally, while bringing sun to Rattenberg is projected to cost about $2.5 million, BLL is footing the bill for the the Discovery Channel’s MythBusters program; the results of planning phase (about $600,000) in hopes that other sun- that trial were inconclusive.8 Still, as anyone who has ever starved municipalities will take note and seize on the idea killed ants with a magnifying glass knows, focused light can themselves. be deadly. While it might sound like the improbable premise of a Yet mirrored sun can also heal; the benefits of soaking
Guy Maddin film,4 Rattenberg’s mirror plan makes profound up the sun’s vitamin D have long been touted. Roland sense. When in place, the system of reflective surfaces will Barthes, in his meditation on the Eiffel Tower, recalls the not just light up the town in winter, it will also metonymi- never-realized plans for a second tower in Paris. “A bonfire cally stand in for the town itself, with its shining glassworks placed on top of the structure was to illuminate the darkness and prismatic crystal wares. The gleaming charms of “die of every nook and cranny in Paris by a system of mirrors Glasstadt Tirols” (the “Tyrol glass city”)—already jewel- (a system that was undoubtedly a complex one!) … the like—will be illuminated and magnified. The town will surely last story of this sun tower (about 1,000 feet, like the Eiffel capitalize on these connections, and perhaps take advan- Tower) was to be reserved for a kind of sunroom, in which tage, too, of the region’s historical fascination with gleam invalids would benefit from an air ‘as pure as in the moun- and sparkle. Fifteenth-century painters in northern Europe— tains.’”9 This tower, “quite mad technologically,” as Barthes Dutch, German, Austrian, and Flemish artists such as Jan notes, would have been at once a sophisticated surveillance Van Eyck—obsessed with oil paint’s ability to transmit mechanism and a medicinal chamber, a conjunction that luminescence, depicted many glistening gems and glowing sheds light on several nineteenth-century fixations: safe mirrored orbs.5 This distinctly Northern realism was fixated cities, healthy bodies, and the promise of technology. But on luster (in contrast to the Italian devotion to perspective); this quixotic hybrid was not to be. it is thus fitting that the streets of Rattenberg will soon twin- More contemporary reflective applications are no less kle. The plan is, in all the senses of the word, brilliant. mad or fantastical. In 1999, the Russian space station Mir There might be, however, inadvertent effects (beyond attempted to launch a “space mirror” that would have, if the obvious squinting perils) of the town’s newly mirrored perfected, cast a circle on the earth five miles wide and as surfaces. Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los bright as full moonlight. The mirror would have become, in Angeles, for instance, serves as a warning. The building essence, an artificial, or mirror, moon. It could have been opened in October 2003, but come springtime, with the honed and focused to light up darkened northern regions; increasing intensity of the sun and its particular angle in it also might have aided farming, disaster relief, and military the sky, Gehry’s signature metallic aesthetic went awry as efforts.10 Regardless of its potential, the space mirror was one section of the building’s mirror-polished stainless steel widely condemned for its presumed negative effects on the exterior began to emit excessive glare.6 Residents of the circadian rhythms of animals, plants, and humans. Worse, condos across the street complained about the reflections critics saw it as a narcissistic endeavor, an attempt to trump off the building’s northwest corner, some claiming to record nature that might disrupt fragile ecosystems built on regular temperatures of up to 138 degrees Fahrenheit where the cycles of light and dark. These fears were allayed when the sun was focused. While the assertions remained contro- space mirror was damaged as it was being deployed, and versial, apocryphal tales circulated of road cones melting in the experiment was shelved for the foreseeable future. the streets. In 2005, cowed by pressure about traffic acci- All mirrors inspire charges of narcissism, of course, dents the glinting building might cause (none had actually and even Rattenberg’s clever solution to its wintry gloom occurred), Gehry agreed to have about 4,000 square feet of does not escape this accusation. Will tourists flock to see the building sandblasted to dull its harsh glitter. the mirrors of Rattenberg and bask in the flickering promise Throughout history, mirrors have reflected the sun that humans can reroute the sun and supersede nature? for a variety of purposes. Sometimes the effects are delib- Or will they recoil at this high-tech hubris, mourning the erately injurious. It is said that around 212 BCE, Greek village’s old-fashioned candle-lit Yuletide celebrations? mathematician Archimedes defeated the Roman army with As we all know, there are good mirrors and bad ones: his sun-powered “death ray” during the siege of Syracuse. those that are flattering and those that are unkind. If mirrors The Epitome Ton Istorion, a twelfth-century text by Zonaras, have an implicit doubleness, so, too, does the sun, especially narrates how Archimedes “burned up the whole Roman as we reckon with global warming. While its rays might fleet. For by tilting a kind of mirror toward the sun he con- alleviate depression, they also increasingly rain down the centrated the sun’s beam upon it; and ... kindled a great radiation that causes skin cancer. Might a town like Ratten- flame, the whole of which he directed upon the ships that berg take a different tack and market its very lack of sun? In lay at anchor in the path of the fire, until he consumed them this eco-tourism with a difference, it could become a vaca- all.”7 In 2005, MIT students, seeking to prove that this tale tion haunt for photosensitive shade-worshippers, and those of devastation might be more than the stuff of myth, set a seeking respite from the harmful energies of a sun strength- small boat on fire using a device made of more than 100 ened by ozone depletion. mirrors that focused the sun into laser-like rays. Accounts of
the students’ success provoked much skepticism, opposite: fresco (ca. 1599-1600) in Uffizi Gallery, Florence, by Giulio Parigi 91 and they were asked to recreate their experiment for showing Archimedes’ “death ray.” 3 BLL website,
2 One is put in mind of the children pleasuring in the warmth of the sun in Ray Bradbury’s above: Bartenbach LichtLabor’s diagram of sunlight redirected on the town of short story “All Summer in a Day,” first published in The Magazine of Fiction and Science Rattenberg. Courtesy of Helmar Zangerl at Bartenbach LichtLabor. Fiction, March 1954; reprinted in A Medicine for Melancholy (New York: Doubleday, 1959). opposite: Tim Noble & Sue Webster, Spin Shadow Heads, 2006.
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SLEIGHT OF LIGHT 1955). Colored shadows were first performed by Charles and Jonathan Allen Maria Drouillat in 1914, but patented in the same year by Max Holden, a possible instance of shadow theft. Shadow- There is money in shadows. graphy retains its popularity with contemporary practitioners —Bernard Miller, The Strand Magazine (July–December 1897) including the Indian duo Amar Sen and Sabyasachi Senby, the former described at www.handshadowgraphy.com as Shortly after midday on 7 March 1865, a narrow annunciat- “making love with the creative art of hand shadows since ing beam of sunlight entered an otherwise darkened room at 1973.” In common with their Victorian forebears, the duo’s Cheltenham Town Hall, England. Light was deemed inimical shadow back-catalogue features contemporary satirical nar- to the spirits that the two charismatic American mediums, ratives, including a twenty-fingered tribute to the deaths of the Davenport Brothers, had hoped to summon for the Princess Diana and Mother Theresa in 1997. Shadow- assembled audience from within a raised wooden-paneled throwing remains one of magic’s allied arts. séance cabinet. However, when a tiny square of drapery The ubiquitous shadows cast on the white screen fell from one of the room’s high windows, the unrestrained by pranksters in today’s movie theaters pay inadvertent figure of Ira Davenport was momentarily seen throwing homage to cinema’s oedipal relationship to magic, since “spirit-animated” musical instruments by hand from the cab- both Devant and Trewey played important roles in the evolu- inet’s interior. This inadvertent shadow farce was witnessed tion of the more layered shadow-play of the cinema, which by amateur magician John Nevil Maskelyne (1839–1917), eventually dislodged magic’s hold on popular spectatorship. who within three months had accurately recreated the Trewey was a friend of the Lumière Brothers and arranged Davenports’ cabinet using illusion technology alone, wrong- the first London presentation of the cinématographe at the footed the advance of Spiritualism in England, and founded, Royal Polytechnic Institution in February 1896. Devant, who together with George A. Cooke (1825–1904), one of the was by then working closely with Maskelyne and Cooke greatest dynasties of performance magic’s Golden Era. at the Egyptian Hall in London’s Piccadilly, recognized a The management of shadows on the magic stage is rival spectacle and approached Trewey directly. Something rarely left to chance. Lighting cues for performances tend of a shadow-war ensued between the two ombramanists, to follow a dual trajectory, on the one hand creating a fiction with Trewey refusing all negotiation and Devant eventually of transparency—the magician and assembled props picked securing an alternative device, R. W. Paul’s moving-picture out in an array of flattering lighting states—and, on the animatographe. A few months later, Devant obtained one other, charting a meticulous choreography of concealment of Paul’s devices on behalf of Georges Méliès, owner of where shadows and darkness assist the unseen. Moreover, the magic Théâtre Robert-Houdin in Paris and eventually it is not always within shadows that the mechanics of an illu- Star Films, who had himself been refused terms of use for sion are hidden. Shadow misdirection is common, whereby the cinématographe by Antoine Lumière the previous year. an area of ambiguous illumination is offered intentionally to The twin-lensed projection of film’s future—documentary distract the audience’s suspicious gaze. The resulting focus, (Lumière) and fantasy (Méliès)—emerged literally from a or “guilt,” moves away from the body of the magician, who history of shadows. is then free to execute any necessary sleight under the full glare of stage lights. Painted trompe l’oeil shadows also fea- ture on the surfaces, or within the interiors of many magic props, creating effects that confuse volume, orientation, and materiality. In the realm of the audience, it is not by chance that magic shows often feature rapid pyrotechnic sequences. The temporary shadow cast upon a spectator’s retina by a sudden flash of light can provide cover for much necessary stage business. But shadows enter the history of magic in less covert ways. Shadow-throwers (also known as ombraman- ists, shadowists, or shadowgraphers) were common by the late nineteenth century in Europe, with celebrated French magician Félicien Trewey (1845–1920) knuckling and fingering over 300 animal and human characters into mono- chromatic life within a moon-like circle of projected light. Hand-shadowgraphy was widely popularized in England by magicians such as David Devant (1868–1941), and via opposite: The Shadow Magazine, 15 January 1933, with story by Maxwell books where techniques were often presented alongside Grant (Walter B. Gibson). Courtesy Nostalgia Ventures; copyright Condé Nast. instructive routines for the would-be drawing-room conjuror. above: The Davenport Brothers inside their spirit cabinet. From left: Ira Dav- Foot-shadowgraphy became the specialty of another enport, William Fay (their manager), author Robert Cooper, and William Henry 97 French performer Chassino (Éléonor Chassin, 1869– Davenport. Courtesy Aldus Archive. Devant’s familiarity with the effectiveness of the theat- (William Larsen and T. Page Wright, circa 1920); “Shadow ricalized shadow led to an illusion entitled “The Window of Pagoda” (Cyril Yettmah, circa 1930); “The Mark Wilson Spirit the Haunted House” (1911), essentially a shadow variation Cabinet” (Alan Wakeling and John Gaughan, circa 1980); on the magic playlet form evolved by the magician during and “The Origami Folding Shadows” (Jim Steinmeyer, circa his ten-year association with Maskelyne. An audience com- 1990)—each contributing to the growing enlistment of mittee was invited to the stage to inspect a raised platform female assistant performers who materialized and vanished upon which rested a large box-like window frame, removed, within magic narratives that reflected the sexual stereo- so Devant said, from a house in which a violent murder had types of their eras. If the shadow was increasingly gendered taken place. No other persons were seen to approach or within performance magic, then a wand found in the collec- leave the platform, yet a complex shadow murder play was tion of magic historian Mike Caveney offers something of a suddenly visible from within the frame featuring a cast of shadow-phallus. A miniature sibling of the shadow-cane, five characters, including a fireman with hoses, and culmi- the object belongs to the community of artifacts known nating with the room’s interior appearing to be engulfed by as jouets séditieux, or subversive toys, where selective flames. wood-turning creates cast shadow portrait silhouettes (often On the surface, this voyeuristic domestic tableau would politically contentious) when held against a light surface. have appealed to Edwardian tabloid appetites—the Crip- Caveney’s wand commemorates an important moment pen murder had fixated the popular press during 1910 and of patriarchal transmission when the mantle of the Royal 1911—yet the unconscious, it could be said, of Devant’s Dynasty of Magic was passed by magician Harry Kellar illusion belonged to the proceeding era, one in which Vic- (1849–1922) to Howard Thurston (1869–1936) on 16 May toria had spent the forty years after Prince Albert’s death 1908 at Ford’s Theatre in Baltimore, Maryland. Carved passing through various intensities of mourning black, her from the wood of the stage on which the event took place, public body itself a gradually resolving shadow. The period the wand is turned to cast a shadow of the head of each was characterized by what Philippe Ariès termed la mort magician at alternate ends, the magicians’ bodies meeting de toi (“thy death”), an increasing intolerance of separation in a crypto-erotic conjoining of potency along the wand’s from those to whom one is closest that, during a period shaft. of high mortality, caused mourners to seek consolation in Godfather to all subsequent comic-book superheroes, spiritualism and expressions of exaggerated grief.1 Mortal- The Shadow—created by Walter B. Gibson (1897–1985), ity pervades Devant’s “shadow people” as the illusion was magician and ghostwriter for many renowned perform- elsewhere known, since they are cast by human beings ers including Harry Houdini, Howard Thurston, and Harry Blackstone—made his debut in the early 1930s. Maxwell Grant, Gibson’s pseudonym for many of the early Shadow stories, was an eponymous nod to magic dealers Max Holden (owner of the performance rights to the “Colored Shadows” illusion) and U. F. Grant, who in 1930 had written The Shadow Conjuring Act, a thirteen-page self-published mimeograph laying out alternative patter routines and pre- sentation methods for existing shadow acts. The origins of the superhero are to be found, therefore, not in the distant galaxies or bat-filled caverns of the Hollywood imagina- tion, but in the tenebrous corners of the New York (Holden) and Massachusetts (Grant) magic worlds. “By combining,” Gibson wrote, “Houdini’s penchant for escapes with the hypnotic power of Tibetan mystics, plus the knowledge who are not just out of sight (like the many hidden perform- shared by Thurston and Blackstone in the creation of illu- ers of the popular spectacles d’ombres of the same period), sions, such a character would have unlimited scope when but from figures that, through illusionistic means, seemed confronted by surprise situations, yet all could be brought never to have existed, or to have existed beyond compre- within the range of credibility.”2 hended realms. These were shadows of shades, a kind of One of the effects U. F. Grant appropriated in The augmented tenebrosity pertinent to the anxieties of an era Shadow Conjuring Act was an illusion entitled “Walking withdrawing from Christian assurances, and haunted by the Away from a Shadow.” In fact, the effect was created in new and unfamiliar ghosts of Freud and Darwin. Devant’s 1924 by Alexander Stobl, a New York–based Hungarian, audiences were increasingly disturbed by their own shad- for magician Harry Blackstone (1885–1965). The suggestive ows, let alone the perplexing live memento mori conjured title brings to mind the German poet and botanist Adelbert upon his stage.
Devant’s illusion was the first in a number of subse- above: “Boudoir of a Dancing Girl,” ca. 1920s. Courtesy Scott Penrose. quent box-type shadow illusions using differing opposite: Chassino. commercial stone-lithographic poster, ca. 1900s. 98 methods—including “Boudoir of the Dancing Girl” Courtesy private collection. von Chamisso’s story of Peter Schlemihl (1813), a young point to the receding gothic romanticism of Dorian Gray, man who sold his shadow to the devil, only to have the devil and forward to the horrific and unsolicited blast-shadow later try to sell it back in return for his soul. A portrait of self-portraits left by victims on the streets of Hiroshima— Blackstone exists showing the magician casting a demonic vivid reminders of science’s oft-bedeviled if not downright shadow against a wall, echoing a long tradition of repre- errant trajectory. Without any contemporary lighting records sentations of the mutually lucrative kinship between magic available, one might imagine the native green glow of the performers and diabolic envoys. Stobl’s innovation involved phosphorous screen prompting Blackstone to balance the a freestanding phosphorous-coated screen upon which the stage lighting with a red gel in the footlights, offering the magician’s three-quarter length projected shadow could be possibility that his stage might indeed have had a somewhat fugitively retained, allowing him to appear to leave it behind diabolic air, or, with retrospective theatricality, a pulp sci-fi at will. Blackstone’s consequent nightly stage self-portraits thermonuclear glow. Harry Blackstone’s interest in stage chiaroscuro contin- 1 Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes Towards Death from the Middle Ages to the Present ued with “The Floating Light Bulb,” designed and built by (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974). Thomas Edison, and considered by many to be his master- 2 Walter B. Gibson, preface for Crime Oracle and The Teeth of the Dragon: Two Adven- work of illusion. Here, a small light bulb with no discernable tures of the Shadow (New York: Dover, 1975). source of power illuminated the darkened stage and defied a 3 The other belongs to David Copperfield and protects the physical choreography of the sequence of physical laws at the fingertips of the charismatic performer during his famous “Flying” illusion, the movements of which were meticulously magician. The climax of the trick, developed and popularized researched from accounts of self-propelled flight during dreaming. more recently by his late son Harry Blackstone, Jr. (1934–97), occurred when the bulb was seen to float, still illuminated, high over the heads of the audience before returning to the magician’s outstretched hand. This example of the pen- etration of the theater’s “fourth wall” by a magic property remains, according to Blackstone’s widow, Gay, one of only two legally protected “intellectual properties” relating to a performance behavior existing in magic’s long and litigious history.3 If the spring sunlight entering Cheltenham Town Hall in 1865 threatened disenchantment, then by the time that Blackstone’s tiny electric light bulb floated out across the vast theaters of Las Vegas and beyond in the 1970s and through into the 1990s, the shadows it cast upon the upturned faces of the audience were secularized, com- modified, even gendered. Yet despite this transformation of umbrageous charm, such illusions retain their power to lift spectators momentarily away from their own shadows into collective speculative wonderment, before returning them to the auditorium in firm possession, unlike poor
Peter Schlemihl, of their troublesome doubles. above left to right: Harry Blackstone, Sr., ca. 1920; Harry Blackstone, Jr., per- forming The Blackstone Floating Light Bulb, 1985. Courtesy Gay Blackstone and 100 the Blackstone Magik Enterprises Collection. FIVE O’CLOCK SHADOWS the importance of his appearance onscreen. It was a gross colby chamberlain miscalculation. Kennedy had recently been campaigning in California, and a fresh tan burnished his already photogenic “Don’t Let ‘5 O’clock Shadow’ Start a Whispering features. Nixon, on the other hand, was recovering from Campaign,” warns a 1937 print advertisement for Gem a serious knee infection that had left him twenty pounds Razors and Blades. “Let down a little in your personal lighter than usual. Nevertheless, with an audience of 70 mil- appearance and it’s just human nature for others to surmise lion about to tune in, Nixon refused the network’s cosmetics that things aren’t so good with you!”1 In the accompany- and instead sent an aide to a nearby drugstore to pick up a ing image, two women point and look askance at someone package of Lazy Shave.6 unseen but presumably hapless—and indubitably ill-shaven. Lazy Shave “Hides the Beard!” claimed the box Defining five o’clock shadow as “that unsightly beard growth copy. A “color-cake for between shaves,” it was essentially a which appears prematurely at about 5 P.M.,’” Gem Blades powder makeup thick enough to mask a five o’clock shadow used the variation “Avoid 5 O’clock Shadow” as its company for a few extra hours.7 Its creator, Max Factor, packaged the slogan well into the 1940s.2 It was an advertising campaign powder as part of its Hollywood Signature line of “grooming aimed squarely at social anxiety, invoking the shadow to essentials” for men. Just as the Gillette Company had done conjure up everything ominous and unwelcome about a since 1946 through its sponsorship of The Gillette Cavalcade day’s worth of facial hair. Today, in an age distant enough of Sports, Max Factor took out advertisements featuring from the last episode of the 1980s television series Miami ballplayer spokesmen in newspaper sports pages to help Vice to have absorbed in full the impact of Don Johnson’s obscure their products’ essentially cosmetic function, which designer stubble, five o’clock shadow has lost any such might begin to explain why Lazy Shave so regretfully eluded sinister implications. At one time, however, it was the very Nixon’s definition of makeup.8 Oddly enough, the Max specter of personal and professional calamity—so much so Factor brand first came to prominence as a fixture of Hol- that one case of five o’clock shadow left an indelible mark lywood, where its eponymous founder developed cosmetics on the face of US politics. exclusively for actors and actresses appearing before the The 1960 presidential contest between Vice President camera. Lazy Shave, needless to say, was a later invention. Richard Nixon and Senator John Kennedy was the first to During the debate, Nixon began to sweat under the studio feature a series of televised debates. “Never before have lights, and the makeup melted off his cheeks. so many people seen the major candidates for President of The rest, as they say, is history. Nixon’s pale complexion the United States at the same time,” NBC newsman Frank and dark jowls unnerved audiences, and Kennedy won the McGee put it when he introduced the second debate on crucial first debate on the strength of his good looks and October 7, “and never until this series have Americans seen composure. His success that evening carried him into the the candidates in face-to-face exchange.”3 The debates White House by a razor-thin margin. It was not, however, were a nod to the growing importance of television, which total victory. Those who listened to the debate on the radio by then already reached nine out of ten households in the (among them Kennedy’s running mate, Lyndon Johnson) United States. Nixon had previously enjoyed some success awarded the win to Nixon. A debate champion since his with the medium, such as when he rescued his 1952 Vice high school years, Nixon had kept his discussion of the Presidential candidacy from allegations of corruption with issues focused even as his appearance unraveled. “Nixon his “Checkers” speech. Television cameras, however, hardly ... suffered a handicap that was serious only on television,” flattered his appearance—particularly given his naturally observed Daniel Boorstin in his prescient 1962 book The pale skin and heavy beard. Just two weeks prior to the first Image: or, What Happened to the American Dream. Boorstin debate, he discussed his predicament with television anchor used the term “pseudo-event” to describe the increasing Walter Cronkite: “I get letters from women, for example, dramatization of society and politics through their trans- sometimes—and men—who support me, and they say, formation into a series of televised spectacles. “If we test ‘Why do you wear that heavy beard when you are on tele- Presidential candidates by their talents on TV quiz perfor- vision?’ Actually, I don’t try, but I can shave within thirty mances,” he argued, “we will, of course, choose presidents seconds before I go on television and still have a beard, for precisely these qualifications. In a democracy, reality unless we put some powder on, as we have done today.”4 tends to conform to the pseudo-event. Nature imitates art.”10 The dark shadow also dogged Nixon in print thanks to his To Boorstin, Nixon was the first major victim of the pseudo- frequent appearances in the work of Washington Post car- event’s up-ending of politics, a presidential candidate judged toonist “Herblock” (Herbert Block), whose caricature of the on the basis of his audition as a television personality. As the politician had badly needed a shave since 1948.5 writer Hunter S. Thompson put it, “The mushrooming TV The first of the debates took place at a CBS studio in audience saw [Nixon] as a truthless used-car salesman, and
Chicago on 26 September. Nixon typically depended on a they voted accordingly.”11 special blend of powders for television appearances, but That label of salesman dogged Nixon through his when Kennedy declined makeup, an intimidated Nixon did career, alternately as praise for his abilities or doubt of his likewise—evidently giving greater weight to the good intentions. The quip “Would you buy a used car from 101 insinuations that using cosmetics might invite than this man?”, usually attributed to the humorist Mort Sahl, was in equal measures comedic and genuinely concerned.12 In effect, Nixon provoked the same ambivalence as profes- sional salesmen themselves, who, as a class, traded on an aura of trustworthiness and for whom a clean shave was an essential outward manifestation of their integrity. Henry Babbitt, the real estate salesman in Sinclair Lewis’s satire of the 1920s, begins the day struggling with his razor: “Furi- ously he snatched up his tube of shaving-cream, furiously he lathered with a belligerent slapping of the unctuous brush, furiously he raked his plump cheeks with a safety-razor. It pulled. The blade was dull. He said ‘Damn—oh—oh—damn it!’”13 Willy Loman, Babbitt’s cultural successor, lives in a house that “smells of shaving lotion.”14 What Nixon shared with the average salesman— fictional or otherwise—was membership in the expanding ranks of the middle class. Just as the phrase five o’clock shadow made pointed reference to the 9-to-5 schedule of the typical worker, the contest between Nixon and Kennedy was as much a drama of origins as it was of political positions. The son of a California lemon farmer, Nixon had made his way through government by virtue of a fierce—and fiercely adversarial—Quaker work ethic. “I won my share of scholar- ships, and of speaking and debating prizes in school,” Nixon wrote of his time at Whittier College “not because I was smarter but because I worked longer and harder than some of my gifted colleagues.”15 The same competitive spirit that won Nixon accolades, however, also gained him a reputation for expendable principles and calculated ruthlessness. His 1 Advertisement for Gem Razor and Blades, Time, 11 October 1937, p. 33. According to ambitions were as plainly evident as his beard. Kennedy’s, the OED, this advertisement is the first recorded usage of this term. by contrast, came packaged in an air of privilege and public 2 “Advertising News and Notes,” The New York Times, 13 February 1943, p. 20. service. Aristocratic in upbringing and demeanor, Kennedy 3 Footage of the debate available at