Editors:

Laura Whadey Claire Hurtig Nicholas Herman Heather Diack

Advisor:

Alexander Nagel

Editorial Committee:

Guita Lamsechi Sarah Guerin Contrapposto Jenny Florence Carol Choi 2003/2004

In addition to our advisor and editorial committee, we would like to thank the following individuals and groups at the University of Toronto: Professors Marc Gotlieb and Michael Koortbojian; the Fine Art Department; Dean Michael Marrus and the School of Graduate Studies; Dean Pekka Sinervo and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences; the Student Administrative Council; as well as the Graduate History of Art Student Association. Finally, we would also like to thank our authors for their contributions. About Contrapposto Table of Contents

Behaving and Misbehaving: Andrea Mantegna's Devotional Images S arab Guerin Contrapposto is the annual academic student journal of the Fine Art Department of the University of Toronto. The journal To Engage the Viewer: The Relationship between Narrative endeavours to publish outstanding essays written by both graduate and the Viewer in Hellenistic Art and undergraduate students in the Department. The publication is Jennifer Kozerawski funded by various student and administrative organizations at the University, and is produced entirely by students. The 2003/2004 Fee-Male Charm School: Homoeconomics in Gerome's The edition is the third volume of Contrapposto. Snake Charmer Allan Dqyle

The People of India: A Document of Colonial Abstraction S arab S tanners

John Cage and the Minimal: Silence, Chance and Materialism Meg Campbell

Andy Warhol: The Flaneur of Postwar America Maranatba Coulas

Wavelength- Michael Snow Irmgard Emmelbainz

Repetition and Reason: A Consideration ofYayoi Kusama's Art During her Prominent Years in New York Candice Hamelin

Toward Reflexive Practice in the Historiography ofPersianate Art Guita Lamsecbi ISBN 0-7727-2434-2 Published September, 2004 Each essay in this publication is copyright of its respective author. Printed in Canada Behaving and Misbehaving: Andrea Mantegna's Devotional Images

S arab Guerin

he last chapter of Hans Belting's Likeness and Presence: A History if the Image T Before the Era ifArt analyses the confluence between the two models that he envisions for pictures in the Western world: the religious image and Art.1

The fifteenth century saw this transformation take place, and Belting notes that the

pictures of fifteenth-century Italy were Janus-faced: "People did not experience two

kinds of images but images with a double face, depending on whether they were

seen as receptacles of the holy or as expressions of art. This double view of the

image persisted: even when applied to a single work."2 Two devotional works

produced during this transitional period were Andrea Mantegna's (1430/1-1506)

Berlin Virgin and Child and his Brera Lamentation if the Dead Christ. A devotional

image, stated simply, is a picture that is "abbreviated in form, but plurisignate in

content."3 I will illustrate how these two images existed and functioned under each

'imaginary' paradigm. First their status as devotional pictures will be probed: how

do the images function in private contemplation and what was their theological

development? After a close reading of the two images, I will turn to examine how

Mantegna's conception of these works as 'art' changed or perhaps even hindered

1. Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image bifbre the Era of Art. Trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 458-490. 2. Belting, Likeness, 458. 3. R. Berliner, "Bemerkungen zu einigen Darstellungen des Erlosers als Schmerzensamann" Das Miinster9 (1956): 97ff. Quoted in Belting 1990, 13. 7 Behaving and l\fisbehaving Sarah Guerin 8 their devotional function: how do these pictures behave as religious images, and "I slept but my heart is awake" (Song of Songs 2:5).5 Even in the sleep of infancy this how do they misbehave as art? child hints at his extraordinary nature. The child's hairline too, noticeably

The size of Andrea Mantegna's Vilgin and Child in the Gemaldegalerie highlighted and accentuated, does not suggest that of an infant, but one of wisdom

Berlin (43h x 32w em; Fig. 1) announces that it is a devotional image, not the type -indeed, it reminds us of the ancient appellation of the Virgin: sedes sapientiae. In to be held in one's hand, but large enough that it could be hung on a wall or her lap the Virgin holds "the New Testament counterpart to the wise king installed at a private altar. The image, painted in distemper on linen, is not securely [Solomon] of the Old Testament, the incarnation of Divine Wisdom, the Word dated, but I accept Jane Martineau's latest dating which places the image between become flesh."6 Although this seems to be an image of a simple mother and child,

1465 and 1470 due to its similarity with aspects of the Camera Picta, itself dated the details gently hint at the divine nature of the Son. c.1465-1470.4 And yet there are no halos to announce the figure's status as the Virgin

The Virgin Mary is depicted as a very young woman; she is dressed in a Mary and Jesus Christ. How was the Renaissance viewer to read the image, to know simple dark blue gown, and holds her newborn son close to her breast, his head its subject? Jack Greenstein makes an argument for the Renaissance reading of an brushing against her cheek. The mother's gesture of intimacy seems absent minded, image based on Leon Battista Alberti's (1404-1472) explanation of perception in On for she gazes pensively into the distance: her mind sees and contemplates the Painting. future, her young eyes are worn with weariness and sadness. Her child, seemingly Next, intuiting [intuentes] we come to recognize [d{gnoscimus] how the many forward-facing surfaces fit together on the body; and like any other newborn, is wrapped protectively in swaddling clothes and sleeps designating these conjunctions of the surfaces in their places, the artist will rightly name the composition.7 peacefully in his mother's arms. Both mother and child are enveloped in a rich Greenstein suggests that the level of semiotic recognition of a subject is based on brocade which gives the painting warmth and a frugal sumptuousness. The figures the shape of the work rather than the specific "persons or things"depicted.s One occupy the majority of the picture plane and seem to be pressed up against this imaginary barrier. They are very close to the viewers -we could almost stretch out 4. Jane Martineau, Andrea Mantegna (l'vfilan: EJecta, 1992), 205. 5. A similar Virgin with sleeping Christ by Neri di Bicci shows Christ holding a scroll our hand to stroke the fleshy and tender fingers of Christ which have escaped from inscribed with this verse (Martineau, 205). 6. Ilene H. Forsyth, Th~Throne of Wisdom: Wood Sculptures of the Madonna in Romanesque France his swaddling clothes. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 26. 7. This is Jack Greenstein's translation, "On Alberti's 'Sign': Vision and Composition in As we sit and ponder this image, details incongruous to such a naturalistic Quattrocento Painting" Art Bulletin 79 (1997): 670. Spencer's translation of this passage reads: "Then, looking at it [the image] again, we understand that several planes of the scene begin to strike us. Those fingers we just stroked, are they in fact blessing us? observed body belong together, and here the painter drawing them in their places will say that he is making a composition." Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting. Trans. John R. Spencer (New Haven: Harvard University Press, 1966), 68. 8. Greenstein, 696. 9 Behaving and l'vfisbehaving Sarah Guerin 1 0 could say that a sophisticated viewer of Mantegna's Berlin Madonna would read the a naturalistic idiom, all share a particular physiognomic type: "Tapered oval faces triangular configuration of the Madonna and Child and because of its similarity to with broad cheeks; straight, narrow noses; small mouths; large [almond shaped] the Verona Madonna, that it is of the same subject.9 Because of this 'shape eyes."1 4 Mantegna's Berlin Madonna possesses all of these features- features that recognition,' Renaissance artists did not "feel compelled to reproduce these we recognize from traditional Byzantine icons or from Venetian paintings in the recognizable prototypes in their works" and were, therefore, free to "invent the manieragrecaThus, contraty to Greenstein's theory, which identified the spatial likenesses of persons they depicted."10 \'Vhen speaking of Mantegna's Berlin configuration of the image as the signifier of a 'Madonna and Child,' and which

:Madonna Greenstein notes that "the portrayal is so intimate and detailed that it is leaves the artist free to use the likeness of a model for the painting, Maguire and tempting to suggest that Mantegna employed a model, or cast someone known to Goffen reveal that Mantegna continued to use the Byzantine method of the patron in the role of the Virgin."ll physiognomic identification, even when using a naturalistic idiom. The Madonna is

To think in such terms is to wear the blinders of modernism. Greenstein a recognizable individual, as visually literate Italians could not have mistaken the

15 and modern viewers are, in a sense, blinded by the naturalism and emotional Virgin Mary's characteristic features for those of 'some model.' The painting is realism of Mantegna's painting. Because they feel that this woman is recognizable, both a successful religious image and work of art. they assume that she must have been a model. Opposed to Greenstein's program Henk van Os notes that although Mantegna's Berlin Madonna is of surface recognition is Henry Maguire's outline of the Byzantine pattern of superficially like the Eleousa Madonna, the "radical individualization of stereotypes" pictorial recognition which he discusses in his book, The icons and their bodies. Here leaves the Eleousa prototype "so far behind that it becomes irrelevant."16 I disagree.

Maguire speaks of an "accuracy of definition"12 for the saints, where each of the The melancholy and absorbed look on the Virgin's face coupled with the cheek-to- major saints has a minimum requirement of defining features or attributes. They cheek motif would have evoked for the fifteenth-century viewer the Eleousa icon, as are 'individualistic' or recognizable to the viewer who is 'literate' in reading these well as its rhetorical narrative. The Eleousa icon (Fig. 2),17 developed as a signifiers. In the Veneto, which had always benefited from close ties to the 47(1975): 488. Byzantine Empire, the Byzantine method of semiotic recognition had long held 14. Ibid.,490. 15. I am suggesting that unlike ourselves, and also those Byzantine visitors, like Gregory sway. 13 Rona Goffen notices that the Madonnas of Giovanni Bellini, who also used Melissenos, who failed to recognize the saints in Western churches, the Italians of the fifteenth century could read both the language of naturalism and the language of prototypical icons, just as they were familiar with both their vernacular and Latin. We are literate only in 9. Martineau, 7. the "vernacular" while Gregory Melissenos would only have known "Latin" (Maguire 46), 10. Greenstein, 696. and thus be confused by a text which was a perfect amalgamation of the two. 11. Ibid., 697. 16. Henk van Os, The Art of Devotion in the Late Middle Ages in Ettrope: 1300-1500. Trans 12. Henry Maguire. The icons and their bodies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 16. JVI:ichael Hoyle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 132. 13. Rona Goffen, "Icon and Vision: Giovanni Bellini's Half-Length Madonnas" Art Bulletin 17. Belting notes that E!eousa actually referred to the icon's theological role rather then to a 11 Behaving and .Misbehaving Sarah Guerin 12 counterpart to the Threnos icon, the depiction of the Lamentation of the Virgin emphasize the proleptic meaning characteristic to devotional images.2° Christ in where the weeping Virgin holds her dead Son's face next to hers, cheek-to-cheek.18 swaddling clothes here foreshadows Christ's dead body, wrapped in a shroud, ready

The transposition of this gesture from after the Deposition to the time when Christ for burial. The bright highlights on the child's head suggest a deathly pallor, and the is still a baby was inspired by Symeon Metaphrastes's eleventh-century hymn. The drooping head will one day hang as that in the Imago Pietatis. 21

Marian Lament was sung during the Passion liturgy of Good Friday and employs Such a complex reading of the image takes time, takes contemplation. the rhetorical trope of antithesis to heighten the pathos experienced by the Virgin: The intricacy of the devotional narrative is not the only aspect that tells us that this

Nicodemus ... placed you painfully in my arms, which even lately is a devotional image - the half2length form announces its purpose. The history of lifted you joyfully as an infant... And once I took care of your swaddling-clothes, and now I am troubled with your funerary the half-length image can be traced back to its use in Roman funerary portraiture apparel. I washed you in lukewarm water, now I bathe you in hotter tears. I raised you in a mother's arms, but leaping and where it held the basic significance of commemoration combined also "with the jumping as children do. Now I raise you up in the same arms, but without breath, and lying as the dead. Then I dipped my lips hope for eternallife."22 Sixten Ringbom, in his seminal text Icon to Narrative, in your honey-sweet and dewy lips ... Many times you slept on my breast as an infant, and now you have fallen asleep there as a understands the half-length devotional image to be related to, but not identical with dead man.19 Andachtsbilder. 23 These sculpture groups were figures that had been isolated from a The hymn links Christ's birth with his death, his incarnation with his crucifixion,

Mary's joy with her grief- this is the meaning behind the Eleousa icon. Mantegna 20. Meiss, 361; Martineau, 205; Six ten Ringbom Icon to Narrative: The Rise of the Dramatic Close­ was certainly invoking this tradition and this history through the use of the cheek- up in Fifteenth-Century Devotional Painting (Abo: Abo Akademi, 1965) 61; Umberto Baldini, Andrea Mantegna (Firenze: Edizioni d' Arte il Fiorino, 1997), 26 7. 21. I believe that there was a tradition of the Byzantine Lament of the Virgin that continued to-cheek motif coupled with the pained expression on Mary's face. in Italian folk poetry. Indeed, there is a lullaby, very similar to the Byzantine lament, set to music by Tarquino Merula in the seventeenth century (there is no date or author for the The rhetorical antithesis is further emphasized by Mantegna's choice of text). This seems to indicate that the poem is much older than the seventeenth century, and it would be a fruitful project to trace to its origins, and study in its relation with the portraying the Christ child asleep, in swaddling clothes: details that further Byzantine Lament. Hor ch'e tempo di dormire ftglio e non vagire Perche tempo anco verra che vagire bisognera deh ben mio deh cor mio va fa Ia ninna nanna na ... Over prendi questo latte dalle mie mamelle intatte Perche ij minnistro crudele ti prepara aceto e fiele fixed Madonna type like the Hodegetria. Vladimir painted his famous version for the Russian deh beri mio deh cor mio va fa Ia ninna nanna na ... grand dukes in 1136 (280), and by this late Byzantine period it seems that the iconography Amor mio sia questo perto hor per te morbido letto for the theological role had to some extent solidified to show the Virgin and Child cheek to Pria che rendi ad alta voce l'ama a! Padre su Ia Croce cheek. See Chapter 13 of Likeness and Presence. deh ben mio deh cor mio va fa Ia ninna nanna na ... 18. Hans Belting, "An Image and Its Function in the Liturgy: The Man of Sorrows in 22. Goffen, 494. Byzantium" in Dumbarton Oaks Papers 34-35 (1981): 9. See also Kurt Weitzman, "The Origin 23. Wilhem Pinder discusses this in response to Erwin Panofsky's paper, "Imago Pietatis" of the Threnos" in De Artibus Opuscula XL: Essqys in Honour of Envin Panojsky. Ed. M. Meiss Festschrift fiir M.]. Friedlander Zf!m 60. Geburgstag (Leipzig, 1927), who stretched W. Pinder's (Zurich: Buehler Buchdruck, 1960), 476-90. argument in Die deutsche Plastik des viezehten Jahrhunderts (Munich 1925) to include panel 19. Henry Maguire, "The Depiction of Sorrow in Middle Byzantine Art" in Dumbarton Oaks paintings of the Late Medieval and Early Renaissance. Ringbom would like to make a more Papers 31 (1977): 163. PG 114 col. 216B-C. subtle distinction between the different genres and the different media. 13 Behaving and :Nlisbehaving Sarah Guerin 14 biblical narrative to highlight and intensify the emotional character of the moment. naturalism with which Mantegna has imbued the Madonna and Child only

The devotional image is akin to the Andachtsbilder as a scene isolated from a heightens this illusion: that God is present in one's private home. narrative, but differs in form, which the devotional image took from the Byzantine The second image to be examined is Mantegna's Lamentation over the Dead half-length icon, the hieratic image of the saint, and the miraculous archiropiite Christ (Fig. 3). It too is distemper on linen, but its size is much larger than the images.24 As in the Andachtsbilder, narrowing the field of view in the devotional Madonna and Child, 68h x 81w em. Although the painting remained in Mantegna's image to one expression, focussing the experience to a single emotion, serves to own private collection until his death, nothing is known about who the patron magnify the individual- both affectively and physically. The individual, now in might have been,27 Ronald Lightbrown hypothesizes that Mantegna painted it for

'dramatic close-up', is seen in half-length. The frame of the image crops the portrait himself, as his own devotional image: "Mantegna may have intended the picture for above the waist, giving the illusion that the individual is sitting on the other side of his own private devotion: certainly its unorthodoxy of composition and low a window. Alberti states: "I inscribe a quadrangle of right angles, as large as I wish, colouring would not have commended it to the average fifteenth century person. "28 which is considered to be an open window through which I see what I want to paint."25 Its continued use as a devotional image after Mantegna's death is suggested by a

Not only is the individual extracted from a narrative for our contemplation, the letter in 1531 from Ippoleto Calandra to Duke Federigo who writes that half-length image suggests that the person could actually be there, through the Mantegna's "Cristo ch'e in scurto" was to be put in the private rooms of Duchess window of the frame. Alberti's description of the light-rays emphasizes their Margherita Paleologa."29 There is no unanimity among scholars as to the dating of physical, tangible character: "finest hairs of head or like a bundle, tighdy bound Lamentation over the Dead Christ, though it too can be placed around the Camera Picta, within the eye."26 If the light-rays are continuous, reaching the prototype in heaven, as the latter's foreshortened ceiling figures express similar technical concerns. 3D is their space not then contiguous with ours? \X!hen Alberti's discussion of light- Therefore, this image can be dated 1465-1470. rays is integrated into our reading, we are physically connected through these rays Although the Lamentation over the Dead Christ is another ancient subject, to the holy people depicted in the image. The Madonna and Child could be (are) Mantegna's depiction of it is truly revolutionary. There is a pink marble slab that is sitting on the other side of the picture plane, just beyond the window. Maybe the positioned perpendicularly to the picture plane. Laying there is a conspicuously rich brocade is folding over the window-sill, stretching into our space. Indeed, the 27. Ronald Lightbrown, Mantegna: with a complete catalogue ofthe paintings, drawings and printJ· (Oxford: Phaidon, 1986), 421. 28. Ibid., 423. 24. Hans Belting, The Image and Its Public in the Middle Ages: Form and Function ofEarfy Paintings 29. Ibid., 421. ofthe Passion. Trans. Mark Bartusis and Raymond Meyer (New Rochelle: Aristide D. Caratzas, 1990), 42-43; Belting, Likeness, 410-19. 30. Those who support a date that coincides with the Camera Picta, but not those who say it 25. Alberti, 56; my emphasis. is a preparatory study for it as Kristeller (1901) and Berch en (1927) did, are: Crowe and 26. Alberti, 46. Cavalcaselle (1871, 1912), Longhi (1962), Camesasa (1964), and more recently Thiirlemann 15 Behaving and l'vfisbehaving Sarah Guerin 16

dead man with round wounds in his hands and feet, and a slash on his right side. Lamentation simply, then, a virtuosic technical performance? Or could the

He too is laying perpendicular to the picture in drastic foreshortening, so that his foreshortening of Christ aid in its function as devotional image?

head, resting on a pillow and surrounded by.a faint halo, is the farthest away from The dramatic foreshortening seems to place the viewer at Christ's feet.

us. Emerging from the dusk of the background are three mourning figures: An Alberti's system of linear perspective determined the viewer's placement in relation

aged woman, the Ever-Virgin Mary, wiping away her tears; a middle-aged man with to the constructed space of the image: "Then I establish, as I wish, the distance

clasped hands and open mouth, moaning; a disembodied nose and mouth emitting from the eye to the picture."34 Alberti 'casts' the viewer in the painting; the eye

a painful cry. On the right side of the image is an ornate jar- perhaps for the becomes an integral character in the narrative. The relation of the disembodied 'eye

embalming spices, the myrrh - and beyond this, a dark corridor. The hands of the point' to the vanishing point will create the illusion that the viewer is standing

corpse are uncomfortably propped so that they are parallel to the picture plane, higher or lower than, closer or further from the depicted scene. When this aspect

proudly displaying their wounds. The tonality of the picture remains muted as its of visual syntax has been taken into consideration, we realize that even if it seems

major colour is the pale grey of Christ's decomposing flesh and the meagre grey that the marble slab is perpendicular to the picture plane, we are actually standing

cloth that covers his loins and legs. The warm ochre of the marble does little to above the corpse, looking down at the body - a discontinuity which is responsible

change the mood; it only enhances the coldness of Christ's flesh.31 The image is an for our visual uneasiness. The visual uneasiness forces the viewer to acknowledge

uncomfortable one -we feel ourselves to be in such Claestrophobic proximity to that Mantegna's foreshortening is not perfect. The technical imperfection is,

this dead body that we suffer from vertigo, unsure of where we stand, physically furthermore, not a lack in the painting but announces additional meaning behind

and psychologically. What sort of image is this? How is it to be understood? the composition. By altering the technical perfection of the work, Mantegna

The drastic foreshortening of the image has long remained the main multiplies the levels of significance: he has deepened the devotional complexity of

focus of scholars, who use it to discuss Mantegna's use of foreshortening tools and the work. his burgeoning artistic genius of composition.32 Even Raphael's father, Giovanni Christ's feet, mundane and banal parts of the human form, the humble

Santi, explains Mantegna's "alto e chiar ingegno" as comprising, among other things, limbs that come into contact with the dust of the earth occupy the foreground of foreshortening which "deceive[s] the eye and cause[s] art to rejoice."33 Is the the composition.35 The head, the mind, the seat of wisdom is the farthest object

away from the viewer. Why place the emphasis on the mundane rather than the (1986 1 0) and De Nicolo Salmazo (1997 21 ). (Lightbrown 423, Baldini 269). 31. Felix Thurlemann, Mantegnas Mai!iinder BeweinUiyg: Die Konstitution des Betracters durch das Bi!d (Konstanz: Universtitatsverlag Konstanz, 1989), 12. 32. Martineau, 155. 34. Alberti, 57. 33. Ibid., 155. 35. Thiirlemann, 16. 17 Behaving and l'vfisbehaving Sarah Guerin 18 cerebral? The choice of focussing on the stigmatized feet of Christ becomes clearer scene, here directly at Christ's feet."39 The viewer therefore is included and

through an investigation of a new method of devotion that developed in the late participates in the scene represented. l'v1iddle Ages. Yet, an even more complex reading is perhaps possible: not only is the

Meditationes vitae Christi is an informal amalgamation of the four Gospel viewer to be there, weeping at Christ's feet, but is to take an active role in the narratives and several apocryphal sources. \Vritten around 1300, it quickly became embalming of Christ. The passage in Meditationes vitae Christi that recounts the

one of the most popular texts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.36 The text's Lamentation after the Deposition does not instruct the reader to participate in the great novelty is how it instructs the reader to participate in the gospel narrative, to scene, as the author does in other scenes such as the Adoration of the Shepherds.40

'physically' interact with its characters. Belting notes that the reader's more personal The description of the wrapping of Christ's body is extremely detailed, and the

participation influenced painters of narrative images to modify their own designs to author seems to forget the reader, and instead there is an intense focus on the account for and to promote such devotion.37 Thiirlemann believes that the preparation of Christ's feet for burial by Mary Magdalen:

Lamentation does just this: by placing the viewer directly at Christ's feet, Mantegna is The others began to shroud the body and prepare it with linen cloths according to Jewish custom... the Magdalen held His feet. allowing us to step into the narrative of the Lamentation, and become, like Mary \Xlhen they came to the legs, near the feet, the Magdalen said, "I pray you to permit me to prepare the feet at which I obtained and John, one of the mourners,: ''\Vhen we stand as viewers of Mantegna's mercy." This was permitted, and she held the feet ... what she once moistened with tears of remorse she now washed with painting, when we imagine ourselves in the position of the implicit viewer, we are much more copious tears of sorrow and compassion. She gazed at the feet, so wounded, pierced, dried out, and bloody: she wept faced with the foreshortened representation of Christ's body, as if it were real, with great bitterness.41

stretched-out before us on a stone slab."38 Alexander Nagel also reads the Mantegna emphasized the feet and gave this view of Christ to make the viewer feel

fragmented nature of the weeping figures as forcing the viewer to assume a as if he were the Magdalen, paying homage to these the most humble parts of the

position within the depicted scene: "The viewer is directly implicated by the Saviour. The anointing of Christ at the Lamentation would give meaning to the jar

'cropping' of the scene: \Xlhat we see is understood as a fragment of a larger whole.

By being given an intimate view, the viewer is by implication placed 'inside' the 39. Alexander Nagel, Michaelangelo and the Reform of Art (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 81. 40. "You too, who lingered for so long, kneel and adore your Lord God, and then His 36. Van Os, 12. mother, and reverently greet the saintly old Joseph. Kiss the beautiful little feet of the infant 37. Belting, The Image, 46. Jesus who lies in the manger and begs His mother to offer to let you hold him awhile. Pick 38. "Als Betrachter von Mantegnas Gemalde stehen wir, wenn wir uns in die Position des Him up and hold Him for awhile ... " Isa Ragusa and Rosalie B. Green, eds and trans. impliziten Bildbetrachters hineinversetzen, dem verkiirzt dargestellten Christuski:irper Meditations on the Life of Christ: An Illustrated Ma11uscript of the Fourteenth Century. Paris, Bibliotheque gegeniiber, wie wenn wir einem wirklichen, vor uns auf einer Steinplatte ausgebreiteten Nationale, MS. !tal 115 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 38. .Menschen gegeniiberstehen wiirden." Thiirlemann, 17. 41. Meditations, 343 . 19 Behaving and ~fisbehaving Sarah Guerin 20 of ointment or perfume at the right of Christ's head- perhaps he has turned his Kunstmuseum. It is another full length image of the dead/not-dead Christ, but this head towards the jar to invite us to begin the anointing?42 time vertical rather than horizontal. Hauser answers his own question by examining

Certainly Mantegna's Lamentation w.orks in this context of an almost the prominence of Christ's penis in the composition. One soon realizes that this theatrical, dramatic devotion, but the Lamentation parallels the iconography of the holds true for the Brera Lamentation as well: Christ's penis is located at the exact

Man of Sorrows, or Imago Pietatis. The iconography stems from a Byzantine image centre of the composition, at the intersection of Christ's spine and the horizontal which accompanied the new eleventh-century Passion rites in the Eastern Church, created by the uncannily bent, stigmatized hands. Hauser harkens back to Leo distilling Christ's Passion into a multivalent picture useful in both the Good Friday Steinberg's argument in the Sexuality qfChrist, but specifically to Steinberg's and Holy Saturday ceremonies: it depicts the "death sleep" of Christ.43 In the West, argument concerning Christ's penis as the wound of the circumcision- the first the Passion imagery gained Eucharistic significance. The 'original' icon that resides shedding of the blood of God. This wound is connected to the Passion, and like in S. Croce Gerusalemme is said to be the true likeness of Christ that Pope Gregory the Passion it is redemptive: "Christ's submission to circumcision was understood the Great saw in the consecrated Eucharist,44 a tale which gained prominence in the as a voluntary gift of his blood, prefiguring and initiating the sacrifice of the

45 century that dogmatized the transubstantiation. The body of Christ, dead but still Passion." The theme of the circumcision is quite prominent in Mantegna's work,

4 living, is elevated, not by the priest, but by two angels. Here, the altar is actually the as his Circumcision of 1470 is the earliest monumental treatment of this subject. 6 tomb, and we see not the substance of the body of Christ with the accidents of Thiirlemann inadvertently builds on this reading of Christ's penis: he notes that the bread, but the body of Christ in its true corpulence -Ecce Agnus Dei qui to/lis peccata stigmata on Christ's hands and feet, and apparently his side, are arrayed in a similar mundi. fashion to devotional imagery dedicated to the five wounds of Christ (Fig 4): the

If indeed Mantegna was drawing on the history of the Man of Sorrows, "abstract representation of the five wounds of Christ are distributed like why did he not choose the traditional half-length image as he had often done in the Mantegna's in a quasi-geometrical configuration on the image plane."47 But past? Andreas Hauser worries about this question while examining another of Thiirlemann is wrong, the fifth wound, the lance wound, is almost invisible in the

Mantegna's images, the later Pieta (1495-1500) in Copenhagen, Staatliche Lamentation, and it is instead replaced by Christ's penis, the first wound of the

circumcision. Mantegna, therefore, choose the full-length, foreshortened Christ,

42. Prof. A. Nagel has commented that this reading is in some sense, no doubt, true, but it cannot be taken as a direct narrative influence on Mantegna's Lamentation, for why would 45. Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (Toronto: the jar of perfume be so far from the viewer? I tend to agree. Let us then think of this Random House, 1983), 52. similarity as a fortuitous intersection between the text and the image which those meditating 46. Steinberg, 50. on Mantegna's image were bound to stumble across. 4_7. '~ie in dem hier abgebildeten Holzschnitt mit seiner abstrahierenden Darstellungsform 43. Belting, The Image, 102-104. smd die FiinfWunden Christi bei Mantegna in einer quasi-geometrischen Konfiguration auf 44. Ibid., 72. 21 Behaving and Misbehaving Sarah Guerin 22 not just to practice his impressive skills of foreshortening, but to incorporate into Germany.48 Nevertheless, Mantegna used distemper on linen for all of his one image, two common images of devotion - the Man of Sorrows and the devotional images. This technique refers to the use of glue made of animal bones

\'Vounds of Christ. The dramatic foreshortening was to increase the 'plurisignate' instead of egg whites, or later oil, as the substratum for the pigment. The result of qualities of the Lamentation for devotional contemplation, and not solely to increase using distemper directly on a linen canvas, or over a very thin layer of gesso, is that

Mantegna's fame and reputation as an artist through ingenious composition. The the image has an "opaque brilliance and precision akin to pastels, enabling the ingenious composition allows Mantegna to compress into one image a traditional paintings to be viewed in any light without the reflections of a varnished picture."49

Lamentation, Eucharistic symbolism, and devotion to the wounds of Christ. The Rothe alludes to the fact that the distemper's characteristic visibility made this foreshortening and naturalism supports the devotional function of the image, and medium perfect for private devotional images, which would be discernible in less does not hinder it. than ideal lighting circumstances as would undoubtedly be the case in private

Although I promised at the beginning of the paper to examine both how homes. Thus, Rothe understands Mantegna's use of distemper as a purely these two pictures worked as religious images and as art objects, I have focussed functional one, so that the pictures can better behave as devotional images. mainly on their behaviour in the religious realm, which apparently supercedes the Van Os disagrees though, for he feels that Mantegna's choice of traditionally espoused mode of working as art objects. The naturalism of both the distemper on linen was a manifesto to his innovative nature: "So even with the

Mad!Jnna and Child and the Lamentation over the Dead Christ, and the innovative technique Mantegna was proclaiming his originality. He wanted to be different, foreshortening of the latter served and heightened the devotional function of the exceptional... Mantegna broke with accepted craft practice because he served works. The 'artistic' aspects were a means to a devotional end, and these qualities patrons who sought exceptional artists."SO Mantegna painted his devotional images cannot be thought of as 'misbehaviour'. How then do they misbehave? with distemper on linen almost as a signature. It was uniquely his style, and a way

There is one feature, besides being devotional images, that the Madonna of distinguishing a Mantegna from the work of another painter, for example, and Child and the Lamentation over the Dead Christ hold in common and with which Giovanni Bellini. Whereas Rothe sees the significance of the distemper simply as they loudly proclaim themselves to be art objects: I refer to Mantegna's use of subsumed to the functionality of the devotional image, van Os sees its significance distemper on linen. The medium of distemper was certainly not a common one in fifteenth-century Italy, although quite popular in the Netherlands and in

48. Rothe, Andrea. "Mantegna's Paintings in Distemper" in Andrea Aiantegna (Milan: Electa, 1992), 80. 49. Ibid., 80. die Bildflache verteilt." Thiirlemann, 15. 50. Van Os, 132. 23 Behaving and l\fisbehaving Sarah Guerin 24 as a means to an individualistic artistic persona. This, however, is not how the begins with Jan van Eyck, with his startlingly perfect devotional images, which are images misbehaved. an "unobstructed vision of the other worldly splendour."52 The illusion of a perfect

How does the use of distemper affect our viewing and reception of the vision is disrupted, though, by remnants of the world before the picture plane. two images? How does it change our interpretation? Neither of the given Thus, van Eyck is holding "in check the illusion of unimpeded access to a realm of explanations takes this into consideration. Mantegna's paintings in distemper supernatural experience,"53 to which I would add that he calls attention to the act immediately call attention to themselves. The non-existent or extremely thin layer of representation itself, and away from the devotional imagery that it depicts: "The of gesso allows the texture of the fine linen to come through and articulate the elements that unmask the image's artifice and reinforce its remove from everyday surface of the painting: the distemper does not allow for a perfectly smooth, reality are discreet, yet they nonetheless undercut any notion of the image as a mirror-like surface, but announces to the viewer the image's status as a painting, transparent screen or window."54 and as an object. Mantegna purposefully disturbs the perfection of the Obviously Mantegna's work is different than van Eyck's, but I argue that representation in order to bring to the forefront its status as representation. This the choice of distemper problematizes the picture plane, problematizes the window technique is particular to his devotional images, as Mantegna consistently used into the other world, certainly behaves, or misbehaves, in the same way as van tempera on panel for his portraits, the other major form of private image he Eyck's reflections. Hamburger closes his paper thus: painted. In the portraits he achieved a pristine, almost flawless and perfect surface Van Eyck's ... mimetic strategies need not be seen exclusively in terms of the evolution from 'image' to 'art' to use Belting's -one that conforms much more closely to Alberti's ideal of a window. Why use terminology. Artistic self-consciousness does not necessarily undermine religious response; it can also be used to heighten and such an 'opaque' medium as distemper only for the devotional images, which, as we refine devotional experience. 55 discussed above, had the most to gain from this illusion of the window frame? Hamburger's examples certainly seem to confirm this statement. But Mantegna, a

Jeffrey Hamburger suggests a solution in his article, "Seeing and Believing: generation later than van Eyck, did purposefully disturb the illusion of the vision of

The Suspicion of Sight and the Authentication of Vision in Late Medieval Art and the other world, in order to call attention to its own state of having been

Devotion," where he speaks for the most part of the validation of vision in manufactured. This emphasis on the painting as a painting, as a created work of art fifteenth-century mystical writing.51 But in order to approach his central topic he interrupts the painting's behaviour as a devotional image much more than

51. Jeffery Hamburger, "Seeing and Believing: The Suspicion of Sight and the 52. Ibid., 48. Authentication of Vision in Late Medieval Art and Devotion" in Imagination und Wirk!ichkeit: 53. Ibid., 51. Zum Verhaltnis von menta/en und rea/en Bildern in der Kunst der friihen Neuifit. Ed. Klau Kruger 54. Ibid., 52. und Alessandro Nova (Mainz: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 2000), 47-69. 55. Ibid., 61. 25 Behaving and Misbehaving Sarah Guerin 26

Mantegna's use of naturalism or his ingegno. Mantegna forces the viewers of his If the stain on the picture plane signifies the Real, and the distemper has devotional images to acknowledge their status as created- and maybe even his own stained, has obstructed our "unmediated" vision of the divine, the stain can be status as creator. thought of as a statement of the ultimate ineffability of the divine, of the Real.

Let us then take this argument one step further, but in order to do this we Would not Lacan say that religion is our attempt to construct and contain the Real? must misbehave a little ourselves. In his text, Alexander Nagel speaks of "material To submit the uncanny and unsettling remnents of the Real to the Law of the disruptions at the level of the picture plane" as "stains."56 What else is Mantegna's Father? In disrupting the picture plane, Mantegna is not only questioning the choice of distemper but a stain on the surface of the image? Jacque.s Lacan possibility of representing the divine, as Hamburger suggested, but is encouraging theorizes the stain in his seminar, "Of the Gaze as Oljet Petit a," 57 and in fact his the viewer to step out of the Symbolic paradigm for 'understanding' the Real/the first example of the stain, Ia tache, is the amorphous object in Hans Holbein's divine - encouraging the viewer to go beyond the traditionally prescribed methods painting of The Ambassadors (1533) which only comes into view when we change of devotion. our ideal view point from the one dictated by the perspective in the rest of the Mantegna's curious choice of the distemper is not understandable in other painting. Lacan takes this as a metaphor for his tripartite construction terms. It is in making this choice that he misbehaves as an artist- not simply by

(deconstruction) of our perception of the world: Symbolic, Imaginary and Real. 58 choosing to depict religious scenes in innovative and naturalistic ways. Mantegna's

The amorphous skull is a signifier of the Real- to 'understand' it one must step out images misbehave by calling into question, as Hamburger notes, the possibility of of the constructed space of the Symbolic order, move away from that point that representing the divine, and perhaps Mantegna even subconsciously questions, as

Alberti assigned to us. But what does it mean for Lacan to be a signifier of the Lacan would suggest, the premise of cognition of the divine itself, the Real forever

Real? Does our reading of the use of distemper qualify as a Lacanian stain? masquerading as the divine. If we return to our original premise of the Janus-faced

image, pictures looking backwards as religious objects and forward as artistic 56. Nagel, 59. I fully realize that this is meant in the context of Georges Didi-Huberman's thought, but in keeping the constraints of time in consideration, and because I feel it is expressions, Mantegna's devotional images fail within both paradigms. In the extremely interesting, I will limit my reading of the "stain" to Lacan. 57. Jacques Lacan, "Of the Gaze as Oiject Petit a" in Four Fundamental Concepts ofPsycho­ Lamentation and the Vit;gin and Child, Mantegna subverts the artistic ideal of perfect Ana!Jsis (1973). Trans. Alan Sheridan (London: The Hogarth Press, 1977), 65-119. 58. Quickly, the Symbolic is the world of language and cultural norms into which we are naturalism in order to extend the images' devotional signification. Yet the initiated at the mirror stage. Prior to the mirror stage we existed in an undifferentiated consciousness where the "I" is not defined, and "I" is contiguous with the surrounding environment and (m)other. The mirror stage signifies the moment when each individual effectiveness of the devotional images is in turn subverted by the use of distemper realizes that they are not contiguous with everything else and must accept the language and norms of society to communicate with the Other..The Imaginary is our a posteriori construction of the ideal state we were in as infants, outside the Symbolic order. The Imaginary is a fiction, a fairy tale to rationalize the unknown. Finally, the Real is truly real. It is the universe beyond our constructed perceptions, outside of our experiences mediated by the law of the Father Qanguage). 27 Behaving and Misbehaving Sarah Guerin 28 that hinders its full devotional potential. The Janus-faced images do not participate fully in either paradigm, and by consulting Lacan, their Real meaning speaks of skepticism and negative theology.

Fig. 1: Andrea Mantegna, Madonna and Child, 1465-70. Berlin, Gemaldgalerie.

Fig. 2: Madonna of Vladimir, c. 1100. Moscow, State Tretjakov Gallery. 29 Behaving and l\fisbehaving

Fig. 3: Andrea Mantegna, Lamentation over the Dead Christ, 1465-70. l\filan, Brera.

Fig. 4: Five Wounds of Christ, 1484-92. Niirnberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum. To Engage the Viewer: The Relationship between Narrative and the Viewer in Hellenistic Art

Jennifer Kozerawski

he act oflooking at a work of art entails much more than simply our sense T of sight, rather it involves a complex interplay between what we see and how we perceive it. The process by which we "see" a work of art not only establishes a point of contact between the viewer and the work but also produces an immediate response, as it were, a dialogue within the viewer's mind: 1 judgments are made, questions are asked and interest is decided. As a result, the viewer no longer simply "sees" a work of art but comes to understand it, as a mode of communication is established and a relationship to the work of art takes shape. As simple as the act of looking may seem, the effects of this process of "seeing" on the viewer and on the work of art have far reaching consequences.

Perhaps nowhere else in the history of ancient art was the relationship between the viewer and the work of art so explored and exploited as in the

Hellenistic period.2 Celebrated for its artistic developments in the spheres of naturalism, illusionism, spatial composition and movement, it is no surprise that the

Hellenistic period inspired both its Roman successors and modern scholars and connoisseurs alike. But what exactly is it about the characteristics of Hellenistic art

1. Richard Brilliant, Visual Nan·atives: Storytelling in Etruscan and Roman Art (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1984), 16. 2. The Hellenistic period is generally relegated to the years between the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C. and the Battle of Actium in 31 B.C. 33 To Engage the Viewer Jennifer Kozerawski 34 that appeal to both ancient and modern viewers? \Xlhat inspired Hellenistic artists desires to the viewer. As a result, he is attempting to initiate a dialogue with the to infuse their work with a sense of animation? For what purpose, and for whom? outside world, but most importantly, a narrative is being conveyed and established

The strategies the artist used to transcend the limitations of his medium, with the viewer. be it sculpture or painting, in order to produce a realistic and lifelike effect is It is, however, the Boy and Goose that exemplifies how an intimate certainly part of its appeal. By endowing works of art with those qualities naturally relationship between viewer and art takes shape. This work actively engages the inherent in the viewer's physical, spatial and visual experiences, Hellenistic artists viewer in a mode of communication, not only by emulating the behavior and increasingly engaged their audience by creating an ambiguity between the "real" and appearance of the living, but also by involving the viewer directly in an unfolding the "unreal". The interest of Hellenistic artists in the development of more story. The intimate and authentic relationship this creates between the viewer and naturalistic modes of representation was coupled with the heightened awareness of the work transforms the act of "seeing" a work of art into "experiencing" a work the spectator, and the viewer, as spectator and recipient of information, provides of art. It is thus, not surprisingly, in an age characterized by a keen interest in the the key to understanding the motivation and creation of many Hellenistic works of individual, that many significant artistic innovations developed in the Hellenistic art. For example, the Terme Boxer (Fig.1; 1" Century BC) is infused with a sense period were directly rooted in modes of narrative that appealed to the viewer's of life not simply because of the accurate representation of his wounds and natural experience of reality. Not only do many examples of Hellenistic art employ physiognomy but also by the awareness he exhibits of his surroundings. The sharp a realistic depiction of the figural form as an entity existing in three-dimensional turn of the Terme Boxer's head suggests that some external stimuli has caught his space (a characteristic of the Lysippian tradition),3 they also seek to implicate the attention: he acts as an animate being. He is aware of his environment and viewer through a temporal and physical experience. As a result, narrative art interacts with the world in the same way we do. It is this which captures our extends between the viewer and a work of art. attention and instills the figure with life.

This same sense acknowledgement of the outside world, and the sense of

3. Although the years iu which Lysippos worked actively as an artist are variously debated, realism it conveys, can also be seen in the Boy and Goose (Fig.2; 2nd Century BC). (anywhere from a period beginniug as early as 370 B.C. and finishiug as late as 305 B.C.) it is certain that he held a prominent position as court sculptor for Alexander the Great within Here the boy actively responds to something "out there," beyond himself. Sitting the years 336-323 B.C. The work of Lysippos and his school had a profound influence on the form and composition of Hellenistic sculpture. His famous Apoxyomenos (Man on the floor, the little boy looks up and reaches out with his right arm to the viewer Scraping Himself) introduced a new canon of proportions in the representation of the human form based on optical perception. By reducing the size of the head and elongating standing above him. His body is open and excited rather than closed. His gesture the length of the torso, Lysippos was able to impress a greater sense of height in the figure. In addition, by the projection of the arm into space, Lysippos' Apoxyomenos broke open reveals a sense of urgency as he desperately tries to communicate his needs and the conventional closed envelope composition of Greek sculpture and urged the viewer to contemplate the figure from various points of view. 35 To Engage the Viewer Jennifer Kozerawski 36

As such, a work of art no longer simply functions as an end in itself, as continuous narrative is clearly represented on the Telephos frieze surrounding the

"meaning in a work of narrative art is a function of the relationship between the inner colonnade of the interior court located on the Great Altar of Zeus at two worlds, the fictional world created by the author and the real world."4. Its Pergamon. Dated around 180-60 B.C. and erected by Eumenes II, the frieze point of reference is the viewer, who exists beyond the work yet within the reality depicts the story of the foundation of the city of Pergamon by its self-proclaimed to which the work is referring. Consequently, the meaning and purpose of a work ancestor Telephos, son of Herakles and Auge. \X'hat is particularly distinctive are dependent on the viewer. This relationship between the viewer and a work of about the pictorial mode of continuous narrative is the repetition of one or more art is not only crucial to understanding the work's overall meaning, it is also a key figures (in this case Telephos) across the pictorial expanse, performing actions that consideration during the work's initial conception and creation.s are clearly intended to take place at different moments in time. The story is

In contrast to statues, however, the challenge to create a narrative artistic represented as unfolding in a continuous and uninterrupted sequence of space and language based on human experience is perhaps most telling in the spheres of time with a clear beginning and end. This is facilitated by a continuous, albeit painting and relief due to the inherent problems of translating the three- shifting background,10 in which compositional elements such as trees and columns dimensional world into a language of two-dimensional visual images that would be serve to delineate changes in locale, such as the cities ofTegea and Mysia in the both comprehensible and believable.6 George Hanfmann notes that "all human Telephos story. Atmosphere, depth and perspective are realistically rendered by actions unfold in time and are carried out in space."7 The solution was both the diminution of certain figures and also, as in the case of Auge and her retinue, by convincing and innovative, in contrast to the principles of classical narrative art, placing the figures higher up on the picture plane to imply the recession of space. II where figures are generally isolated from one another, events occur in a timeless The frieze is thus constructed as a two-tiered composition; figures that are meant moment, and the background provides little indication of space or depth.8 The to appear closer to the viewer are placed in the foreground while those figures development of continuous narrative in Hellenistic art aimed to unify all of these further away are placed higher up and are rendered on a smaller scale.12 This is at pictorial elements into a logical and coherent whole.9 The employment of once a significant departure from the classical tradition, where ftgures often occupy

the entire height of a frieze, and a conscious acknowledgement on the part of the

4. Brilliant, 16. artist as to the principles of optical perception and experience. 5. Andrew Stewart, "Narration and Allusion in Hellenistic Baroque," in Nan·ative and Event in Ancient Art, ed. Peter J. Holliday (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 132. 6. Peter H. von Blanckenhagen, "Narration in Hellenistic and Roman Art," American Journal of Archaeology 61 (1957): 83. 10. Pollitt, 200. 7. George M.A. Hanfmann, "Narration in Greek Art," American Journal of Archaeology 61 11. Andrew Stewart, "A Hero's Quest: Narrative and the Telephos Frieze," in Pet:gamon: The (1957), 71. Telephos Frieze from the Great Altar, Vol. 1, edited by Renee Dreyfus and Ellen Schraudolph 8. R.R.R. Smith, Hellenistic Sculpture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991), 164-165. (San Francisco, California: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1996), 40-42. 9. von Blanckenhagen, 79-82. 12. Smith, 165. 3 7 To Engage the Viewer Jennifer Kozerawski 38

The Telephos frieze was originally situated at eye level, and was 80 to 90 with the Telephos frieze, scenes are depicted one after the other, and the figures are meters in length. Along with the realistic portrayal of perspective, proportion and repeated in a forward moving sequence. However, there is little in terms of detail, scale, 13 this format urged the spectator to view the story consecutively as he or she differentiation among figures, or delineation oflocale as on the Telephos frieze. It walked along adjacent to it. This involved the viewer both physically and is, rather, the bowl inscriptions, located above the figures' heads, which identify the temporally, as one had to walk along the frieze in order to understand its whole stories being depicted. meaning. By physically following the frieze, the viewer can mentally engage with The Telephos frieze influenced classical painting in its use of continuous the events of the Telephos narrative. 14 Peter von Blanckenhagen has observed; the narrative and its consequent appeal to the viewer.18 The Odyssey Landscapes (Fig. composition of the Telephos frieze, much like events in reality, cannot be viewed in 3) exemplify these characteristics. The Odyssey paintings are often referred to as a a single moment but must unfold over time.15 The use of an uninterrupted and frieze and regarded as a whole, although the scenes depict several of Odysseus's forward moving story provides cohesiveness, despite the changes in time and place. adventures from Books 10 and 11 of Homer's Odyssey, divided by illusionistically

However, this is only achieved by the direct involvement of the viewer, who painted pilasters, suggesting the idea of an exterior view. It is thought that in the actualizes the frieze through his or her viewing of it. 16 The frieze itself does not Hellenistic original, on which these paintings were based, the scenes were narrate the story but provides the necessary visual cues for narration. It is the conjoined as one continuous landscape painting. Unlike the Telephos frieze, in the viewer who narrates the story and "must change the imagery into some form of Odyssey paintings the landscape is the main element, and almost envelops the small internalized verbal expression."17 This relationship between the viewer and the figures of Odysseus and his men, who are minute in relation to the overall pictorial work of art is fundamental in all works of narrative art. space. The use of soft colours and atmospheric perspective adds a lively quality

Possible antecedents for the continuous narrative found on the Telephos now missing in the Telephos frieze, which, it should be mentioned, was also once frieze remain uncertain and are a topic of much debate. One fertile source may painted. While the Telephos frieze aims to portray a convincing sense of time and have been a group of Megarian bowls, known more commonly as the 'Homeric place with its limited use of landscape elements and focus on the protagonists, the

Bowls' (ca. 175-125 B.C.). These drew their subject matter from Greek epic poetry Odyssey landscapes employ nature as their primary vehicle for presenting pictorial such as the Il!iad and the Odyssey and dramas such as the tragedies of Euripides. As narrative.

The Hellenistic artists' awareness of the limitations of their media was not 13. von Blanckenhagen, 82. 14. Holliday, 10. lost in their attempts to bring a story to life. While the Telephos frieze occupied 15. von Blanckenhagen, 79. 16. Pollitt, 200. 17. Holliday, 4. 39 To Engage the Viewer Jennifer Kozerawski 40 the inner court of the Great Altar of Zeus at Pergamon, closed off from the world, before our vety eyes, making it present by representing the situation as if in a state the Gigantomachy frieze (ca. 180 B.C.) that adorned the outer walls of the altar of actuality,"21 and thus directly implicating the viewer. Nike's head, which is now offers a strikingly different solution to the questions of realism. The frieze is lost, would have originally turned to the left, and, like the Terme Boxer, would occupied by the Gods and Giants who are carved in such high relief that they seem appear engaged by something. Andrew Stewart proposes that she would have been to protrude and loom over the viewer. 19 The technique seems to defy the restricting facing the viewers.22 As a result, the focus of the composition implies its two-dimensional medium. Even more striking is the way in which the artists have spectators, who are transformed into active participants. made the figures on the east side of the frieze share the space of the viewer; the Directly including the viewer in the composition of a three-dimensional sculpted figures emerge onto the real stairs of the altar (Fig. 4). This sculptural narrative is also pivotal to the Lesser Attalid Dedication on the Akropolis acknowledgment of the outer physical world results in an unusual and unique state in Athens (ca. 200 B.C.). Representing several historical and mythological battles, of ambiguity. But paradoxically, as opposed to representing a continuous narrative, the dedication depicts dead and dying Giants, Amazons, Gauls and Persians. The the Gigantomachy frieze presents a single event in a dramatic, dynamic and extant figures were originally accompanied by nearly a hundred other sculptures timeless moment.20 The viewer is ultimately unable to comprehend it as such with and were placed on or near the south wall of the Akropolis. Although the the frieze running along the three sides of the altar; rather, the work can only be composition of the group is uncertain, it is clear that the figures were placed on understood sequentially, by walking along beside it, rather than in a single glance. plinths directly on the ground rather than on bases. The most controversial aspect

As a result, despite the realistic depiction of movement, action and theatricality of this sculptural group was whether or not victors were depicted. With the figures facilitated by the deep carving and animation of the figures, the extended scene placed directly on the ground, the viewer is thus encouraged to walk around and seems frozen in a suspended moment of indefinite time. amongst them. This not only allowed for the physical three-dimensional

The technique of representing one eternal moment is also illustrated by interaction between the work of art and the viewer, to a greater extent than in the the Nike ofSamothrace (4'h Century BC). As a sculpture in the round, Nike, the works discussed thus far, but most importantly it enabled the viewer to both personification of Victory, alights upon the prow of a victorious ship, the wind identify with the defeated enemy and with Attalos himself.23 As a result, a close dramatically blowing in the drapery behind her. The Rhodian artists set "the scene relationship between the viewer and the sculptural group of the Lesser Attalos

Dedication was achieved. Physically, by directly placing the figures in the immediate

18. Stewart, "A Hero's Quest," 42. 19. "The massive Zeus appears to burst out of the east frieze and the Giants threaten to 21. Stewart,143. seize the viewer." Brilliant, Arts, 347. 22. Stewart,143. 20. Smith, 164. 41 To Engage the Viewer Jennifer Kozerawski 42 space of the viewer; temporally, by situating the work within an eternal moment as What is common in all of the modes of narrative composition discussed with the Nike of Samothrace; and finally psychologically, by appealing to the here is the correlation between the viewer and the work of art. The realism of a empathy of the viewer. Unlike the Great Altar of Zeus at Pergamon, where the narrative created by "calling on the senses other than sight"25 calls upon the narrative is condensed into a single moment, the Dedication, with its many figures viewer's imagination or phantasia26 in the telling of a story. The emphasis placed in varying stages of dying, encourages the viewer to continue the narrative in his or upon this intimate correlation between the viewer and a work of narrative art her mind. reveals the deliberate and underlying motivations of the Hellenistic artists.

The idea of extending a moment in time and employing the imagination Through means of a realistic visual language, the artists were able to elicit a of the viewer to complete or extend a narrative is perhaps most forcefully explored particular emotional response and/ or impress a point of view by invoking familiar in the sculptural group of Marsyas and the Scythian slave. The figures of Marsyas conditions of perception in their work. This objective, being the intended meaning and the Scythian slave are usually represented as separate figures, although they are or message within a narrative, is fulfilled, as we have seen, by the presence of the meant to tell the story of Marsyas and his musical competition with Apollo (ca. viewer whose physica~ emotional, and psychological attention is specifically

200-150 B.C.). It is the figures' interrelation as a three-dimensional sculptural directed by the narrative composition.27 The goal of this visual orchestration is to group that activates their narrative and their psychological meaning. This effect is lay stress upon those aspects of the narrative that serve to highlight its purpose. heightened by the fact that their composition does not direcdy represent a For example, in the sculptural group of Marsyas and the Scythian slave, it is not definitive event but an impending one, which gives the group a particular visual explicidy the recreation or manifestation of the well-known story that is of interest power. Rather than showing the musical competition itself or the subsequent to the artist, rather it is the pathos exhibited by Marsyas as consequence of having punishment, the artist has chosen to depict an intermediary moment. While the challenged a god. In both the Telephos frieze and the Lesser Attalid Dedication,

Scythian looks up at Marsyas, Marsyas himself, who is hung from a tree, in turn the message was a highly political one; the frieze promotes a rule based on divine looks down at him. It has often been interpreted that the Scythian is watching origin, and the Dedication depicts the efforts expended to overcome a strong and

Marsyas while he is sharpening his knife but, as Anne Weis has convincingly argued noble enemy.28 To the ancient and modem viewer, who is invited to engage and from the posture of his body, the Scythian is in fact looking up at Marsyas for the participate in the telling of these narratives, his or her role is one of both activator first time as he rises to complete his abominable task. 24 Tradition (Rome: Giorgio Bretschneider Editore, 1992), 99. 25. Weis, 99. 26. Weis, 99. 23. Pollitt, 96. 27. Stewart, 151: 24. Anne Weis, The Hanging Mar.ryas and its Copies: Roman Innovations in a Hellenistic Sculptural 28. Pollitt, 96. 43 To Engage the Viewer Jennifer Kozerawski 44 and bearer of meaning. In the effort to close the gap between viewer and art,

Hellenistic artists were able to reflect the viewer's experience of the world while shaping a part of it as well.

Fig 1: Bron'(! Boxer, 2nd or early 1st century B.C.. Rome, Museo National delle Terme.

Fig 2: Bl!)' and Goose, 2nd century B.C.. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum. 45 To Engage the Viewer

Fig. 3: Odyssey Landscape, c. 50 B.C.. Rome, Musei Vaticani.

Fig. 4: Gigantomachy, c. 180 B.C.. Berlin, Pergamon Museum. Fee-Male Charm School: Homoeconomics in Gerome's The Snake Charmer

Allan Dqyle

hen viewed through the lens of recent feminist and queer theory Jean­ W Leon Gerome's the Snake Channer (1880; fig. 1) presents itself as a location where colonialist ideological anxieties of race and gender are enacted. In her application of the Saidian critique to the art historical register Linda

Nochlin uses the painting as evidence of the objectifying gaze of the Western male by highlighting the painting's 'homoerotic' imagery.1 Given that it shows the exquisitely painted flesh of a nude pubescent Egyptian boy, the term seems apt.

However, under the homoerotic rubric, the fetishization of ethnic difference evident in Orientalist art resists a straightforward reading. Viewing the Snake

Channer as homoerotic permits one to position the painting within in a tradition of nineteenth-century French representations that picture the male body as potentially homoerotic while still remaining within a heterosexual understanding of the masculine.

The question of retroactively positing homosexual or homoerotic desire onto the painting is made difficult by the instability of sexual categories in late nineteenth-century France. Homosexuality was constructed as a category of behaviour within medical discourse at the end of the nineteenth-century in the

West. Gerome's painting falls within a period when the codification of sexual

1. Unda N ochlin, The politics of vision: essays on nineteenth-century art and socie!J (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 35. 49 Fee-l'VIale Charm School Allan Doyle 50 behaviour was still fluid. This issue is further complicated by the absence of such a Understanding the homoerotic as a defensive psychic mechanism allows us to typology in Egypt at the time. As a Flaubertian scholar has pointed out, colonial account for the production and valorization of images of eroticized male bodies travel literature presents a similar challenge to its current interpreters: within the rabidly homophobic and misogynist art world of Gerome's France.

Here terminology becomes, if not a problem, a reminder that In the last decade a substantial body of art historical accounts of this defining "the homosexual" as such is very much a Western enterprise; while male-male sexual practice is plentiful in Muslim period have applied queer and gender theory to eighteenth and nineteenth-century culture, there is no Arabic word equivalent to homosexuality. The closest approximation is the classical Arabic liwat, which French Neo-classical and Romantic painting- a tradition which Gerome inherits. designates an act of sodomy performed on or by means of (not with) a boy.2 A number employ Alex Pott's discussion ofWincklemann's codification of antique

A homoerotic reading of the Snake Charmer therefore involves the use of sculpture into a typology of two beaux ideal of male beauty: the ultra-masculine

terms that either did not exist or were, at best, unstable in mid-to-late nineteenth heroic warrior and the feminine ephebic youth.s The ephebe was an athletic male

century France. This historical and cultural over-determination raises the question youth in Ancient Greek culture. They were often figured on Attic vases as beautiful

of how the painting's erotic content may be articulated in today's terminology. young men who engaged in sexual relationships with older more muscularly define

Michael Hatt provides a useful understanding of the homoerotic: males. The younger male was courted and seduced by the older in a publicly

the homoerotic marks the boundary that divides the homosocial approved social ritual. Abigail Solomon-Godeau argues that these two ideals and the homosexual; a steel frame that keeps one out and the other in. But, to identify this frame is to draw attention to, not bookend what Potts refers to as a 'quasi-totalitarian monism' of masculinity in simply the division, but the dangerous closeness of the social to the sexual. 3 Neo-classical aesthetics. She claims that they form a continuum of representation

I wish to use Hatt's definition in relation to the Snake Charmer. as being neither of male bodies that excludes women by incorporating the feminine within the male

simple expression of sanctioned homosocialfraternitf or, forbidden homosexual form and therefore achieves "sexual difference without women."6 It will be argued

desire but rather as manifesting an erotic bivalence. The homoerotic functions as

an unarticulated boundary that underwrites the disavowal of the overtly intercourse, but the traces of male love bring sexuality into the open as a means of returning it to silence. This is, I would contend, what homoeroticism is: the marking of a limit for homosexual and thereby guarantees the integrity of the homosocial.4 homosocial desire, even an admission of homosexuality in order to disavow it and redefine homosocial bonds as licit" (13). See Michael Hatt "Near and Far: homoeroticism, labour and Hamo Thornycrofts Mower," Art History 26:1 (2003): 34; Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Male 2. Joseph A. Boone, "Vacation Cruises," PMLA 110 (1995): 92. trouble: a crisis in representation (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997), 50; Eve Kosofsky 3. l\fichael Hatt, "The Male Body in Another Frame: Thomas Eakins The Swimming Hole as a Sedgwick, Between men: English literature and male homosocial desire (New York: Columbia Homoerotic Image," in The Bocfy: ajournal ofphzlosopby and visual art. Ed. Andrew Benjamin University Press, 1985), 23. (London: Academy Editions, 1993), 13. 5. Alex Potts, Flesh and the idea: Winckelmann and the origins of art history (New Haven: Yale 4. In a more recent paper, l-Iatt broadens his definition slightly to include even the possible, University Press, 1994). albeit momentary, articulation of homosexual desire within the homoerotic: "Sexuality is 6. See Solomon-Godeau, 65 for discussion on Potts; see also Carol. Ockman, Ingres's eroticized both close and distant, pressing so near yet falling so far; it is present in the two men's bodies: retracing the serpentine line (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 60-65. 51 Fee-l'vlale Charm School Allan Doyle 52 that the exclusively male environment of the Snake Chatmercontinues and involves The architectural space depicted in the Snake Chatmeris constructed in a similar reference to lost, idealized images of male flesh. two-point perspective. One vanishing point falls on the left edge of the canvas and

The scene Gerome describes is about seduction: of a snake, of a man, a the other lies well beyond the right side. They both occur on a horizon line that spectator and of the viewer. It is one of his finest works: a dazzling display of horizontally bisects the space at the approximate level of the fold in the green­ technical virtuosity. The painting demonstrates the Academic tradition of fitm, turban just above its owner's eye-level. The horizon line establishes the position at clearly delineated drawing, which Gerome couples with intense local colour. Its which the artist and viewer must share in order for the perspectival illusion to be sumptuous cobalt blue background gives a us a feeling of a temperate interior while effective; hence, the viewer/ artist of the painting is positioned at approximately the the hue's optical tendency to recede subtly aids the impression of the architecture's same eye level as the Pasha. This indicates that the painting is constructed in order deep, recessional space. The artist delicately plays the warm earth pigments used to to facilitate the viewer's identification with the light-skinned Pasha. We may equate build up the skin tones off of the cool expanse of the blue wall. It is also unusually the cross-legged charmer with the Pasha due to age, similarity of skin tone, and large for Gerome measuring thirty-three by forty-eight inches. their both having white beards. I therefore read the painting as implicating the

The tonal range is wide and clearly marked in the gradated hues of the perspectivally located viewer in an exchange between the Pasha and the charmer. In men's flesh. Like many Orientalist painters Gerome paid a great deal of attention to the center of this triangular matrix the boy performs for the Pasha who is seated racial distinctions and his multi-ethnic audience in the Snake Charmer denotes a almost directly in front of him. range of ethnicities present in Egypt at the time. It also reflects a connotative The Snake Chatmer presents the viewer with a 'behind' view: one is racialist 'value scale' where the lighter skinned figures are more prominent in immediately invited to enjoy the boy's beautifully painted backside. This implies narrating the incident depicted and the darker occupy lower, less prominent both scopic pleasure and the possibility of sodomitical penetration. By having the positions. The audience consists of males of various ages. The youngest being viewer come from behind, Gerome limits what they can observe - tantalizingly clearly younger than the performer and the oldest would seem to be the charmer. preventing them from seeing all of the action and confirming the boy's sex. The

The dominant audience-member is an older man whose prominence is shown by composition also generates a structural tension. While standing in front of the his elevated position and his green turban. (I will hereafter refer to this figure as the painting, the viewer's point of view is one of (a) behind. However, his identification

'Pasha'). The close similarity of hue between the boy, the charmer, the basket and with the Pasha also allows him to occupy a position in front of the boy - if only in the Pasha's robes generate a cyclical movement of the viewer's eye between the fantasy. Despite his location in the 'background' of the painting, the Pasha is in fact principle figures in the drama. 'before' the performance it depicts. The viewer is both in front of and behind the 53 Fee-Male Charm School Allan Doyle 54 boy. The implications of the paradoxical repositioning of the viewer offer a This allows us to grasp the possibility that the behind-the-(primal)-scene view possible connection to the phallic pose of the boy and the implication of sodomy Gerome presents is not a purely formal decision; it manifests the paradoxical that petvades the picture. structure of infront/behind which Edelman relates to the image of a 'moebius

Lee Edelman explores a similar confusion of front and behind in his loop'. The moebius loop is a one-sided figure which confuses front and behind. analysis of anal sex in Feud's Wolf Man case. Edelman argues that the Sodomites are 'loop-y' in having a penis in front and a site of penetrative (feminine) psychoanalytic understanding of the formation ofheteronormative sexuality in the pleasure in their 'behind'. Edelman writes: primal scene relies upon a temporal inversion which he names '(be)hindsight'. 7 In a The sodomite, therefore, like the moebius loop, represents and enacts a troubling resistance to the binary logic of before and fascinating reading of Freud's text, he presents the specter of sodomy as a rupture behind, constituting himself as a single-sided surface whose front and back are never completely distinguishable as such.9 within the heterosexual. According to Freud, in order to accept castration a man Hence, I suggest that Gerome's painting not only describes the sodomitical must disavow the anus as a site of pleasure, which then becomes a location of encounter between the colonialist and Oriental Other but enacts it itself. The phobic anxiety: physical act of viewing the picture mimics the homoerotic scenario it narrates by The scandal of the sodomitical scene, therefore .... derives from its repudiation of the binary logic implicit in male structurally positing the threat/promise of sodomitical invasion of the male body. heterosexualization and from its all too visible dismissal of the threat on which the terroristic empire of male heterosexuality Despite the Snake Charmer's nearly-photographic recording of detail it is has so effectively been erected .... Playing out the possibility of multiple, non-exclusive erotic identifications and positionings, not clear who is charming whom. When one first comes upon the painting, one the spectacle of sodomy would seem to confirm precisely those infantile sexual speculations that the male, coerced by the bogey assumes the boy is the protagonist and yet clearly the 'charmer' is the man playing of castration, is expected to have put behind him.B the pipe; the music and/ or the rhythmic motion of the flute is what is supposed to

be charming the snake. So what is the relation of the boy to the charmer and the

boy to the Pasha? How does this performance relate -if at all- to the alleged 7. Lee Edelman, "Seeing things: Representation, the Scene of Surveillance, and the Spectacle of Gay Male Sex," in Inside/Out. Ed. Diana Fuss (London: Roudedge, 1994), 95. Edelman homoerotic atmosphere of the painting? To answer these questions one must points out that "in the ftrst instance the primal scene is always perceived as sodomitical, and it specifically takes shape as a sodomitical scene between sexually undifferentiated partners, consider how the Egyptian snake charming ritual was performed and what it would both of whom, phatasmatically at least, are believed to possess the phallus. In a sense, then, the primal scene as Freud unpacks it presupposes the imaginative priority of a sort of proto­ have meant in the consciousness of Gerome's audience. I will therefore turn to a homosexuality, and it designates male heterosexuality, by contrast, as a later narcissistic compromise that only painfully and with difftculty represses its identification with the so­ called 'passive' position in that scene so as to protect the narcissistically invested penis from the fate that is assumed to have befallen the penis.of the mother" (101). Edelman's concept is also used by Darcy Grimald Grigsby, Extremities: painting empire in post-revolutionary France (London: Yale University Press, 2002), 204. 9. Edelman, 105. See also Grigsby who also uses Edelman's 'moebius loop' in her discussion of Girodet, 204. · 8. Edelman, 106; my emphasis. 55 Fee-Male Charm School Allan Doyle 56 number of travel texts that describe the ritual of snake charming and the related flesh trade in general was not an uncommon theme for Gerome. In addition to his phenomenon of male dancers in nineteenth-century Egypt. paintings of prostitutes he also produced a number of canvases depicting slaves

Given his interest in Egypt, it seem likely that Gerome read E.W. Lane's being auctioned, inspected and on display. Given his predilection for this theme,

Manners and Customs if the Modern EJ!Jptians of 1830; it has even bee suggested that he his familiarity with Lane's text and his extensive travel in Egypt, I believe one may based some of his compositions on its illustrations.10 In his book Lane discusses a assume that Gerome was familiar with the tradition of male dancers and their tradition of male dancers who would dance in public while in female drag. He licit/illicit status. It is also important to note that the snake charmers, dancers and discourages his audience from assuming that such activities were illicit. The prostitutes were from the very lowest of socio-economic classes; they had few propriety of these dancers is testified to by the fact that they were employed at options but to trade on their various charming attributes. Given the similarity important social occasions such as weddings and circumcisions in high-caste between the performance of a dance and the snake charming ritual we can families. In fact, they were sometimes used when females dancers would have been therefore see the boy in the 5 nake Charmer as resonating with the dancing of the considered too risque. These khaJPaLr were so successful in their masquerade that khawa!s or ginks. As mandated by the above theorization of homoeroticism, there is some visitors thought they were hermaphroditic; the French writer Ernest Godard no visible indicator between the two: the boy-as-'exotic'-dancer can function as an insisted on examining one boy's genitalia to verify his sex.11 They were also known object of homoerotic (as opposed to homosexual) desire because his status as a to go around in public veiled, not, Lane is quick to point out "from shame, but khawal or gink, licit dancer or illicit prostitute, is visually undetectable. merely to affect the manners of women."12 These transvestite dancers however Lane also describes a ritual where a snake charmer is called upon to could easily be confused with ginks. These male dancers were "almost exacdy cleanse a room of serpents. In order for the charmer to preempt the accusation that similar" to the khawa!s but, Lane implies, male prostitutes as well.13 he had a snake hidden in his clothing he was made to perform "surrounded by

Although he did not paint the male dancers Lane describes, Gerome spectators" and that "incredulous persons ... even stripped him naked."14 This frequendy painted am!ehs, female dancers who were also prostitutes. He often account is striking in its difference from the one Gerome depicts. In Lane's shows them direcdy engaging the viewer in an open gesture of solicitation. The description, the boy is the charmer and there is no older man with a flute. Here the

boy strips to prove he's not cheating. This raises the question of why he's naked in 10. Albert Boime, "Gerome and The Bourgeois Artist's Burden," in The Aca~ ;rnd French pt#n:ting in the Ninetemth century (London: Phaidon, 1971), 70. Gerome's version. It does not seem as if the boy is calling serpents out from their 11. Rucli Bleys, The geograpl;y f!!perversion: male-tiJ-mafe sexual behalliom' outside the West and the ethnographicimagination, 17§0-1918 (Washington Square, N.Y.: New York University Press, 1995), 115. 12. E.W. Lane, Afanners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (London: Everyman's Library, 13. Lane, 389. 1966), 389. 14. Lane, 390. 57 Fee-l\fale Charm School Allan Doyle 58 hiding places. The enormous snake he has wrapped around his body was clearly not Lane's account is echoed in striking ways in the travel writings of the lurking in a wall crevice but came out of the large open basket beside him. One author Gustave Flaubert and his companion, the photographer Maxim du Camp. must therefore ask why he is naked? Obviously verification that he had not hidden They went on tour of the Orient together in 1849. Like Gerome, it is clear that the snake is not required here. The viewer's awareness of his unexplained nudity is Flaubert, and presumably du Camp, were familiar with Lane's book, The manners and heightened by the noticeable absence of his clothes. This is a remarkable omission customs of the modern Egyptians. 16 Both moved in the same social circles as Gerome for an artist who executed his paintings with such forethought and planning as and all three knew the art critic and author Theophile Gautier. Flaubert recounts

Gerome. It gives the odd impression that the boy has come out of the basket as his journey in unpublished travel notes, journal entries and his letters. Du Camp well, as if he too was summoned by the old man's charm(s). As with the potential published his considerably less explicit account when he returned to France. reading of the boy as a possible prostitute (khawal or gink), the motivation behind In his journal Flaubert describes seeing Egyptian dancers perform for the the boy's nakedness generates an uncertainty that engenders the picture's first time. He witnesses a performance where males dance a native form of a homoerotic aspect. 'striptease' called the Bee. He is enraptured by their dance. In a letter home he

Lane also describes street performers called howah who would enact describes them as 'bardashes', "two rascals, quite ugly, but charming in their various forms of legerdemain in public places. He tells us that an older male, a corruption", and says he'll have one return to dance the Bee for him. Flaubert goes

howee, would wind snakes around a boy's arms and head and then perform various on to find women dancers not as exciting as the men. He articulates this a little harmless tricks on/with him, most of which seem to involve mock-penetrating his later on his journey when he writes of his audience with the Egyptian courtesan

body with various objects. The howee also does "[s]everal indecent tricks" that Lane Kuchuk Hanem who also dances the Bee. Flaubert, who sleeps with her after her

feels he "must abstain from describing: some of them are abominably disgusting."15 performance (both of which he enjoyed tremendously), notes that her dance

Although we are left to imagine what acts the boy/man duo committed, it is reminded him of something he had seen before: "I have seen this dance on old important to note the association between an older man, a boy, snakes and sexual Greek vases."17 This reference to Archaic pottery suggests that despite its beauty,

acts. This incident also underscores the interpretive gap between the West and her performance is not an original; Flaubert's comment figures his experience with

East. Behaviour that Lane considers unmentionable for his English audience was Hanem as a copy, the origin of which is located in the distant past.

obviously appropriate public amusement in Egypt. 16. Flaubert recommends Lane's book to his mother in a letter. See Gustave Flaubert "Letter to Dr. Jules Cloquet Cairo, 15 January 1850" in F!aubert in Egypt, trans. Francis Steegmuller (London: The Bodley Head, 1972), 81. 17. Gustave Flaubert, "Travel Notes: Esna. Wednesday, 6 March 1859" in Flaubert in Egypt, 15. Lane, 391. 115. 59 Fee-Male Charm School Allan Doyle 60

At Aswan, Flaubert encounters another dancer-prostitute who and charged with a mission by the government, we have considered it our duty to indulge in this form of ejaculation. So approaches him with the line "I am a dancer; my body is suppler than a snake's."18 far the occasion has not presented itself. We continue to seek it, however.21 Despite her skill, Flaubert finds that both the performance and the sex pales in His avowed desire to have sex with a boy prostitute is shocking but not surprising comparison to his earlier experience with Hanem but both would seem lacked when one considers that Egypt was virtually synonymous with sodomy in the something. Expressing his disappointment in the women dancers he concludes that French imagination. The first incident Flaubert recounts on landing in Alexandria is "the Bee is a myth, a lost dance whose name alone survives" and, he draws on a indicative of this unspoken agenda. He writes of Maxim du Camp being suggestion from his Egyptian servant] oseph who "claims to have seen it really immediately attracted to some ''little Negro boys" and asks, "By who is he not danced only once, and by a man."19 Thus, it is suggested that the male body is the excited? Or, rather, by what?"22 Like Flaubert, du Camp whores his way across only proper vehicle for the transmission of a tradition and that even this fails to Egypt. Sexual tourism was an integral part of the male colonial adventure23 and perform up to a phantasmatic standard. \'Ve find this same temporal reversal always included the opportunity to experience sodomitical pleasure. As one articulated with remarkable clarity in another letter: commentator put it succinctly in 1884: "Like all Oriental people, the Arab ... is a Anyone who is a little attentive rediscovers here much more than he discovers. The sees of a thousand notions that one carried sodomite."24 This widely held stereotype meant that any artistic representation of within oneself grow and become more definite, like so many refreshed memories. Thus, as soon as I landed at Alexandria I the East was pervaded by the possibility of a sodomitical encounter. saw before me, alive, the anatomy of the Egyptian sculptures: the high shoulders, long torso, thin legs, etc. The dances that we have had performed for us are of too hieratic a character not to 21. Flaubert "Letter to Cloquet," 84. He is eventually successful in his quest. It is interesting have come from the dances of the old Orient, which is always to note that when he writes to Bouilhet of the experience he is unusually reticent. Flaubert young because nothing changes. Here the Bible is a picture of writes: "Work hard, try not to be too bored, don't copulate too often, conserve your life today.20 strength: an ounce of sperm lost is worse than ten pounds of blood. By the way, you ask me if I consummated that business at the baths. Yes- and on a pockmarked young rascal Flaubert's description of the principle dancer/ stripper above as a bardash wearing a white turban. It made me laugh, that's all. But I'll be at it again. To be done well, an experiment must be repeated" (204). Despite his jocular tone, there is also a noteworthy leads us to the conclusion that he was a male prostitute (gink). His interest in the absence of satisfaction here: even after his desire to 'know' (in the biblical sense and traditional sense: Flaubert traveled under the pretence of a mission to study the agricultural practices of Egypt for France) the Sodomitical Other has been consummated, he is left sexual availability of the male dancer is confirrned when he continues his letter to unsatiated. He therefore vows to repeat (perhaps endlessly) the act until he 'does it well'. 22. Flaub.ert, "Letter to Louis Bouilhet: Cairo. 1 December 1849," in F!aubert in Egypt, 43. Louis with the following admission: 23. On this topic, see Robert Aldrich Robert, Colonialism and Homosexuality (London: Routledge, 2003). Speaking of bardashes, this is what I know about them. Here it is 24. Kocher as quoted in Bleys, 164. Bleys provides ample evidence to support the claim that quite accepted ... Traveling as we are for educational purposes, there existed a "deeply rooted European belief that all Arabs were, essentially, sodomites" (164). In Extremities, Darcy Grigsby gives a detailed account of the French understanding of sodomy in Egypt in the early part of the centmy (the stereotypical view of the East as 18. Flaubert, "Travel Notes: Wednesday, 17 April 1850" in Flaubert in Egypt, 153. unchanging makes this material useful throughout the colonial period). This is made 19. Flaubert, 153. particularly powerful by her discussion ofletters of soldiers writing home of their fears of 20. Flaubert "Letter to Cloquet," 81; my emphasis. being raped by mameluks. Grigsby's fascinating discussion of the role of Egyptian Other 61 Fee-:i'vfale Charm School Allan Doyle 62

The equation Arab = sodomite is perhaps most famously demonstrated in They appeared as a trio: an old man, a young man, and a boy of fifteen. They carried a knapsack that contained a squirming mass Richard Burton's "Terminal Essay," the final section of his translation of the One - several scorpions, two vipers, and a large black snake of a kind found in the Mokattam. The boy took the snake, wrapped it Thousand and One Nights. Here, Burton proposes a 'Stodaic Zone' (falling roughly in around his body, lifted it to his lips and let it glide several times between his shirt and his bare skin .... The charmer then the tropics) where he claimed sodomy was "popular and endemic" and "held at proposed to immunize me for the rest of my life against all kind of bites, and to endow me with the power to handle with perfect worst to be a mere peccadillo."25 He also informs us that in the Orient: safety all animals no matter how venomous. I accepted with pleasure, hoping for some kind of magical ceremony, and put The male figure here, as all the world over, is notably superior ... myself in the boy's hands. I sat down cross legged before him, to that of the female. The latter is ... meaningless and he took my hand, pressed my thumb, wrapped a snake around monotonous. The former far excels it in variety of form and in my wrist, and addressed me in words that were rapid and sinew. In these lands ... there will be a score of fine male figures staccato: he lifted the snake to my ear; it bit me hard; with a to one female, and there she is, as everywhere else, as inferior as finger he took the blood from the bite and spread it on the is the Venus de Medici to the Apollo Belvedere.26 ground; then he breathed twice into my mouth, and made me breathe twice on the large black snake, which he had wrapped Burton therefore articulates the thesis that has been traced from Winckleman around my neck, twice rubbed my bloody ear with his hand that he had moistened with his saliva, once again asked me for 'a big (through Potts and Solomon-Godeau) to Flaubert: the preference for male over tip' and the thing was done. 27

female bodies with recourse to models of Antique statuary as exemplars. According In his notes, Flaubert emphasizes the erotic and economic nature of this incident:

to this logic the lover is always inadequate to desire; that she always arrives too late By means of baksheesh as always (baksheesh and the big stick are the essence of the Arab: you hear nothing else spoken of and see and marked by lack (i.e. castration). The Orient allowed colonial masters such as nothing else) we have been initiated into the fraternity of the p.rylli or snake-charmers. We have had snakes put around our Burton, Flaubert, du Camp and Gerome, to experiment with homoerotic desire necks, around our hands, incantations have been recited over our heads, and our initiators have breathed into our mouths all without fear of being tarred by the sodomitical brush. Whereas at home, to even but inserting their tongues. It was great fun- the men who ' engage in such sinful enterprises practice their vile arts, as M. de fantasize about having sex with a French male youth would be damaging to his Voltaire puts it, with singular competency. 28

masculinity, to sample such pleasures abroad only reinforced the citadel of the male The ceremony of snake charming therefore involves a number of

ego. 'homoerotic' aspects. The boy;s nudity makes him available for inspection and

Maxim du Camp published an account of his encounter with a snake delectation of the older, colonial master. Their exchange of breath and body fluids

charmer while on tour with Flaubert shortly after his return to France. Du Camp brings them into near-penetrative proximity. All of this, coupled with the economic

wrote: relation between a clothed, older European male and the naked, adolescent boy in

within Napoleonic France is highly relevant to the account given here of Gerome, who, 25. As quoted in Boone, 91. according to Albert Boime was a 'lackey' of the Second Empire. See Grigsby, 78-124; Boirne, 26. As quoted in Bleys, 216. 68. 27. Maxim du Camp, "Le Nil, Egypt et Nubie," in Flaubert in Egypt, 88-89. 63 Fee-Male Charm School Allan Doyle 64 his room, suggests that the 'sinful art' of snake charming may involve same-sexual criticism of Theophile Gauthier. Gauthier discussed the presence of the serpentine contact. Of course, in ethnographic mode, the picture simultaneously passes as a line of beauty in the elongated and contorted vertebrae of Ingres' Odalesques. record of an unusual, exotic but not erotic performance. The elasticity of this Gauthier was also an advocate and friend of Gerome. Gerome himself was a great double-reading is due to the location of this scene in the Orient. In the fantastic devotee of Ingres. Applying Ockman's theses to Gerome indicates that he may

East, the artist could get away with representations that would have violated have literalized the notion of the 'serpentine line' in the Snake Charmer, exorcising it cultural taboos if set at home in the West. The pseudo-scientific alibi of the from the ephebic body and localizing it within a symbol of licentious seduction and ethnography, which was continually reasserted by Gerome's excessive recording of (feminine) sin. detail in the Snake Charmer allowed him to mask his desire while simultaneously The position of the charmer's phallic skin-coloured pipe at approximately indulging it. With this in mind, we should find it unsurprising that his paintings the boy's crotch hints at fellatio. His playing indicates that, at least metaphorically, were condemned by some critics for his dispassionate, cold, inhuman character he has blown the boy up. There is a suggestion here that the boy is literally while at the same time, being denounced as indecent (the latter charge coming from pneumatically inspired by the charmer's instruction. This is not unlike du Camp's

Zola of all people!).29 charmer blowing into the mouth of his snake (or blowing into Flaubert and du

The body of the boy in the Snake Charmer is tense and markedly rigid. His Camp's mouths). The boy in turn appears to have made the turbaned older man in legs are locked, his buttocks clenched, his back and neck are uncomfortably front of him erect. His body is shown in an oddly rigid pose where all but his head straight. His pose provides a strong contrast to the huge serpent that virtually and shoulders are locked into a single plane. With the relationship to the two older, engulfs his body with its sensuous embrace. Gerome sets up a visual binary bearded men (Pasha and charmer) in mind one can see the boy as an ephebic type between them, suggesting that all of the boy's (ephebic) curves have been displaced who's erotic potential is marked in the phallic character of his pose. Maxim du onto the snake. The boy-snake couple therefore separates out the polarities of the Camp recounts following moment from the performance of his boy charmer: beaux ideal: masculine-feminine curvature and masculine-masculine rigid severity. [The charmer] spat into its mouth, and pressed strongly with his thumb on the head of the innocent reptile, which immediately Carol Ockman has traced the notion of the 'serpentine line' from antiquity, to the became as straight and stiff as a stick. This effect, surprising at ftrst, is of course very easy to obtain. All one has to do is exert a violent pressure on the snake's brain (which is very weak), and 28. Flaubert, "Letter to Bouilhet," 86. thus induce a cataleptic state: the snake is immediately rendered 29. Robert John Ackermann, Heterogeneities: race, gender, class, nation, and state (Amherst : immobile, so stiffened that it cannot be bent, only broken)O University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 84. It cou1d be argued that these two are not necessarily exclusive, that one can be cold and sexually excited at the same time. Although I think this is true (Sade was an early favourite of Ffaubert and there is certainly evidence of similar tastes at work in Gerome's oeuvre), the idea of dispassionate (sexual) passion is still a readings. somewhat paradoxical notion and involves the tension between two (seemingly) opposed 30. Du Camp, 89. 65 Fee-J\Iale Charm School Allan Doyle 66

Not unlike du Camp and Flaubert, the snake is made easily erect. This of Potts' 'quasi-totalitarian monism' underscores the absence of female models in movement between flaccidity, curvature, pliability etc. on the one hand, and nineteenth-century French Academic drawing classes.31 This meant that the hardened, rigid, fu:mness on the other provides a striking parallel to the relation experience of 'working from life' was always marked in advance by the absence of between the snake and the boy. Both can be taken as metaphors for the dialectic of the ideal.32 The model was only understood as being a substitute for the missing phallic presence and castrated absence which, according to psychoanalysis, forms body of the universal ideal located in an archaic past. This aesthetic idealism was a the kernel of human subjectivity. One may therefore conclude that the boy has philosophy that Gerome whole-heartedly embraced as both an artist and an been 'charmed' like the snake in du Camp's account. Since the pose is determined influential teacher. 33 by the snake charming ritual and the old man has taught the boy the ritual, he has The boy in the Snake Charmer may be viewed in light of this controversy dictated the boy's pose; thus, making him 'erect'. The boy's upraised arm would over the sexual vs. aesthetic use of models. Under such a reading, he may be taken suggest a state of phallic tumescence. This is to view the boy as standing in the to mark a moment of slippage between pederasty and pedagogy, an anxious middle of a phallic economy of libidinal exchange where one male has made the intersection of insemination and emulation. The carpet he stands on can almost be other male stiff, generating another state of erection in turn. The charmer charms taken for a model stand and his performance space may be read as an atelier. the snake, the boy charms the Pasha by displaying his charm(s), and the painter When the rise of the use of the female nude in France gained strength towards the charms the viewer with his skill in depicting the 'charming' scene. end of the century, Gerome waged an active campaign against the use of female

The Snake Charmer shows us a nude male surrounded by clothed men models at the Ecole. Although feminist art historians such as Soloman-Goudeau who closely observe and inspect his body. This brings to mind the position of a life and Carol Ockham discuss this phenomenon mainly in the ftrst half of the century, model in a drawing class. Nineteenth-century French academic training underwent I would argue that Gerome's rear-guard aesthetics and politics allows us to extend a shift from the use of male to female models. Although, female models were used it to include his studio production. privately in the earlier period, they were considered too potentially scandalous for a The boy in the Snake Charmers overly-rigid pose and the metallic public atelier- not unlike the transvestite dancers of Lane's Egypt. Female models smoothness of his skin also indicate that he may be seen as a statue. I therefore were also associated with prostitution (as were dancers). Academic training 31. Solomon-Godeau, 191-2. subscribed to Winckelmann's theory of the archetypal beaux ideals of the beautiful 32. Solomon-Godeau, 186. 33. Oliver Rich on, "Representation, The Despot and The Harem," in Europe and Its Others. Ed. Francis Barker (Colchester: University of Essex, Colchester 1985): Rich on has here male body. This however, was in tension with the importance of drawing from the drawn a parallel between the role of the archaic origin of aesthetic beauty in Neo-classicism and Orientalism arguing that after "having taken everything they could from Greek and male nude model in academic education. Solomon-Godeau's feminist interpretation Roman antiquity, painters found in the Orient a new myth of the origin, a new model in an 67 Fee-Male Charm School Allan Doyle 68 argue that we may view the boy in the center of the Snake Charmer in a similar light to "skewer" him in the sauna. 37 In another letter to a male confidant he describes to Flaubert's 'Bee' dance or Burton's Egyptian women: as a recast ancient statue swaddling his clap-stricken penis in bandages, thereby 'mummifying' it. Flaubert's erected to paint-over the experience oflack in the colonial encounter. This would mummified phallus and his dead friend's body are inanimate fetishes that allow us to relate the canvas to the series of statues and the paintings of statuary compensate for an irreparable loss. Like the ancient statuary that populate that became a near-obsession in Gerome's late studio production. In the later Orientalist prose and painting, they insist that the beloved is always chanced upon canvases he frequently paints himself in the process making figurative sculpture, as already dead; that it is made marble by our desire a priori and that the pantheon often life-size statuary that were patina ted with life-like colouring. His famous of ancient ideals is nothing but a warehouse of funerary monuments.

Pygmalion (painting 1890, sculpture 1892) is one of numerous examples. These Madeline Dobie reads Theophile Gautier's Orientalist stories and formalist disturbing works depict the blurring of the line between dead material and animate aesthetics through the psychoanalytic lens. She argues that the 'Orient' was a fetish beings. Such a 'crossing the line' between life and death (metaphor and materiality) object with which the artist attempted to compensate for castration. She points out is precisely the structure of sexual fetishism at work in the Snake Charmer and, I that "the substitution involved in fetishism is a substitution for something that was would argue, the French colonial project in general.34 never there in the first place: the fetish creates the "original" that it replaces (the

In a poignant letter, Flaubert writes oflosing Alfred Le Poittevin, a man he maternal phallus)."38 This is the metaleptica~ sodomitical reversal of past/present, describes as the one he loved "most in the world."35 Mourning for his beloved front/behind which Edelman finds in Freud and which is evident in the

friend he recounts washing his body and wrapping it in shrouds so that when "it compositional structure of the Snake Charmer. The boy is an Orientalist phallic was done he looked like an Egyptian mummy in its bandages."36 Here, Flaubert object (as lack) around which circulates an economic exchange of same-sex desires. associates a mummy (the Orientalist fetish par excellence) and the ablutions of death Although this could take place within the regime of masculinist aesthetic ideology rituals within a atmosphere of loss and homoerotic desire. This brings to mind a of Nineteenth-century French elite visual culture, historical revision allows us to letter where he discusses his search for an Egyptian bath boy whom, wrapped in restore the psychic exchange it en-tails. Gerome's painting invites the Western male towels, he would pay to unwrap, wash and massage his naked body. He then hoped to sample the pleasure of sodomizing the Oriental Other from the comfort of Paris

older civilization" (2). 34. It is interesting to note that Freud develops his theory of the fetish through a reading of 37. Flaubert, The Letters, 85. Burton's text and directly connects it to both 'priruitive' cultures and homosexuality. 38. Madeline Dobie, Foreign Bodies: Gender, Language, and Culture in French Orienta/ism (Stanford: 35. Gustave Haubert, The Letters of Gustave Flaubert 1830-1857. Ed. Francis Steegmuller Stanford University Press, 2001), 167. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 96. 36. Flaubert, The Letters, 94. 69 Fee-Male Charm School Allan Doyle 70 circa 1880 (or Williamstown Mass. circa 2004) without surrendering his fortress of heteronoramtivity.

Fig. 1: Jean-Leon Gerome, The Snake Charmer, c. 1870. Williamstown Mass., Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. The People of India: A Document of Colonial Abstraction

Sarah S tanners

''We must not forget that in the sky of India, serene as it is, a small cloud may arise, at first no bigger than a man's hand, but which, growing larger and larger, may at last threaten to burst, and overwhelm us with ruin."1

or all of the attempts to describe, define and 'know' India, it remained F stubbornly abstract to its British colonizers. A looming cloud on the horizon, forever changing in shape and scope, an abstract form that British

colonizers could best deal with by keeping it within sight. With the advent of

photography in 1839, and its exponential growth in accessibility in the years that

followed, this new technology became the primary means of capturing India. It

was a way to make India visible, to give it shape and define its contours, in order to

come to 'know' India. This obscure colony, as it appeared to its colonizers, was,

from the beginning, reasoned with through images. As Avtar Singh Bhullar has

observed with regard to India, "It is sometimes asserted that the images per se are

the only way reality may be perceived, that appearance alone is reality, or what

makes reality."2 This sentiment is manifest in the 1868-1875 publication of eight

volumes entitled The People of India: A Series of Photographic Illustrations, with Descriptive

Letterpress, of the Races and Tribes of Hindustan, OriginallY Prepared Under the Authority of

1. Lord Charles Canning on the occasion of his leaving London for India in 1855 to become Governor General of the colony, quoted by J.W. Kaye, The Sepf!Y War, vo!. I: 569-570, and reprinted in Nihar Nandan Singh, British Historiography on British Rule in India: The Life and Writings of Sir John William Kqye 1814-1876 (New Delhi: Janaki Prakashan, 1986), 238-239. 2. Avtar Singh Bhullar, India: Myth and Reality, Images of India in the Fiction of English Writers 73 The People of India Sarah Stanners 74 the Government of India, and Reproduced l?Ji Order of the S ecretaty of State for India in Council, Without a native tradition of documenting events for historical record, or anything edited by J. Forbes Watson and John William Kaye, and published by the India that resembled the Western European standards of a textual history, India appeared Museum in London. It was the first large-scale ethnographic publication to employ to its colonizers in desperate need of a history. British colonizers attempted to photographs;3 to be exact, 480 albumen prints are included in the eight-volumed make sense of it all on their own terms- from their perspective.6 Despite this set. Indeed, it will be shown that this multi-volume colonial project is a document schism, Cohn asserts that "the British believed they could explore and conquer this of the effort to make reality in India. It was an effort that aimed to contain and space through translation: establishing correspondence could make the unknown control the idea of India and its people by way of both aggressive (literal) and and the strange knowable."7 With any sort of translation, something is always lost passive (symbolic) abstraction. Paradoxically, it was the use of the photographic from the original meaning. Translation is an agent of abstraction. This translation medium to make India more 'real', at least in the eyes of its British makers, that process abstracted any true sense of India into something more palatable to the such abstractions were perpetuated. English, and under better control. There is an indexical motive in The People of As it is the result of a dynamic system of symbolic constructions and India; the people within its pages are contained in a position to be evaluated and subjective perceptions, 'knowledge' may be considered a layer of abstraction that learned safely. They are presented in a manner that will aid in the formation of a affected both The People of India publication and the actual people of India particular knowledge. themselves. During the colonial period, Britain wielded power over India through In the forward to Cohn's Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge, Nicholas the assertion of 'facts' that the colonizers themselves had constructed.4 As Dirks makes a keen point, "Colonialism was made possible, and then sustained and explicated most convincingly in the post colonial discussions of Bernard Cohn, strengthened, as much by cultural technologies of rule as it was by the more knowledge is equated with power and this was especially obvious in British India. obvious and brutal modes of conquest"8 Through photography, the British As Cohn states in his Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (1996): collected and constructed a 'knowledge' of India. The nineteenth century colonists In India the British entered a new world that they tried to comprehend using their own forms of knowing and thinking. in India were immediately conscious of the camera's suitability as a tool for There was widespread agreement that this society, like others they were governing, could be known and represented as a series anthropology. It provided an apparently empirical method for building knowledge of facts. 5 about India's people. Gawahar Nagar: Ajanta Publications, 1985), 3. 3. Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric if English India (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), as per Ray Desmond quoted on page 104. . 6. Ibid., 4. 4. Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 7. Ibid., 4. 1996), 4. 8. Nicholas Dirks, "Forward" in Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms if Knowledge (Princeton: 5. Ibid., 4. 75 The People oflndia Sarah Stanners 76

The People of India was born in the wake of the Mutiny/Rebellion of 1857. is essentially used to form a prescribed type of knowledge as set out by the

\'Vhether one believes that it was a mutiny or a rebellion, 1857 marks a time in India accompanying text. Being singled out and under surveillance, as in the Panopticon when natives who were enlisted in the Crown's armies rose up against their and the pages of The People of India, the subject is encouraged to discipline itself in

superiors that ultimately ended in the death of both Indian and British men, response to being watched; constant good behaviour proves beneficial when one women and childern. After this event and the ensuing Sepoy war, there existed a knows that he or she can be seen. The People of India, like so many colonial projects,

heightened state of surveillance and uneasiness within the colony. Considering this works to objectify India. In the words of Foucault: "He is seen, but he does not milieu, The People of India can be understood within the ideas put forth by l\iichel see; he is the object of information, never a subject of communication."13 The seer,

Foucault's essay on "Panopticism."9 Foucault's description of the Panopticon is on the other hand, remains unseen.14 One's attitude is therefore changed by the

interestingly comparable to The People of India, as he says: awareness of being within sight. In history, a sort of self-abstraction occurs. There

This enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in is no doubt that Foucault would agree with the abstracting force behind The People which the individuals are inserted in a fixed place, in which the slightest movements are supervised, in which all events are of India, as he says of such situations: recorded, in which uninterrupted work of writing links the centre and the periphery, in which power is exercised without Our society is one not of spectacle, but of surveillance; under the division, according to a continuous hierarchical figure, in which surface of images, one invests bodies in depth; behind the great each individual is constantly located, examined and abstraction, there continues the meticulous, concrete training of distributed ... all this constitutes a compact model of the useful forces; the circuits of communication are the supports of disciplinary mechanism.10 an accumulation and centralization of knowledge; the play of signs defines the anchorages of power; it is not that the beautiful In this power system, Foucault asserts that there exists a system where the excluded totality of the individual is amputated, repressed, altered by our social order, it is rather that the individual is carefully fabricated is individualized. II This aspect of power exertion would explain the numerous in it, according to a whole technique of forces and bodies .IS

unique subjects within The People of India. Although this publication makes The power referred to by Foucault is exerted through the objectification of those

sweeping generalizations in terms of assigning caste, race and moral values, it also against whom the power is directed. This self-disciplining action, or self-

works to highlight individuals and presents them as being distinct from the other abstraction, is apparent in The People of India photographs where royal families,

types and tribes within the volumes. As Foucault says, "Visibility is a trap."12 The political or religious figures, and other subjects of high standing seem to revel in

subjects in The People of India are continually available for evaluation and their image the attention of the camera lens. With these examples of obviously willing

Princeton University Press, 1996). 9. Michel Foucault, "Panopticism," Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by 12. Foucault, 200. Alan Sheridan, 2nd edition, 1995 (New York: Vintage Books, Random House, 1977). 13. Ibid., 200. 10. Ibid., 197. 14. Ibid., 201. 11. Ibid., 199. 15. Ibid., 217. 77 The People of India Sarah Stanners 78 photographic subjects within the volumes of The People of India, we can see that The photographs were produced without any definite plan, according to local and personal circumstances, by different sometimes the colonized actually participated in their own transformation into an officers; and copies of each plate were sent home to the Secretary of State for India in Council.17 understandable subject of a readable colony .. It is possible that such photos could New negatives were then produced by photographing the submitted plate so that have initially been taken for private purposes, perhaps a family portrait albumen prints could be made from these negatives to fulfill the publication of two commissioned by the subject. Nonetheless, the power of their enjoyment in having hundred sets of this multi-volume project. From studying three separate copies of their photograph taken is rendered null by its inclusion in an ethnographic study. volume 6 (one from the University of Toronto, one from the University of Their ease with assimilating the manner of a typically European family portrait is l'viinnesota and one from Indiana University), the variance in tone and quality of now simply a marker of their supposedly higher civility and character as compared the same subject makes it clear that creating exactly identical copies of albumen to the rest of the people of India represented in the volumes. All of these prints was virtually impossible at a time when hand-printing was the only way to moments of objectification throughout the pages of The People of India are ultimately make reproductions. With essentially original prints in each and every volume of sought in order to facilitate the construction of 'knowledge'16 - the ultimate form the two hundred sets, there were certainly plenty of opportunities to influence or of power. Simply put, The People of India volumes represent a process of defming abstract the photographed subjects in The People of India. the Other in order to define the self. As the collodion process began to replace the paper negative process Perhaps the most aggressive or literal layer of abstraction in The People of there seemed to be a new concern with the ability of photographs to be India publication is the occurrence of negative and print manipulation. The manipulated. A speech delivered by Dr. Nash on September 25, 1856, at the opportunity to control the subject in the printing process is equivalent to the meeting of the Madras Photographic Society, and later published that same year in manipulation of India's people in the textual accounts of the colony at this time. In The Indian Journal of Art, Science and Manufacture, expresses a concern for the both cases, the colonial British visualization oflndia's men, women and children manipulation of negatives: are askewed by interpretation and the aim of the descriptor. In The People of India, The grand object of photography in my humble opinion is, to the photographed subjects have all been ftltered or translated by the editors, J. depict nature as she exists ... [he goes on to say in the final section of his speech] .. .In connexion with the "paper process," Forbes Watson and John William Kaye. The possibility of photographic editing is I regret to find (I speak from observation) that some photographers keep in their employ paid artists, whose duty is to understood in a statement found in the preface to The People of India, which describes the process of submission and publication that took place: 17 J. Forbes Watson and John William Kaye, ed., The People of India: A Series of Photographic Illustrations, with Descriptive Letterpress, of The Races and Tribes ofHindustan, Originalfy Prepared Under the Authority of the Government of India, and Reproduced I?J Order of the Secretary of State for India In Cound!, vol. 1 (London: India Museum, 1868), preface. 16. Foucault, 220. 79 The People of India Sarah Stanners 80

touch up or patch all imperfect negatives for the purpose of the addition of black ink dots in the subject's eyes (of volume 6 in particular),19 printing and exhibiting to the public ... These pseudo­ photographs can be readily detected by a magnifying lens, and soon reveals itself to be a corrective tactic. Very carefully, the dots are placed ought to be exposed for special condemnation, and I beg of the council either to prohibit such spurious productions from being directly where the pupil of the eye should appear and the same black ink appears to exhibited at the approaching "Madras Photographic Exhibition," or to call on the exhibitors to attach to them some other tide be used to fill in overexposed or flawed areas in the background of the print (Figs. than that ofPHOTOGR,.>\PH. A Painted positive photograph, I consider, a high display of art, but a painted and patched up 3 and 4). The placement of this ink is meticulous- clearly not the effort of a negative, for printing pseudo-positive photographs, a gross deception on the public.18 vandal. That this is not a case of simple vandalism is also proven by the fact that

This statement does indicate that negative manipulation was occurring at this time, the inking of pupils can be found in copies of volume 6 owned by the University of enough so to cause a formal objection by Dr. Nash. It also reveals how Toronto, the University of l'vlinnesota and the Indiana University library. All three photography was aligned v.rith the epistemology and the pursuit of'reality'. There separate copies of the same volume exhibit these hand-done corrective are many instances of what might be called corrective abstraction within The People abstractions, therefore indicating a sort of production-line approach to making the if India publication. Direct manipulation of a negative can be seen in subjects 127, volumes. The motive for inking the eyes may have been the same as in the cases

137, and 146 from volume 3, where their eyelids have been re-articulated (Fig. 1 where the negative was manipulated to define the eyelids in volume 3 - a and 2). The contour lines of the eyelids in these photographs appear drawn-in and compulsion to fix the subject's eyes. Again, it can be assumed that the subjects had stark white. This effect is produced when the negative has been drawn on, moved their eyes during the exposure time, thus producing a blurred area where therefore blocking the passage of light through the negative during the printing the eye should be represented. The ethnographic nature of this publication may process to produce a clear-cut unexposed white silhouette on the print. The eyes have been the impetus for capturing a precise representation of the subject being of these particular subjects may have also had highlights added in the same manner. photographed. Their appearance is corrected for better consumption by the those

A subject blinking or moving their eyes may have prompted the editors to fix such who would study the volumes. These abstractions of the eyes are, in a sense, aberrations. physical evidence of the subject becoming the subjected. Their gaze is controlled

Much more obvious is the manipulation of the actual albumen prints by the British seer/ cameraman. throughout The People of India publication. What at first appears to be vandalism, There is also the effect of erasure to consider in these examples where the

eyes have been fixed. These abstractions are employed to erase the fact that the

18. Dr. Nash, "Description of Negative Process (Wet Collodion On Glass)," The I11dian Journal ofArt, Science a11d Manufacture, 1, 2; second series (1856): 45-50, quoted in Janet Dewan, The Photographs ofLinnaeus Tripe: A Catalogue &Jison11e (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 2003), 19. Subjects 325 and 335-2 undoubtedly exhibit inking on the pupils of the eyes. This is also 88 and 90. apparent on subject 19 of the Indiana University's copy of volume 1. 81 The People of India Sarah Stanners 82 subjects' eyes moved during the exposure time. Any indication of this moment of Mirza Ali Mahomed, subject 294 from volume 6, looks particularly uncomfortable unconformity is obliterated. In a sense, an erasure of time has occurred - the time in his pose, as a clearly European-style pedestal table impedes on this sitter's when the subject resisted fixation- where the moment failed to be captured. Just space20 (Fig. 6). However, as discussed earlier, such impositions were not entirely as time has been falsified, space can be falsified as well. In both cases, a new reality rejected by those being photographed. is represented, and the time-bound and space-bound limitations of colonialism and Nevertheless, the vast majority of photographed subjects in The People of its 'knowledge' can be ignored, or at least abstracted. India look uncomfortable and unwilling, as their body language is often stiff and

Another type of manipulation that is evident in The People of India is the unsure. Whether their unease was due to an uncertainty about the technology or stopping-out or painting-out of the negative to make the background of the print the cameraman before them is impossible to tell. The staged nature of many of the blank. This process creates a clear space for the 'types' to be studied. This recalls photographs is best recognized in a pseudo-vignette, listed as subject number 60 the function of casting light behind the imprisoned subject in the Panopticon. A from volume 2, depicting a "Sunwar Family" in Nepal (Fig. 7). The rigidity of the kind of reverse silhouette is created with the blanked-out background, resulting in family's pose is contrasted with the blurred face of the baby, which could not obey the individualization of the subject in a situation where the seer is not seen. This the photographer's instructions to remain still during the exposure time. Roland blank background also recalls the stark white backgrounds of the early Company Barthes might see this blurry baby as the punctum of this photograph; it highlights paintings of Indian types. With photographs like subject 1 from volume 1 and the falsity of this entire arrangement. The rather suspicious stare of the figure to subject 152 from volume 3 of The People of India, abstraction is achieved through the far left also signals an awkward tension between the photographer and the decontextualizing (Fig. 5). But abstraction is equally achieved through the overt photographed. These directed vignettes are also a form of abstraction. They are and stereotypical contextualization of subjects in The People of India. It is a process representations of what the photographer wanted to present and not necessarily of making a 'reality', the abstract-real. Countless subjects oflower caste or social what was actually there. status are staged in front of foliage. Families appear to be posed in front of These abstractions also have a moralizing agenda. In the "Moormi distinctly tropical bushes and vegetation; a common tactic in the representation of Group" photograph, subject 76 of volume 2, we are presented with a scene of a the exotic other. On the other hand, subjects of this publication are also abstracted woman carrying fodder while a couple of men look on in a lethargic manner. Such by the juxtaposition of familiarizing props, such as British furniture and even a scene acts to validate the so-called 'civilizing' efforts of the British Empire. The classical architecture. Many subjects are posed next to classical architectural details, like a column or balustrade, and others are themselves posed in a classical manner. 20. This same table is used in several of the photographs of volume 2. Clearly it was a favourite prop of a particular photographer. 83 The People of India Sarah Stanners 84 need to help the supposedly subjugated female population of India was a frequent reflective of their own state - quarantined within a constructed world or category excuse of the colonizers that defended their presence by their 'improving' mission. unique to themselves. These observations are very keen, but Suleri fails to

Lady Charlotte Canning, wife of the Governor General of India and partner in consolidate her argument by neglecting to discuss the very woman behind The other mutual endeavors- such as The People ifindiaphotographs, as will be soon People if India- Lady Charlotte Canning. There are no less than 19 large bound discussed- was a professed advocate for women's education and had begun a volumes full of watercolour sketches, journal entries, letters, and photographs by study on the problems of widowed Indian women and those in plural marriages. 21 Charlotte Canning, all in the manner of the 'feminine picturesque'.26 This particular

Sara Suleri opens her chapter on "The Feminine Picturesque," from The aesthetic is most apparent in what was once called "the most civilized room in

Rhetoric if English India (1992), by noting that for women, "outside the confmes of India."27 Lady Canning's private sitting-room at Government House, Calcutta, domesticity, one of the few socially responsible positions available to them was the underwent 6 weeks of redecoration at her request, and even boasted punkahs, or role of female as amateur ethnographer."22 On the periphery of politics and any fans, that would have been operated by her servants. A very similar arrangement real social impact (much the same as Indian society at this time), women translated was made at Lady Canning's sitting-room at Government House, Barrackpore, their colonial anxieties into picturesque, aestheticized accounts of the India that which used no less than450 yards of rose-chintz. Just as Lady Canning abstracted surrounded them.23 Suleri goes on to make a fruitful connection between this her Indian surroundings to make an English 'reality' within these rooms, the

'feminine picturesque' and The People if India, pointing out that this publication subjects in The People if India are also abstracted to fit within constructed and

"randomly collapses social, religious, and regional divisions into a frxed grid of confining spaces known as race and caste - safely placed in the category of Other. colonial misapprehension."24 Suleri makes it clear that although The People of India As Suleri might have said about Lady Canning directly, if she had not neglected to carries a largely scientific character, it also exhibits the "sequestering capacity" of research in this area, she was "confmed in the calm of the picturesque"28 The the picturesque.25 Suleri's discussion serves to make analogies between Fanny women behind this feminine picturesque impulse that Suleri did take time to

Parks' pre-Mutiny /Rebellion journal, Harriet Tyler's memoir from after the discuss are explained to be functioning on the periphery of colonization, creating j'viutiny /Rebellion and The People of India to show that there was an impulse to still-lifes that paint a picturesque tranquility over their own anxieties. This may be aestheticize, contain and categorize what was different to the authors but in fact true of Lady Canning, but one of the people that she most regularly shared her

21. Charles Allen, A Glimpse of the Burning Plain: Leaves From the Indian .Journals of Charlotte Canning (London: Michael Joseph Ltd., 1986), 19 and 21. 25. Ibid., 82 and 104. 22. Suleri, 75. 26. This is a unique collection that is in a private royal collection at Harewood, England. 23. Ibid., 75. 27. Allen, 28. 24. Ibid., 82. 28. Suleri, 86. 85 The People of India Sarah Stanners 86 visualizations with was Queen Victoria herself. In this case, Lady Canning's Canning's mode of vision in writing is also abstracting in its description of India's periphery position was what informed her Majesty, and these representations of people through analogy and verbal paintings of their clothing and attributes. It is

India were made most often through visual modes. this sort of amateur ethnography and feminine picturesque that likely influenced

Not only a devout subject to the Queen, Lady Canning was appointed as the shaping of The People of India project. The description of "specimens" through the Queen's Lady of the Bedchamber as early as 1842 and kept in close company an inventory of their garb is a common tactic throughout the eight volumes of this with her Majesty ever since. Lady Canning was even obliged by the Queen's request publication. This approach is reminiscent of the carefully scaled three-dimensional to keep up a correspondence with her at least every 6 weeks whilst in India- models of Indian 'types' that were relatively contemporary with this publication. especially since Lord Canning was not keeping up his letters to the Queen.29 In The Royal Ontario Museum holds a collection of these native-made but European- one of Lady Canning's ftrst letters from India to Queen Victoria, she writes on bought South Asian 'dolls', which rely heavily on deftning each 'type' through the

February 24, 1856: clothes that it displays. Although one may be unsure about the inherent or

The women are most graceful in their long draperies in bold like emotional qualities of an unknown individual, one can, however, readily describe Greek statues & of brilliant heavy colours and narrow bright borders, green, red, orange, crimson being the usual colours. The clothing in an effort to obscure ignorant observations. little children naked & like bronze cling to their mothers & ride astride on their hips in a very peculiar manner. I am so very sorry When an investigation is made into the speciftc people behind the to be utterly unable to draw these picturesque ftgures. Photography is making good progress in India & I hope soon to conception and actual publication of The People of India, many passive abstractions send some specimens to your Majesty. How I wish that your Majesty could see the most interesting part of your dominions & are evident; abstractions that symbolically aided in colonial efforts to contain the I often think how much His Royal Highness would delight in the study of these races of people and their curious habits and in the actual people of India, and more so, their own notions of India itself- to keep that symptoms of improvement working in them.30 ominous cloud within sight. First, in response to the aforementioned letter to the In this letter, the people of India are spoken about as if they are artifacts: specimens Queen from Lady Canning, it is hard not to believe that Lady Canning had much to that might be examined as being part of the fauna of a dominion, or even case do with the conception of this project to visually survey the people of India. Lady studies of improvement.31 Many levels of abstraction are apparent in this one Canning was also a photographer, having taken "thousands of photographs" while letter. We must consider the fact that anyone writing to the Queen would have put in India:32 most of which are now apparently lost. 33 The preface to The People of their own writing through a process of self-editing in pursuit of propriety. Lady India mentions Lady Canning as being a part of the original conception:

29. Allen, 37. 30. Ibid., 21. 31. Lady Canning made studies of local plant life while in India, which can make for an eerie comparison with The People of India. See Allen, 35. 32. Allen, 42. 87 The People of India Sarah Stanners 88

During the administration of Lord Canning, from 1856 to 1863, believe implicidy ... I'm sure you could find out to a great extent the interest which had been created in Europe by the remarkable how this rea!jy isY development of the Photographic Art, communicated itself to India, and originated the desire to turn it to account in the Lady Canning peppers a great many of her own letters to the Queen with opening illustration of the topography, architecture, and ethnology of that country. There were none, perhaps, in whom this interest was lines like, "I wish your Majesty could see ... "38 Clearly there was a desire to make awakened more strongly than in Lord and Lady Canning.34 India more rea! through images. It is my feeling that unless she significandy contributed to this project, Lady In a speech delivered on January 22, 1862, in favour of appointing Canning would have surely not been mentioned at all. The preface goes on to Alexander Cunningham as the Archaeological Surveyor of India, Governor General state: "It was their wish to carry home with them, at the end of their sojourn in Lord Canning states: India, a collection, obtained by private means, a photographic illustration, which It will not be to our credit as an enlightened ruling power, if we might recall to their memory the peculiarities of Indian life."35 Since it has been continue to allow such fields of investigation [architectural ruins in India] to remain without more examination than they have well established by post-colonial scholars that the British had a desire to collect and hitherto received ... \Xlhat is aimed at is an accurate description­ illustrated by plans, measurements, drawings or photographs and bring home mementos of their Grand Tour, I would instead like to focus on the by copies of inscriptions - of such remains as most deserve notice, with the history of them so far as it may be traceable, and significance of Lady Canning's correspondence with Queen Victoria- the Empress a record of the traditions that are retained regarding them.39 of India who never set foot within the colony herself. The motivation to share This relates to a colonial sentiment that John Falconer made apparent in his article

India visually with the Queen is also tied up in many ways to a feverish increase in "A Passion for Documentation: Architecture and Ethnography," that was interest in India after the 185 7 Mutiny /Rebellion. The preface to The People of India published in India Through the Lens: Photograpf?y 1840-1911 (2001 ). Falconer noted even admits that after "The great convulsion of 1857-58" there was an increased how photography was used for the comprehensive accumulation of knowledge in interest in "the people who had been the actors in these remarkable events."36 The both the fields of architecture and ethnography.40 In relation to this analogy, if

Queen herself expresses a deep desire to see what was really happening in India in a Lord Canning was asserting the importance of an image index (or "photographic letter dated October 22, 1857 to Lady Canning: archive") oflndia's buildings, he may have felt the same way about the actual

\Xlhat I wish to know is whether there is any reliable evidence of eye people of India. This sort of inventory is clearly the direction that The People of India witnesses- of horrors, like people having to eat their children's flesh- & other unspeakable & dreadful atrocities ... Or do these not rest on Native intelligence & witnesses whom one cannot 37. Queen Victoria quoted in Allen, 81. The underlining is the Queen's own emphasis. 38. Lady Charlotte Canning quoted in Allen, 121. 33. It is hard not to wonder whether any of these "lost" photographs by Lady Canning made 39. Lord Canning (1862) quoted in "Photographic Collections of the Cambridge University it into The People of India volumes. Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 1860s-1930s," University of Cambridge, 34. Watson and Kaye, ed., preface. (November 22, 2003). 35. Ibid., preface. 40. John Falconer, "A Passion for Documentation: Architecture and Ethnography," in India 36. Watson and Kaye, ed., preface. Through the Lens: Photograpi!J 1840-1911 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian, 2001), 69-118. 89 The People of India Sarah Stanners 90 publication eventually took, even though it began as a "private" endeavour. The order out of the ruins ... such an India - and it is the India of to­ day - may we not fitly designate as 'India in a l\fess'?-12 preface to the volumes explains that after "the pacification of India had been Surely Lord Canning was advised, and felt himself compelled, to do as much as he accomplished ... " officers of the India Services were "encouraged" and could to present an ordered and understood India to the rest of the British Empire. "patronized" by the government, and by Governor General Canning's personal This may be a motive behind the shift of The People rifindia from a personal to a request, to take photographs of the people they encountered throughout their governmental endeavor. travel through India's many different areas.41 Thus the project went forward with Canning himself was also shifting at this time from the role of Governor official sanction and development, led by Mr. Clive Bayley, Lord Canning's "Home General to Viceroy, with India now strictly under the Crown after the Sepoy War. Secretary". This sudden shift in the original conception of The People rifindia, from Despite criticism from the media, the Canning remained in the Queen's favour, as a memento of the Canning's sojourn to a colonial project aimed at constructing an well as with other people, such as John William Kaye. Kaye was a politically active archive of "the Races and Tribes of Hindus tan" is itself an abstracting layer of The historiographer who wrote History rifthe Indian Muti'!)l (c.1896), which was dedicated People rifindia. The actual people oflndia are suddenly objects for study in a to the memory of Lord Canning. Kaye was also, as mentioned before, one of the politically volatile period that desperately wanted to decipher 'good native' from editors of The People rifindia, which was published between 1868 and 1875. It is said 'bad native'. This was especially timely when one turns to the contemporary that Kaye encouraged Canning to "curb the panic and minimize the apprehension response to Lord Canning in the media. Known as "Clemency Canning" - a among the English people."43 To look at The People rifindia in a role of propaganda reaction to his move to grant clemency to those natives that had not committed a material reveals another layer of abstraction. Kaye's impact on this publication is serious crime during the Mutiny /Rebellion - Canning, and the British Government better understood when considering the fact that Lady Canning died in 1861 and at large, was feeling pressured to at least appear as though everything were under Lord Canning in 1863. This historical and political voice on the Mutiny /Rebellion control. Negative media reports on India abounded throughout the empire at this would have had a great deal of control over the direction of The People rifindia, a time. The September 1858 article entitled "India in a Mess" described the state of project that was published after the death of those who conceived of it as a visual the colony as: record of their Indian experience, not a political tool, per se. It should be noted that an India in which European is eyeing native, and native is eyeing European, and both feel that the old relation is gone, and neither half of the 200 published sets of The People rif India were released to government know what the new relation is to be: an India in which the army, and almost every other institution, has abolished itself, and where there is no constructive power at hand to raise a new 42. W. D. Arnold, "India In A Mess," Fraser's Maga:::jne, 58 (1858): 731. 43. Nihar Nandan Singh, British Historiograpi!J on British Rule in India (The Life and Writings of Sir 41. Watson and Kaye, ed., preface. John William Kqye, 1814-1876) (New Delhi: Janaki Prakashan, 1986), 242. 91 The People of India Sarah Stanners 92 agencies. It is also interesting to take note of the ex libns label in the volumes that Revisionists on the topic of caste in Hindu India, such as Louis Dumont the University of Toronto owns; it indicates that the Ontario Legislative Library in 1966, explain that the classic Hindu theory of varna that informed the caste donated them to the University's Robarts liqrary in 1980. Sara Suleri sensed the system is actually founded on, as D.A. Washbrook reiterates: political motivations behind this colonial project as she points out that The People of a holistic, integrative and hierarchical vision of society. This vision of society is holistic because it incorporates all the India "demands to be read as an act of cultural negotiation through which the Raj different castes into membership of a single, whole community; it is integrative because it conceives them as mutually could symbolically demonstrate its intimate knowledge ... constructing thereby an interdependent rather than competitive•6 ethnographic manifesto of coloniallegitimacy."44 This post-Mutiny /Rebellion In 1992, Nicholas Dirks critiqued and expanded on revisionists like Dumont to political dimension of The People of India may be said to symbolically, or passively, discuss how the colonial abstraction of the traditional Hindu notion of caste was abstract the notion of India's people. They are abstracted into a comprehensive turned into something that is largely perceived as being void of any political nature and contained survey of the native peoples of India for use by the government and and intrinsically rooted in immutable traditions of Hi1.1duism, thus legitimizing the the everyday Brit who feared the unknown, or who might have even questioned the superimposition of British politics and measures of so-called civil improvement legitimacy of Britain's hand in India. onto Indian society.47 What Dirks asserts is that this view of Indian society as

The People of India may be considered a force in passively (or symbolically) being peripheral in terms of politics is false. This misrepresentation was based on abstracting the perception of India's native peoples in terms of caste constructions, the colonial view of caste as a product of religion only, while it was in fact linked most significantly, and in shaping the perceptions of race, religion and gender of largely to its precolonial politics in the relations between Holy men, royalty,

Indian people for easier consumption by the people of nineteenth century Britain. independent producers and the community in general. It might also be said that

I use the word consumption because there existed among many British people at colonialism, and especially its discourse, made a Frankenstein of the traditional this time, and Western Europeans for that matter, a hunger for evidence of the notion of varna (caste). This is evident in that the social fixity of the caste system is superiority of Caucasians.45 Consuming such 'facts' of racial superiority would essentially threatened by the modern capitalist state, but for a colonial India, the produce a sense of entitlement in Europe's colonial projects in the East, and in the caste system proved to be the perfect module in which to contain and control the

New World. population.48 As Dirks says, "Under colonial rule, caste -now disembodied from

its former political contexts -lived on. In this dissociated form it was

44. Suleri (1992), 104. 46. Washbrook, 145-146. 45. D.A. Washbrook, "Ethnicity and Racialism in Colonial Indian Society," in Racism and 47. Nicholas Dirks, "Castes of Mind," Representations, 37: (Winter 1992): 56-78. Colonialism, ed. R. Ross (fhe Hague: Martinus NijhoffPublishers, 1982), 157. 93 The People of India Sarah Stanners 94 appropriated, and reconstructed, by the British."49 The caste system was, for the threat to such organization. This characteristic is due in large part to the climate of

British, a new and convenient kind of colonial society in which the people of India anxiety that pervaded the British mind after the 1857 Rebellion/Mutiny. It was could be contained, controlled and ordered. At the same time, the caste system thought that such events could be avoided by gaining a greater 'knowledge' of the satisfied the colonizer's drive to keep Indian society static- in that free enterprise people of India. Regardless of the reasons why, the evaluation of subjects through and capitalism could not be pursued under this strict system- whilst the British a common denominator of caste is an abstracting force throughout the volumes of colonial society functioned from the center as the ever-improving operator of it all. The People of India.

In The People of India, caste is the main module of description- it forms Although The People of India was informed by these colonial the foundation of the grid in which its subjects are evaluated. It seems that caste reconstructions of caste, this publication in turn supported and validated such became a way for the British colonizer to articulate his or her understanding of constructions. As Bernard Cohn says, "The 'official' view of caste was very much

India's people and societal behaviour. As Dirks says, "caste became increasingly related to how the British collected information about the caste system."Sl It is the only relevant social site for the textualization of Indian identity."50 The almost as if the caste system made India more decipherable for its colonizers - descriptions of the majority of Hindu subjects in The People of India make use of a although the irony is that they were in fact obscuring it even more. The British constructed caste vocabulary (i.e. "low caste" and "moderate caste") that seem to colonizer saw India and its people in a very pluralistic manner. 52 It should be be aimed at colonial interests in social status within British India, especially in terms acknowledged that the British mind-set at this time was coming from a milieu that of post-Mutiny /Rebellion times. The People ofindids subject number 3 of volume 1, was very focused on the idea of 'a people' of a common culture. That a Nation

"Paharis or Pahariahs (Bhaugulpoor)," has an accompanying textual description, correlates with its people was a common belief. Discussing this attitude, D.A. which concludes by indicating that these type of people are usually employed as Washbrook observes: luggage bearers. Hardly an objective ethnographic study, the colonial bias is Corning to India with its array of minute symbolic distinctions and immense heterogeneity of languages, sects and customs, it is rampant throughout all the volumes of this project. There is evidence of a deep not difficult to conceive how British sociologists would see in these differences the origins or makings of many different interest in each 'type' of Indian person's usefulness to the British and their efforts "peoples". 53 in the colony. It is particularly obvious that military suitability is a priority in the description of most male subjects in The People of India, as well as their level of 50. Ibid., 66. 51. Bernard Cohn, An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), 154. 48. Ibid 66-67,71-72. 49. Ibd, oL 52. Washbrook, 156. 53. Washbrook, 157. 95 The People of India Sarah Stanners 96

This pluralistic English eye is especially evident in the nineteenth century accounts page," regarding subject number 8 in volume 1. It is actually possible to sense the of India that were written for a general British readership that was eager to visualize uncertainty of its various authors56 as we read The People ojindids descriptions even this otherland and its other people. In December of 1857, Blackwood's Edinburgh today. Therefore, as these volumes largely misrepresent the people of India, they,

Magazine published an article entitled "The Religions of India," which reads like a on the other hand, clearly represent the abstracting vision of its makers. typical Victorian piece of travel literature, describing various scenes that are Besides seeing a multiplicity of cultural groups or ethnicities, India was happened upon by very elaborate but exact directions. Revealingly, the author does also seen by its colonizers "through concepts of race stratification" which led to the not hesitate to make obvious his bewilderment with the heterogeneity before him, people of India being evaluated, as Washbrook put it so succinctly, "on the basis of as he writes, "God is fractured into a thousand minor deities, representative of his their supposedly inherent attributes."57 This is very much associated with the various attributes, - for every god there is an idol, and for every idol myriads of literary and even pictorial practice of describing the being of the Other through worshippers!"54 This pluralistic view of India is very much sensed in The People of physical evidence- such as costume, the shape of the head (phrenology), and skin

India volumes- Brahmin vs. non-Brahmin, aborigine vs. "supposed" aborigine or colour. The emergence of Social Darwinism and eugenics compounded this. non-aborigine. Even today, when looking through The People of India and its didactic Christopher Pinney's "Classification and Fantasy in the Photographic Construction letterpress, witnessing so many 'types' of people is disorienting, especially when of Caste and Tribe" and his Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photograpf?y make there seems to be no logic to the order of the subjects.55 In fact, nearly every significant arguments that show this fixation on physical attributes, as indices of secondary resource on The People of India publication makes note of its nonsensical one's character, to be evident in the practice of anthropometry.ss With the tool of compilation. The volumes themselves were clearly put together in haste, with photography, native subjects were captured against uniform grids, asked to hold certain subjects juxtaposed with statements such as, "The descriptive particulars measuring sticks or even held in place with metal clamps. Although no physical respecting the l'vfUSAHARS will be supplied on a separate slip for insertion on this instruments were used with the subjects in The People of India, the restraints are

clearly present in the insistent categorization and textualization of its subjects, as 54. "The Religions oflndia," Blackwood's Magai]ne, 82: 506 (December 1857): 744. 55. There is apparendy no system of order to the presentation of subjects in The People of well as the physical nature of the publication itself. India, but considering the original conception of this project (a visual account of the Canning's sojourn in India), I decided to compare the localities of the subjects in this project to a map of India that showed the travel routes of Lord and Lady Canning. The localities (London: l'vfichaelJoseph Ltd., 1986), inside covers. listed in the table of contents from volumes 1 through 6 seem to roughly correlate to the 56. Just as photographs were solicited from various photographers for this project, the locations found along the routes taken by the Cannings through India. These routes are textual descriptions were procurred from a variety of amateur and professional likely the same ones taken by most British Officers in India at this time. The map I referred ethnographers, even previously published texts were used. to is "Northern India, Viceroy's First and Second Camps & Lady Canning's Last Tour'' and 57. Washbrook, 156. "North-West India, Viceroy's Camp 1860 & Lady Canning's Himalayan Tour" in Charles 58. Christopher Pinney, "Classification and Fantasy in the Photographic Construction of Allen, A Glimpse of the Burning Plain: Leaves From the Indian Journals of Charlotte Canning Caste and Tribe" in Visual Anthropology, 3: nos. 2-3: 259-286, and Christopher Pinney, Camera 97 The People of India Sarah Stanners 98

As mentioned before, there is a disorienting effect in perusing this multi- Sayyid Ahmad Khan, when he encountered the early volumes of The People rif India volume colonial project. A sort of apologia, it seems, acknowledged this in the last whilst in London with his family in 1869. In response to meeting an Englishman sentence of the preface: "although the work.does not aspire to scientific eminence, who had obviously made himself familiar with The People rif India, Khan wonders, it is hoped that, in an ethnological point of view, it will not be without interest and "What can they think, after perusing this book and looking at its pictures, of the value."59 Although the layout and organization is perplexing and abstract, its power or the honour of the natives of India?"62 This observer clearly sensed the

Indian subjects are nevertheless kept within sight, neatly tucked away in eight abstracting abilities of The People '!{India. It is essentially a publication that sought handsome volumes, ready to be pulled from the shelf at home in England and the reality of India by actually making its own reality. This catered reality was flipped through over tea, for evening entertainment, or to be referred to in libraries presented through the photographs in The People rifindia and supported through the and offices.60 In any case, the subjects remain within grasp, both psychologically disciplining nature of this colonial project, the management or editing of its and physically. contents, the political motives behind its fruition, and the support it gave to

Bernard Cohn would classify The People '!{India as an example of the misapprehensions of caste, race and gender. Ironically, its own title reveals this re-

"Surveillance Modality" made manifest; in that it satisfied a desire to designate, and presentation of India's people, as the subtitle to The People rif India begins by make recognizable, the undesirable and threatening members of the population by indicating that it is A S eties rif Photographic Illustrations ... Any illustration is an creating "a systematic means of recording and classifying a set of permanent adaptation of something, never a true reflection. features that distinguish an individual."61 It is this process of wedging actual people into individual categories, recognized visibly and emphasized textually, that results in the production of a subject. A subject that is indexed numerically and ends up standing as a generic representative of a perceived segment of society. The ramifications of this process are most powerfully heard in the concern expressed by

Indica: The Socia! Uje of Indian Photographs (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997). 59. Watson and Kaye, ed., preface. 60. The English gentleman or gentlewomen could get to know one's East in comfort. This casual reception of the publication is eveident in the six volumes owned by tbe University of Toronto's Robarts library since only the ftrst two volumes appear to be worn from handeling, while the later volumes are found to be. in much better condition. This could be an indication of the waning interest that can occur in a casual reader from viewing page after page of "subjects". 62. Sayyid Ahmad khan quoted in C.A. Bayly, ed., The Raj: India and the British, 1600-194 7 61. Cohn, 11. (London: The National Portrait Gallery Publications, 1990), 280, cat. 346. 99 The People of India Sarah Stanners 100

'

Fig. 1: Pundit Ramnarain, Hindoo Priest Fig. 2: Rttnneea Jatnee, Girl ifJ at Tribe (detail), in The People if India (London: (detail), in The People if India (London: India Museum, 1868-75). India Museum, 1868-75). \'-'':,

Fig. 5: S onthal Aboriginal (detail), in The People if India (London: India Museum, 1868- 75).

Fig. 3: Babras, Merchant Class (detail), in Fig. 4: Langhans, Minstrels (detail), in The The People if India (London: India People if India (London: India Museum, Museum, 1868-75). 1868-75).

Fig. 6: Mirza Ali Mahomed, in The People ifIndia (London: India Museum, 1868-75). 101 The People of India

Fig. 7: Sunwar Famify, in The People if India (London: India Museum, 1868-75). John Cage and the Minimal: Silence, Chance and Materialism

Meg Campbell

hile the terms "minimal music" or "systemic music" are most often W associated with the work of composers such as Lamonte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass, among others, the name John Cage comes up in the role of a precedent or an inspiration for the work of these individuals. Cage's oeuvre is not easy to fit into the "Minimalist movement in music, as the same intentions, methods and results as seen in the compositions of those others mentioned above do not exist. In experiencing Cage's output from the

1950s and 1960s, however, and in reading in his own words about his intentions in creating his work, as well as taking into account the responses and critiques of his contemporaries, it is difficult to miss the many common threads linking his work with the art of the l'vfinimalist movement. Complicating this issue is the fact that there is a vagueness surrounding the term "l'vfinimalist" in almost every field. J\1Iost visual artists were uncomfortable being labelled as Minimalists by critics and the

"movement" did not exhibit the cohesiveness of those that came before and after it. The looseness of the term is often discussed, and art historian John Perrault describes the fluidity of the term:

l'vfinimal art becomes the l'vfinimal style, and the Minimal style relates to a larger tendency that might be termed the l'vfinimal sensibility ... Other examples in other media would be ... John 105 John Cage and the :Nfinimal Meg Campbell 106

Cage's elimination of traditional instruments, notation and translucency, steel for its strength, or the colour grey for its neutrality, as in the "composition" from music .... Cage's music becomes theatre.1 work of Donald Judd, for example. Even here it is evident that the haziness that prevented a definitive application of Very early in his career, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Cage tried his the term "Nfinimalist" to anyone's work was also to cross boundaries between the hand at painting, writing poetry and composing music, and even gave lectures to visual, musical and dramatic realms. This vagueness may actually allow some housewives on the subject of modern music and art in order to support himself freedom, then, in making comparisons between Cage's work and the visual art of during the Depression.4 The composer's tendency to shift from one field to the time. Describing Cage's compositions generally as "sound art" may assuage the another was shared by a number of the :Nfinimalists, notably Judd, who worked as a difficulty for some who were reluctant to label his compositions as music. Cage critic before beginning to make his own art in earnest. An ability to succeed in himself recognized the problem in defining his work/pieces: more than one endeavour perhaps also indicates a willingness to break through If this word 'music' is sacred and reserved for eighteenth and nineteenth century instruments, we can substitute a more boundaries and to disobey the guidelines traditionally set out in any of the arts. meaningful term: organization of sound.2 Cage has been named as a precedent to the l\finimalist movement in music; This approach allows Cage's use of sound as material to be allied with the work of however, one may find as many parallels between his work and that of the Minimal many :Nfinimalists. Sharing their ambition to remove outside references and context in visual art. Cage may be seen, then, not merely as a composer but also as an artist from the components they presented as elements of their artworks. who worked in the Minimal discourse using sound as a material, just as others used Cage had an ascetic view of sound, and he reduced its application from metal, wood or glass. His arrangement of sound by methods involving chance, and four properties to just one in his compositions: his oft-noted omission of intended sound, silence, also parallels the work of the Now, when you analyze the physical nature of sound, you fmd that is has three other characteristics besides pitch - it has Nfinimalists and related visual artists. timbre, loudness, and duration. The only one of these four characteristics that does relate to both sound and silence is, quite Because Cage had singled out duration of sound as the fundamental obviously, duration. And so I came to realize that any structure for percussion music - for a situation in which harmony does not element of his work, the gaps that he placed between sounds became as important exist - must be based on duration, or time. 3 as the overt "intended" elements of audible sound. Parallels have been drawn A parallel can be drawn between this reduction of a material to one element and between this attention to blank space and the use of the same element in the similar approach taken in some :Nfinimalist work: the use of plexiglass for its Nfinimalist visual work of the time:

1. John Perrault, "Minimal Abstracts," in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, Gregory Battcock ed., (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 262. 2. John Cage, Silence (Nliddletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 3. 3. Calvin Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors (New York: Penguin Books, 1968), 91. 4. Tomkins, 80. 107 John Cage and the Minimal Meg Campbell 108

[Cage] used it not simply as a gap in the continuity or a pause to absence of colour, to accomplish something similar to Cage's aim of imbuing a lend emphasis to sounds, but in much the same way that contemporary sculptors were using open space, or negative piece with artistic potential that becomes realized through the presence of the volume' - as an element of composition in itself.S viewer. Robert Rauschenberg, whose work proved to be a strong influence to the Cage saw silence not as a void, but rather as a space filled with potential. In his Minimalist movement, created white paintings in the early 1950s, and this similarity most famous piece, or perhaps the piece that became his most notable due to the to Cage's compositions has been noted by critic Toby Mussman: confused and even angry reactions it provoked, the performer would approach an "White, of course, is the one colour carrying in it the 'potential' instrument, usually a piano, sit down, and then wait. The length of the piece, the for all other colours, just as the use of no programmed sound by John Cage in his ten-minute piece of silent music carries in it the duration of the "silence" that it created, became its now famous title: 4 '3 3 ': The potential for any sound.7 first performance of this work took place in 1952: In 1950, painter Barnett Newman created his piece The Wild, which was peculiar

In the \'Voodstock hall, which was wide open to the woods at the for its dimensions of 243 x 4.1 em. The thin strip of reddish painted canvas back, attentive listeners could hear during the first movement the sound of wind in the trees; during the second, there was a provides an example of work that does not allow the eye to rest on it for an patter of raindrops on the roof; during the third, the audience took over and added its own perplexed mutterings to the other extended length of time; inevitably, the viewer examines what surrounds the piece, 'sounds not intended.'6 viewing the wall as much as a spectacle as the work itself. Fittingly, the idea of It is easy to see how the "silence" of the piece was not silence at all, but rather an silence was an element from the early conception of the piece, and the work is open-ended event which tuned the ears of the listeners to the ambient sounds of listed as End of Silence #1 in brochure for Newman's 1958 exhibition at Bennington their environment, and even, as described above, allowed the audience contribute College.8 to the performance themselves, even if they did not intend to do so. In this way, In highlighting the architecture of a gallery space, one can look to the 4 '3 3 "acts as a reverse frame, drawing attention to what is present externally by sculptures of Robert Morris, particularly those shown at the Green Gallery in 1964. virtue of its simplicity. Works such as Cloud (Fig. 1) and Corner Piece (Fig. 2) articulated the shape of the In the visual work of some Minimalists, a similar result is gained by the room by disrupting it. Because of their muted grey colour, the objects were not exhibition of pieces which, in themselves, do not give the viewer enough to look at visually jarring but rather imposed themselves on the space through their and so draw the eye to the surrounding space of the gallery walls or any other placement. Much as in Cage's 4'33'; the entire room became activated, as the number of elements in an exhibition's locale. Some have used colour, or likewise,

5. Tomkins, 87. 7. Toby Mussman, "Literalness and the Infinite," in l'vfinimal Art: A Critical Anthology, 6. Tomkins, 119. Gregory Battcock ed., (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 246. 109 John Cage and the Minimal Meg Campbell 110

"silences" were only the unintended or pre-existing elements of the environment, In 1953 and 1954, Cage collaborated with pianist David Tudor by

and were made significant by purposeful omission. composing pieces and sending them off without first hearing them performed. As

Some may see Cage's use of chance in his compositions as a practice that Calvin Tomkins states, by using this method,

separates him from the :Minimalists. While it is true that many pieces by :Minimalist in works which left some of the decisions up to the performer... it was possible to arrive at results that the composer could not artists were strictly planned and controlled in their execution, there were some foresee- music that would be truly indeterminate. 10

artists, such as Carl Andre, who included unplanned elements in their work. One The act of conception without realization was also practiced by some Minimalist

may argue that this release of control even accomplishes some of the goals of art in artists, Judd among them, who drew up plans for sculptures that would be

the l\1inimalist vein. The use of chance removes the artist from his or her creation·, constructed without his supervision. A clear parallel emerges between these two

by eliminating purposeful choices on his or her part, and leaving determination of practices. While ultimate control over the piece's final appearance would be

certain elements to fate, the work is not marked by the creator's personality. The approved by Judd, there was still a surrender of control as to the work's physical

human trace left by the artist's imperfect construction of geometric shapes is an expression. By taking this approach in his work, example of such a sign of personality. Artists who were interested in flawless, Cage's integration of real time and chance in his performances unsettled received notions of composition, just as Warhol's serial industrial manufacturing of their work hoped to achieve this goal of highlighting works produced by assistants undermined the modernist premise that the artwork is a handmade expression of a subjective self. 11 the absence of the artist's hand. Cage, too, sought to distance himself from his This idea of art planned by the artist but assembled or constructed by others compositions in a similar fashion: became increasingly accepted from the 1960s onward, reaching its peak in the work I myself use chance operations, some derived from the I-Ching, others from the observations of imperfections in the paper upon of the Conceptual art movement of the 1970s. Before that, however, Carl Andre which I happen to be writing ... Question: Is this athematic? Answer: ... It is not a question of having something to say.9 allowed some of his pieces to be assembled with little or no input on his part. With

The Minimalist aversion to communicating content or a specific message, other works such as 144 Magnesium Squares (Fig. 3), he was involved in selecting the than the very being or presence of the material, be it sound or steel or brick, is materials initially, but when they were to be exhibited elsewhere, the individual clearly present in Cage's practice. components were not marked with any sequential directions; this anaxial symmetry,

in which the overall format is specified but the internal arrangement is not, became

8. Ann Temkin, ed., Barnett Newman, (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art Publishing 10. Tomkins, 124. 2002), 188. ' 11. James Meyer, Minima/ism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, (New Haven: Yale University 9. Cage, 17. Press, 2001 ), 235. Meg Campbell 112 111 ] ohn Cage and the :Nfi.nimal a part of Andre's artistic approach. Some have suggested that Andre's work in allowed chance to determine the final state of the piece. Pouring the blocks out railway yards unloading and unloading boxcars, may have contributed to this view: onto the floor, a common staging ground for his work, Andre ceded his control

The elements, if not utterly identical, were at least interchangeable: over the objects and allowed gravity to be ultimately responsible for their

Because any part could replace any other part, the materials did placement. This use of indeterminacy is a common aim in the work of both Cage not lend themselves to relational structures. In refusing to determine the mutual relations of forms, he suppressed his and Andre; there are many ways to achieve this distancing from a reliance on desire to compose.12 constant decision-making. This connection has been noted before: It seems that both Andre and Cage were eager to distance themselves from Cage's attitude toward sound has much in common with the traditional methods of composition. It is impossible to draw the conclusion that aesthetic of later l\finimalism, in its insistence on the artwork as object rather than the bearer of the composer's or audience's their motivations were identical, but it is clear that in the resulting works, each emotionalneeds.14

artist's use of chance is a common thread that unites their art practice. This is attitude represents a general shift in the modes of art-making in the last half

There were also cases in which Cage used existing systems, sometimes of the twentieth century that can be particularly attributed to the influence of

:Nfinimalism. While Cage may have not wished to rid his work of all feeling and mathematical, to act as a further screen between himself and a finished work. emotion, he most certainly did not want to brand it with his own. In this approach, Cage's Music of Changes (1952) was based on the structure and system of the I- too, his tendency towards an open-ended way of working is evident. Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes. In creating this work Cage used chance in

conjunction with the divining symbols found within the text, using a predetermined Another similarity between Cage's work and :Nfinimal visual art is a focus

set of sounds that were arranged according to the symbolic system of 1-Ching. on the significance of the materials being used. The presentation of paint-as-paint, wood-as-wood was meant to allow the viewer to concentrate on the particular Here there is an admixture of both uncertainty and control:

One may conclude ... that in the Music of Changes the effect of the qualities of the material, the "wood-ness" of the wood. This, of course, goes hand chance operation on the structure (making very apparent its in hand with the extensive editing done in order to avoid the projection of any anachronistic character) was balanced by a control of the materials.1 3 particular "meaning" in the work, in order to remove it from any external context In Carl Andre's Spill (Scatter Piece) of 1966 (Fig. 4), one can see a similar operation. or associations. Both in listening to Cage's pieces and hearing his intentions in his Andre chose the materials, 850 white plastic blocks, but through his process, he own words, one discovers that for him, sound was a material that could stand on its

own; it did not need to be fit into the limiting framework of traditional bar music 12. David Bourdon, "The Razed Sites of Carl Andre," from Artfomm, Oct. 1966, in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, Gregory Battcock ed., (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 104. 13. Cage, 26. 113 John Cage and the l\1inimal Meg Campbell 114 composition. In his book Silence, Cage has a conversation with himself in which he "everyday sounds" that Cage utilized in performances were similarly un-musical in expresses his conclusions on the topic of "purpose" of his art: "Question: What is any other context. This transfom1ation allowed Cage, Judd and other JVlinimalists the purpose of this 'Experimental' music? Answer: No purposes. Sounds."15 His to step past previously held ideas about the materials used in art-making. free modes of composition allowed Cage to make this claim that he did not have a Apart from the similarities in terms of intentions behind and materials pre-determined program for his work. Sound, then, becomes a material that can be used in the work of both Cage and the l\linimalist artists, there were many parallels presented as its own end. It is by its placement in the work of a composer that in the responses to their art. Besides revealing the kinship between Cage's sound is elevated to the status of an element of a work of art: compositions and Minimalist artworks, this also provides a glimpse into the

A single sound by itself is neither musical nor not musical. .. tumultuous results of breaking established boundaries in the world of att. Cage's It is simply a sound. And no matter what kind of a sound it is, it can become musical by taking its place in a piece of music. 16 pieces have been called "not music" and the lVIinimalists works "not art-enough";

One can look to Carl Andre's bricks or Dan Flavin's fluorescent tubes as examples this disagreement about what exacdy qualifies works to fit into the categories of art of a similar sensibility in the visual arts. The commonplace object does not become and music seems to centre on the perception that the works show too much

"activated" until the artist decides to make use of it in a piece. Donald Judd's work simplicity or too litde labour and effort. Although Cage and the visual lVfinimalists has often been discussed in this same vein. The kind of materials he used in his gamered much attention from critics, this attention was not always positive, and

"objects" of the 1960s were decidedly un-artistic on their own, as some noted: their work was mocked by the public or seen as a complete effrontery to

'judd's copper and steel were nothing before they were sculpture."17 As Francis established standards of quality and legitimacy. The straightforward presentation of

Colpitt states, they were also selected for their lack of association or meaning: bricks in Andre's Lever(1966) or the silence of 4'33"provoked in the audience a

'judd uses industrial materials ... prima~y for their surface qualities and their feeling of indignation at being subjected to these works of "art," pieces that they planarity. If they mean anything, it is function or utility: their reason for being."18 suspected they could have easily created themselves. There was not enough to look

It is only once they have been manipulated as Judd intends them to be that the at, not enough to listen to; in this absence, the viewer or listener was left to their materials gain any notable artistic qualities. The unusual instruments and so-called own thought, forced to consider as much what was not being shown or performed

as what was in fact presented. The over-stepped bounds in Cage's compositions 14. Edward Strickland, Minima/ism: Origins (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 162. and the pieces of the l\1inimalists provoked as much, if not more, contemplation 15. Cage, 17. 16. Tomkins, 87. through their omission of traditional elements as they could have by including 17. Frances Colpitt, Minimal Art: The Critical Perspective (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1990), 11. 18. Colpitt, 10. 115 John Cage and the :Minimal Meg Campbell 116 them, and the influence of this strategy has echoed through much of what has since developed in the worlds of art and music.

Fig 1: Robert l\Iorris, Untitled (Cloud), 1963

Fig. 2: Donald Judd, One-person show, Green Gallery, New York, 1964. 117 John Cage and the i'vfinimal

Fig. 3: Carl Andre, 144 Magnesium Square, 1969. London, Tate Gallery.

Fig. 4: Carl Andre, Spill (Scatter Piece), 1966. Andy Warhol: The Flaneur of Postwar America A Discussion ofSilver Liz as Cleopatra, displayed at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Maranatha Coulas

or many centuries, artists, critics and others have tried to find ways to Feffectively document and describe the period in which they lived and worked. Modern German theorist Walter Benjamin, for example, studied the character of the city of Paris during his time with a particular interest in the

Parisian arcades. Benjamin linked the arcades to poet Charles Baudelaire's figure of the flaneur, described by Baudelaire in Les Fleurs du Mal and Spleen de Paris. 1 The flaneur was an observer of the Parisian metropolis and its crowds, and was adopted by Benjamin as a tool to describe the city of Paris as well as his 'myth' of the metropolis.

Like Benjamin's flaneur, Andy Warhol's artworks, such as the 1963 Silver

Uz as Cleopatra, (Fig. 1) speak about the ideas in art and the America of the post-

World War II and Pop Art period. Just as, for Benjamin, the flaneur setved as a representative of Paris during the early twentieth century, so, too, do Andy

Warhol'~ artworks stand today as descriptors of the time and place in which they were created. An examination of the contextual, iconographic, and stylistic aspects of Silver Uz as Cleopatra will reveal Andy Warhol's role as the flaneur of postwar

America. 121 Andy Warhol Marantha Coulas 122

In the 1960s, the content of Warhol's work was strikingly contemporary. coordinates of the contemporary world .. .in exchange for a primordial realm.6 The subjects of his paintings encompassed everything from the hot personalities Pop art refuted abstraction's exclusive claim to "moral purity" by expanding art and events of the daily news to products available at the local store.2 The A.merican into the domain of kitsch, thus countering the elitist and purist works to which, economy in the postwar period had been revolutionized by mass production and they felt, only a small sector of society could relate.? By using the new commodity mass consumption, reaffmning the country's status as the world's leading industrial aesthetic, Pop artists created a fresh meaning for art and its subject matter and capitalist civilization.3 This consumer economy inevitably transformed images and altered the relationship between art and its audience.s Thus, Pop artists created a objects as well as their social significance. A new aesthetic that represented vernacular American art during the period following the Second World War. merchandise and all aspects of the buying and selling of goods and services, Another element of 1960s culture which accompanied the new including product design, packaging and advertisement, became a significant commodity aesthetic was a widespread preoccupation with the field of presence at this time.4 Public experience of the visual realm was saturated with the communication, or mass media. According to ]\;fichael Compton, the "information iconography of mass consumption which, according to art historian Benjamin industry" was a topic that was in vogue and was a focus of sociological study at the Buchloh, was "recognizable as the common denominator of collective perceptual same time that Pop Art originated.9 Images of products, scenes, and celebrities experience."5 This new aesthetic was undeniably American and coincided precisely seen repeatedly in magazines, newspapers and on television are characteristic of the with the genus of Pop Art imagery utilized by Andy Warhol. It can also be seen in iconography of Andy Warhol. Warhol was innovative in that he used bold, the work of other contemporary artists such as Roy Liechtenstein, Claes astonishingly simple images gleaned from television programs or from the pages of Oldenburg, Tom \'Vesselmann,James Rosenquist, and other members of the Pop magazines and newspapers.10 This use of "ready-made" imagery can be seen as Art movement. In describing the Pop Artists' motivations, Robert Rosenblum looking to the work of Dada artist Marcel Duchamp, who used the term states that Warhol and his contemporaries were engaged in an "readymade" to describe mass-produced objects that he had been elevated to high effort to re-Americanize American art after a period of Abstract art status, such as his f

Warhol, is also evidence of his interest in including subjects that had been voyeuristic curiosity in her audiences. In this way Taylor had become a secular previously absent or forbidden from the canvas as they were thought to debase the "divinity" as well as a "product" for consumption by the masses.J7 Thus, Warhol inherent high-art status of the medium of painting.12 Just as Duchamp used mass- used a great American star to create what Rosenblum describes as a "post-Christian produced objects in his artworks, Warhol's Silver Liz as Cleopatra (1963) consists of saint," a new American representation of the fanatical obsession with mass a photograph of Elizabeth Taylor in character as Cleopatra displayed in a repeated consumption and media in the twentieth century, as he had done previously with format. Kynaston McShine states that, in this choice of subject matter, ''Warhol Marilyn Monroe in 1962 (Figs. 2 and 3). 18 The image of Elizabeth Taylor, along drew on mass media as a catalyst for dreams of glory and glamour."13 Warhol had with the images of the many other stars that Warhol depicted, also represents the a particular personal interest in the public personae of American celebrities. He "tragicomical conditions of [the stars1 existence in glamour... [and] the lasting had been captivated by the phenomenon of stardom ever since he was a child and fascination" on the part of those who consume the stars' images.19 In this way, believed that famous people were fit to be role models for the American public.1 4 Warhol's iconography displays the idiom of the voyeuristic culture of spectacle and

This personal affinity to the spectacle of celebrity and this fascination with the consumption characteristic ofPost-WWII American culture, a pictorial language most admired figures can be seen as Warhol's inspiration for depicting Elizabeth that is pervasive in Warhol's oeuvre.

Taylor, who was renowned at the time as the "love goddess of the screen."15 Just as Warhol's iconography speaks about the context of his works, his

Warhol depicted Liz during the year of her spectacular portrayal of Cleopatra, in style and technique also reveal the contextual underpinnings of 1960s America. In which role she was, according to McShine, not only "Queen of the Nile, but also his paintings, Warhol employed the photographic techniques and conventions that

Queen of Hollywood due to a highly publicized romance, both on and off screen, defined the social practices of the viewing of popular imagery.20 In 1962, Warhol with Richard Burton."16 Taylor's career was propelled by the events of her private took up the commercial silkscreen technique that he used one year later in the Silver life, in particular her affairs and marriages, which constantly placed her in the media Liz as Cleopatra. Warhol chose this method because it is almost a completely spotlight. From Warhol's perspective, she was an exquisite representation of the mechanical process in which the machine even determines the colour of the paint

that would appear in the finished work. To Warhol, this method was appropriate 11. David Hopkins, After ModemAtt: 1945-2000 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press), 37 and 41. 12. Compton, 37. 13. McShine, "Introduction," 17. 17 Ibid., 18. 14. Ibid., 17. 18 Rosenblum, 36. 15. Ibid., 18. 19 Buchloh, 53. 16. Ibid., 18. 20 Ibid., 53. 125 Andy Warhol Marantha Coulas 126 to and representative of the increasingly mechanized culture of postwar America.zt because I want to be a machine."27 This mechanization of the painting process and

Warhol stated in an interview in the mid-sixties that "hand painting would take use of ready-made imagery "drew on the tradition ranging from key figures of New much too long and anyway that's not the age we live in. Mechanical means are York Dada, to the work of [Robert] Rauschenberg and [Jasper] Johns in the early to today." 22 In addition, Warhol believed that the artist was not the sole being able to mid-fifties."28 Warhol's images have the distinct weathered appearance of create art but that it could be made by anyone, and that art-making could be a mechanized print, which in the case of the Silver Liz as Cleopatra refers to popular shared endeavor with multiple participants, akin to commercial mass production.23 representations of Elizabeth Taylor in magazines, newspaper and television.29

In traditional media production, the processing and printing of an image causes a \Varhol's technique also consisted of a multiplication or repetition of reduction in the clarity of the image. Similarly, after Warhol repeatedly processed identical images. He used this repetition to comment on the way American society his image for the screen, increasing amounts of detail would vanish and the image was focused on consumption, tragedy, and the saturation of celebrities' images and would begin to look worn.24 Warhol also intentionally and haphazardly rolled the stories within the mass media. The repeated images of Elizabeth Taylor present paint through the screen, resulting in a variable spreading of the paint, which the viewer with a fixated reenactment of pictures, scenes and events seen repeated allowed for chance effects and alluded to the imperfections of the machine.25 This perpetually in the media. According to McShine, during the sixties this practice can be related to sound artist John Cage's idea of chance operations. Cage multiplication of images in the visual realm had become a characteristic part of the had an interest in the value of spontaneous occurrences, which he would American consciousness.3° In the case of the Silver Lit Warhol's repeated intentionally include in his musical compositions and performances, such as photographs appear in a sequentially structured, grid-like composition. According

Indeterminacy (1959). In using the silkscreen technique, the artist's efforts result in to Buchloh, "such seriality had become the major structural formation of object- the image having a mechanized rather than a unique character. In this way, the perception in the twentieth century."31 This composition omits the concept of participation of the artist actually serves to depersonalize the artwork.26 In pictorial space and instead emphasizes the unending symbolic nature of the explaining his motives for employing this technique, Warhol stated in remarks in image.32 Thus, the composition of the Silver Liz refers to the actual character of the catalogue of a Swedish exhibition that "the reason I'm painting this way is commodity, to object status, to product display, and, more specifically, to the

27. Andy Warhol: remarks printed in the catalogue of his exhibition in Stockholm 1968· 21. 40. Buchloh, quoted in Compton, 163. ' ' 22. Warhol.· Conversations About the Artist Patrick Smith, (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 28. Buchloh, 48. 1988), 118; 40. quoted in Buchloh, 29. Compton, 104. 23. Marco Livingstone, Pop Art A Continuing Histog (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990), 78. 30. McShine, "Introduction," 18. 24. 104. Compton, 31. Buchloh, 43. 25. Buchloh, 50. 32. Heiner Bastian, "Rituals of Unfulfillable Individuality: The Whereabouts of Emotions," 26. Ibid., 50. 127 Andy Warhol Marantha Coulas 128 commodification of fame and personality. The end result is described by Buchloh there is no repetition really, that everything we look at is worthy of our attention. as a "soliciting of the viewer's active participation as an act of consumption."33 That's been a major direction for the twentieth century, it seems to me."37

Another aspect of Warhol's technique that relates to context is the Warhol understood the desire to consume and the power of the mass placement of the grid-like composition of the Silver Liz as Cleopatra on a media to form the way objects, people, and events are perceived in the context of monochrome silver background. The color scheme stems from the modernist American culture. In an age marked by mass production, consumerism, and a tradition of monochrome painting. Thus, Warhol's ideas can be related to some of voyeuristic interest in the life of the movie star, Warhol elevated the everyday image the most significant issues emerging from the New York School of painting during not only to an iconic status but also to the level of "high art." Warhol's artworks this period.34 Jackson Pollock, for example, used industrial aluminum paint in featured not only Elizabeth Taylor but also included a large range of postwar works such as Lavender Mist (1950) and White Light (1954). The industrial origin of American history and imagery. Rosenblum describes Warhol's oeuvre as an this material alludes to the machine age, and the reflection of light on the material "abbreviated visual anthology of the most conspicuous headlines, personalities, surface underscores its mechanical nature.35 In \Varhol's Silver Liz, the use of the mythic creatures, edibles, tragedies, artworks and ecological problems of the 38 silver industrial paint draws on the same ideas while at the same time making an time." In one of his interviews, Warhol asserted that allusion to the 'silver screen.' In this way, Warhol's style and technique turned Pop art is for everyone. I don't think it should be for the select few, I think it should be for the mass of American people and mechanization's perceived threat to the tradition of art-making into an aesthetic they usually accept art anyway.39 representation of postwar American culture.36 Thus, Warhol's Silver Liz as Cleopatra speaks about the ideas in art and the historical

By the using the imagery and techniques of mechanization, consumerism, surroundings of American culture during the post-World War II and Pop art and popular culture in the Szlver Liz as Cleopatra, Warhol inspired American period. Warhol's works are observations of daily life and they embody the audiences to think about the aesthetics of the images that they saw on a daily basis. consciousness of the time in which the artist lived. It is evident, therefore, that

Warhol's work familiarized Americans with the concept of everyday life itself as art Warhol was the jlaneur of postwar America. and presented a different perspective from which to think about these images.

Sound artist John Cage stated that "Andy has fought by repetition to show us that

37. McShine, "Introduction", 13. Retrospective Am!y Warhol (London: Tate Publishing, 2001), 27. 38. Rosenblum, 27. 33. Buchloh, 45. 39. Gretchen Berg, "Nothing to Lose: Interview with Andy Warhol," in Cahiers du Cinema in 34. Ibid., 46. English 10 (May 1967) 38-43; quoted in Buchloh, 40. 35. Ibid., 46. 36. Hopkins, 115. 129 Andy Warhol Marantha Coulas 130

Fig. 1: Andy Warhol, Silver Uz as Cleopatra, 1962. Mailbu, Dagny Janss.

Fig. 3: Andy Warhol, Golden Mari!Jn, 1962. New York, Museum of Modern Art.

Fig. 2: Andy Warhol, Mari!Jn Diprych, 1962. London, Tate Gallery. Wavelength- Michael Snow

Irmgard Emmelhainz

or J\!lichael Snow, ftlm is 'mind,' his ftlm Wavelength (Fig. 1) attempts to be so, F md In n•dtl tn nnd=t,nd b,tttl th' ll""

empirical versus the phenomenological, from which I conclude that Wavelength fails

to become 'mind.' The ft1m embodies many of the ideas that were circulating in the

intellectual world in New York when it was made, constituting a reformulation of

artistic practices and a challenge to the Greenbergian modernist paradigm. It can be

read from distinct perspectives-some critics have focused on its structuralist or

structuralist/ materialist conception,! its formal and narrative solutions, its

embodiment of consciousness experiences, language structures and perception

processes, self-referentiality and construction processes and the way it deals with

time and space relationships. Wavelength also displays a close link to lVlinimalism and

painting, making Snow's work rather difficult to frame and classify. It addresses a

vast range of preoccupations, as well as being an experiment with distinct media:

photography, painting, music, sculpture and ftlm. His oeuvre constitutes a constant

researchwithin each medium's possibilities. The debate between Annette

i\iichelson and Peter Gidal on Wavelength/ and the wide array of criticism written

1. The term "Structuralist" was coined by P. Adams Sitney in order to address experimental film in the United States in the sixties, and the term "Structuralist/Materialist" was conceived by Peter Gidal in order to talk about avant-garde f:tlm in England. 2. InArt'fommNos. 10 and 11 (June and September 1971). 133 Wavelength Irmgard Emmelhainz 134 on Snow from the art and fllm historical and the art and fUm criticism and theory question of his fllm's relationship to experiences of consciousness and perspectives, led me to explore the fllm from an interdisciplinary point of view. In epistemological processes, into which I intend to delve more deeply. Wavelength has this essay, I intend to study closely Snow's ideas and the theoretical issues he was been described as a 'minimalist fllm.'3 In this section of the essay I will compare exposed to while he was working on the fllm in an attempt to place it within its Snow's preoccupations in terms of perceptual issues with rninimalism, and further I intellectual context. Because I will be looking at Snow's writings, statements and will read the fllm from the spectator's point of view, positing it as a interviews, as well as at theories that were circulating at the time, the readings I phenomenological experience, as a metaphor for epistemological and propose will be necessarily opposed to one another. In the opposition mentioned consciousness processes framed by Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology. The reason I above, constituted by the empirical addresses how Snow explores the fllm as chose Merleau-Ponty to frame and contextualize Wavelength is because his medium within its technical and narrative possibilities and its formal aspects, and phenomenology was exceptionally important to several key artists who were the phenomenological its emulation of consciousness and epistemological working in the 60's. But as we will see, a problem is evident when we use Merleau­ processes. The empirical dimension can be deftned by three elements: the zoom, Ponty to frame the phenomenological experience that Wavelength offers. Thus, the sound and the human events, which together comprise the phenomenological another strand of phenomenology can serve to understand this experience better, experience of the fllm. A third element beyond the initial opposition of as this analysis led me to conclude that the perceptual experience bestowed by the empiricism/ phenomenology, is the ftlm's self-referentiality and its relationship to fllm is closer to Husserl's phenomenology. language and thought processes, and the Wittgensteinian problematic it puts Lastly, I contend that the f1lm embodies an experience that emulates the forward which undermines the 60's Greenbergian Modernist paradigm. way in which our language is constructed. I will come to this conclusion after

I will analyze Wavelength in terms of its relationship to the tenets of elucidating whether the way Wavelength is composed constitutes a Greenbergian structuralist film, which is a movement in the sixties in New York with which Snow attempt to achieve purity within fllm as medium, or if its structure relates to the is commonly associated. Then, I will attempt to put forward the fllm's narrative and attempt to constitute a metaphor for thought through fllm's language associated to formal aspects, and explore the way in which Snow experimented with the Wittgenstein's latter ideas on language, which were important to Snow as he was medium's possibilities, constituting a constant exchange of references between making the fUm. But I shall conclude that the fllm fails to do so, in that reality and illusion, related to the role of time and space relationships in Wavelength. epistemological processes are subjective, and in that the medium's nature impedes

A common interpretation of Snow's work, derived from the artist's statements, has to deal with his preoccupations about perception and visuality, the 3. Comwell1980 35, Irmgard Emmelhainz 136 135 Wavelength Film and art critics have addressed the issue of the relationship between such processes from taking place. Based on an historical argument on the author's the formal and narrative aspects of Wavelength as a means of emphasizing time­ ideas, and looking at forgotten issues that lie at the core of his work, particularity space relations. Art critic Annette Michelson in "Toward Snow" pointed out that the relevance of phenomenology and Wittgenstein's philosophy, I will also claim the emptying out of the space redefines the filmic space as that of action and at the that Wavelength fails to convey a phenomenological and linguistic experience due to same time introduces a narrative tension.6 Film critic Peter Gidal disputes her the nature of ftlm itself. claim, as for him, filmic space has always been defmed in terms of action and he 1. Empirical Questions states that nothing increases expectation more than Warhol's stare, which was an l'vfichael Snow's ftlms have been associated with the Structuralist important basis for Snow's explorations.7 Both critics set out questions of medium movement in film, together with Tony Conrad, George Landow, Joyce Wieland, specificity in Wavelength viewed from different perspectives, inscribing the film into Ernie Gehr and Paul Shartis. Sitney defines structural ftlm as one which: and pointing out its relevance in both the art historical tradition and the history of Insists on its shape and what content it has is minimal and subsidiary to the outline ... The three characteristics of the film. The debate between Michelson and Gidal is an example of the discussion structural fUm for Sitney are: a fixed camera composition, (fixed frame from the viewer's perspective), the flicker effect, and loop onfthe late sixties and early seventies which sought to define experimental ftlm or printing -very seldom will one find all three in a single film ... 4 video art, particularly from an art historical or a film critical perspective. One of the traits of Wavelength that aligns it with the Structuralist Besides the formal and structuralist traits of the ftlm, one fmds narrative movement 1s the shape that describes its conical zoom, constructed by the aspects which can be understood as Snow's intent to give the viewer an awareness movement from one side of the room to other until its culmination, the of time, posited by the four human events, which bring us back to the nature of photograph of the sea waves, flattening the visual field as it progresses. In critic film as a narrative medium, as well as evoking the viewer's awareness within a given Peter Morris' view, "the trace of the shape follows -conical- functions almost as a [and ofJ temporality. Together with these interruptions in the film, there are sculptural equivalent of time and reinforces the total integration of space and technical ones: "cuts, halts in progression, shifts in the speed of the advance, time ... "5 The ftlm's construction causes the perspectival relations to be inverted: changes of .times of day and night, mutating image textures, mercurial colors and our view of the room starts on the corner and it flattens out progressively: depth is light intensity, and, later in the film, superimpositions that include both flashbacks slowly extracted from our vision, and the film is structured as if coming towards a

flat surface.

Works: Mi~hael Snow 1961-67 (Kingston: Agnes Etherington Art Centre, 1983), 8. 4. Sitney, P. Adam$, "Structural Film," Film Culture No. 47 (Summer 1969), 1. 6. P~ter Michelson, The Ae~thetics of Pornograpf?y (New York: Herder and Herder, 1971 ), 30-3 7. 5. Peter Morris, "Snow Place for a Lady: The early filins of Michael Snow," Walking Woman 7. Gtdal1971, 8-10 (See Michelson's response to Gidal in the same issue). 137 Wavelength Irmgard Emmelhainz 138

8 and flash-forwards." Peter Gidal points out the relevance of the ftlm being one fthn, as in my view, they constitute a further exploration within the possibilities of single shot; despite the "interruptions," it is the zoom that gives the ftlm its unity, film. involving formal and abstract language, constructed by color gels, flashes, negative The sound in Wavelength has an ambiguous role: on the one hand, it alterations and superimpositions.9 The role of sound in Wavelength is also central alludes our sound perceptions in real life when we are hearing the street sounds and because it corresponds to the changes that take place on the screen; it brings us people's voices, but on the other, the sound that comes from the sine wave can be back· and forth between the narrative of the human events and the progress of the seen as an element that dislocates us from 'reality' into the realm of filmic illusion. zoom. Film critic Philip Monk points out the role the human appearances and their In the third human event, filmmaker Hollis Frampton enters the room and relation to the sound. For him, the human events are meant to "deconstruct collapses onto the floor -he's "dead"; this incidence reminds us of the time passing elements that make ft!m, in particular, image-sound relationships."10 On the first by. The zoom goes non-intenupted past the body; and we are reminded of it later part of the film we hear a sine wave in sync sound. When the first human when a woman comes in and makes a phone call about the dead man lying on the appearance occurs, one of the women who comes into the room opens the window floor. If we analyze the formal elements of the ft!m, a constant play between and we hear street sounds; the window will be shut later and the sine wave returns; illusion and reality is apparent, in that the human events, the sound, the room and later on, a woman will play the Beades' "Strawberry Fields Forever" (Monk relates the zoom are constandy interacting with each other, making us question the limits the song's lyrics to the red-pink tones that we see produced by the filters). So far, between our real perception (the scanning of the room which is objectified and the sound has been a glissando, after that and until the end of the fum, it will be a mechanizrd by the zoom) and the interruptions of that perception (human events, crescendo. 11 In this empirical study of Wavelength, the main constituents of the ftlm are sounds, the play with the filters, textures and focus), whose role is to make us the zoom, the human events and the sound. I will argue against Monk's view on the aware of narrative time. human events' role as constituting a deconstruction of the formal elements of the This last outcome, the awareness of narrative time, can be seen as a

refe~ence to film itself and its potential as medium, which was one of the traits of

film that the Structuralists were trying to exhaust as far as they could: to explore 8. Bart Testa, "An Axiomatic Cinema: Michael Snow's Films," Presence and Absence: The Films ojAfichae! Snow (1956-1991) Edited by Jim Shedden (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 36. and expose the possibilities of ftlm itself. The role of the zoom posits a paradox; on 9. Gidal 1971, 8-10. 10. Philip Monk, "Around Wavelength," The Michael Snow Project, Visual Art 1951-1952 the one hand, it objectifies the viewer's vision through the camera as a mechanical (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario and the Power Plant, 1994), 325. 11. Crescendo: A musical direction indicating that the tone is to be gradually increased in force device and makes the viewer aware of what he or she iJ not seeing. On the other, it or loudness; Glissando: A slurring or sliding effect produced by a musical instrument. Source: Oxford Dictionary Online; date of revision: 04/17 /02; URI,: http://dictionacy.oed.com/entrance.dd 139 Wavelength Irmgard Emmelhainz 140 constitutes the eye through which we perceive the loft, becoming the tool for the fact in itself in the world."13 We can read this statement as an attempt of Snow's emulation of the viewer's consciousness, and thus, a metaphor for consciousness. work in general to present itself as a cinematic experience in the phenomenological

2. Phenomenological Aspects sense. Moreover, Husserl's phenomenology will also prove useful in addressing the

The camera and its products involve as many eccentricities in issue of tempoqlity in the perceptual/ epistemological process experienced in relation to "truthful" representation (What?) and the way we and our eye/brain see.12 Wavelength.

Snow's statement shows clearly the paradox that his work poses in terms of his l\Ierleau-Ponty's philosophy was well known in the United States at the preoccupations with perception, consciousness and epistemological processes. time Wavelength was made in 1967-1968. In their writings and statements, the

These terms are often used when critics write about his work as well as being :tvfinimalist artists were referring to Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception as a recurrent themes he elucidated in his writings and interviews. In an attempt to source/ explanation for what they were doing. Though Snow does not specifically investigate the problematic of the viewer's experience in Wavelength, and in speak about their influence, nor of being interested in the Phenomenology, some traits relationship to Snow's intent to present the viewer with a perceptual experience in of his work relate to the Minimalist aesthetic as well as to Merleau-Ponty's earlier the f1lm, I refer to two strands of phenomenology which may help us to better ideas on visual perception. understand what the experience of the fJlm is like in terms of perception. On the One of Snow's installations, Blind (1967), clearly depicts his interest in one hand, I chose Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology rif Perception, which will serve to experimenting with perception in the Merleau-Pontian sense. The work consists of elucidate the spatial and physical experience of Wavelength; even though Snow does four grids that stand parallel to each other, creating corridors between themselves. not mention him in his writings or interviews, Snow is commonly associated with The viewer can walk between the meshes, being included in the work, where his or minimalism, and Merleau-Ponty's ideas served as the basis for many minimalist her perception varies depending on where he or she is standing. This work can be investigations. On the other hand, Wavelength may be posited as a presentation in the related to the work of Minimal artists such as Robert Morris and Richard Serra, in

Husserlian sense, in that the viewer intuits the fJlm that is presented before him: the sense that they are concerned with issues of the spectator's perception of the where an act of recognition takes place and an intention is fulfilled. Snow has work. More specifically, a parallel can be drawn to Morris' L Beams or one of his stated: "I'm trying to point out the reality of images, to take representations as a grid pieces. As Frances Colpitt states, "that [the three Beams] are identically shaped

is registered instantaneously. While this recognition structures subsequent

12. Snow, l'vfichael. "l'vfichael Snow and Bruce Elder in Conversation" (1982), The Michael Snow Project: The Collected Writings of Michael Snow, Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Waterloo, 13. Snow, l'vfichael. "Pierre Theberge: Conversation with l'vfichael Snow" (1978) The Collected Ontario, Canada, 1994: 223 writings of Michael Snow (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1994), 198. 141 Wavelength Irmgard Emmelhainz 142 experiences of the group, the configuration is perceptually altered as the spectator For Merleau-Ponty, by restoring the object to the visual experience we moves around and between elements."14 L Beams relates to Blind in that as the take away its objectivity in that as we acknowledge the object, we reflect upon it viewer changes his or her position within space, the relationships and perception and it becomes part of our knowledge; "objective thought is unaware of the subject between viewer/ spectator and the object constantly shift. of perception. This is because it presents itself with the world ready-made, as the

The title of Blind is literal; if we find ourselves experiencing it from a setting of every possible event, and treats perception as one of these events."16 In distance, and someone is walking between the meshes, we see different hues of the case of Blind, the position of the viewer in respect to the work changes our vision as the meshes distort and/ or blind our perception of the person inside it. In experience and thus our perception of it; thus, the objectivity has been removed. that sense, Snow allows us to play with our visual and bodily perception Like Morris, Snow emphasizes the fact that the act of perceiving ts

(embodying both Merleau-Ponty's notion of visual and bodily perception), performative, and by doing so, he makes the experience of Blind a real one, away differently from the minimalists, whose concerns were more corporeal and spatial from illusion. Hence perception in Blind involves the perceiving subject in a than visual As Langford states, "for those looking on, the walking spectators situation, rather than positioning it as a spectator who has somehow abstracted him

become part of the work as their bodies bring out the optical illusions of depth that or herself from the situation so an interconnection of action and perception takes

the different weaves of the panels create."15 Blind creates a visual experience in place. The fact that this interconnection takes place "ensures that there is no lived which we are obliged to complete what we are seeing with our mind. Merleau- distinction between the act of perceiving and the thing perceived."17 Snow's and

Ponty gives us the example of the cube, whose equal faces we never see at once Morris' pieces emulate a bodily epistemological experience, but Snow takes it a step

and which is only conceivable as a whole in our minds, even if we change our further in that he distorts our vision in order for us to be aware of our visual

position while viewing it. This premise is taken by the minimalists, especially by perception when we are experiencing Blind.

Morris, but Morris' art is different from Snow's in that the bodily experience had a We have spoken of the pictorial perception theorized by Merleau-Ponty in

main role in the perception of his objects, what Michael Fried calls Theatricality, terms of perspectival vision in the work of Cezanne and how it related to

while in Snow's case it is both visuality and the bodily perception that are equally Wavelength. We could also say, however, that the viewer's experience in Wavelength

emphasized. can be described as a phenomenon of bodily and visual perception in the Merleau-

16. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Parcottrs Deux: 1951-1961 (Lagrasse: Verdier, 2000), 207. 14. Frances Colpitt, Minimal Art: The Critical Perspective (Washington: The University Press, 17. Philip Monk, "Colony, Commodity and Copyright. Reference and Self-reference in 1997), p. 95. Canadian Art." Vanguard (Summer 1983), 15. 15. Langford 2001, 64. 143 Wavelength Irmgard Emmelhainz 144

Pontian sense because the ft.lm takes us slowly through the process of recognizing literally be a solipsism: our perception is supposedly made evident to us. As Elder and scanning the room. ~fichelson has pointed out that:: notes, "in Wavelength, the reality of the room and the windows comes to be

The camera, in the movement of its zoom, installs within the transformed into a metaphor for consciousness, while the ft.lm itself in the course viewer a threshold of tension, of expectation ... we are proceeding from uncertainty to certainty, as our camera narrows of its time more and more becomes concrete reality."21 We should not able to its field ... to every perception there always belongs a horizon of the past, as a potentiality of recollections that can be distinguish between what we are seeing and what we are experiencing; what we see awakened ... the continuous intervening intentionality of possible recollections (to be actualized on my initiative, actively), is our perception; it makes a reference to our private experiences.22 In Wavelength, up to the actual Now of perception. IS the viewer's vision functions as the source of empirical knowledge that shows us Here ~chelson is speaking of an epistemological process, describing how the how we perceive the world, just as in any everyday experience. subject, while perceiving, becomes aware of past experiences and tries to interpret ~chael Snow has stated: "my ft.lms are (to me) attempts to suggest the the actual one in terms of what he or she has lived. mind to a certain state or certain states of consciousness. They are drug relatives in Our awareness of perceiving the room is enhanced by the fact that film is that aspect. You aren't within it, it isn't within you, you are beside it."23 Whereas a medium that, by nature, includes time. Merleau-Ponty tells us that "the spatial Merleau-Ponty emphasizes the connection between mind and body in perception, synthesis and the synthesis of the object are based on this unfolding of time."19 We in Wavelength the concept of body is hypostatized by that of vision, and this visual could propose that the situation we are exposed to while watching Wavelength equals experience may be described as one of consciousness. Thus, the question of the the process of perceiving reality and enhances our self-consciousness of this subject being detached or not from this consciousness experience arises, as Snow process, as, after Merleau-Ponty: points out when he states "you are beside it." \Xlhereas for Merleau-Ponty we relate ... consciousness of the object presupposes self-consciousness, or rather they are synonymous. In so far, then, as there is ourselves to the world through our bodies (because we are our bodies), the consciousness of something, it is because the subject is absolutely nothing and the 'sensations,' the 'material' knowledge ideational and the material are intimately linked, and our mind is inextricable from are not phases or inhabitants of consciousness, they are part of the constituted world.zo our body, which both thinks and perceives:

Snow takes us through the processes of ourselves perceiving the loft and what The primary truth is indeed 'I think,' but only provided that we understand thereby 'I belong to myself while belonging to the happens in it, intending to secure the option of distinguishing our perception from world. When we try to go deeper into subjectivity, calling all things into question and suspending all our beliefs the only form the act of experiencing the ft.lm. What takes place while watching in the ft.lm should 20. Merleau-Ponty 2000,237. 21. Elder 1994,229. 18. Michelson 1971, 31. 22. See Rosalind Krauss, "Sense and Sensibility" Ariforum 12:3 (November 1973), 49. 19. Merlean-Ponty 2000,239. 23. Michael Snow, "Letter from Michael Snow" (1968), The Michael Snow Project, The Co!!ectea Writings, 44. 145 Wavelength Irmgard Emmelhainz 146

in which a glimpse is vouchsafed to us of that non-human Husserl a transcendental reduction may take place, for l\ferleau-Ponty tlus ground[ ... ] Inside and outside are inseparable. The world is wholly inside and I am wholly outside mysel£.24 reduction can never be completed because the world is reduced to consciousness

For Merleau-Ponty, the subject is. at once the perceiving entity and the thus we can never detach ourselves from it. object of perception, so if we read Wavelength from a Merleau-Pontian perspective, \X7hat JT7ave!ength does to the viewer, is to put him in a reflexive mood,

2 then the fact of watching the ftlm would be equal to reality and thus we would not where he goes through an intentional experience and a transcendental reduction: 7 be able to differentiate reality from the film. But if we overturn Merleau-Ponty as a ''\X<'hen we move into the phenomenological attitude, we become something like source to describe the ftlm's phenomenological experience and regress to Husser!, detached observers of the passing scene or like spectators at a game. We become we see that it is possible to differentiate between a real experience and a ftlrnic onlookers. We contemplate the movements we have with the world and with things

28 experience. Seen in Husserlian terms, the ftlm brings the viewer back to himself, in it ... " makes him step back from the situation and analyze it from the side. This is While viewing the ftlm, we experience a constant shift between the

because reading Wavelength not as representation of the world but as presentation, in material aspects of the ftlm (the zoom, the cuts, the focusing and re-focusing, the

filters, the narrative, the sound ... ) and the aspects Snow borrows from reality. the Husserlian sense, brings us closer to the actual experience of the ftlm.25

This differentiation between the two strands of phenomenology (Merleau- \X7hen he speaks of the 'different kind of belief,' we may refer to Husser! again, as

Pontian versus Husserlian) in analyzing the ftlm lies at the core of the for him, in perception, "'each act of belief "has a 'mere presentation' as its

2 counterpart, which presents the same object in precisely the same manner, i.e. on phenomenologists' positions in terms of the transcendental reduction. 6 While for

the Wesen." (Morant, Dermon in the introduction to Husser!, Edmond. The Shorter Logical Investigations, Routledge, London and New York, 2001: xiv) 24. Merleau-Ponty 2000, 407. 27. For Husser!, the intentional experience always transcends itself towards the object, its 25. The term presentation has many nuances for Husser!. It can be seen as act-material or matter, character is a 'pointing beyond itself towards something. (Morant, Derman in the which can be readily completed into: Presentation as the representation underlying the act; introduction to Husser!, Edmond The Shorter Logical Investigations, Routledge, London and Presentation as 'mere presentation,' as qualitative modification of any form of belief, as mere New York, 2001: lxili) understanding of propositions, without an inner decision leading to assent or dissent; 28. Robert Sokolowski, Introduction to Phenomenology (Cambridge: The University Press, 2000), Presentation as nominal act; as the subject-presentation of an act of assertion; Presentation as 48. "To turn to the phenomenological attitude is called the phenomenological reduction (leading objectifjing act; The notion that all conscious experiences (contents in the real away from the natural targets of our concern, 'back' to what seems to be a more restricted phenomenological sense) are 'in consciousness,' in the sense of inner perception or some view point. Reduction, (re-ducere), leading back, a withholding or withdrawal) \lC'hen we enter other inner orientation (consciousness, original apperception) and that with this orientation a into this new viewpoint, we suspend the intentionalities we now contemplate. This presentation is eo ipso given, led to all contents of consciousness being called 'presentations.' suspension, this neutralization of our doxic modalities, (epoche) is the neutralizing of natural (Husser!, Edmond. The Shorter Logical Investigations, Routledge, London and New York, 2001: intentions that must occur when we contemplate those intentions. [On the bracketing:] \lC'hen 262-264) we enter mto the phenomenological attitude, we suspend our beliefs, and we bracket the 26. "For Husser!, every reduction as well as being transcendental is necessarily eidetic. That world and all the things in the world. \lC'hen we bracket the world or some particular object, means that we cannot subject our perception of the world to philosophical scrutiny without we do not ~r~ it into a mere appearance, an illusion, a mere idea, or any other sort of merely ceasing to be identified with that act of positing the world, with that interest in it which mtent:J.onality m the natural attitude. We consider it as correlated with whatever intentionality delimits us, without drawing back from our commitment which is itself thus made to appear targets it. If it is a perceived object, we examine it as perceived; if it is a remembered object, as a spectacle, without passing from the fact of our existence to its nature, from the Dasein to 147 Wavelength Irmgard Emmelhainz 148 the ground of the same matter, and only differs from the former act in that it leaves language, which can be read in terms of Wittgenstein's second philosophy, of the presented object in suspense, and does not refer to it positively as existence.''29 which Snow was aware and also made references.31

Snow has also stated that in his work, in general, he is: Snow was concerned to a certain extent with issues of medium specificity,

Interested in trying to direct the spectator to an experiencing of as we could see in his earlier work. For example, the Walking Woman series (1962- the image as a 'replaying,' as you put it, of a past event but also with the present sense of 'critically' seeing this representation. 1964), which consist of the shape of a walking woman cut out at first in cardboard, However I'm also interested in the 'suspension of disbelief' that is involved in totally empathizing with an image.30 and later printed in various objects. She even appears in Wavelength -the figure

I have encountered a problem while elucidating about the ftlm on stands next to the photograph of the waves- and shall constantly haunt Snow's phenomenological terms. Historically, and in terms of Snow's relationship with later work. This series is an exploration on figuration and its various possibilities, as minimalism, it would make more sense to frame Wavelength from Merleau-Ponty's "Snow has taken the image of a walking woman figure, decomposed it and phenomenology. But because of the film's nature, and because of the type of recreated it in various ways. The resulting works both clarify the functioning of experience it offers the viewer, we must read it in terms of a presentation in the human ftguration and give figuration itself as self-defining role ... "32 Snow is

Husserlian sense, as what comes into play while viewing Wavelength is "all about concerned with shape and explores its many possibilities, referring to the medium seeing," we are confronted with a series of images before our eyes that make us of sculpture and painting and where they come across: figuration. aware of ourselves perceiving the ftlm. What the film does is present itself; it does Even though the Greenbergian ideal strives for purity in every medium, not constitute a representation of any kind. more specifically in painting, we can still see that Snow is interested on addressing

3. Language and self-referentiality specific Materialistic and formal issues in his art practice though he claims not to be

The formal issues that Snow deals with in Wavelength can be viewed from able to set them apart. In the case of the Walking Woman series, it is figuration that two stances. First, because of the ftlm's formal properties, and because of the way he deals with, and in Wavelength, it can be said that Snow intends to explore the he experiments with ftlm as medium, it can be said that Snow is concerned with the possibilities of film as a medium. It may be seen on the way he makes use of the

Modernist Greenbergian ideal of art for art's sake, the concern of medium zoom as the main component of the ftlm, as well as the formal tools that we have specificity and the search for purity. Second, we could relate the formal structures mentioned above. Snow's relationship to this particular modernist paradigm is of the ftlm to Snow's idea of constituting a 'ftlmic language' that would emulate our 30. Snow 1994, 197. 31: For a detailed analysis of the relationship between Snow's work and Wittgenstein see we now examine it as remembered ... " Sokolowski, 48. Elizabeth Legge, "Taking it As Red, Michael Snow and Wittgenstein" The Journal of Canadian 29. Husserl, Edmond. The Shorter Logical Investigations (London: Routledge, 2001), 256. Art History, Vol. 18 (Spring 1997) 32. Dompierre 1983, 57. 149 Wavelength Irmgard Emmelhainz 150 paradoxical; on the one hand, he strives for purity of the medium (this stems from the production process and the work's past, that is, the work's self-reference within is structuralist preoccupations, which we have analyzed above) and on the other, time. On the other hand, we could read Wavelength as au attempt to posit ftlm as an his research drives him towards the mixing of issues related to painting, music, exploration of the ftlm's language, of its constitutive elements such as the zoom, sculpture, etc.; yet, his formal solutions approach him to Greenberg's and Fried's the travel, the close-up, etc., as a 'linguistic metaphor for ftlm syntax,' these notions of painting. We could argue that, while striving towards the Modernist elements '[having] their own set of 'meanings."'36 For Sitney, ~fichael Snow "has paradigm, "Snow attempted to discover latencies within media obscured by what made two utterly clear ftlms which investigate and add new 'meanings' to the was shared across them. What gets 'mixed' are not media but levels of presentation elements of ft1m language."37 These ftlms are Wavelength, and the ftlm that followed and of representation."33 its production, +-~ (Back and Forth, 1969).

If we look closely at Bruce Elder's interpretation of Snow's constant It is possible to relate Snow's linguistic concerns in ftlm in to the way references to the medium, we can see that he posits it as self-referential; he defmes Wittgenstein's latter philosophy defines language, specifically, in his ftlm Rameau's conventional self-refereutiality as the attempt to eliminate any allusions outside the Nephew I?Ji Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) ~y W'i!ma Shoen (197 4), in which work itself in order to align the work of art with its own being. But in the case of Wittgenstein's later ideas are his expressed point of departure.38 Snow describes his

Snow's work, Elder reads it as being different from the convention, as for Elder the ftlms as "representational experiences," and a parallel can be drawn between these

"representational experiences" and the ftlm's structure, with words and language use of self-reference [in Snow's ftlms] seems to have a dual motivation. Firstly, it reveals the stages in the process of the respectively. He has also stated that he" ... decided to model the form of [his] work, construction of the work, and so affirms (since what one constructs are objects) the objecthood of the work. Secondly, a sound ftlm, a talking picture, on the forms in and of speech, on the units of since these references are embodied in recognizable images, they necessarily refer to times past. Self-reference in your work speech so that a visual unit could be the number of frames it took to say a syllable, [Snow's] becomes references to the production process, references to the work's past and a means of bringing this past, a word, a phrase or a sentence ... "39 this historicity, into the present.34

Elder offers two explanations of self-referentiality in Snow's work: he approaches it

35 to the minimalist strive towards "objecthood" and also as the means to refer to another would be -specificity. The critical terms that were found to describe this effect were words like: "literalness" and "Objecthood." Judd calls them: "specific."" See Krauss' "Objecthood," Critical Perspectives in American Art (Massachusetts: The University Press), 33. Monk 1994, 321. 1976. 34. Elder 1994,227. 36. Sitney, P. Adams. "The Films of Michael Snow," New Cinema Review 1 (September 1969), 35. Objecthood is a term mostly associated with Minimalism. Krauss defines it as being the 28. result of Judd "stripping [his] objects of the aura of transcendence ... " For Krauss, these 37. Ibid. objects "are concrete instances, the way a carton box used for a particular purpose of the 38. See Snow's notes for Rameau's Nephew ... in The Collected Writings of Michael Snow, 99-100. way a specific table with this surface and not another, with this size and shape and not 39. Snow 1994,206-207. Irmgard Emmelhainz 152 151 Wavelength

Wittgenstein's philosophy is divided in two periods or stances, and in the language-game in which the sign is embedded is that mechanism.42 second period he completely undermines the ideas that he developed in the first. In Thus, the construction of meaning for \V'ittgenstein resides in a mechanism of the Tractacus Logico Phi!osophicus, his First Philosophy, he developed a picture theory of associations of signs within sentences that take place in conscious mental representation in which he explained the agreement of thought and language with processes. reality in terms of an agreement in form. The elements of thought and proposition If we read Wavelength as the representation of a language game that uses its must have the same forms as the object in the world they label, the form being seen formal aspects to construct a form of speech, we can see that it becomes an effort as the possibility of becoming part of certain combinations with, respectively, other to constitute visual sentences that empirically bring us to an analogous process of names and other objects.40 how we acquire knowledge in the world, in the sense that it drives the viewer It would be poindess to try to interpret ff7ave!ength as a representation for through a process of construction of meaning. For Wittgenstein, meaning resides in Wittgenstein's picture theory, because even though Wavelength's camera is objective, it language's conventions; that is, it depends on the context in which a word is is also presumed that Snow is aware of each viewer's unique experience of it as we spoken. Snow intends to hypostatize the conscious process of apprehension of the construct its meaning in our own mental processes and though viewers have similar everyday experience (scanning the loft) that is put forward by language, considered 41 experiences, they may not be the same. by Snow "as representation, as illusionism. [Language has] its own peculiar In his Second Philosophy, \V'ittgenstein compares the way speech is limitations, which can be experienced in a dialogue between recorded speech and

constructed and posits it as a game, as for him: moving picture as well as in this statement."43 The visual experience we have in

It is not the inner psycho-physical goings-on that are Wavelength is intended to equal that of the epistemological experiences that we have determinative of the sense of the sentence 'p' or the sentence 'I believe that but rather the the use in the language p,' grammar, in everyday life that refers to itself because we are constantly confronted with our game; and to the extent that orie can speak of the sentence being linked to or embedded in a 'mechanism'; the grammar or the conscious perception of the filin and the role memory has in such processes.

For Elder, this epistemological process is illustrated by the zoom, as "it 40. Robert L. Arrington, "Making contact in language: the harmony between thought and reality," Wittgenstein's philosophical investigations Text and Context Edited by Robert Arrington and draws viewers back into the presence and into a mode of self-reflexivity, both Hansjohan (London: Routledge, 1991), 177. 41. " ... 'How can I speak for others on the basis of knowledge about myself?' 'How do I about the filin and their own mental processes ... the zoom demonstrates how know at all that others speak as I do?' The answer is, I do not. I may find out that the most common concept is not used by us in the same way. And one ofWittgenstein's questions is: What would it be like to find this out?" (Cavell, Stanley, Must we mean what we sqy?, Cambridge 42: Stephen Hilmy:. "'Tormenting questions' in Philosophical Investigations," Wittgenstein's University Press, 1976: 67) \'{/e can assume that Snow is aware of these issues when he refers phzlosophzcal znvestzgatzons, Text and Edited by Robert Arrington and Hans Johan (London: to Wavelength as an attempt to suggest various states of consciousness. (Snow, :Nlichael, Routledge, 1991), 105 "Letter from l\lichael Snow" (1968), The 1\iichael Snow Prqject, The Collected Writings of Michael Snow. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Ontario, Canada, 1994: 44) 153 Wavelength Irmgard Emmelhainz 154 temporality influences our experience of events and their meaning, as these are presentation or metaphor for consciousness. This conclusion can be explained by anticipated, perceived, and then remembered."44 Clearly, one of Snow's interests is the following ideas. to put forward a visual representation of language, as for him "language has a The elements of Wavelength could be seen as to conform a grammar in the plastic nature."45 sense Wittgenstein defines it; as he states, "one might [similarly] say that a word like

Conclusion 'red' is important because it is used frequently ... And thus the grammar of the word

The initial opposition between the empirical and phenomenological 'red' is important because it describes the meaning of the word 'red.'"46 Likewise, elements of the ftlm converges 111 the third part: language. Due to its formal Wavelength describes its own meaning to the viewer; it presents itself to him or her solutions and the fact that it takes the medium of ftlm beyond a narrative 111 the Husserlian sense. But since every viewer has a particular, subjective construction, Wavelength manages to become a 'pure ftlm' and Structuralist ftlm in expenence, the ftlm fails, just like language and philosophy, to be a plausible the sense in which we have discussed it. The ftlm's relationship to minimalism is presentation for consciousness, since language is a "basic human structure that is paradoxical; as we have argued, Snow's work can be related to the researches of the capable of transforming various fundamental sentences into the widest variety of minimalist artists, but when we 'apply' their theoretical background (that is, new utterances while retaining these within its own particular structure."47 These

Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology), we see that it fails to become an experience in phenomena (understanding) take place in consciousness, and as the particular those terms, constituting a Husserlian presentation. This conclusion is also structure that is retained while encountering Wavelength is the fihn itself (an illusory debatable, as we will see below. experience), in our minds we translate the information it bestows upon us into our

Snow and Elder speak about a convergence of illusion and fact taking place own particular structures. There is no objectivity and the subjective ~onsciousness

111 Wavelength; it is the aspect of fact (seen as the junction of perception and is underestimated by Snow's and Elder's statements that the ftlm may be a fact or a language) in the ftlm that is undermined by the very nature of human perception representation of consciousness, or even a metaphor. The fihn does not equal an and consciousness. As our minds are shaped in a certain way by means of language epistemological experience because how we obtain knowledge in the world is and because language's structure is self-regulating, the experience of viewing subjective, and in Wavelength the camera objectifies the empirical process of

Wavelength does not equal the spectator's experience while watching the ftlm, nor a understanding.

43. Snow 1994,207. 44. Bruce Elder, "Michael Snow's Wavelength," Descant No. 8-9 (Spring-Summer 1974), 111- 46. Wittgenstein 1994, 267. 117. 47. Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 45. Snow 1994,90. 1977), 16 155 Wavelength Irmgard Emmelhainz 156

The fact that the form or structure of the ftlm plays a mayor role in its The previous statement brings us to setting series of questions derived perception, and because the ftlm is a visual experience, we could speak of a dialectic from this investigation: how illusion works in lVave!ength, the role of time in our play between reality and illusion that takes place in Wavelength. Even though the ftltn perception of the ftlm; the convergence of phenomenology and language in is self-referential, for the reasons we have stated above, we cannot help but be JVave!ength and how it can be undermined by, for example, deconstructivism or aware of our own thoughts, of our own consciousness as we watch it. Thus a Gadamer's hermeneutics, which meets at Husserl's phenomenology and constant shifting between form and content takes place, and where such questions Wittgenstein's philosophy. take place and interact "[... ] what is understood can affect the form of rules that compose one's horizons. The subject matter opened up by the rules of language can call those rules into question and provoke new rules -and consequently, new modes of perception and action."48 \Ve cannot help but have a dialogue between our minds and what we are watching in the ftlm. Snow intended the ftlm to be analogous to our minds when we are watching it, but since we think in terms of language, an interaction between what is going through our mind and the ftlm takes

place. The double play in the viewer's mind of which Snow and Elder speak only works in terms of illusion.

The initial task that this paper sought to accomplish was to treat

Wavelength as Snow's philosophical problem, just as Snow did when he was

elaborating his ftlm, as well as to further explore issues posited previously by critics

that have analyzed the fUm. If we view it as putting forward an issue of

\Vittgensteinian language, and then we read it phenomenologically, it fails to

represent consciousness because we are entrapped in our own grammar, as we

cannot think outside of language - but does not that constitute nominalism?

48. David E. Linge, Introduction to Gadamer's Philosophical Hermeneutits (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 197 6), XXXIX. 157 Wavelength

Fig. 1: Michael Snow, Wavelength (still), 1966-7. Repetition and Reason: A Consideration of Y ayoi Kusama's Art During her Prominent Years in New York Candice Hamelin

ayoi Kusama's primary artwork during the sixties was herself. Signified by Ythe net and its structural opposite, the polka dot, she is the subject most strongly evident in her painting, sculptures, environments, and

performances and there is not one work in her oeuvre that does not carry a mark of

the artist's physical presence.1

Kusama (b. 1929) arrived on the New York art scene from her native

Japan in 1957 with the intention of establishing herself as a prominent artist on the

internationallevel.2 As a child, she suffered from reoccurring hallucinations

consisting of repetitive and proliferating dots, nets and flowers. 3 Her desire to

physically control the appearance and activity of these visions presented Kusama

with a subject matter and artistic drive that became essential during her formative

years in New York. Her fixation on presenting images that took the form of dots

and nets is described by Kusama as "an inspiration for my work; obsessional art, I

call it."4 She began producing intense repetitive compositions as early as the 1940s,

yet her work remained somewhat unknown until 1959 when she had her first

1. Laura Hoptman, "Down to Zero: Yayoi Kusama and the European New Tendency," Love Forever: Y qyoi Kusama, 1958 1968 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1999), 6. 2. Andrew Solomon, "Dot Dot Dot," Artforum International, v.35, (Feb 1997): 67. 3. Lynn Zelevansky, "Driving Image: Yayoi Kusama in New York," (New York: Museum of Modern Art 1999), 14. 4. In interview with Kay Itoi, "Kusama Speaks," Artnet, http://www.artnet.com/Magazine /features/ itoi/ itoi8-22-97 .asp 161 A Living Work of Art Candice Hamelin 162

American solo exhibition at the Brata Gallery in New York.5 There she presented paradoxically resists such a classification. Through the analysis of the five "obsessive" artworks, which gained the attention and praise of artists Donald aforementioned artworks, it becomes evident that Kusama's oeuvre cannot be

Judd and Frank Stella, who recognized in her work elements of emerging contained within any single art historical movement; rather, her work is self- minimalist aesthetics and who consequentially labeled her as such.6 However, referential and defiant of categorization. As Kusama states, "I'm not interested in unlike the phenomenological minimalist assumption of detachment between the those categories. Museums try to include me in their group shows of all kinds - object and its maker, Kusama's infinite reiterations present underlying imagery that Minimal art, Pop art, Woman art. But Kusama is Kusama, not anything else."7 embodies and emphasizes her intense psychological attachment to her subject Kusama's childhood infirmity provided her early works with a reserve of matter. As with her painting Interminable Net of 1959 (Fig. 1) and soft sculpture imagery and subject matter. Her "obsessive" paintings, also known as "Infmity

Accumulation No. 1 of 1962 (Fig. 2), Kusama deals with her personal fears of Nets," meticulous paintings comprised of repeated semi-circles, akin to nets and hallucinations and sex respectively, and nevertheless is mistakenly categorized as dots, gained early recognition among Minimalists for their repetitive and reductive

minimalist for her employment of seriality and modularity. aesthetics. Conversely, unlike the subject matter of the Minimalists, her work is a

In addition to being identified as a minimalist, Kusama was also visual embodiment of the illusive forms that dominated her childhood

considered to be a central figure in both the Pop and New Tendency movements. hallucinations. In paintings such as Interminable Net, the net patterns visually

The aesthetic characteristic of her Airmail Stickers of 1962 (Fig. 3), a collage embody the form and shape ofKusama's childhood fears, while their physical

comparable to Andy \'Varhol's silk-screens, demonstrates the repetitive application representation of such forms reflects her confrontation with these fears. She

of pop culture images. Unlike the aloof works by pop artists, Kusama's collage describes this artistic practice as "art medicine," a process of self-healing that allows

exhibits a personal interpretation of her status as a Japanese artist consumed in the her to expose and outwardly liberate herself from the subject matter of her

American milieu. Finally, her application of formal techniques, such as hallucinations. 8 Each repetitive recreation of nets and dots is meticulously placed,

monomorphism and monochromism, led to Kusama's assimilation with the New reflecting Kusama's intense involvement, both physical and emotional, in the

Tendency group Zero, whose primary focus was to efface the role of the artist in work's production. As Judd himself once noted, Kusama's final artistic product "is

one's artwork. Kusama's Narcissus Garden (Fig. 4) overdy represents her social ideas a result of [her] work, not a work itself."9 As such, the strong self-referential tone in

and more importandy the presence of her body in the artwork, and thus

7. Itoi, ibid. 8. Lynn Zelevansky, "Driving Image: Yayoi Kusama in New York," (New York, 1999), 15. 9. Libby Lumpkin, "Yayoi Kusama: LA County Museum of Art," Artforum International 5. Zelevansky, 12. 6. Pamela Wye, "Is she famous yet?" Art Journal, v.57, (Winter 1998): 96. v.37 no. 1 (Sept 1998): 147. 163 A Living Work of Art Candice Hamelin 164 her work contradicts the minimalist tendency to remove one's self from the personal objectives were widely misinterpreted by many predominant figures in the composition. Although Kusama employs the reductive and repetitive aesthetics New York art world, including Judd. Her works were described by him as "having often attributed to the minimalist styles, her .work's repetition is not aesthetically a single interest; obsessive repetition."11 Judd, despite his assistance in the creation based. Rather it is an artistic technique used to deal with her psychological of Kusama's works, failed to observe the real implications of the work's modularity. preoccupations. Like her net paintings, despite its overt personal overtones, Kusama's furniture has

Kusama's early net paintings emanate her desire to gain control over her been trapped in minimalist rhetoric, due to its use of repetition. internal reservations. Her obsessive repetition, often accredited as a minimalist Kusama's employment of repetition unfortunately and unremittingly practice, is both a complex and important idea that extends beyond the boundaries results in the inaccurate categorization of her work. In addition to her affiliation of her paintings. Although a by-product of her childhood hallucinations, Kusama with .Niinimalism, Kusama became linked with Pop art shortly after Bellamy incorporates repetition into her early objects with the aim of overcoming her fear presented her repetitive-based artworks alongside the works of pop artists like of sex, a trepidation embedded in her mind at an early age: Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, and A.ndy \Varhol. 12 A.t this time, her collages

I had a phobia about sex because of the education I received as a were aesthetically comparable to the silk-screens created by Warhol in their young girl. I was taught that sex is dirty, something you have to hide. \'Vhat I did was to bring sex into the open; I covered an repetitive and grid-like composition of modern-day symbols of consumer culture entire sofa and everything else around me with penises. That soothed my feat of sex and I was able to come out of my such as airmail stickers, price stickers, ftle-folder labels, gummed reinforcements, phobia.10 and dollar bills.1 3 Kusama's collage Ainnai! Stickers is, in some respects, visually With the help of her friend Donald Judd, Kusama began creating sculptural analogous to Warhol's 200 Cans ifSoup in its display of bright colours, pop-culture artworks by physically attaching individual pieces of sewn canvas, in the shape of a objects, and its repetitious grid-like structure. In these works, both Kusama and male penis, to the architectural frame of found objects. Kusama's Accumulation No. Warhol repetitively display a single cultural object; an airmail sticker and soup can, 1., an old armchair frame submerged in white protuberances, is the first of her respectively. Despite such similarities, Kusama's collage is also disengaged from many soft furniture sculptures that exposed her personal anxieties towards sex. By the pop tendencies employed by Warhol. The surface of Warhol's silk-screen is repetitively placing phallic objects on commonplace items, Kusama immerses unified and polished; his repetitive placement of the visual subject matter, which herself in a sexual environment with the intent of overcoming her sexual ultimately serves as a commentary on American culture and commercialization is apprehensions. After showing Accumulation No. 1 at the Green Gallery in 1962, her '

11. Solomon, p. 72. 12. Zelevansky, p. 17. 10. Itoi, ibid. 165 A Living Work of Art Candice Hamelin 166

14 both mechanical and spiritless. In contrast, Kusama's surface is disjointed; she insinuates the overall similarities that exist between American artists and their places hundreds of airmail stickers overtop and at subtle angles to one another. In artworks. In contrast, there exists a lone sticker in the collage's lower left-hand this manner, she emphasizes the work's intimate handmade qualities: " ... the segment that repudiates the conventional upright format. The inverted sticker, a activity of pasting each element down, draws attention to the fevered mode of their subtle figurative representation of Kusama and her work, is her personal creation; they become intense and pointedly personal in a manner alien to the cool interpretation of her status in the New York art world; she refuses to conform to detachment of a silkscreen print."15 Thus, the meticulous pasting of each individual standard American artistic practices, and for that reason she remains distinct. sticker both exemplifies and embodies I

Unlike Warhol and his contemporaries, Kusama is mentally, physically elements from popular culture and everyday life.17 However, her metaphorical and unabashedly involved in her artworks. Her irrepressible desire for repetition, a opposition in Airmail Stickers refutes both classifications. Ultimately, Kusama's consistent element in her production, leads to her labor-intensive application of work is too organic and too emotional in its references to conform to the aesthetics objects. As a consequence, the emphasis shifts away from Kusama's artwork and of either minimalism or pop art.

16 ultimately onto the act of its making and its maker. She reiterates and elaborates In addition to Kusama's classification among American minimalists and this latter point through her emblematic subject matter and its precise directional pop artists, her work was also assimilated within Zero, a group belonging to placement on the canvas. Kusama's visual theme of the airmail-sticker functions as Europe's New Tendency. The aim of group Zero, and New Tendency for that a commentary on her affiliation with the American art world; a notion supported matter, was to explore the material and visual properties of surface, colour, and by the international nuance of 'via air mail', placed amid the confines of America's light in an attempt to create an art that was anti-metaphoric, uniform, and empty of signature colours. For that matter, considering Kusama's physical and emotional any reference except to itself.18 Artists within the New Tendency viewed Kusama's rapport with her artworks, it is safe to assume that each sticker may be a figurative formal application of repetition and modularity as "strategies that reinforce the representation of individual artists working in New York at that time. Kusama's concrete nature of the artwork as an artwork and nothing else."19 Her early works, upright placement of each sticker within a relatively linear grid-like structure such as her net paintings and accumulation sculptures, visually conformed to the

organic patterning seen in New Tendency works and were therefore often viewed 13. Ibid., 16. 14. Leo Sun, "Controlled Infinity: Perspective on Yayoi Kusama," http:/ /www.leoplanet.net/writings/yayoi 17 Ze!evansky, 16. 15. Zelevansky, 16 .. 18 Hoptman, 44. 16. Hoptman, 50. 167 A Living Work of Art Candice Hamelin 168 as such. Her acceptance amongst group Zero artists led to the presentation of her doing so, Kusama performatively opposed the central ideology of New Tendency work alongside Europe's avant-garde artists as early as 1960, when New Tendency by becoming inseparable from the work of art itself.

2 had its fttst major international show. 0 Kusama's presence in her work was so evident throughout the sixties that

Despite the visual similarities between Kusama's early work and that of in hindsight artists such as Hans Haacke have noted that "it was clear from her the New Tendency artists, Kusama's presence remains the central element in her earliest Infinity Net paintings through the happenings of the late sixties that work. Although this factor is less obvious in her early work, Kusama's Narcissus Kusama was headed into the peculiar world of art performance."24 A retrospective

Garden (Fig. 4), an installation at the 1966 Venice Biennale, undeniably exhibits her look at Kusama's art reveals the artist's progression towards self-incorporation self as the work's subject matter. At fttst glance, Kusama's composition of 1,500 within her works. Her Infinity Net paintings and soft sculptures subtly revealed mirror balls resembles a Zeroesque work through its exploration of artificial and her psychological states and functioned as the foundation for her later works. As natural effects of light and colour.21 However, Kusama's work contradicts this Kusama ventured into different media, such as collage and installation, her classification through its representation of her social ideas and, more importantly, presence escalated from the figural to the literal before finally moving into the her physical body. Shortly after installing the work, Kusama began selling realm of performance art.25 Although her work was often misguidedly categorized individual units in an attempt to emphasize the economical underpinnings of the by the confines of various 1960s art movements such as l'vfinimalism Pop art and ' ' contemporary art world.22 By selling these units, Kusama had "transformed New Tendency, she and her work nevertheless remain distinct- uniquely Kusama.

Narcissus Garden from a New Tendency garden folly into the act of social critique against cultural nationalism, excessive commodification, and the strangulation of individual creativity."23 In making such a statement, the emphasis of the artwork shifts from the object to the maker, a factor exemplified by Kusama's physical involvement in the work. In addition to selling individual units, Kusama transformed her Narcissus Garden into a performance piece by physically immersing herself within the field of mirror balls, which thereby unified her art and self. In

19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., 51. 22. Ibid. 24. Ibid., 48. 23. Ibid., 52. 25. Ibid. Candice Hamelin 170 169 A Living Work of Art

Fig. 1: Yayoi }(.usama, Interminable Net, 1959. Collection of Nlichael and Gabrielle Fig, 3: Yayoi Kusama,Airmai/ Stickers, 1962. New York, The \'Vhitney Museum of Boyd. American Art.

Fig. 4: Yayoi Kusama, Narcissus Garden, 1966. Venice, Venice Biennale. Fig. 2: Yayoi Kusama, Accumulation No. 1, 1962. Beatrice Perry Family Collection. Toward Reflexive Practise in the Historiography of Persianate Art

Guita Lamsechi

n the study of Perso-Islamic art historiography, there is a growing I consciousness of certain internal contradictions. These contradictions are derived from the perspectives of traditional European art history and the

dominance of a European teleological view of artistic development. This may be

due to an awareness of postcolonial theory, which, as James Herbert says

"promises to push beyond the ideas and beliefs of colonialism by challenging them,

and perhaps putting them right."1

Following a sketch of the difficulties inherent in the attempt to

circumvent colonialism, I will show that the existing scholarship has tended to

apply to Persianate art criteria that were developed in connection with European

art, particularly Italian Renaissance art. These are especially suited to the Western

tradition but ill-suited to the Persianate context.2 Their application to Persianate art

has led to a misguided devaluation of it; it is seen as inferior in terms of criteria that

are mostly irrelevant to its specific practices. The use of inappropriate tools has left

the real value and deeper meaning of Persian art undetected. Despite some real

scholarly advances, this situation has amounted to an instance of colonialism that is

1. James Herbert, "Passing Between Art History and Post-Colonial Theory," in The Subjects of Art History: Historical Objects in Contemporary Perspectives, eds. Mark A. Cheetham, Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 213. 2. Sylvan Barnet cautions against the use ofEuro-centric language in the 7th edition of A Short Guide to Writing about Art, (Boston: Tufts UP, 2003), 269. While the use of the terms "East" and "West" are problematic because they imply a Euro-centric superiority, he 173 Toward Reflexive Practice Guita Lamsechi 17 4 only lately being corrected by scholars such as David Roxburgh. Although colonialism of those she critiques.6 Herbert acknowledges that Spivak recognizes

Roxburgh does not seem to make use of postcolonial theory directly, his work, she must divide her own subjecthood between her own ethnic origin and her which this paper will make much use of,. is in very strong sympathy with this analytic voice, which is itself derived from the West. She recognizes the existence theoretical direction and he has considerable success managing the difficulties that of this reversal of authority by her own refusal to speak for India. She demands

7 colonialism represents. that we accept "our 'unlearning project"' to unlearn the presumptuous Western

The difficulties are considerable; the magnetic attraction of colonialism claim to the position of the absolute Subject. In effect she argues for the seems to await scholars and thinkers at evety turn. Thus, Gayatri Chakravorty acknowledgement of "the limits of Western colonial representational practise."S

Spivak notes the danger of falling into the subtle machinery of the colonial Even so, Herbert says that she does fall into the trap of assuming the role

approach, and, according to Herbert, even Spivak may fall prey.3 Although she of the absolute Subject and she acknowledges this danger in the final chapter of her would refuse to speak for the colonized in "Can the Subaltern Speak?"\ she book Critique of Post-Colonial Reason. He also charges himself with having succumbed

attempts to extract the 'absolute Subject' in Deleuze and Guattari and in Foucault.5 - at least partly - to the trap awaiting the unwary scholar.9 Postcolonial theory

In Herbert's account, Spivak indicates that these authors demarcate a certain demands the continuous re-examination of our own epistemological apparatus to

colonial authority in the process of challenging the centrality of the subject in uncover the unintentional production of the absolute Subject. Thus, we must also

liberal-humanist thought, but that this in turn seems to allow them to assume the recognize the persistent danger confronting us in our own efforts to re-present the

role of absolute Subjectivity. In this way she identifies a remnant of colonial scholarship of Persianate art. Having recognized the very real pitfalls, I propose

thinking in the work of others. At the end of this process, however, according to nevertheless to proceed, albeit warily.

Herbert, she effectively assumes this role for herself, inadvertently reproducing the Much of the scholarship on Persianate art reflects the broader colonial

condition in which the colonizer speaks for the colonized. This has occurred

acknowledges that no substitutes have yet been agreed upon. through the application of criteria specific to Western artistic developments onto 3. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?," in Marxism and the Intetpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Gossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, Persianate art. Ironically, this attempt to understand Persianate art and to show its 1988), 271. Spivak acknowledges this danger from the outset. See, for example page 271: "although I will attempt to foreground the precariousness of this position throughout, I true value has also led to its undeserved devaluation. know such gestures can never suffice." Her project of calling into question the role of the Western intellectual as 'sovereign subject' is useful for considering the obstacles to our understanding of Persianate art. 4. Spivak, 296, 281; Herbert, 224. . 5. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus:.Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Richard 6. Herbert, 223-4. Hurlev et. al. (New York Vicking Press, 1977). Spivak's "challenge" against "the notion of 7. Spivak, 296. the su'rreptitious subject ... marked by the transparency of the intellectual" ups the ante on 8. Herbert, 223, 224. 9. Ibid., 217. Edward Said's critique of Michel Foucault. See Spivak, 280. 175 Toward Reflexive Practice Guita Lamsechi 176

The study of Persianate drawing, painting, and calligraphy has devoted Writing about the pictorial constructions of Bihzad and other Persian painters, the much energy to questions of attribution and provenance in much the same way that authors claim that the painters the study of European art has done. These investigations are distincdy less useful in ... had no share of the European feeling that a picture should conform as closely as possible to visual appearances; they had the case of Persianate art than they are for European art historiography. Innocuous, none of the zest in exploration which has made European painting a voyage of discovery; they were content to express and indeed laudable, as they may appear, these efforts have amounted to a themselves in an art without atmospheric effect, without light and shade, an art which owed nothirlg to the study of anatomy manifestation of colonialism, as the central issues of this art have tended to be or the study of perspective.... It must be admitted that Persian painting betrays no intellectual grasp of the structure of things.12 obscured rather than clarified by this approach. Pre-modern Persian art is "static," then, compared with Western art and Roxburgh writes that the West "needs to re-engage itself with the mute the optical naturalism that developed within it. Roxburgh takes issue with this material beyond the compass of western analysis by empirical investigation of the severe judgment of Persianate art, however, noting that their opinions are far from object."10 Roxburgh is on the right track, I believe, because he is still working to isolated: "Binyon, Wilkinson and Gray's remarks would have been less disturbing if root out the contradictions in his own scholarship. He has demonstrated a it were not for the fact that their descriptive language has retained its currency in continued commitment to reconsidering the foundations and methodology of the studies ofPersianate painting until the present day."13 study of the art historiography of Persianate visual culture. Thus, Binyon et al. are representative of a scholarly tendency that seeks to Roxburgh's approach is a necessary corrective to the attitude expressed in make specific comparisons between the art and art writing of the Italian 1933 by Binyon, Wilkinson and Gray. The latter are engaged in a comparison Renaissance and Persianate practices emphasizing common aesthetic features of between Persianate and Western art, in which the Western work is normative. As media. This approach, having valorized the priorities of Italian Renaissance art Roxburgh puts it, these "authors' teleological concept of Western art is based on above all else, has resulted in a perception of Persianate art as merely "decorative the progressive refinement of formal devices - a history of visual problem solving and exhibiting no (formal) development."14 - and the result of the comparison is to characterize the Persianate painting Roxburgh is opposed to this, as he is to a certain Western view of drawing tradition as static, never changing, lacking in innovation."11 Binyon et al. privilege and painting, articulated by Giorgio Vasari in sixteenth century Italy, which focuses \Vestern forms of image-making and the concept of artistic development based on this notion of the value of art. This is clear from a passage cited by Roxburgh. 11. Roxburgh, "The Study of Painting," 9. 12. Lawrence Bin yon,]. V. S. Wilkinson and Basil Gray, Persian Miniature Painting: A Descriptive Ca~alogu~ of the Miniatures Exhibited at Burlington House, January -March 1931 (Oxford: Oxford 10. David Roxburgh, "The Study of Painting and the Arts of the Book," Muqarnas 17 (2000) Uruvers1ty Press, 1933), 5; Roxburgh, "The Study of Painting," 9. 9. 13. Roxburgh, "The Study of Painting," 9, n. 58. 14. David Roxburgh, Prefacing the Image: The Writing of Art History in Sixtemth-Century Iran 177 Toward Reflexive Practice Guita Lamsechi 178

15 on issues of authorship and ownership. This traditional focus on attribution and historical writing in Persia dates to some thirty years earlier. IS Dost Muhammed was provenance in art historical scholarship is particularly problematic for a discussion one of several authors whose writings of art histories were derived from of Persianate visual culture. Joseph Alsop points out that the anonymity of the contemporary critics, practitioners (artists and artisans), and written sources such as practitioners of Perso-Islarnic arts of this period is problematic for a mode of histories, biographies, and poetic texts such as the Khamsa by the poets Nizarni and scholarship which links the phenomena of remembered artists with the existence of Amir Khusraw Dihlavi. a notion of art historical consciousness.16 Yet, the sixteenth century dedications and Dost Muhammed's text is not a comprehensive listing of practitioners or art historical writings in the 'prefaces' of Persianate albums demonstrate that critical theory. Yet certain traditions of artistic production investigated by recent contemporary audiences were able to make distinctions between the works of scholarship are ignored in his writing.I9 Thus, Robert Hillenbrand goes so far as to different artists and their technical prowess as well as between individual artists' say that "Dost Muhammed, the prime literary source for [Persianate painting], is a works. As Roxburgh says: "contemporary viewers had a language to describe, very poor exchange for Vasari."20 Be that as it may, \'\!estern scholars have been assess, and judge what they saw, despite the fact that the lack of an ekphrastic deterred from analyzing a wider range of fttst hand accounts written by Persian tradition implies an absence of this particular fortn of engagement with the connoisseurs by deeply rooted notions based on comparisons with Western art visual."17 historiography and, in particular, Italian Renaissance painting. Furthermore, the

Just as there were indigenous means of distinction and modes of notion that the textual corpus of Persianate art is "scanty" compared with appreciation and acknowledgement of individual artists and works, there was an European or Chinese art historiographic literature is embedded in the scholarship.21 indigenous Persian tradition of art historical writing. For example, the prefaces to Roxburgh, of course, points out that there is considerable literature that has not yet

the albums and the Gulistan i-Hunar are primary examples of contemporary writings been investigated by scholars.22

on Persian aesthetics. Much of the first hand art historical writing is based on the Colonialism, according to Herbert, "measures any given stance against sixteenth century writings of Dost Muhammed. He has been compared with Vasari that which it is perceived not to be."23 Something such as this seems to infortn the

and is considered to be the fttst Persian art historian. In fact, the practise of art work of Roxburgh, which endeavours to resist such a tendency. He entreats

(Boston: Brill, 2001), 9. 18. Roxburgh, Prifadng the ItNage, 7. 15. Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Artists, trans. George Bull (reprint, Markham: Penguin, 19. Ibid., 8. 1965); Roxburgh, Prefacing the Image, 6. 20. Robert Hillenbrand, in Roxburgh, Prifadng the Image, 7. 16. Joseph Alsop, The Rare An Traditions: The History ofAn Collecting and its Linked Phenomena 21. \XIheeler M. Thackston, introduction, Album Prifaces and Other documents on the History of Wherever These Have Appeared (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982), 255; in Roxburgh, 2001, Calzgraphers and Paznters, Muqarnas Supplement, vol.1 0 (Boston: Brill, 2001 ). 9, n. 37. 22. Roxburgh, Prifadng the Image, 7-8. 17. Roxburgh, "The Study of Painting," 9. 23. Herbert, 215. Guita Lamsechi 180 179 Toward Reflexive Practice and its formal priorities.27 Closely related is the notion that this art manifests an scholars to undertake first hand the "analysis of texts as sources of artistic theories inferior sort of optical naturalism, as if it is attempting, and failing, to achieve the by which we might analyze ways of thinking about and seeing art if the study of naturalistic effects that were so important in the Italian Renaissance.28 Clearly, Persianate art is ever to escape from the strictures of certain forms of analysis

24 representational art in the Perso-Islamic world does not follow the course of (stylistic, taxonomic) and categorization (illustration, decoration)." optical naturalism taken by Western art; its internal dynamic and its concerns are If the 'ideal' is defined by the priorities of European art, then non- quite different. Persianate artistic traditions are almost devoid of an interest in an European art that does not share those priorities will necessarily be found to be Albertian reconstruction of the world with its referential relationship to the external lacking. Herbert writes: "the emergence of the 'colonial' is dependent for its visible world. Alberti entreated artists to strive to create a semblance in painting representation upon some strategic limitation or prohibition within the that approximated a view through the frame of a window. Yet Islamic arts of the authoritative discourse itself."25 In the case of Persianate art, the scholarship which "classical" period (ca.1370-1650)29 had very different concerns.30 Thus, such preserves and has given value to it has also served to misrepresent and devalue it applications are rare in the Persianate aesthetic of this period. The "window on the through the colonial voice of traditional European art historical practice. This is to world" in Persianate art is detailed but does not attempt a realistic perspective. say that market forces and the concern to champion this tradition have also been There is little evidence of applications of scientific analyses of perspective and instrumental in contributing to the tendency to misalign Persianate art traditions anatomy in this art - unconcerned, as it is, with modeling in light and shade or with European ones.26 In order to validate Persianate art in the West, there was an atmospheric effects. In their "rebuttal of perceived reality," Islamic artists working attempt on the part of scholars to evaluate it as they would Western examples. within an aniconic culture perhaps intended to avoid "the problem of usurping Paradoxically, this led to the devaluation of this art as not living up to criteria that God's creative prerogative," so that what is depicted may not be confused with its were largely irrelevant. These concerns ?ave also contributed to the devaluation of referent in the real world. 31 It is not a mirror-like mimesis of the visible world; it is, Islamic art, which was consequently designated as being merely "decorative." rather, an abstraction based upon the re-workings of earlier responses to perceived When Binyon et. al. characterize Persianate art as "archaizing" and lacking reality, as well as appropriated and indigenous literary sources. These mirrored the "innovation" indicative of internal development, this criticism is articulated

through its apparent opposition to the Western teleology of visual problem solving 27. Ibid., 6-9. 28. Ibid., 9. 29. Yves Port~r, "From the 'Theory of the Two Qalams' to the Seven Principles of Painting, ;heory, Termtnology, and Practtce m Perstan Classical Painting," Muqarnas 17 (2000): 17, n.

24. Roxburgh, Prefacing the Image, 8. 30. Roxburgh, Prefacing the Image, 9. 25. Herbert, 214. 31. Ibid., 198. 26. Roxburgh, Prefacing the Image, 6-9. 181 Toward Reflexive Practice Guita Lamsechi 182 reflections are mediated by the imagination of the artist, according to Dost art in terms of (external) formal priorities leads to its being regarded as merely

Muhammed. Persianate painting formulates an alternative form of complex spatial "decorative."34 Thus, the mode of viewing exemplified by Binyon, Wilkinson, and organization, one which requires cognitive processes that are foreign to the Gray tends to rob Persianate art of its own voice.

perspectival organization of Italian Renaissance art. It is clear, however, that "Insofar as painting remained confmed to the book," Roxburgh writes, "it 35 contemporary viewers did understand what they saw as representative of the diminished in value." In the fourteenth century, however, the function of images

external world as well as of internal (cultural) traditions.32 Any critical discussion of within the context of the book, as manuscript illustration, changed when paintings

the organization of the pictorial plane in terms of the relational systems developed in books began to gain autonomy from the text. The full-page, framed

compositions of the thirteenth century, in which the paintings are literally and in the Italian Renaissance is not applicable.

This principle has been articulated in connection with European art itself. figuratively circumscribed by the text, give way, by the fifteenth century, to a

Frances Ames-Lewis objects to viewing drawings from the Northern European physical, or even thematic, separation of the paintings from the text of the

36 tradition in the same way that we would view Italian examples, claiming that the manuscript. Thus, the function of images in fifteenth-century Timurid illustrated

difference between these traditions is so great that they fail to shed light on one manuscripts is no longer solely narrative. The selection of themes for illustrations

another.33 If this is so, then surely the purposes, techniques and graphic styles of may be motivated by political or aesthetic concerns outside of the text.37

Persian art of the "classicaf' period diverge even farther from the aesthetic Changes in the relationship between text and image in the fourteenth

traditions to which Binyon, \Vilkinson and Gray refer when they pronounce pre- century reflect the growing independence and importance of the image in the

Persianate world.38 Beginning in the fifteenth century, the conception of images modern Persian art "static."

The European developmental model consists of media-based transitions became such that the role of drawing and painting served a broader range of

from manuscript illustration to panel painting to oils on canvas. If this model is

University Press, 1981) vi. will retained as normative, it contribute to the perception of Persianate art as 34. Roxburgh, Prefacing the Image, 9. 35. Ibid., 8. frozen in the medieval period and having experienced no aesthetic development. 36. Lisa Golombek, "Toward a Classification of Islamic Painting," in Islamic Art in the Metropo!itall Museum of Art, ed. Richard Ettinghausen (New York: Metropolitan Museum of The characterization of Persianate arts in codex form as a whole diminishes and Art, 1972, 23. 37. J?avid Rox~urgh, "The Pen of Depiction: Drawings of 15th and 16th Century Iran," devalues the internal processes of its development. This habit of viewing Persianate Studies t~ Is!amtc and Later India11 Artfrom the Arthur M. Sack!erJiiuseum (Cambridge: Harvard Umverslty Art Museums, 2002), n. 20; Priscilla Soucek, "The Manuscripts of Iskandar Sultan: Structure and Content," in "Timurid Art and Culture: Iran and Central Asia in the Fifteenth Century," eds. Lisa Golombek and Maria Subtelny, Studies i11 Islamic Art and Architecture vo!. 6 32. Ibid., 9. (1992): 116-31. , 33. Frances Ames-Lewis, Drawing in Earfy Renaissance Itafy (London: New Haven: Yale 38. Golombek, 23. 183 Toward Reflexive Practice Guita Lamsechi 184 functions. This ultimately led to the increasing autonomy of images. The albums of century. 40 And drawing asserts itself even in painting. The drawn line is still visible the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries document this broader functioning of painting in the finished painting as a boundary between fields of colour and over colored and drawing, as Lentz and Lowry demonstrate in their book Timur, and the Princefy areas to define the internal details of facial features, fur, and clothing. Thus, the

Virion. linear qualities of drawing are retained in Persianate painting. The tendency to see

At the same time, traditions operated within Islamic art to elide the drawings as ephemera, representing merely a stage in the preparatory process processes of drawing and painting with writing. As part of the anti-iconoclastic towards a fmished painting, which is derived from writers such as V asari, continues effort to extend to depiction the legitimacy afforded to writing, Islamic writers today in thinking about the drawings preserved in the Persian albums. endeavoured to conflate drawing and painting. If visual art were to be esteemed in It must be noted that the Vasarian opposition between 'exploratory' and much the same way as writing, it was hoped that it would be understood as a kind 'finished' works fails to convey the complexity of the creative process for of parallel, and perhaps equal, cultural form. Persianate drawings.41 The distinctions between 'exploratory' and 'finished'

This leads to two further conflicts with the tradition exemplified by adequately describe the common working method of the Italian Renaissance

Vasari: the relation between drawing and painting, and the relation between workshops; the drawings contained in model-books were regarded as relatively exploratory, preparatory and finished works. Vasari regarded drawing as being ephemeral 'exploratory' items, as stages on the way towards the creation of superceded and surpassed by painting. He criticized drawings by Jacopo della 'fmished' paintings. This is neither quite the working method of the Persianate

Quercia in his collection for their resemblance to the work of an illuminator rather period, nor does it describe the understanding of these works at the time. than that of a sculptor.39 This criticism may be seen as a libel on drawing in general, Roxburgh writes that "these drawings do not fit into the rigid functionalist regime compared with painting, for the former generally lacks the modeling in colour that that the distinction requires."42 This rigid distinction is derived from practices in gives Italian Renaissance painting its formal distinction. Italian Renaissance workshops and the function of drawing in the European

In Persianate art, however, drawing is not superceded by painting as it has tradition of visual art. It can obscure matters applied to the art of the Timurids, tended to be in the Western tradition. In the Western tradition, the processes of with its much looser functional regime. drawing tend to have been incorporated within painting, but in the Persianate The functional status of the images does not seem to affect their context, drawing's self-sufficiency as a medium develops in the mid-sixteenth arrangement within the albums, nor does their state of completion seem to affect

40. Roxburgh, The Pen of Depiction, 50. 39. Ames-Lewis, 130; Giorgio.Vasari, Uves of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, ed William 41. Ibid., 50. Gaunt vol. 1 (London 1927), 214. Guita Lamsechi 186 185 Toward Reflexive Practice this; their position in the album is not as haphazard as it may seem. As Michael for the compiler in much the same way as a poet was called upon to invent and

47 Fried points out (drawing upon the writings of George Peale), the construction of recite poetry at a court gathering. For Roxburgh, the creative practise of 43 the viewing format is telling: it indicates how these works of art were viewed. The recombining standardised forms and models in the compositional process of collections of drawing, painting and calligraphic samples in the Persianate albums Persianate drawing of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is the crucial aspect of

are arranged so that by turning the book or standing in a small group around it, the the artistic enterprise. "In a Persianate setting," he writes, "production of the 'new'

works can be viewed upright to the viewer from the edges of the pages. Both Lisa demanded response to the 'old' as part of the contract of communicability, the

Golombek and Leo Steinberg discuss the traditional art historical bias that viewer expected that the artist [or poet] would imitate his predecessors."48 The 44 privileges the viewing position as a factor in the reception of art works. They performance was appreciated for the elegance with which it engaged in the processes of transfer and transposition of the elements of this visual language. indicate that the horizontal viewing format for works in books versus that for This performance was in some ways like theatre. Thomas Lentz draws an pictorial art works (paintings), which are usually viewed upright, has formed analogy between Timurid art and formal theatrical traditions such as Japanese No obstacles for the evaluation of drawings and paintings that are circumscribed by 45 theatre. Using a symbolic vocabulary, stereotyped images communicate a 'theatrical text and were not meant to be evaluated as "easel pictures." reality' where "the artificial vocabulary of expression is regarded as theatrically In "The Pen of Distinction," David Roxburgh argues that the believable and aesthetically valid."49 preservation of these drawings in the (royal) albums is in itself proof of their value The stylized vocabulary of Timurid art, which was understood by the elite as independent works. Further proof of their value may be found in their audience of the royal court, contains analogies and allusions to the poetry of Persia. performative function. These works were intended to be viewed, appreciated and But these images were not merely evocative of texts; they evoke other levels of discussed by an audience. The performative nature of this art is taken up by Lisa meaning through patterns of repeated images that functioned for the contemporary Golombek.46 To say that it is performative is to say that it is a practice in which the viewer as a bridge to the non-representational medium of poetry. Timurid art is artist's ability to work to a given standard is of greater importance than his ability to thus typical of the arts of Persia, including music, in which the importance of produce a unique work of art. An album project creates a context of performance metaphor and analogy is a universal characteristic.

42. Ibid., 50. c ch· 43. Michael Fried, Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: on Thomas Eakins and Stephen rane ( tcago: 47. ~1aria Su~telny, "Scenes from the Literary Life ofTimurid Herat," Papers in Medieval University of Chicago Press, 1987). . . . . , . Studtes, Pontifical Institute, Toronto, 1984; in Roxburgh, 2001,45, n. 146. 44. Lisa Golombek "Toward a Classiftcatton of Islamtc Pamtlng, 32; Leo Stemberg, Other 48. Roxburgh, The Pen of Depiction, 56, f. 17. n. 17. Criteria, in Twentieth Century Arl (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 71. Confrontatio~s 49. Thomas Lentz, Painting at Hera! under Baysunghur ibn Shahrukh (Ann Arbor: UMI 1988) 45. Steinberg, 71. 257. ' , 46. Golombek, 32. Guita Lamsechi 188 187 Toward Reflexive Practice for producing an inwardly spiralling circle of increasing self-referentiality whereby This graphic language of Timurid art consists of the recombination of form became content."53 basic morphological units into larger units. The preliminary steps of the design Such a judgment of Perso-Islamic art ignores the representative functions process entails the selection of appropriate images as compositional units which of its pictorial forms to the internalized systems of cultural reference linked to its may be variously copied freehand and reduced to fit the desired medium and politics and literature. It is based upon inadequate knowledge of the cultural purposes, or traced directly using "pouncing''5° to be orchestrated into another context within which the work was produced and the resulting misunderstanding of composition. This practice "habituated the practitioner to a certain mode of visual its functions. This misunderstanding could not have occurred given a reasonable thinking."Sl The morphology of Persianate visual language is composed of knowledge of the exegetical function of Persianate artistic traditions. The language indigenous mythic literature and visual idioms borrowed from the local traditions barrier that so many Western scholars of Persianate arts have experienced in of Persian and Chinese art. Lentz writes: confronting this work may be responsible for this. This may be an obvious point, The stylized figures, actions and settings viewed by the painter as units are constructs, symbolizations or abstractions which are but perhaps it should be noted that a knowledge of one's own literary tradition used to represent reality for a small restricted audience. The resultant structure is not to be defined as stiff, academic, and frequently allows one to understand the art produced in tandem with that tradition. unimaginative merely because its devices are almost completely inherited and expressed conventionally; on the contrary, there So, for example, a knowledge of Ovid or Homer will be necessary to unravel the are likely to be other levels of meaning in this intentional 52 repetition and patterns of imagery. allegorical allusions of many art works in the Western tradition. Familiarity with this

The repetition of forms and artistic references to poetry, or to other visual literature allows us to "read" this art. Just so in the case ofPersianate art. Without a

works, was a dominant artistic practice in the Timurid period with its highly knowledge of the literary context within which this art is produced, and to which it

complex systems of metaphor and allegory. A kind of innovation that was peculiar refers, the imagery that must be reduced to mere unintelligible "decoration."

to Persianate art developed within this practice. New forms developed which The standard configurations of miniature paintings, which depict stories

depended upon knowledge of literary references. These new forms used models of traditional Persian epic poetry, allow the reader/ viewer to understand the scenes

from traditional literature and hybrid forms. Roxburgh suggests the complexity of depicted. Were the stylized forms to be reconfigured in an alternative manner, the

this aesthetic world when he notes that "some have criticized this literary process scenes would no longer be recognizable.54 Dost Muhammed theorized that the

50. For a discussion of "pouncing" as a method of transfer, see Roxburgh, "Persian Drawing, ca. 1400-1450: Materials and Creative Pr-ocedures," Muqarnas 19 (Brill, 2002): 60- 63. 53. Roxburgh, Prefacing the Image, 87. 51. Roxburgh, "Persian Drawing," 67. 54. Golombek, 32. 52. Lentz, 260. Guita Lamsechi 190 189 Toward Reflexive Practice indigenous to this cultural context and that operate within this highly self­ history of Persianate depiction is a history of graphic outlines or a series of

5 referential visual language. archetypes refmed and perfected in the course of a visual tradition. 5 What has been attempted here is to indicate the direction in which work There is a marked contrast in the evaluation of Persianate art during the on Persianate art must proceed if it is to recover from the limitations that have fifteenth century compared with the value placed on originality and individual been imposed by colonial hubris. As Herbert notes, such an endeavour itself is expression as a criterion of artistic merit in the European tradition beginning in fraught with the dangers of hubris: "escape from the colonial may not be possible; Quattrocento Italy. The intertwining of drawing, painting and calligraphy in to attempt to escape, paradoxically, may prove the most colonial gesture of all."58 Persianate art underscores the functional and theoretical importance of Persianate Binyon et al. tend to devalue Persianate art through an assertion of its drawing of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Medieval Islamic manuscript "fundamental and unfathomable difference," in Herbert's terms.59 Roxburgh paintings operate through a system of static symbols meant to be decoded as an himself may also be liable to the charge of "cultural acquisitiveness" in attempting intellectual exercise.s6 This decoding can only take place when considered within a "to appreciate a different culture on its own terms."6° This would be, Herbert says, tradition of repetition, through which the visual art accumulates a kind of exegetical merely the other side of the colonial coin. As Herbert demonstrates in his critique force, revealing its deep relationship with the literary tradition. In this context, the of Spivak and in his own self-critique, there is no privileged 'Archimedean point' European notion of innovation would simply be disruptive and necessarily from which we may with assurance avoid all traces of the colonial.61 Our work is detrimental to the force and meaning of the individual work. Originality, in the bound to be troublingly imperfect and no less so than the work of our forbearers. Perso-Islarnic world, must operate very differently. As Serpil Bagci puts it, It behooves us, then, to confront their work, and the art itself, with a significant originality "was understood as being an individual contribution to the existing measure of humility. tradition."57 The mode of expression is culturally encoded by processes that are If the tools traditionally used in the approach to Perso-Islarnic art have

restricted our understanding of it, it is because those tools were developed for the 55. Abdi Beg Shirazi's so-called "Theory of Two Pens" (attributed to Ali b. Ali Talib) elides writing with depiction in the 'A'in-i Iskandari' (Rules of Alexander) composed in ve:se in elucidation of Western art and are appropriate to it. They are less suited to 1543-4. The objective of the standardized archetypes of depiction, like the standardized Persianate art. Their indiscriminate use seems to result in a colonialist attitude forms used in writing, was to see past the appearance of the visible to and to make a ' distillation of essential properties. This idea was a pervasive one, reappearing in Dost Muhammed's Preface. Qutb al-Din Muhammed quoted from Abdi Beg Shirazi in a preface he composed in 1556 for an album to be examined at assemblies. See Porter, 109-118; Roxburgh, Prefacing the Image, 199. 58. Ibid., 215. 56. Golombek, 32; Oleg Grabar, Mostfy Miniatures, Princeton New Jersy, Princeton University 59. Ibid., 215. Press, 140-141. 60. Ibid., 215. 57. Serpil Bagci, "From Translated Word To Translated Image: The Illustrated 'Sehname-i 61. Ibid., 219. Turki' Copies," Muqarnas 17 (2000): 162, n. 3, 4. 191 Toward Reflexive Practice hampering the efforts of scholars in coming to grips with this art and discouraging them from engaging with the intellectual content of this highly academic art. A poor understanding of the literary context of Persianate art, combined with the application of largely irrelevant criteria, has led to its relegation to merely

"decorative" status. Scholars such as Dav-id Roxburgh, however, are working to rectify this situation thanks to their self-reflexive approach. The application of postcolonial theory, as James Herbert understands it, to this area of art historiography will continue to help remove obstacles to a fuller understanding of

Persianate art.

Fig. 1: R.ustam and I.ifandtjtir, 1430. 193 194 About the Authors Jennifer Kozerawski

] ennifer Kozerawski is a recent graduate from the University of Toronto Meg Campbell where sh: completed her undergraduate Hon. B.A. degree in Fine Art History and Architecture. Currendy, she continues to attend interest courses in Meg Campbell is entering her final year of a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree, with a art history at the university and is a volunteer at the Royal Ontario major in Visual Studies and minors in Art History and English. She works mosdy Mus~um. In the future, she hopes to pursue the study of ancient art and in photography and painting and has a particular interest in the study of architecture at graduate school. Contemporary art. Guita Lamsechi Maranatha Coulas Guita Lamsechi recendy completed her M.A. in Art History, and is currendy a Maranatha Coulas is in her final year of her undergraduate degree in Fine Art Ph.D. student at the Uruverstty of Toronto with an interest in Persianate art. History and Geography at the University of Toronto. She grew up in the Muskoka cottage country region but feels that Toronto life has become a major part who she Sarah Stanners is. Following the completion of her undergraduate degree, Maranatha will be applying to the Master of Architecture program at U ofT in the pursuit of her Sarah Stanne~s ~sa Ph.D. ~tudent in the History of Art at the University of dream of becoming a leading-edge architect. Toronto and 1s l~terested 111 Amencan and Canadian abstract painting. Sarah is also currendy the Asststant Curator of the Hart House Permanent Collection. Allan Doyle

Allan Doyle is a first year M.A. candidate in Art History and a practicing artist. His research interests include nineteenth-century European painting, contemporary art and critical theory.

Irmgard Emmelhainz

Originally from Mexico, Irmgard Emmelhainz is a 1st year Ph.D. candidate at the University of Toronto specializing in experimental illm and video art.

Sarah Guerin

Sarah Guerin is a second year Ph.D. student in the direct entry program. After a flirtation with Modern Art and Theory, she has decided to focus on the Medieval Art of twelfth and thirteenth century Europe.

Candice Hamelin

Candice Hamelin has an undergraduate degree from U ofT in Human Biology with minors are Chemistry and English. After completing her degree, she traveled to China and taught math and chemistry at a Canadian school in Guangdong province. \JV'hile in Asia, Candice decided to return to U ofT, where she plans on taking a few more modern art courses in the fall of 2004 and applying to the graduate program. Candice is interested in pursuing an academic career in the study of Modern Art.