A quarterly magazine of art and culture Issue 9 CHILDHOOD WINTER 2002/03 CABINET US $8 Canada $13 UK £6

columns 9 THE CLEAN ROOM / SUPERFLY ME TO THE MOON David serlin Race, physiology, and the culture of aerospace science

13 LEFTOVERS / AT DEATH’S DOORKNOB paul collins The bloody-minded invention of Dr. Dibble

15 COLORS / SULphur THOMAS BELLER Moody, toxic, light, and tasty

17 INGESTION / CULINARY LANDSCAPES ALLEN s. WEISS Antonin Carême, the Palladio of cuisine

maIN 21 The Wall and the Eye: An Interview with Eyal Weizman Jeffrey Kastner & Sina Najafi Architecture and negative planning in the

32 Paint Your Troubles Away Richard Fleming A wall with a view in an Israeli settlement

35 Cable TV’s Failed Utopian Vision: An Interview with Dara Birnbaum Nicolás Guagnini Televisual activism and the revolution that never was

41 Thaddeus Cahill’s “Music Plant” Brian Dewan The Telharmonium and the promise of electrical music on tap

42 artist project: To be looked at, from a distance, with eyes crossed Dan Wolgers

43 Hello, nice to meet you, do you want to go to Holland?: A conversation with Robert Kloos and Mónica de la Torre Regine Basha How cultural attachés sell their countries

48 Save Your Family Jay Worthington Readers’ photos, protected until 2047

childhood 51 Fröbel and the Gifts of Kindergarten Norman Brosterman Cultivating the modern child in the garden of play

58 Artist Project: School Year Helen Mirra

65 Where the Wild Things Were: An Interview with Leonard S. Marcus David Serlin & Brian Selznick The history of children’s literature from Orbis Pictus to The Rabbits’ Wedding

70 ARTIST PROJECT: A Pack of Blind Sniffing Dogs Byron Kim

72 Picturing Innocence: An Interview with Anne Higonnet Sina Najafi From the ideal child to the knowing child

78 Does a Proletarian Child Need a Fairytale? Alla Rosenfeld The Soviet Production Book for Children

83 Artist project: ON READING Wendy Ewald 86 The Doll Games Shelley & Pamela Jackson Thirty years on, a scholarly reconsideration of the Jacksons’ childhood world

92 Homo Bulla: An Interview with Sabine Mödersheim Kris Coue The trouble with bubbles

95 Artist project: Drawings Marcel Dzama

99 Finders Keepers Michael Witmore On the history of prodigies

102 Artist project: Praxis Dr. Kössendrup Aura Rosenberg

104 Skabbetti, peas, apple cake, and ice cream anonymous A meal based on recipes by children

105 Special CD insert: Juvenilia curated by Brian Conley & Christoph Cox

108 Artist Project: Sound of Music Barbara Pollack

110 Model child: An Interview with Max Berger Joseph R. Wolin On being photographed. Constantly. By your mother.

112 Some Relics of Childhood Rodney Phillips Early works by Auden, Isherwood, Kerouac, Plath, and Shelley

116 Artist Project: Sculpture from Drawing Billy & Christo Halloway

119 The Rough Guide: Favell Lee Mortimer’s The Countries of Europe Described Todd Pruzan A xenophobic travelogue for Victorian tots

AND postcard Babies of the World, Unite! cabinet Immaterial Incorporated Cabinet is a non-profit 501 (c) (3) magazine published by Immaterial 181 Wyckoff Street Brooklyn NY 11217 USA Incorporated. Contributions to Cabinet magazine are fully tax-deductible. tel + 1 718 222 8434 Donors of $50 or more will be ackowledged in the magazine and further fax + 1 718 222 3700 enriched by receiving some form of edifying tchotchke from us. Checks email [email protected] made out to “Cabinet” can be sent to our address. Please mark the envelope www.cabinetmagazine.org “Donation. Not to be spent on doughnuts or other late-night junk food.”

Editor-in-chief Sina Najafi Cabinet wishes to thank the following foundations and individuals for their Senior editor Jeffrey Kastner generous support. Editors Frances Richard, David Serlin, Gregory Williams CD editors Brian Conley & Christoph Cox The Flora Family Foundation Art directors (Cabinet) Ariel Apte & Sarah Gephart of mgmt. The New York State Council on the Arts Managing editor & graphic designer Brian McMullen The Frankel Foundation Art director (Immaterial Incorporated) Richard Massey/OIG The Peter Norton Family Foundation Image editor Naomi Ben-Shahar “Childhood” image editing Brian Selznick Debbie Yu Editors-at-large Saul Anton, Mats Bigert, Jesse Lerner, Allen S. Weiss, Edward Wilson & Hesu Coue Jay Worthington Kendall B. McGreggor Website Kristofer Widholm & Luke Murphy Lydia Denworth & Mark Justh Production manager Sarah Crowner Ted Hartigan Development consultant Alex Villari Corina Goulden Contributing editors Joe Amrhein, Molly Bleiden, Eric Bunge, Andrea Codrington, Christoph Cox, Cletus Dalglish-Schommer, Pip Day, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss, Dejan Krsic, Tan Lin, Roxana Marcoci, Ricardo de Oliveira, Phillip Scher, Rachel Schreiber, Lytle Shaw, Debra Singer, Cecilia Sjöholm, Sven-Olov Wallenstein Research assistants Sasha Archibald, Amoreen Armetta, Christine Potts Prepress Zvi @ Digital Ink Founding editors Brian Conley & Sina Najafi

Printed in Belgium by Die Keure

Cabinet (ISSN 1531-1430) is a quarterly magazine published by Immaterial Incorporated, 181 Wyckoff Street, Brooklyn, NY 11217. Periodicals Postage paid at Brooklyn, NY and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send address changes to Cabinet, 181 Wyckoff Street, Brooklyn, NY 11217

Subscriptions Individual one-year subscriptions (in US Dollars): $24, Europe and Canada $34, Mexico $50, Other $60 Institutional one-year subscriptions (in US Dollars): United States $30, Europe and Canada $42, Mexico $60, Other $75

Please either send a check in US dollars made out to “Cabinet,” or send, fax, or email us your Visa/Mastercard/American Express/Discover information. To process your credit card, we need your name, card number, expiry date, and billing address. You can also subscribe directly on our website at www.cabinetmagazine.org with a credit card. Institutions can also subscribe through EBSCO and Swets Blackwell. Back issues available in the US for $12. For prices outside the US, please see back page or email us.

Advertising Email @cabinetmagazine.org or call + 1 718 222 8434.

Distribution US and Canada: Big Top Newstand Services, a division of the IPA. For more information, call + 1 415 643 0161, fax + 1 415 643 2983, or email [email protected]. Europe: Central Books, London. Email: [email protected] Cabinet is also available through Tower stores around the world. Please send distribution questions to [email protected]

Cabinet accepts unsolicited manuscripts and artist projects, preferably sent by e-mail to [email protected] as a Microsoft Word document or in Rich Text Format. Hard copies should be double-spaced and in duplicate. We do not publish poetry. Please see www.cabinetmagazine.org for our sub- mission guidelines. We can only return materials if a self-addressed, stamped envelope is provided.

Contents © 2002 Immaterial Incorporated & the authors, artists, translators. cover: The 19th-century French neurologist Duchenne de Boulogne applying All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction of any material here is a no-no. electricity to stimulate a young girl’s individual facial muscles. The views published in this magazine are not necessarily those of the writers, Source: Duchenne’s 1862 book The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression let alone the cowardly editors of Cabinet. page 1: Samuel Kastner’s drawing of the cover, 2002 Erratum: We offer apologies to John Roberts. The first footnote of his essay “ The Logics opposite: Annika von Hausswolff, Girl with Chainsaw, 2002 of Deflation” in issue 8 was also printed as the final paragraph of the text. courtesy Casey Kaplan Gallery

Contributors founder of Clockwork Apple in New York City.

Ellen Band is a composer and sound artist based in Somerville, Massachusetts. Annika von Hausswolff is an artist based in Stockholm. She is represented Her first solo CD, 90% Consumer Sound, was released by XI Records in by Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York, and by Andréhn-Schiptjenko Gallery, 2000. In 1994, she founded Audible Visions, a performance space for new Stockholm. music and sound art in Somerville. Anne Higonnet is a Professor at the Department of Art History and Archaeo- Regine Basha works independently as a curator, writer and co-producer of logy at Barnard College. She is the author of Pictures of Innocence: The History public projects. She is the former Cultural Affairs Officer for the Canadian and Crisis of Ideal Childhood (Thames & Hudson, 1998) and Berthe Morisot Consulate in New York. (Harper Collins, 1990).

Tom Beller is a writer and founding editor of Open City. He is based in New York. Susanna Hood is a choreographer, composer, dancer, producer, singer, and actor based in Toronto. Max Berger, son of Barbara Pollack and Joel Berger, is a freshman at Brooklyn Tech High School. In 1998, he received a national photography award from the John Hudak, based in Dobbs Ferry, New York, creates sonic of the Boys and Girls Club of America. His next project, “Max’s 15th Birthday Party,” sounds that surround him in his everyday life. The sounds that result from his will be presented at Participant, Inc. in January 2003. manipulations retain the essence of the original sounds, but transform them into ghost-like afterimages. New York-based artist and independent producer Dara Birnbaum has achieved international recognition within the arts, spurring some of the most controver- Pamela Jackson is an independent scholar. She is working on a book about sial discussions in contemporary media exploration. She is the recipient of the Philip K. Dick. American Film Institute’s prestigious Maya Deren Award, among numerous other awards from international film and video festivals. Her work is part of Shelley Jackson is the author of The Melancholy of Anatomy, a collection of renowned permanent collections both in this country and abroad. short stories, and Patchwork Girl, a hypertext novel.

Philip Blackburn, a native of Cambridge, , received a doctorate from Jeffrey Kastner is a Brooklyn-based writer and senior editor of Cabinet. the University of Iowa and has been senior program director at the American Composers Forum since 1991. “Enclosures”– his 15-year project to publish Samuel Kastner is a Brooklyn-based artist, writer, and third grader. Harry Partch’s works in a series of videos, CDs and a book– received an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award. Blackburn runs the Innova Recordings new-music CD Byron Kim is an artist with a studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Lisa Sigal (also an label and co-founded the Sonic Circuits International Electronic Music Festival. artist), Emmett Kim, Ella Bea Kim and Adeline Kim live with him in Park Slope.

Norman Brosterman is the author of Inventing Kindergarten (Harry N. Abrams, Robert Kloos is Director for Visual Arts, Architecture & Design at the Consulate 1997). General of the Netherlands in New York.

Paul Collins is the author of Banvard’s Folly and the forthcoming Sixpence Julia Loktev is a filmmaker and video installation artist based in New York. House: Lost in a Town of Books (Bloomsbury). He edits the Collins Library (col- Her feature film, Moment of Impact, was screened in numerous international linslibrary.com) for McSweeney’s Books. film festivals and won the Directing Award at the Sundance Festival. Her video installation work will be exhibited at the Whitney Museum this spring. Brian Conley is New York-based artist and a founding editor of Cabinet. Leonard S. Marcus is the author of Ways of Telling: Conversations on the Art Christoph Cox teaches philosophy and contemporary music at Hampshire of the Picture Book (Dutton, 2002) and Storied City: A Children’s Book Guide to College in Amherst, Massachusetts. He is a contributing editor of Cabinet. New York City (Dutton, forthcoming 2003). He lives in New York.

Brian Dewan makes filmstrips, parlor music and mini-architecture in Brooklyn, Vincent Mazeau is an artist/designer living and working in New York. He is a New York. He also makes electronic music and plays electric zither in the founding member of Big Room, a New York-based association of artists and Raymond Scott Orchestrette. designers.

Edmond M. Dewan has been a research scientist at Hanscom Field Air Force Helen Mirra is represented by Meyer Riegger Galerie, Karlsruhe. She is senior lec- Base since 1957. His early work includes a theory of REM sleep and the first turer in Visual Arts and Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Chicago. demonstration of a machine controlled directly by a human brain. Since then his work involves atmospheric bores, gravity waves, turbulence, and stellar Sabine Mödersheim is Assistant Professor at the Department of German scintillation. at the University of Wisconsin Madison.

Marcel Dzama was born in 1974 in Winnipeg, Canada, where he lives and Gen Ken Montgomery is a sound artist who has lived and worked in New York works. His work has recently been seen in a solo exhibition at Timothy Taylor since 1978. Montgomery was one of the original founders of Generation Unlim- Gallery in London and in the 47th Biennial of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in ited and the Pogus Productions record labels, and in 1989 founded Washington, D.C. Generator, the first sound art gallery in New York City. He continues to produce concerts and recordings of his work and other sound artists. Email: genken@ Catharine H. Echols is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of generatorsoundart.org , Austin. She conducts research on language acquisition. Luna Montgomery, born in Brooklyn, is an actress/singer/musician/ dancer/ Wendy Ewald is artist-in-residence at the John Hope Franklin Center; a senior performance artist and seventh grader. She has been seen in the Swans video research associate at the Center for Documentary Studies at ; “Love of Life” and in Zoe Beloff’s 3-D film Shadowland. Her voice has been heard and a senior fellow at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School on the radio, on CDs and on answering machines between New York and Italy. University. Her collaborative works are in the collections of major museums and the subject of seven books, including Secret Games: Collaborative Works with Sina Najafi is editor-in-chief of Cabinet. Children 1969-1999 (Scalo, 2000). John Oswald is a musician and sound/multimedia artist based in Toronto. Bill Farrell is doing post-doctoral research in behavioral neuroscience at the Director of Research at Mystery Laboratory, he developed the art of “plunder- University of Texas, Austin. phonics,” critical and creative audio cut-ups of popular music. Oswald is also an improvising saxophonist who has played and recorded with artists including Teddy Fire was born in the same year as Never Mind the Bollocks. In his late Henry Kaiser, Derek Bailey, Jim O’Rourke, and the Canadian collective CCMC. teens, he gave up music and poetry and now works in a record store in Boston. Rodney Phillips is Director of Humanities and Social Sciences at the New York Richard Fleming records sound for documentary films and enjoys taking long Public Library. He is the author, with Steve Clay, of A Secret Location on the walks. Currently he is writing Walking to Guantanamo, a book about crossing Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing, 1960-1980 (Granary Books/NYPL, Cuba lengthwise. He lives near the water in Brooklyn. 1998), and his chapbook of poems, made in collaboration with the painter John Jurayj, has just been released by Granary Books. His poems have appeared in Ted Gannon is a composer, sound designer, and multi-instrumentalist based in numerous journals, including the Paris Review and Fence. He lives in New York New York. City.

Nicolás Guagnini is an artist and writer living in New York. He is also co-founder Barbara Pollack is an artist and writer who has had solo shows at the Holly Solo- of Union Gaucha Productions, an experimental and independent film produc- mon Gallery, Threadwaxing Space and Esso Gallery, which represents her work. tion company. Her works are in collections of major museums; her upcoming shows include “PG-13,” a two-person show of video works at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Billy Halloway was born in 1997. He goes to school in New York City. in February 2003 and an installation at Trans> in May 2003. Christo Halloway was born in Zimbabwe in 1953. He is a model-maker and the Todd Pruzan is an editor at Blender magazine. His writing has appeared in publications including Magazine, the Washington Post, the Village Voice, the New Republic, and McSweeney’s. He lives in Brooklyn.

Aura Rosenberg is an artist who lives in New York City and Berlin. She is represented by Gasser & Grunert gallery in New York. Her book Berlin Childhood has just been released by Steidl/DAAD. She teaches at the School of Visual Arts and the Pratt Institute and her agency is Issue Management.

Alla Rosenfeld, a native of , is currently Director of the Department of Russian Art and Senior Curator of Russian and Soviet Nonconformist Art at the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. She is also a Ph.D. candidate at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Brian Selznick has written and/or illustrated many books for children, including The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins, which was awarded a 2002 Caldecott Honor.

David Serlin is an editor and columnist for Cabinet. He is the co-editor of Artificial Parts, Practical Lives: Modern Histories of Prosthetics (NYU Press, 2002). He can be reached at [email protected]

Thuunderboy, born Ted Conrad, is now 31 years old and living in Queens.

Mónica de la Torre is co-author of Appendices, Illustrations & Notes (Smart Art Press) and editor of the anthology Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry, recently published by Copper Canyon Press.

Allen S. Weiss has been working hard on ingestion: He recently co-edited French Food (Routledge), and his Feast and Folly is forthcoming (SUNY).

Eyal Weizman is an architect, based in Tel-Aviv and London, who has conducted research on behalf of the human rights organization B’tselem on the planning aspects of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. Weizman is currently developing his doctoral thesis “The Politics of Verticality: Architecture and Occupation in the West Bank” into a TV documentary film and a book to be published next year.

Gregory Whitehead is a playwright, radio artist and voice performer who makes frequent excursions into the occluded soundscapes of the dead. Recent works include O Monstrous Voice Like Mine and Everything I Know About Glossolalia.

Michael Witmore teaches English at Carnegie Mellon University. His book, Culture of Accidents: Unexpected Knowledges in Early Modern England, was just published by Stanford University Press.

Dan Wolgers is a Swedish artist living and working in Stockholm.

Joseph R. Wolin is a curator and critic in New York. His most recent project, “Royal Art Lodge: Volume 1,” curated with Wayne Baerwaldt, will open at The Drawing Center in New York in January 2003 and travel to The Power Plant in Toronto and De Vleeshal in Middelburg, the Netherlands.

Jay Worthington is a lawyer in New York City. He is also one of the founders of Clubbed Thumb, an independent theater company in New York, and editor-at- large at Cabinet. columns “The Clean Room,” David Serlin’s column on science and tech- The clean Room / SUPER- nology, appears in each issue. / “Leftovers” is a column that FLY ME TO THE MOON examines the cultural significance of leftovers or detritus. / David Serlin “Colors” is a column where a guest writer is asked to respond to a specific color assigned by the editors of Cabinet. / …There was a good view of the Earth which had a very distinct and pretty blue halo. It had a smooth transition from pale blue, “Ingestion” is Allen S. Weiss’s column on cuisine, aesthetics, blue, dark blue, violet and absolutely black. It was a magnifi- and philosophy. cent picture. – Yuri Gagarin at his first press conference,15 April 1961.

In early 2002, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced that it had cut $16 million from its annual budget originally earmarked for developing a smaller space suit for female astronauts.1 The decision, which angered women scientists and their supporters both inside and outside the space industry, came as a surprise to those who have witnessed NASA’s commitment to gen- der equity expand over the past three decades. Prior to the 1990s, most space suits were custom-tailored to the individual physical measurements of (predominantly male) astronauts. But in recent years, in keeping with its mandate to make its gear reusable and cost-efficient for the long term, NASA has chosen to make available space suits in only three sizes: medium, large, and extra-large. According to NASA’s own internal accounting, these three sizes work for about 90 percent of the men in the space program but only about 35 percent of the women, most of whom tend to have smaller chests and shorter arm spans than their male counterparts. Smaller sized suits, if built, could accommodate up to 95 per- cent of the female astronauts currently enrolled in the space program. Indeed, creating a smaller range of space suits would benefit all astronauts of smaller stature, regardless of their gender, as it would allow many individuals a greater degree of physical control prohibited by the larger suits. The demand by women astronauts for smaller-sized space suits highlights the relative homogeneity and uniformity of astronaut culture as it has evolved over the past half century. Until very recently in NASA’s history, women and minorities were almost universally excluded, especially since airplane pilot training was typically the prerequisite for NASA’s first roster of astronauts. The tacit emphasis given over to the needs of male astronauts, whether in space suits or in laboratory experiments, has obscured the needs of not only women but of women and men of varying sizes and physical characteristics. The privilege accorded to the male astronaut’s space suit by aerospace scientists and NASA administrators is, of course, hardly surprising: in the space sciences, as in the life sciences more generally, the male body is used as the uninterrogated base line of our species from which all variations and permutations emerge. Built upon centuries of passive assumptions and naturalized across a billion cultural exchanges, male privilege is the thin, alien oxygen that science sips to stay alive. The internal history of astronauts and their haberdashers suggests how the focus on physiology and the norms generated thereby have contributed to an exclusive culture of male, and specifically white male, aerospace science. Long before Yuri Gagarin or Alan Shepherd were ever catapulted into their lonely orbits, scientists in the aeronautics indus- tries during the 1930s and 1940s chose young white men for their leadership potential or their technical expertise to be part of the vanguard of experimental aeronautics. In order to train pilots for long-range air activities, officers chose men who could endure high altitudes and fast speeds as well as extreme conditions such as heat, cold, fatigue, hunger, and sleep deprivation. Ross A. McFarland, who chaired the Harvard School of Public Health in the late 1940s and early 1950s, used the cream of military recruits to study the effects of alcohol, tobacco, and carbon monoxide on human performance. His laboratory studies pushed the body’s limitations and charted its circadian rhythms in order to understand and even predict the extreme conditions of

air travel on the human body. Nonwhite pilots, such as the indebted to British high modernism. Elton’s astronaut pines famous Tuskegee Airmen, were kept isolated from the rest of for his family, desperate to “only connect” like E.M. the armed forces during World War Two and were Forster, while Bowie’s Major Tom does a Virginia Woolf naturally excluded from such tests, creating a shallow pool and disappears into the black void of space altogether. By of applicants on whom to base the latest equipment designs contrast, when themes of space exploration and visitation or model the latest pressure suits. occur in black popular music of the 1970s—such as in con- By the time NASA reorganized administratively for outer cept albums by George Clinton/Parliament Funkadelic—they space explorations in the late 1950s, the culture of astronaut are community-based narratives filled with deft humor and training followed from the studies conducted on a small, social critique, tied inextricably to the house party dance elite sector of Navy and Air Force pilots, most of whom were floor rather than the isolated teenage bower. chosen because they fit the masculine ideal required of The racial barrier for black astronauts was finally broken specialized military personnel. Notwithstanding thorny ques- at the end of the 1970s, three decades after the consolida- tions about race, physiology, and performance tion of a federally funded aerospace industry. Major Robert that continue to vex contemporary biologists and social Lawrence, Jr., an Air Force test pilot who held a Ph.D. in theorists, the physical standards that gave rise to an exclu- chemistry, is often recognized as the first black astronaut sively white population of aircraft pilots in the 1940s dictated though he never left the earth. Lawrence was killed in the the selection process for astronauts in the 1950s and 1960s. crash of an F-104 fighter in December1967 just six months An unproblematized belief in the relationship between high after he was named to the Air Force's manned orbiting levels of performance and white male body types influenced laboratory program, a short-lived precursor to NASA training every aspect of astronaut training from endurance tests and that closed in 1969. Had he survived the crash, Lawrence health care needs to ergonomic designs for cockpit interiors would have been America's lone black astronaut until NASA and space suits. chose three black trainees for the space program in 1978. Despite the inability of non-whites to participate as actual Dr. Guion S. Bluford, one of those three black trainees, astronauts, the relationship between space and race in the became the first African-American man in space when he 20th century was vividly imagined in both political discourse was named to the crew of the space shuttle Challenger and cultural works. Both black and white visionaries used in 1983; coincidentally or not, it was the first space shuttle space as an arena for reimagining the possibility of social flight both to launch and land during the night. Dr. Mae C. and political systems outside of the daily indignities com- Jeminson, the first African-American woman in space, made manded by prejudice, often configured as the transgalactic even more spectacular headlines when she flew aboard the egalitarianisms seen in popular entertainments like Star Trek. space shuttle Endeavor in 1992. Long before the arrival of Lieutenant Uhuru on the bridge But the era of seemingly unlimited equal opportunity for of the starship Enterprise, however, black intellectuals and astronauts is more deceptively complex than it might appear political figures adapted themes to challenge at first glance, challenging the narrative of immutable social racial hierarchies. In the 1940s, for example, Elijah Moham- progress at the heart of any civil rights agenda. In 2000, Rus- med, the originator of the Nation of Islam in the United sian officials announced the availability of space aboard its States and former mentor to Malcolm X, explained the his- Soyuz 5 rocket for the small price tag of $20 million. tory of global race relations as a space drama of One year later, and exactly four decades after cosmonaut operatic proportions. Following an initial Big Bang and 66 Gagarin’s historic mission during the height of the Cold trillion years of cosmic peace, an evil black scientist named War, white American businessman Dennis Tito ponied up Yakub was credited with having created the white race in a the dough and became a Soyuz 5 Nominated Space Flight period of only 600 years. In 1991, Minister Louis Farrakhan, Participant. Short, squat, and well above the median age of who assumed the Nation of Islam’s political leadership, male astronauts of any nationality, Tito realized his life-long announced that he had been taken aboard a wheel-shaped dream of space tourism, bypassing the regimentation of spacecraft currently in orbit 40 miles above the earth for a NASA’s astronaut training program for post-communist Rus- consultation with Elijah Mohammed. In addition, Farrakhan sia’s embrace of cold hard cash. More recently, Lance Bass described a formidable battalion of fifteen hundred smaller of the boy band ‘NSync negotiated and won available space space ships housed in the mother ship, though it is unclear aboard the first Soyuz rocket scheduled to depart in2003 on exactly who or what is piloting these spacecraft. One a ticket paid for by Pepsi. Television networks, taking advan- wonders why the Nation of Islam keeps its astronaut training tage of this new frontier of product placement, are preparing program surreptitiously hidden from public view. to launch new space-based reality TV programs, including Black artists in the 1950s and 1960s were reliable pro- one called Celebrity Mission which will follow Bass’s adven- ponents of space travel to imagined worlds. With the tures. One imagines a succession of images of the maudlin mainstreaming of the civil rights movement and the inter- singer giving, with Glasnost-inspired earnestness, a pearly- national rise of Black Power as a political force, space toothed, life-affirming thumbs-up for the umpteenth time to exploration could be used to investigate ideas of race pride, the on-board cameras. The whole enterprise will resurrect race neutrality, or the absence of race altogether. Many black the pre-Warholian transmutation of ordinary people into musicians maintained a deep and abiding interest in space extraordinary super-citizens reminiscent of popular Sputnik- themes: Thelonius Monk, for example, rechristened himself era television shows like Queen for a Day and This is Your Life. with the middle name of “Sphere,” while Sun Ra claimed Future installments of Celebrity Mission will follow big-name an intergalactic citizenship influenced by theories of space (though obviously ) industry icons as they mawk- visitors to ancient Egypt. The angular abstractions of Monk’s ishly writhe in zero gravity. and Sun Ra’s music, coupled with unconventional time sig- In early 2002, at approximately the same moment that natures and arrangements, stood in stark contrast to popular NASA had chosen to dismantle its program for designing music of the era, with the noticeable exception of The Torna- smaller-sized space suits, Mark Shuttleworth of Cape Town, does’ 1962 instrumental “Telstar,” a wordless though eerie South Africa, became the world’s second space tourist. paean to the unknown. International hits of the early 1970s Shuttleworth, in the words of Nelson Mandela, assumed the like David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” Elton John’s “Rocket stature of “our first Afronaut.” But reading Shuttleworth’s Man,” and Klaatu’s “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary biography alongside his temporary title of Soyuz 5 Nomi- Craft” are, for all of their conceptual drama, basically nated Space Flight Participant, words like “nominated” and solipsistic teenage fantasies of white alienation deeply “participant” seem exceptionally awkward given the relationship between the light-skinned Afronaut and the apartheid society in which he spent his formative years. previous: Neznaika, hero of Nikolai Nosov’s Russian children’s book, Neznaika on the In the end, the twentysomething Shuttleworth—who made Moon, 1965. his $600 million fortune by inventing the prototype for Veri- practically indestructible.” Starting out as brownish powder Sign, the encryption software used by millions of Internet resembling snuff, hemacite could be molded into any retail sites around the world—followed the trajectory of least shape and dyed to any color, and it became a popular and resistance by following the privileges of wealth rather than reasonably priced substitute for both and metal among the triumphs of democracy. Riding on the Soyuz 5 enabled architect and decorators. Shuttleworth to bypass the demands for racial and social jus- In fact, by the time of the Manufacturer and Builder article, tice still needed in his own home country as well as in other the Trenton headquarters of the Dibble Manufacturing Com- postcolonial nations. Multimillionaires, after all, have no pany had been for some years producing hemacite house need to challenge the gravity that weighs down the rest of us trimmings and drawer pulls, and it now had a catalogue of here on earth. The historical precedents that restricted mobil- hundreds of designs of their most popular product, hemacite ity for astronauts of any color other than white are erased doorknobs. The doorknobs carried a guarantee for the life- from popular consciousness once again by the 800-pound time of the door, because rather than having a separate knob gorilla of capitalism: a creature which, despite its colossal and shaft to wear out, they were molded as one unbreakable size, undoubtedly has its own space suit. piece. It was a successful enough product that Dibble eliminated his own name from the enterprise entirely: Tren- 1 See Andrew Lawler, “NASA Decision Not Suited for Women,” in Science, vol. 295 (1 March ton became the proud home of the Hemacite Manufacturing 2002), p. 1623. Company. Dibble branched out into products like hemacite cash reg- ister buttons and, quick to pick up on the latest fads, roller LEFTOVERs / AT DEATH’S DOORKNOB skates.3 “To skate manufacturers and dealers,” boasted an PAUL COLLINS ad in the 11 October 1885 issue of the New York Times, “the superiority of our Hemacite Roller over boxwood is now well known.” The campaign seems to have worked: the Disposing of very large quantities of blood is an onerous 21 February 1903 Times carries an ad by the Siegel Cooper chore. You can't give the stuff away—well, perhaps you can, department store, hawking athletic supplies, and nestled but few are willing to endure the stares that proving this point among promotions for medicine balls and $12 Swedish entails. Dogskin Coats (“For sporting use or driving”) is an entry for Yet the slaughtering and butchering trade has long faced 75-cent roller skates with hemacite wheels, a more expen- precisely this dilemma. London butchers in Newport Market sive option than skates with plain “black wheels.” Curiously, during the 19th century were banned from tipping blood Siegel Cooper's ad appears over a plug for Plasmon Cocoa into the street sewers, due to the rats it attracted, though mix—”A blood-invigorating and muscle-making beverage of enough of them flouted this law that sewers under meat mar- the highest order.” Plasmon’s active invigorating ingredient? kets became commonly known as “blood sewers.” Among Albumen, which was also the organic binding agent behind London sewer workers, toiling in these “blood lines” vied in hemacite roller skate wheels. unpleasantness with the caustic rivers that ran W.H. Dibble was certainly an inventive fellow, having pre- under soapmakers and the boiling drains beneath sugar refin- viously patented a dentist’s contraption to simultaneously eries. Indeed, one of the better ways for meat merchants to pry patients’ mouths open while draining away their saliva, dispose of cattle blood was by selling it to these sugar mills, but his hemacite products were not quite the amazing inno- 1 which used it in their refining process. vation that he led others to believe.4 Like a true American, Recycling was already the order of the day: bones were what he had really done was nick a foreign idea and improve ground up for phosphorus matches, tobacco ash was turned upon it. Long before Dibble’s 1877 application, the Parisian into tooth-cleanser, old wool sweaters shredded into wallpa- writer Francois Lepage secured an 1855 patent for what he per flocking, and it was discovered that desiccated fish called bois durci: a pressurized mixture of and cattle eyes made delightful buds for artificial flowers. Unlucky stray blood or, less economically, egg whites. Lepage founded dogs wound up as phony cod-liver oil, and tallow makers in the Bois Durci Company and exhibited its wares at the Great Paris were not above fishing dead dogs and cats out of the International Exhibition of 1862, back when Dibble was still Seine when production quotas demanded it. tinkering with ways to suck the spit out of dental patients. But blood and animal waste remained a perennial problem. Bois durci went on to turn up in a variety of 19th century ink- New Yorkers found one promising use for it in the 1870s: stands, plaques, picture frames, and furniture; Edison even they tried mixing blood with other discarded offal to manure used it for the housing on early telephones.5 their fields.2 Even bois durci was not the first use of blood in buildings. But perhaps the most creative approach to blood disposal Cattle blood had long been used in “blood cements,”—as, for is one we might all still readily grasp, as this headline from that matter, had albumen from eggs, milk, and cheese. One the January 1892 issue of Manufacturer and Builder magazine Chinese recipe called for 100 parts slaked lime, 75 parts bull- attests: ocks’ blood, and 2 parts alum. Floors in South Africa gained a black marble-like polish with the use of blood, and an early Door Knobs, etc., from Blood and Sawdust. London tennis court acquired its hard and glossy surface in the same way; it has even been used as an additive in roofing Doctor W.H. Dibble, of New Jersey, had patented an excit- material.6 It seems there is no part of a house that cannot be ing material for interior decorators: hemacite, he called it. manufactured, in part, from blood. Hemacite, the magazine explained, was “nothing less than Hemacite certainly captured the attention of Victorian the blood of slaughtered cattle and sawdust, combined with architects. By the turn of the century, though, Dibble’s chemical compounds, under hydraulic pressure of forty thou- firm had already suffered a factory fire, moved shop to a sand pounds to the square inch.” new building, and changed its name to Trenton Brass and Sawdust back then had already found use in papermak- Machine Company. The old Hemacite Company was as much ing and as a filling for dolls, and desperate Swedes had also a victim of changing times as fire: new plastics like Bakelite figured out how to distill brandy from it. But these base were in the offing, pushing aside the quaint notion of saw- ingredients of blood and sawdust remained plentiful, and dust mixed with blood. The rechristened company soldiered were wonderfully effective when combined together as on for many more decades, surviving the Depression and an animal polymer, the blood’s albumen binding with the a postwar strike, and until recently still supplied fittings to wood particulate. “Hemacite,” noted the magazine, “is plumbing contractors. But even Trenton Brass is gone now, susceptible of a high polish, is impervious to heat, and with it the last faint trace of Dr. W.H. Dibble and his moisture, atmospherical changes, and, in fact, is 13 Hemacite Company.7

But old hemacite house fixtures, strong and durable as Moody sulphur. Sad sulphur. Asphyxiating toxic stink- they are, live on. So the next time you find yourself running bomb sulphur. Post-coital sulphur! Which was mine? Then short on bouillon, you may take this token of advice: con- it occurred to me that my first encounter with sulphur was sider boiling your doorknobs. happy. Almost ecstatic. It can be summed up in two words: Chemistry set. And within the chemistry set, test tubes. 1 The varieties of London sewers are from John Hollingshead’s splendid subterranean And within the test tubes, colored powders. The chemistry travelogue, Underground London (1862). set was a gift from my father, who had come home from 2 Recycling methods are from “The Art of Utilizing,” in Manufacturer and Builder, October some far away place. Presents my father brought me were 1871. Blood-manure and sawdust-brandy are described in Harper’s New Monthly Maga- highly prized, even though the jigsaw puzzle he’d returned zine, January 1874, p. 304. with from his last trip lay in a jumble on the floor, unsolved, 3 An unpaid bill owed to Hemacite by the August Cash Register Company is cited in the untried. I never did the puzzle, but I loved getting the pres- “Business Troubles” column of the New York Times for 14 February 1894. ent, the exchange of kisses, the coldness on his coat, his 4 See “Dibble’s Dental Apparatus,” in Scientific American, 30 September 1865. sandpaper cheek against my smooth one when he lifted me 5 A description of Bois Durci is available at Plastics Historical Society’s webpage at www. off the ground. plastic-museum.com. The chemistry set felt more than just fun, though; it had 6 See “Blood Used in Building,” in Notes and Queries, Series 10 no. 2 (1905), pp. 34-35, the aura of progress and self-improvement. I was about and no. 3, p. 373. eight years old. I imagined my room a laboratory filled with 7 See Edwin Robert Walker et al., The History of Trenton, 1679-1929 (Princeton: Princeton bubbling beakers, smoke rising in white puffs. My father University Press and the Trenton Historical Society, 1929). Gary Nigh of the Trenton Historical was a doctor, and I knew this had some tangential relation- Society provided valuable information on the company’s history. The strike is detailed in the ship with chemistry. Both disciplines involved men in white 16 March 1946 New York Times. smocks, experiments, charts. My father was a psychoana- lyst. I sensed some abstract link between his profession and the chemistry set: the deeply embedded patterns, the inter- COLORS / SULphur action of potent substances, playing with fire in a controlled THOMAS BELLER environment. There is an abundance of sulphur in the earth’s crust. It’s There’s a butterfly called the Orange Sulphur (Colias eury- especially abundant around volcanoes. Hot-springs smell of theme). It’s the color of a lemon drop. Another butterfly is sulphur. Geysers. Sulphur forced to the surface. You could called the Cloudless Sulphur (Phoebis sennae). It’s the color say sulphur is the fart of the earth. Perhaps sulphur is the of a creamsicle. unconscious of the earth. It lies unseen in the depths, but These are lovely colors, light and tasty. But they’re the manifests itself in all sorts of day-to-day items. bright side of sulphur. They don’t address the feeling of I took out the test tubes. In each was a different chemi- unease that comes over me at the thought of it, something cal, a different color. Sulphur did not stand out at first. I was menacing and hidden beneath the surface. Sulphur is a excited by the ambience of precision, but it was only an substance, a color, a flavor, and a smell. For me sulphur is ambience. I had no discipline. I liked to throw things out of a smell first, then a substance, finally a color. Perhaps it’s windows. I was a consumer of textures: the coarse, granu- a mood. What mood would be sulphuric? Pablo Neruda’s lated texture of Nestlé chocolate milk mix, which I fed into poem, “Walking Around,” as translated by W. S. Merwin, my mouth in heaping portions on which I nearly choked. The contains this stanza: melting, velvety texture of powdered sugar, which I fed into my mouth in heaping por tions on which I nearly choked. The There are birds the color of sulphur, bland, super-fine powder of straight flour, which I fed into and horrible intestines my mouth in heaping portions and nearly choked. I probably hanging from the doors of the houses which I hate, wasn’t the ideal kid for a chemistry set, not that I was there are forgotten sets of teeth in the coffee pot, going to eat it. But I was by then, also, a connoisseur of the there are mirrors dead silences of hallways and the little offices where schools which should have wept with shame and horror, keep the fixers and special helpers. Those were the days there are umbrellas all over the place, and poisons, when I made the rounds of little offices at my school: the and navels. assistant principal, the school psychologist, the math tutor, the English tutor. I was given ink spots to stare There is a bird that is, at least partially, the color of sulphur— at, blocks to play with. I was an expert at these interpretive the Sulphur-Crested Cockatoo. It has above-average talking games, but my handwriting was as legible as a Rorschach ability, apparently, and at the top of its precocious head is a test. I needed a handwriting coach, and Mr. Murphy was that fringe the color of light mustard. man. The Neruda poem brought me closer to the sulphur I was They had let him hang around after retirement to work looking for, but it was his mood, not mine. What did I think with some special cases. His eyes, on cold wintry days, about the color of sulphur? It escaped me. So I resorted to watered like crazy. If it wasn’t for his smile I would have the tactic of the indecisive, the eager to please: I took a poll. thought Mr. Murphy was crying. We met in a slightly musty Among friends after a meal I said, “Sulphur! What comes boardroom with couches along the walls and a long polished to mind?” table in the center where the trustees occasionally met and where disciplinary committees were often held. In later “Stink bombs!” years, when appearing before various tribunals in that room, “Something harsh and dangerous.” I would think it was lucky that Mr. Murphy wasn’t around to “Smelly, but not toxic. Maybe even good for you.” see me like this. The year after those quiet “Something lunar, spacey, airborne.” sessions, I was brought up on fireworks charges, a trace of “What’s the color of sulphur?” sulphur popping into the narrative. “Mustard.” What do you do with a chemistry set? You sit there in your “Sex and suffocation. You have sex and then there is the sad room, the box open, taking everything out gingerly. You have post-coital lighting of a match, which is a sulphur smell.” been instructed to follow the instructions. You make “Why suffocation?” a brief attempt at the manual. But it isn’t long before you get “Because a flame takes up oxygen.” around to the smelling, the handling, the tapping of little bits “Why sad?” “Because it’s post-coital.” opposite: Advertisement hawking hemacite skate wheels in the 11 October 1885 edition of the New York Times. from the test tube into your palm, or perhaps into another a garden of spun glass might never have actually been cre- test tube, for some random mixing of components. You open ated, the history of cuisine attests to its influence in the the test tube called “Sulphur” and smell it. Almost all the fabulous inventions of pièces montées of spun sugar, pastry, other smells exist in the mouth, the back of the throat, or and candy which evoke such fragile fantasy worlds.2 behind the eyes. But sulphur goes straight to the gut, like Culinary history abounds in examples of such construc- that magic trick with the handkerchief that is a deep lustrous tions, even predating Colonna. We might recall the details purple with a little loop in one corner. From that loop you of a great feast given by Amédée VIII, Duc de Savoie, as can pull through a bright pink handkerchief, the whole thing recounted in the 1420 manuscript dictated by his chef de cui- turning inside out as it emerges from your fist. In it goes as sine, Maître Chiquart. The meal was an amazing spectacle, purple, out it comes as pink! The smell of sulphur goes all with the main course presenting a centerpiece formed by a the way down to the bottom of you, then pulls you through miniature castle with a fountain of Love spouting rose water your own ass and turns you inside out and oh my God! Put and white wine at the center of the courtyard, and a differ- that cork back in the test tube! Then stare with horror and ent dish at the foot of each tower. Every animal was highly wonder that something could smell so bad. decorated and spitting fire: a huge gilded boar, ornamented In other words, once you start fixating on a color, you with the guests’ coats of arms; a suckling pig; a roast swan, remember it everywhere. It becomes a Zelig of colors. Sicily replumed with its own feathers; and, there was, as described was the world’s provider of sulphur until the end of the nine- in detail, a huge pike cooked in three manners, the tail end teenth century, when a new method allowed for the mining fried, the middle boiled, and the head roasted, served with of deposits in Louisiana and Texas. The most enduring image three different sauces. This dish, as well as the centerpiece from a visit I made to Sicily a few years ago came late at the that adorns the table, constitutes both a secular feast and end of a day while driving along the southern coast, the sea a cosmic symbol, synthesizing incompatible victuals, con- to my left and open fields of cut hay to my right. Somewhere tradictory modes of cooking, and heterogeneous symbols behind me was the island’s volcano, Etna, which I had vis- into a flamboyant totality. The taste for miracles and marvels ited that morning. It was not yet dusk, and the late afternoon certainly does not avoid its culinary instances, though one sun slanted sharply across a field of hay and made it look might suspect that the pleasures of mirabile dictu far sur- enchanted. It glowed as though lit from below. The yellow passed, in many such cases, those of the palate. orange light was, looking back on it, the color of sulphur. Very often, the visual aspect of a pièce montée surpasses And then there was that reddish brown earth that sat, a few the gastronomic value of the dish itself, however antithetical years after the era of the chemistry set, in a lumpy pile next this might seem regarding the gustatory goals of cuisine. For to my father’s grave: Weren’t there streaks of light brown, the most celebrated of French chefs, Antonin Carême (1783- bordering on orange? Sulphur making a cameo. 1833), the decorative values of cuisine always existed on an equal level with its gustatory qualities. Indeed, Carême’s decorative perfectionism often transcended his culinary aspirations, as when he created pièces montées using ined- INGESTION / CULINARY LANDSCAPES ible binding materials to guarantee their longevity; or even ALLEN S. WEISS more radically, as expressed in the avertissement to the third edition of his Le Pâtissier Pittoresque, he notes the extent One of the seminal texts in the history of European land- of his passion for architecture per se: “I would have ceased scape architecture is the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili of being a pastry-chef, had I blindly abandoned myself to my Francesco Colonna, published in Venice in 1499. The tale natural taste for the picturesque genre, such as I conceived consists of the phantasmatic quest of Poliphilus, presented it for the embellishment of princes’ parks and private gar- as an initiatory drama couched in the form of a dream, dens.” This architect manqué would sublimate his untried recounting his experiences and tribulations as he searches passion into the some of the greatest manifestations of spun for his beloved Polia. Beginning in the anguished solitude sugar edifices in the history of French cuisine. Consider, of a wild, dark, labyrinthine forest, he finally emerges, by for example, his extraordinary “moss-decorated grotto,” invoking divine guidance, into a beautiful, sunny landscape described in Le Pâtissier Parisien: “The effect of this large of absolute perfection. Here he discovers a scene filled with centerpiece is very picturesque. It is round in shape and has gardens and palaces, containing enigmatic and emblematic four arcades. It is made of hard sweetmeat à la reine, which monumental sculptures and ruins representing the arts of must also be glazed: one part with rose-colored sugar, one the ancient cultures of Egypt, Greece, and Rome, such as with caramelized sugar, and the rest with lump sugar to pyramids, obelisks, and temples, all evincing a perfection which you add saffron; but in removing the hard sweetmeats lost in the contemporary epoch. The archaic is brought into from the saucepan, you form groups from five to eight and the service of the arcane. The allegory then thickens as from ten to twelve, over which you sprinkle coarse sugar and Poliphilus continues his neo-Platonic quest toward love and chopped pistachios. The rock forms four arcades, which are truth, encountering five girls representing the five senses, a made up of ring biscuits of almond puff pastry (which you queen symbolizing free will, and finally two young women powder with fine sugar sifted through silk). You simply line symbolizing reason and volition. After visiting the palace, he up these ring biscuits without attaching them at the vertical is taken to the three palace gardens, which are the ultimate joints, which in no time produces a nice ridge of rocks. You expressions of human artifice: gardens of glass, silk, and surround it with meringues glazed and garnished with vanilla gold. The craftsmanship was truly marvelous: “All along the cream. The pedestal is made of German waffles; the garnish walls were flower-beds in the form of tubs, in which were is Genoese pastries in rings, studded with sugar pearls. planted a mix of box-trees and cypress, one cypress between The bower is crowned with a small waterfall in silvery spun two box-trees, the trunks and branches of solid gold, and sugar.”3 This miniature landscape certainly bears comparison the leaves of glass so perfectly imitated that one would have with the Grotte de Thétis in the gardens of Versailles, or the taken them for natural. [...] There were also herbs and flow- blue grotto at Linderhof created for the mad King Ludwig of ers of diverse colors, forms and species, all made of glass, Bavaria. all perfectly resembling the originals.”1 The brilliance and Carême, the architectural autodidact whom one genius of this pure artifice incite Poliphilus’s admiration and gastronome referred to as “the Palladio of cuisine,” spent wonder; mimesis is revealed for its inherent artificiality. This untold hours studying drawing, architecture, and garden imaginary garden of glass established a major aesthetic design (notably works on garden folies) at the cabinet des sensibility, serving as a model for the interweaving of two arts that had only recently received their muses: landscape architecture and cuisine. For while such 17 opposite: Dried splatter, non-toxic. Maybe even good for you. estampes of the Bibliothèque Nationale (Royale) in Paris. This the temporal and fragile nature of his art, as well as the inex- is attested to by his volumes Le Pâtissier Pittoresque (1815) orably mortal side of cuisine. One cannot help but remember and Le Pâtissier Royal Parisien (1815), where it is the outstanding role of the table, often depicted in a state of evident that his inspiration was both classical and romantic, extreme chaos, in pictorial representations of vanitas. though his classicism syncretically responded to the aes- Dali concludes this essay with the claim that, “Beauty thetics of many civilizations. His spun sugar creations in the shall be edible or it shall no longer be.” Is there any better forms of pavilions, rotundas, temples, towers, fortresses, argument to consider cuisine as one of the fine arts? mills, hermitages, and ruins of all sorts, were created in a great diversity of styles: Italian, Turkish, Islamic, Russian, 1 Translated from Francesco Colonna, Le Songe de Poliphile (Venice 1499; Paris, 1546; Polish, Venetian, Chinese, Irish, Gallic, Egyptian, and Reprint: Paris, Imprimerie Nationale Éditions, 1994), edited and prefaced by Gilles Polizzi; so forth. All this was finally combined in an imaginative 120. See Allen S. Weiss, “Syncretism and Style,” in Unnatural Horizons: Paradox and Con- mélange whose results would transgress the historical limits tradiction in Landscape Architecture (New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 1998), pp. of both architecture and cuisine. This conflation 9-42. of styles and epochs is, in the case of both landscape archi- 2 There exists a small museum of spun-sugar art attached to a restaurant, Le Grand Écuyer, tect and pastry chef, a fantasized, stylized reduction of in Cordes-sur-ciel (Tarn, France). historical detail to imaginative decorative fancy. 3 Antonin Carême, Le Pâtissier Royal Parisien (1815), cited in Jean-Claude Bonnet, “Carême, The extreme instance of this architectural passion was or the Last Sparks of Decorative Cuisine,” trans. Sophie Hawkes, in Allen S. Weiss, ed., Taste, not, however, restricted to the art of pastry making. Between Nostalgia (New York, Lusitania, 1997), pp. 176-77. Bonnet’s article is an excellent introduc- 1821 and 1826 he published Projets d’Architecture, which tion to Carême. included projects designed for the embellishment of both 4 Salvador Dali, “De la beauté terrifiante et comestible de l’architecture modern style,” Mino- Paris and . For example, he proposed, for taure, no. 3-4 (1933), p. 74. the place du Carrousel in Paris, a temple dedicated to glory of the French nation, which would display 48 lions’ heads, 12 trophies, 8 statues, and a pantheon of the names of the opposite: Two of Carême’s drawings from his book Le Pâtissier Pittoresque. country’s great heroes. In fact, these projects are as much in keeping with the utopian architectural fantasies of Boul- lée, Ledoux, and Lequeue as they are with the art of pastry decoration. The actual gardens of the 18th and 19th century offered precisely the sorts of folies, pagodas, gazebos, kiosks, pavilions, belvederes, temples and minarets that inspired the books and the pièces montées of Carême. And yet, however fantastic these projects may seem, Carême’s books remain practical guides to pièces montées, one which, it is hoped, may inspire some readers to create their own contemporary follies. A striking example of such architectural fantasy reveals a strange modernity at the core of Carême’s classicism, one based on a curious hybrid of styles, materials and natural orders. In a dreamlike evocation, he describes, in Le Pâtissier Royal Parisien, pièces montées that would represent rivers, cascades, and the waves of the sea. This might be compared with another fantasy of edible architecture, eccentric and fascinating, from a text by Salvador Dali, “De la beauté ter- rifiante et comestible de l’architecture modern style,” which celebrates the oneiric and troubling nature of certain archi- tectural creations, stressing an inexorable desire to “to eat the object of desire.” Specifically, describing two Art Nouveau houses that Gaudi designed on the Paseo de Gracia in Barcelona, he explains how one was inspired by the ocean’s waves during a tempest, and the other by the tranquil waters of a lake. “These are real buildings, veritable sculptures of the reflections of crepuscular clouds in water, made possible by recourse to an immense and mad, multi- colored and gleaming mosaic of the pointillist iridescence from which emerge forms of poured water, forms of spread- ing water, forms of stagnant water, forms of mirroring water, forms of water curled by the wind, all these forms of water constellated in an asymmetric and dynamic-instantaneous succession of bicyncopated, interlaced reliefs, melted by the ‘naturalist-stylized’ nunuphars and nympheas concretized in impure and annihilating excentric convergences, thick protuberances of fear bursting from the incredible facade, simultaneously twisted by all the insane suffering and by all the latent and infinitesimally soft calmness equaled only by that of the horrifying ripe and apotheosic flakes ready to be eaten with a spoon—with the bloody, greasy, soft spoon of gamey meat that approaches.”4 However surreal and nightmarish, this passage is an archetypally modernist continuation of the imaginary conflation of architecture and cuisine. In this context, we might note that, as befits his art, never does Carême actually describe the state of his pièces montées after the meal is finished, veritable ruins of 19 ruins! For to do so would be tantamount to admitting

maIN The Wall and the Eye: An Interview with Bank, where you get a sense that sometimes the government Eyal Weizman offers no guideline other than “We need a town built here,” Jeffrey Kastner & Sina Najafi and the architect is completely left on his own to do whatever he wants. So we have this severe set of guidelines versus no One of history’s most fiercely contested landscapes, the 2,270 guidelines at all, apparently at the same time. square miles of territory known as the West Bank was under the When Leitersdorf built Ma’ale Edumim in 1977-78 he was in control of Jordan when it was occupied by during the 1967 effect setting the guidelines. Ma’ale Edumim was essential in Six-Day War. Over the last 35 years, the area has become home creating a benchmark standard for building settlements. In to some 200,000 Israelis (400,000 including occupied East Jeru- general, Israeli architects and planners had little experience of salem) who populate numerous, new, purpose-built settlements building in mountainous regions. Before the occupation, the perched on its hilltops, overlooking long-established Palestinian Israeli population was located mainly in the valleys, except in lowland communities. This ongoing state-sponsored policy of Haifa, which is a mountain city, and in . The typical expansion onto the high ground has been paralleled by the devel- new Israeli settlements were the kibbutz and the moshav, coop- opment, within the architectural and urban planning professions, erative agricultural and pioneering settlements built mainly of extremely particularized strategies for building on heights. on the fertile plains. It is only after the occupation, and follow- Many of these draw on historical precedents; all are designed ing the political changes in 1977, that the mountain enters the to provide basic municipal amenities within a context of highly public imagination – people write songs about the mountain, refined, surveillance-based security. talk about it, lecture on it, research it. Architects were starting A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture, a to think about the mountain too, but they had little experience catalogue and exhibition originally created by Israeli architects of building there. So this publication by the Ministry of Housing Rafi Segal and Eyal Weizman as their country’s official entry to was incredibly important because it collected different prec- the 2002 World Congress of Architecture in Berlin, is a ground- edents and for the first time set guidelines for how to build in the breaking examination of the character of building, planning, mountains. The “mountain” is important in understanding the and community in the West Bank. Abruptly cancelled last sum- ideological transition in Israel after 1977, when a messianic reli- mer on the eve of the Congress by its commissioning organi- gious discourse entered the political debate with the right wing zation, the Israel Association of United Architects, the project coming to power. Along with it came a decreasing emphasis on has stirred strong opinions in Israel. Although it was dismissed agricultural pioneering and its replacement with a new typology by the association’s president as “one-sided political propa- of the religious suburb, located on mountaintops and without ganda,” A Civilian Occupation was praised as a “a rare work in agricultural space to cultivate. its power and importance for the community of architects and town planners in Israel” by the daily newspaper Ha’aretz. Since What are the historical sources for this relationship to the the cancellation, Segal and Weizman have found other forums mountain? for the work they produced: the catalog is being reprinted by If you look at the geography in Biblical times, the Israelite Babel Press in and a version of the exhibition will be be settlements were primarily in the mountain regions of Judea, mounted at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York, Samaria, and the Galilee, whereas the plains were inhabited by at the end of January and in the exhibition “Territories” at Kunst- the Philistines. So there is a geographical reversal, a paradox: Werke, Berlin, in May 2003. when the Zionists came back to their “promised land,” they ini- In the following interview, Weizman, a partner in Tel Aviv- tially settled in the places where Jewish history didn’t happen based Rafi Segal/Eyal Weizman Architects, discusses both within the land of Israel. The return to the mountain is a return the natural and built environment of the West Bank – from the to those sacred places, to the bedrock of Jewish identity. At this social, political, and religious history of the area to issues of pho- point, the mountain appears in many aspects of culture as a tography and mapping to concepts of strategic building forms symbol and as an unfamiliar reality, and architecture is part of it. and settlement growth patterns. He also asks pointed ethical The government wanted to resettle the mountain and architects questions about Israeli architectural and planning practice and needed to learn how to build there, so the Ministry of Housing considerations of human rights, which he says are central to the came up with guidelines that promoted the use of topography research he and Segal continue to conduct. Weizman spoke by for the establishment of observation points. These were new phone to Jeffrey Kastner and Sina Najafi from Haifa, Israel, in urban typologies that maximized the potential of the mountain October 2002. and made use of the precise morphology of the topography. Basically, if you look at the master plans of the settlements, the Your catalogue cites a 1984 publication by the Israeli Ministry roads retrace the topographical lines that we charted on maps, of Housing that sets guidelines for the construction of new set- so that each settlement takes the exact form of the mountain tlements in the mountain regions of the West Bank. It’s very summit and is built around it as a ring that overlooks all direc- concrete: it proposes an inner ring and an outer ring of houses, tions. It’s most clear in Ma’ale Edumim, where there is not just discusses the idea of offering the maximal amount of views to one peak but many peaks and ridges. There you see the direct the maximum number of settlers, which obviously also allows a translation of topographical cartography into urban form. maximum amount of surveillance of the Palestinian population beneath, and so on. This is interesting in light of the interview in your catalogue with the planner and architect Tho- overleaf: Nokdim to the right & Tekoa to the left. 21 mas Leitersdorf about towns he has built in the West All aerial photos: Milutin Labudovic for Shalom Achshav (Peace Now), 2002 22 23 Since mountaintops are not suited to agriculture, presumably Labor Party and he aligned himself with the right-wing policy many of the settlers are commuting. of establishing settlements just in order to embarrass Rabin. Yes. Essentially, the settlements are built there because the So Peres was actually the first person to promote settlements mountains are not suited to agriculture. It is because Palestin- even before the beginning of “the mountain ideology,” before ians could not cultivate these hilltops, where the good alluvial the reversal of power. As for security, up until 1979 the legal soil has eroded, that they could be seized by Israel and declared tools that the government used in order to seize land and build state land. It’s a complete reversal of the logic of cultivation. settlements were based on the 4th Geneva Convention, to Obviously the settlers have to either rely on the main cities – the which Israel is a signatory. The convention states that you are metropolitan centers like Tel Aviv and Jerusalem – or on indus- not allowed to build permanent settlements on occupied land, trial zones near the settlements, again on hilltops. but you are allowed to build temporary interventions for secu- rity reasons. What the government was claiming was that the Are those industrial centers subsidized? settlements were temporary paramilitary posts. They are subsidized in the sense that you pay much lower This issue was debated twice in the High Court of Justice income tax and council tax. (HCJ). There were petitions by Arab landowners against the confiscation of their land and the building of settlements. The You describe an important evolution toward a kind of messianic first one was the case over the Beit-El settlement, which pro- political ideology. What was going on in 1977 that specifically duced an incredible protocol, with the HCJ judges debating catalyzed this shift? urban form in terms of military-strategic potential and speak- The crisis point in Israeli history was 1973 and the Yom Kippur ing in terms of vision and observation. The HCJ in that instance War. This was a time when the Israelis were fearing total defeat allowed the construction of these settlements, with the Israeli and old fears resurface. Until then, Labor Zionism was trying to High Court Justice Vitkon at one point declaring that, “With reverse the traditional image of the Jew – not as a victim, but as a respect to pure military considerations, there is no doubt that strong, self-sustainable new man. This exemplified itself even in the presence of settlements–even if ‘civilian’ –of the occupying the way the Holocaust was portrayed and sometimes even glori- power in the occupying territory substantially contributes to the fied as an act of national resistance. The national day of Holo- security in that area and facilitates the execution of the duties of caust remembrance, for instance, is called the Day of the Holo- the military. One does not have to be an expert in military and caust and Heroism. In 1973, Zionism experienced “the return of security affairs to understand that terrorist elements operate the repressed,” with a renewed sense of doom, as the Egyptian more easily in an area populated only by an indifferent popu- and Syrian armies seemed to be driving toward the main urban lation or one that supports the enemy, as opposed to an area centers, with only the incredible maneuvers of Ariel Sharon in in which there are persons who are likely to observe them and the Sinai stopping them. But immediately after the war, with inform the authorities about any suspicious movement. Among Golda Meir’s government in ruins, you see the religious elements them no refuge, assistance, or equipment will be provided to in Zionism taking control. One of the first settlements, Sebastia, terrorists. The matter is simple, and details are unnecessary.” was created by Gush Emunim, which is a kind of religious orga- Here the court is clearly establishing the fact that civilians and nization that has always pulled the government by the nose to residential settlements could have a security function that is build settlements, as if to uplift the gloom of the Yom Kippur normally attributed to the police and the army. The next case War. It took four more years for the Labor government, which in 1979 was that of Elon Moreh, where the settlers practically had controlled the country from its creation, to be replaced by shot themselves in the foot by claiming they were not there for the right-wing Likud government of Menachem Begin. And the security reasons but because it was their right and this was their whole settlement policy changed – they discovered the moun- God-given territory. This meant that the court could no longer tain, sacredness, and archaeology again. authorize the settlement as a temporary military intervention.

By this point presumably the left’s political clout had been They were testing this new theoretical definition of what a much diminished. Were the settlements presented as a fait settlement could be, which was not related necessarily to this accompli? Was there a great deal of internal debate in Israel temporary security-based issue, but was related to some kind about this program of settlement building? of divine right? It was always very controversial from its inception. Yes, the settlers felt that as long as the settlement project was judged only on strategic issues they were going to lose their But was it presented as a security issue or was it presented as credibility as an ideological-religious movement. And if other an ideological, religious issue? Or are the two things so tied up security arrangements were found, they could always be together that you cannot pull them apart? evicted. They chose a strategy but ultimately lost the case and You have all the reasons at play together; sometimes some the settlement was destroyed. are stronger, sometimes others. In the first 10 years after the occupation, 1967 to 1977, we had a Labor government. What But did that lay the foundation for future claims? they did mainly was to settle the Jordan Valley with kibbutzes The government had to opt for another legal tool because they and moshavs – this is what they knew, frontier settlements on could not build settlements and argue that they were tempo- the plains. Between 1973 and 1977, it was Shimon Peres who rary strategic military outposts. They said, OK, we can rely on was supporting Gush Emunim. Shimon Peres was Jordanian law and start a project of land registry. The West 24 squabbling with Yitzhak Rabin for the hegemony of the Bank had not had a land registry since Ottoman times, and if you look at Ottoman land laws, you did not have real act of proprietorship and the whole settlement project is built land ownership. You would just pay tax for what you cultivated. upon those topographical lines, which were drafted on those Nobody wanted to own anything beyond what he was grow- photographs. It’s as if those lines set the blueprints of the set- ing on, because that is what you paid tax on. If someone fenced tlements. off a hilltop, he didn’t register it because that would just mean more taxes. So basically Israel was collecting Ottoman tax Was it difficult to obtain permission to take your aerial photo- documents to establish ownership and map out the extent of graphs? cultivated lands. Whatever land could be proven to be under It is very difficult now after operation Defensive Shield, but continuous cultivation remained in private Palestinian owner- previously the Ministry of Defense was allowing us very nar- ship, and the rest was declared state land according to Jorda- row slots, over the air space the Israeli air force was using and nian law, which was based on Ottoman law. underneath the national routes.

But legally, didn’t the Israeli government have to say that the Your aerial images show a number of striking things about the West Bank is actually their land in order to then impose a set of details of the landscape, which nevertheless need to be “read” rules on it, no matter where they borrowed those rules from? with guidance. One was the politics of pine trees versus olive What they were saying was that these patches of land here trees. The Ottoman rules were that the state could acquire any and there, mainly the hilltops because the hilltops were not land that had not been cultivated for a certain amount of time. being cultivated, were State of Israel land. They were state So now the Palestinians are rushing to plant olive trees and the land because they were not under any private ownership, and Israelis are planting pine trees, which grow a lot faster. Israel was the ruler of the area. There were complaints at the That’s true, but it’s not only that they grow faster. Another rea- UN that Israel could not use state land in the way they wanted son for planting pine trees is to make a difference from the olive to because it was still under temporary possession of an occu- tree as a separate national symbol. A third reason is that pines pying power. But Israel claimed that the West Bank was not have an acidic drop on the ground. There are no bushes under actually “occupied land,” because the UN never recognized pine trees, so grazing and shepherding is very difficult in these Jordanian sovereignty over the West Bank. It was a very com- areas that have been planted with pine. Even if you cut the pine plex, self-contradictory and elliptical way of arguing. On the one trees, the subsequent acidity of the land is such that it does not hand, Israel accepted and relied on the Jordanian rules. On the allow agricultural cultivation. Right now we are working on an other, it said something that is in fact true, that the West Bank enlargement of one particular image – in a similar fashion to the was occupied by Jordan after 1948 but that the UN had never kind of work that intelligence analysts do during wartime. They recognized its sovereignty there. can see things that the untrained eye cannot. We try to reveal the hidden narratives engraved on the landscape. You write about how after 1967 this contested land in the West Bank became one of the most photographed terrains in I think that’s important because one of the things our edito- the world, where 3-D stereoscopic images were constructed rial group discussed when we were looking at the aerial using special double-lens aerial cameras. Are the new aerial photos is the degree to which they aestheticize the informa- photographs you’ve included in the catalogue similar to the tion. It sounds like the project you are working on now is one of ones the Israeli government took after 1967? particularization – putting specific information along with the Not at all. These are photographs taken by Milutin Labudovic images. That seems to make a strong case for these kinds of for an organization called Peace Now in order to monitor images that are very beautiful but with which the viewer has settlement growth. They are taken at low altitudes – we were a strange relation in terms of the contrast between their aes- allowed to fly at 6,000 feet over sea level. The stereoscopic thetic qualities and the information they contain. images were essentially 3-D reliefs of the terrain taken at a That is true, but beauty has an incredible political significance much higher altitude in order to build topographical maps. in the context of this conflict, and we tried to show it in these Right after the occupation, the government needed to create terms. When we talk about the panorama in terms of the pic- a map very quickly, and it was difficult to physically get to all turesque and the pastoral, we claim that, in fact, beauty is the places, so they used this stereoscopic technique in order thought of as both a commodity and a strategy in terms of to recreate the structure of the mountain. Before the occu- the views from the settlements. It is there to draw the settlers pation, there were no good topographical maps of the area in and ever closer to the Palestinian communities (which pro- – there were some done by German and American evangelists duce this beauty) – like a moth to a flame. It is a guiding principle who were mapping the Holy Land and some general ones done that the settlements are urbanistically laid out in order to max- by the British mandatory power, but they were absolutely not imize the view. There is a paradox in this beauty in that what good enough to plan and construct with. What interested Rafi is considered by the settlers to be a pastoral, romantic pan- Segal and me about the stereoscopic technology was that a orama is actually the traces of the daily lives and cultivation methodology of design so clearly relied on a technical appa- of the Palestinians, and the settlers both enjoy that view but ratus – the stereoscopic images became the primary tool with simultaneously supervise it. The settlers obviously have a very which topographical lines were charted on maps and then pro- ambiguous relationship to this. On the one hand, the view vided the slate for the design work itself. The desire to map the West Bank immediately after the occupation showed overleaf left: Shaked, Jenin Region. 25 clearly that you don’t just map things – mapping is an overleaf right: Offra, and the Palestinian Village of A Taybe, Ramallah region.

creates for them a kind of biblical landscape that they admire, a policy with this map is something we think is going to inevita- way of life that seems to them more authentic. Yet they are, in bly change the discussion. fact, there to destroy and replace it. Whose maps were used before? Did the Palestinians present It was also interesting to see the physical relationships of the their own maps of the settlements at the peace negotiations? settlements and the Palestinian towns – how close they some- Were there two competing versions of reality offered? times are to each other and how different the building forms The best source for mapping the West Bank was always the were, although, in the more close-up photos you could see CIA. A few times a year they took satellite photographs of the some similarities, too. West Bank and produced a kind of status report on the built fab- When you look at a Palestinian village near a settlement, many ric of the settlements. These were usually classified for a period times you’ll see that the houses that are very near to the fence of time and then released. The novelty in our map is that we – nearest to the settlement – imitate the red roofs of the settle- actually took and were able to trace almost all the master plans ment, usually with red painted asbestos placed on their flat for future settlement growth. These supposedly have to be pub- roofs. So, for example, the architectural sign of a red roof, which lished, but obviously the government and the regional councils for the Israelis is basically a rural, suburban idea of the home, is do not have any interest in the Palestinians knowing the master for the Palestinians a sign of progress, modernity, and luxury – plans. The government is bound by law to make the documents everything they strive for and want to emulate. It is very strange. public, so they post them within the settlements, which the Pal- When you drive through the West Bank, you see the great influ- estinians obviously cannot enter. When we sent letters asking ence of settlement architecture on Palestinian architecture, and to review the master plans, the councils threw a lot of obstacles vice versa. In a sense there is a kind of disturbing mutual admira- in our way and we finally had to threaten them with a petition to tion stretched along the double-poled axis of vision. The settlers the HCJ. Then they gave us some maps, but always old maps, try to learn from the Palestinians how to live in nature; they see and then they’d say, “Oh, sorry.” the Palestinians as the authentic component there, something that they would like to be but cannot. What is the government worried about in terms of what the maps revealed? But in Israeli architecture, that trope of the red, sloped roof is Well, the expansion of settlements is guarded almost like a mili- itself a really displaced kind of beauty – a borrowed European, tary secret. almost Tyrolean, form that in its right context has a purpose but here is not at all suited functionally to the environment. So it was less a question of the identification of the settle- It functions in the settlements as a sign. Many times, settlement ments as they are than the projections of what the settlements building codes require that anyone building their own home will turn into? must build with this red roof because it’s a sign that differenti- Exactly. This is a map of a possible future of the settlements and ates the “us” from the “them.” And I have heard of a residents’ of the West Bank. meeting where settlers tried to resist the red roof – saying it’s a misplaced European element, etc. – while people from Gush What general conclusions did you draw from the map when Emunim, the main settler body, forced them to build them if you actually saw it, either ideologically or in terms of planning only to show Jewish presence. Before the Intifada, when you issues? could still go into the West Bank to Palestinian hummus restau- Most other maps of the West Bank show the settlements as rants, they would quite often have wallpaper of, say, a Swiss points. They show the location, perhaps the number of settlers landscape on the whole wall. Out the window you could see an in them. But by actually showing form, we were trying to make equally, or even more, beautiful landscape, but the “ideal” was a connection between the very organization of matter across somewhere else – in Switzerland, somewhere in the West – not the landscape and human rights violations. So it’s not only the where they were. fact that settlements are there, but it is the forms of the settle- ments – their shape, and size – that are contrary to human rights. In addition to the photographs, the catalogue has an For example, if you look at Ariel, which is an urban settlement aggregate map you’ve put together of all the different set- located west of Nablus, it has an elongated banana shape. This tlements. Is that information itself contested by the Israeli is something you don’t see in a map where it’s depicted as a government? Or was the compilation the difficult part of the point. And you ask yourself, “Why was the settlement built like process? that?” If a student of ours came up with a plan of a city like that, This map is a joint project between myself and the human we would say, “You must be joking! It maximizes traffic, does rights organization B’Tselem that was done in the context of not allow pedestrians to walk, does not serve the population.” a human rights report on violations through architecture and So there must be other considerations involved. You start planning. Nobody contests its accuracy, and some in the Israeli breaking down the formative forces that operate on the form of establishment even work with it. I’ve recently heard that even this stain on the map. On the one hand, the settlement wanted some settlers’ organizations use it. Last summer we presented to stretch itself as long as possible along Route 505, which is it to the American administration, to the Senate Foreign Rela- one of the most strategic east-west arteries, an artery that Israel tions Committee, to the State Department, and the Pentagon. believes would have an armed column going down it in the They checked it and verified it and are now working event of a Jordanian or Iraqi invasion from the east. So the set- 28 with it. That is a great achievement for us. Conducting tlement spreads thin as long as possible along that road. On the other hand, it creates a complete wedge across the north-south Is it simply the pastoral, Biblical landscape that you want to axis and separates Salfit, which is a regional Palestinian center, provide every citizen? No, because when you read the larger from the villages to its north that rely on it for their economy. scale master plans outlining regional strategy, you see how Another thing that it does is envelop Salfit and prevent it from they value observational points, and that their plans lay out a growing in the direction it would like to. All these are done by net of visual control vis-à-vis the Palestinians, the roads, and the formal manipulations, decisions taken by architects and plan- strategic arteries. The overall master plans of the army and the ners – something that shows that we have here a policy of nega- settlement body are at least more honest in their aims than the tive planning. architects. The architects themselves are not willing to admit In architecture lingo, we call this weak form. Weak form to it, so they internalize those regional principles but argue for reacts to a kind of force field that operates around it. Imagine a them in a completely different way. drop of water that is running on a particular surface and it reacts to the surface – in this case, to topography, but also to the tem- The wall-and-tower architectural model of the kibbutz that you perature of the surface, its slope, air flow, etc. There are many discuss in the catalogue seems to be a precedent for the kind political and strategic forces that stretch the forms of the settle- of visual mastery that the settlements strive for. The kibbutz in ments one way or another. The very forms embody the momen- the plain was also an attempt to politicize the landscape and tary balance of forces that created it. What Rafi Segal and I did make it all into one homogenous field over which visual control at our office was to try and read backwards from the form of the could be exercised and over which territorial claims could be stain on the map in order to recreate and understand the forces made. What is the relationship between that kind of architec- that manipulated it. With this method of observation, you can ture and what we see in the West Bank today? see the objectives of the planner. This is our point: It is not only When we edited the catalogue we thought of it as an evolution. that the settlements are there. If that were the only case, you The wall-and-tower is argued by Sharon Rotbard to be the seed could argue that it is not the responsibility of the architect and of Israeli architecture–protective and observant at the same only of the political decision that placed it. But when the form is time. The reason it was built in that way was because they were designed in a particular way to achieve strategic and national building on a plain – you didn’t have the protection of the heights goals– bisect a Palestinian road, surround a Palestinian settle- and you needed the wall, and the eye was centralized within the ment, or to try to create a wedge– the architect is engaged in tower. Now the settlements are doing the same thing, creating negative planning, a reversal of his professional practice, like both the wall and the eye within the very distribution of matter a medical doctor involved in torture. This approach establishes across the landscape. architecture, just like the tank, and the bulldozer, as a weapon with which human rights could be and are violated. The mountain is both wall and tower. The mundane elements of planning and architecture are placed Yes. Planning and architecture has always been the execu- there in order to disturb and dominate, and when an architect is tive arm of the Zionist state; the state has always used it in a designing in order to disturb the growth of other things, he’s not very political way to set borders, to take land and to make the acting as an architect. development and sustainability of Palestinian areas as difficult as possible. You would say it is unethical. This is completely unethical! And it’s not architecture. If there Apart from the controversy, what has the reception of the cata- are violations of human rights in the plans the architect is pro- logue been like outside of Israel? Has it been seen as relevant posing– in the way he is designing the houses, in the orientation to other situations in other places? of the windows, in every detail on both the architectural and the It’s incredibly relevant. Most of the contributors to the cata- urban scale– then these actions are unethical and illegal. This logue describe Israel as a kind of laboratory where elements of incriminates the architectural profession. If the architect were both modernity and tradition are played out in a very powerful just ignoring the Palestinians, it would look completely different. way against each other in a very intense environment. If you This is much worse. This is why there was a huge controversy think about the mountain and the creation of a suburban settle- here with the publication of A Civilian Occupation. Basically, the ment, you’ll see it’s around the same time that Americans are architects were like Leitersdorf– liberal, educated, most often inventing the gated community. It’s essentially a local form of Labor supporters who see themselves as building in the West the gated community. What you see in the West Bank is basi- Bank in a way that best serves the Jewish population there. But cally the same phenomenon you see in Los Angeles’s Orange that is obviously not true. And we were trying to break out the County, Brasilia, Mexico City, and other places but in a much reasons for why the forms are the way they are and reflect from more violent and extreme way. It’s the end condition of those that backwards on the whole ethics of architecture in Israel. urban pathologies – it shows the worst-case scenario of where those kinds of urban arrangements could be going. And I think So when someone like Leitersdorf says, “I was given no cri- the questions we are trying to pose in the catalogue about the teria, but I came back with three sites that took into account responsibility of the architect are applicable everywhere. air pollution, traffic, commuter routes,” and so on–is it your opinion that all of those criteria hide some other criteria that You have written that the geometry of the occupation can only he’s not willing to confront? be understood in three dimensions. There are questions of Obviously. If you look at the 1984 government guide- the underground sewage, archaeology, tunnels, the water res- 29 book, it only speaks of the view. But what is this view? ervoirs, the air space above, and so on. These are issues that came up in the peace talks, of course. But the map you have national sovereignty, one in which a choice of more than one produced is two-dimensional. What would it mean to map this citizenship is available for the same area. conflict three-dimensionally? It’s interesting to look at how, for example, an Israeli highway passes over a Palestinian road or opposite: Settlement in Talmon, Ramallah Region, 1993. Courtesy Efrat Shvily look at how the tunnels intersect. and Sommer Contemporary Art I am currently working on a computer-based interactive three- dimensional map of the West Bank with my colleague Reed Kram. The over-complication of the surface as shown on our map – the fact that it’s no longer possible to draw a continu- ous line that separates Palestinians from Israelis – made clear to the negotiating parties during the peace process that a two- dimensional solution is no longer possible. Shimon Peres’s Oslo proposal was to give the Palestinians limited sovereignty on the land but to retain Israeli sovereignty of the subsoil and the air over it. So you have a kind of sandwich – Israel, Pales- tine, Israel – across the vertical dimension. Peace technicians – the people who are always drawing new maps for a solution – arrive at completely insane proposals for solving the problem of international boundaries in three dimensions. And when you have Jewish enclaves in Palestinian territory, you have to build either tunnels or bridges that connect them to each other. Both typologies were experimented with and proposed throughout negotiations. The most obvious is the proposed safe passage between the West Bank and Gaza that has a Palestinian road with Palestinian sovereignty that goes over Israel’s sovereign territory – with the international boundary being the thermo- dynamic joint between the column and the road. We get into incredibly bizarre and dystopian solutions. Jerusalem itself, according to the Clinton plan, would have had 64 kilometers of walls and 40 bridges and tunnels connecting the enclaves to each other. Imagine an urban environment that operates like that. It would make L.A.’s highway system look flat. This is the total collapse of the idea of territory as produced by maps. Nationalism and mapmaking were always bound together. You had a map and you drew a boundary. But what you see in the West Bank is that sovereign relations are attempting to play themselves out three-dimensionally. And that is obviously an unworkable absurdity. We do not think that there is a viable “design solu- tion” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The perfect line that brilliantly weaves itself through the terrain and answers in its path both national demands, the one line that every- body from Ben Gurion to Barak was looking for, simply does not exist. Nor does it exist in these three-dimen- sional boundary contortions. These just accentuate the exhaustion and the frustration of all possible lines on the two-dimensional plane. This territorial conflict is such that it must be addressed in a non-territorial and thus non-formal way. If you think of similar conflicts between a settling nation and a native nation, there is no his- torical precedent for the idea of partition. We think that the way to manage this conflict is not through the creation of another sovereign state but within the realm of law. Instead of thinking of two states side by side, something that our research shows is impossible without integration on the planning and infrastructure level, we would like to propose the idea of a simultaneous overlap: two states that are not lying side by side but overlap legally across the 31 same territory. This obviously entails a new definition of Paint Your Troubles Away The idea of a wall was controversial. The residents wanted Richard Fleming it, but the erection of a concrete barricade along the length of the exposed flank of Gilo would be an admission, unaccept- Built on high ground, like most West Bank Israeli settlements, able to the authorities, that the lands on the other side were Gilo is the largest neighborhood within the Municipality of beyond control. An encircling wall is defensive, not offensive, Jerusalem that lies to the east of the Green Line. Since Israel and a more militant settlement would never have allowed one took control of this hilltop in the 1967 war, more than 30,000 to be built; the Gilo wall is at odds with the ongoing Israeli pol- lower- to middle-class Israelis, largely Sephardic and Rus- icy of containment and expansion. But each nightfall brought sian immigrants, have settled there. For many of them, it is less a hail of bullets, and the people who live in Gilo were not the a militant settlement born out of colonial ideology than a place sort of settlers eager to trade quality of life for ideology. They chosen for its convenience, cheap rents, and spectacular West had, after all, been enticed to live here by glossy advertis- Bank desert views. Until the beginning of the Second Intifada, ing brochures complete with photographs of the very vis- with the Green Line buried beneath a handsome new ring road tas now assaulting them. People took extended vacations. that whisks commuters to the Jerusalem outskirts, the inhabit- Joggers could no longer run along the road overlooking the ants of Gilo might have been forgiven for forgetting that they valley. In the winter of 2000, the military carted in concrete live in Palestinian territory. panels and installed them like a massive three-meter-tall But one day their picturesque view across the olive groves highway median, obliterating the view. From below, down the to the Arab village of Beit Jala began shooting at them. Bullets hillside, which is to say from Beit Jala, the unpainted concrete whistled up the hill into the windows of Gilo’s 1970s apartment wall snakes around the ridgetop, gray and foreboding, like a blocks. Outraged, the residents sandbagged their windows and modernist fortress. demanded Israeli military action. Houses in Beit Jala were duly A friend tells me that on the Gilo side the concrete panels shelled and destroyed. A multi-million dollar scheme replaced were at first painted a jolly blue, but so much cement canvas many Gilo windows with bulletproof glass, but this was of little was an invitation to political graffitists. According to the Jerusa- comfort to homeowners concerned about property values and lem Post, the mural project was the brainchild of Shlomi Brosh, relegated to living in the dark and windowless back then the head of the culture department of the Municipality. 32 rooms of their apartments. He commissioned eight Russian immigrant artists “to paint the wall with the missing view, in an effort to alleviate some of the ugliness of the concrete slabs.”1 Clearly the authorities wanted to diminish the sense of capitulation the wall represented. And what better way than to paint scenes of the now-hidden land- scape over the concrete panels? The work on the wall is site- specific camouflage. “We did not want to part with the view, but they forced us to. So we copied the view,” Brosh told the Post. Executed in the style of a Midwestern Italian restaurant fresco, the results are a sanitized simulacrum: the landscape beyond the wall “captured beautifully,” as painters like to say. But on close examination, the paintings do not amount to a real- istic portrait. The long and winding trompe l’oeil slab is devoid of Arab inhabitants, and none of the buildings in the distance appears to have been shelled by Israeli tanks. The blurry, distant villages have been settlerized; a disproportionate number of buildings are painted with salmon-tiled gabled roofs, an archi- tectural conceit unknown to the Palestinians, whose villages typically have flat white roofs. The Palestinian “problem” has not been whitewashed but painted out of view.

1 Etgar Lefkovits, “Seeing beyond Gilo's Siege Wall,” The Jerusalem Post Internet Edition, 23 August 2001, at www.jpost.com/Editions/2001/08/23/News/News.33240.html

Photos: Richard Fleming

Cable TV’s Failed Utopian Vision: An the importance was that the audience became participants by Interview with Dara Birnbaum directly affecting the work and thus the viewer was no longer Nicolás Guagnini passive. Gillette and Schneider wanted to emphasize the pro- cess involved in a work. They were both members of Raindance When released its first portable video camera, the Por- Corporation, an alternative media collective that published tapak, in 1968, the three M’s – McLuhan, Marcuse, and mari- Radical Software. juana – determined the political framework of America’s young intelligentsia. The first generation of video artists mapped and The technical device that prompted the explosion of video art defined a utopian territory, voiced in the influential magazine was the Sony Portapak, and the theoretical framework was Radical Software. The titles of two books written by contributors coming from Radical Software. Feedback was one of the main to Radical Software are enough to sample the ideological scope topics. Among the writers for Radical Software was Paul Ryan, that a technological advent helped to foster: Paul Ryan’s Birth who came up with topological models for feedback, quite influ- and Death and Cybernation: Cybernetics of the Sacred (1972) and ential in the works of Graham. Another of Ryan’s concerns was Michael Shamberg’s Guerrilla Television (1971). the application of those models to education. What was the The communitarian use of video paralleled the develop- relationship between education and the community concerns ment of cable television. Control of the means of production, you mention in the early video groups? copyright, and distribution blurred the frontiers between activ- What the Portapak brought in was a high level of self-aware- ism, local news forecasting, and art-making. Media artist Dara ness. In 1965 Nam June Paik bought some of the first con- Birnbaum witnessed this process unfold as she defined her sumer video equipment on the American market. In the fol- own practice. Nicolás Guagnini met Birnbaum to discuss some lowing years, there were so many art pieces that came out of the entangled sociopolitical and artistic issues of the 1970s of literally “living with the Portapak.” There was a sense of and early 1980s. amazement towards that apparatus that, unlike film, could reveal oneself in real time, or in slightly delayed time. Many In early video pieces, one structure repeatedly appears: cam- pieces were diaristic and confined to a secure or isolated envi- era/body/monitor. It started as an interrogation of the self and ronment. The ones I am thinking about deal with being within moved more towards playing with the audience and defining one’s home space. There was not really an extension outward. social spaces in pieces like Wipe Cycle (1969) by Ira Schneider Think about Nauman’s “anti-gravitational” pieces, like walking and Frank Gillette, or in Dan Graham’s works between 1973 on the ceiling; all these types of work were structured in an and 1978. How did that development come about? interiorized safeness. That is different from the methodology From my own experience, I felt that early on there were two that Ryan applied. He seemed much more interested in peda- distinct developments evident. The one you first mentioned, gogical models and collective usages for video. Alternative camera/body/monitor, is best seen in the early tapes by television was trying to reach out, to permeate society. In addi- Bruce Nauman or Vito Acconci. They were coming out of what tion, artists were discussing the portability of video, for example became known as “body art” but also from a projection of an when Allan Sekula made reference to a group of workmen on inner psychological state. But there was also another area of strike – how they utilized a Portapak powered with car batteries, development, which was to create alternative forms to broad- which allowed them to both record spokesmen’s statements as cast television. Here the concern was with relationships to well as to play them back again directly to the strikers who were and through the community, or a much more social “self.” Both assembled. That was more like agitprop. The most interesting fields overlapped. With regard to the self and the body, many experiment with education that I remember was done by stu- works were developed in the isolation of the artist’s studio, dents of the Irvine school system in California who were able such as Bruce Nauman’s 1968 Stamping in the Studio, where to be tutored through open cable channels which linked differ- he inverted the camera so that to the viewer he appears to be ent schools in the area. David Ross presented this at the Long walking on the ceiling. Even though he repeatedly stamps in a Beach Museum of Art. It seemed natural to those students, who rhythmic, almost primitive pattern, he is not really participat- were then in high school, or grade school, to utilize the video ing in any social or communal rite. He remains individualized in systems like a telephone. his own studio. Acconci’s Centers (1971) has the artist pointing at his own image on the video monitor, attempting to keep his Which other writers of Radical Software were influential, and finger in the center of the screen. He was pointing away from how did the magazine circulate? himself and to an outside viewer. In that work he introduces The first issue of Radical Software came out in 1970 through the another aspect of video: using the video monitor as a mirror. Raindance Corporation, which was run by Ira Schneider. Beryl The work also begins to take advantage of the self-reflexive Korot and Paul Ryan were also very involved. I remember that potential of video by becoming more aware of the psychol- the first issue presented a proposal for a paperless society and ogy of interpersonal relationships. Other artists, like Dan Gra- an interview with Buckminster Fuller. The main thrust of Radical ham, were producing works where this social awareness was Software was that there should be an alternative to broadcast evident, but they expanded this initial awareness by also television, that television has the capacity of being a responsive providing for a way that the viewer could interact with their medium and a valuable social tool. This approach was com- work, such as Graham’s numerous delayed feedback/mirror pletely different from how broadcast television was being used. installations. Wipe Cycle incorporated the viewer’s Also, there was the feeling that television should be open to 35 image into delayed feedback loops. In Wipe Cycle, again all. Thus, the magazine would also frequently detail hardware information, along with listing what were then considered Prior to McLuhan’s influence and hippy-ism, there is an Ameri- counterculture videotapes. can tradition of founding utopian communities for religious purposes, like the Shakers, or sociopolitical purposes, like the As early as 1926, Bertolt Brecht proposed that the radio should early-20th-century socialist community Llano del Rio on the step out of the supply business and organize its listeners as outskirts of Los Angeles. This mirrors at a social level that inter- suppliers. Each new technology brings its own democratizing rogation of the self we were talking about. In many cases it is promise, and the Portapak did so as well. about setting a series of rules, and then living with those rules I don’t think so. The Portapak was somewhat of a cast-off of to push their limits and applications. At what point in the early the industry, and it was fortunate that there was someone out 1970s was writing being done about each community having there to grab it. It was basically developed for electronic news- its own cable, with its own broadcast? What relevant experi- gathering. It is well known that in America everything gets old ments were carried out in that direction? before its time. The Portapak promised nothing in and of itself. In the early 1970s, while I was working for Lawrence Hal- It was almost a “throw-away” from the industry and was taken prin, an environmental architectural firm in San Francisco, I up by people who had the insight to see its critical potential. remember doing a small side-job, which was to assist a friend For example, early on in Los Angeles, Michael Asher and his involved in selling cable television. What I hadn’t expected was students at Cal Arts saw the opportunity to gather this portable that it had nothing to do with utopian ideas at that moment. It equipment and use it in ways other than how the industry was was simply a business, and the plan was based on selling and using it. It was also utilized by Jon Alpert and Keiko Tsuno of the delivering television through cable franchises, which would Downtown Community Television Center (DCTV) in Lower Man- provide better signal reception through an expanded network hattan to give a voice to a community and events that may have of cable. What happened was that through federal and state never been covered by television. There was also the collective regulations those cable franchises had to give something back Top Value Television (TVTV), whose well-known work Four More to the community. They had to deliver a basic operating stu- Years covered the 1972 Republican Convention. That work was dio with two cameras that had open access and people would one of the first documentaries to be shot entirely on portable then do their own “hands-on” television. The only stipulation video equipment. Later on, when Sony saw the broader appeal was that the programming had to be deemed “in the local pub- of the Portapak with its multiple applications, they intensified lic interest.” There are very few remnants of this left, except their marketing of it for home and individual use. They even for stations such as the Manhattan Neighborhood Network. It ran many commercial ads showing how even a beautiful-look- was innocent to believe that cable was not related to a capital- ing young woman could carry and use this equipment without ist notion of big business. For me, cable is not a failed utopia being encumbered. because it never was one. It was during its rise and expansion that room was left over for a multiplicity of programming. There It is clear at this point how the Portapak promoted a sense of was a need for software and for a moment it was possible to self-awareness that was not completely divorced from the provide alternative forms of programming within those spots. basic levels of identification that showbiz quickly commodi- From the “Woodstock Nation” on, there was a brief moment fies. Did it help to create any type of community? when you actually felt that a large alternative group existed What you are looking at is the intersection of a moment in time – that there were millions of “us” out there. But this was incred- in which there was a proliferation of available equipment and a ibly idealized. I was in Berkeley at the time, and what I found lot of communities looking for an alternative lifestyle. The usage were a variety of attempts at alternative cultures or counter-cul- of all electronic equipment was also being redefined. Composer tures. I can remember Tom Wolfe lecturing in the early 1970s Peter Gordon talked about the portable audio tape recorder as in the very same building where many student demonstrations a folk instrument. Some video makers consciously or uncon- happened. It was a turnoff to see the author of Radical Chic in sciously used their equipment in the same way. Groups like Vid- a totally white suit that looked so elitist to us, especially eofreex at the end of the 1960s joined together in order to provide because he then represented the total opposite of a blue-collar alternative models of television. Feedback was utilized, formally, worker. And he said, “You think that you are so different. Look as an alternative to the previous types of light shows at rock con- at you. You are all so alike – what you are reading, how you are certs. The attempt was to create a bioelectrical sphere. It was the dressing.” The coding within that “alternative” society was as amazement of being stoned through technology, and this also defined and strict as in the society we were rejecting. provided a sense of community. Video was easy, and easygoing. You could pass around the camera as you passed around a joint. Are you also implying that it was rich kids having fun? It was also light enough so that women could lift it. And the No. Berkeley was then called “Berzerkeley.” It became a deposi- collectives’ development took a different direction. Videofreex, tory for people who were runaways from all different classes reformed under the name of Media Bus, set up what could be con- and types of families, and for people who felt alienated and sidered the first “pirate TV” station in Lanesville, New York, in the thought that Berkeley would provide an environment with less Catskills. Their home-built studio was basically in defiance of FCC pressure. There were amazing teachers at that campus of the regulations. Therefore, it became the first unlicensed TV station University of California, such as Marcuse and Angela Davis. The in America. It was low-power television. It basically went down a free speech movement started there. It was one of the most lane, a couple of blocks, and many of their programs featured local politically active and aware places in the country. You could people. This fostered a stronger sense of community. Of only say that it was unbelievable that America allowed itself 36 course it only worked on a small, marginal scale. that “leisure,” that privilege of consciousness, looking at it from what I feel is now a much more conservative time. search? I was deeply affected by his work, perhaps mostly by his use Your disenchanted outlook on hippy-ism and the utopian of serial reproduction and what it seemed to reflect about ideas circulating among early video practitioners and mass production and the neutralization of signification that collectives seem to me part of the critical vision that a “sec- comes with it. When I was in Berkeley everybody was carrying ond-generation” artist has to bring into a field to mobilize a little red book – Mao’s red book – and when Warhol produced it. Your early works Pop-Pop Video: Kojak/Wang (1980) his portrait series of Mao in a very aestheticized way, it was a and Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978/79) shock – a good shock. The type of imagery and portrayal that brought upon you the appellation “the pirateer of images.” was present in mass media affected many people around me You certainly pioneered the act of making copyright and distri- at the time, like Jack Goldstein. These artists began to utilize bution instrumental issues for the meaning and understanding aspects of the mass media’s forms and modes of production. of the work. How did you come up with the idea of cannibal- However, they were translating these images into other medi- izing television? ums, like Warhol. For me, from 1977 on, it was important not What happened to me when I started working with video in the to translate this vocabulary into other mediums. By turning the late 1970s was that I saw two distinctive roots to video art. One medium of video/television on itself, the real dislocation took was television, which was being ignored, and the other was an place by altering the iconography of television through chang- extension of other art forms like body art and performance art. ing its original structure and context. At a time when there were There was a proliferation of writing, especially coming from no VCRs available, I could capture Wonder Woman and disas- Europe, such as Screen magazine, which looked at America semble the “her” from a seamless flow that provided viewers though the language of film – countless articles and studies on with the Pop glorification of her red-white-and-blue demo- Hitchcock and Film Noir, but nothing on television. And I felt cratic iconography. Before the onset of home video record- that it was absolutely necessary to look into the most common ers, that type of imagery was only coming one way at you. language, and that was TV. 37 Wasn’t Warhol a model already for that kind of above: Dara Birnbaum, still from Pop-Pop Video, 1980. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix, NY TV was strictly controlled. The idea was to grab these images The context of the piece evolved within the logic of the indus- that were part of my own landscape and not to translate their try. meaning by making objects, but to let it exist on tape or film. I A lot of the artists working in the late 1970s and early 1980s had wanted to place the work anywhere that it could permeate back a need for immediacy. I distinctly remember when someone into the culture. It was a way of talking back to the media. smashed the storefront window of Franklin Furnace, angered by the aphorisms that Jenny Holzer had posted there. At that Was that idea of permeating the monolith of mainstream cul- time her work was produced on cheaply photocopied, standard ture, rather than neglecting or resisting it altogether, related to 8 1/2 by 11-inch . That type of immediate reaction, that artists using cable? immediate provocation, was exactly what I was looking for. Yes. Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman was put on The urge for immediacy had a lot to do with being the first gen- cable TV opposite the “real” Wonder Woman on network TV. So eration to grow up entirely on television. It was an apparatus if you were channel-flipping, hopefully you could come across that was introduced in our houses like a gun. It was a weapon, both versions – which I felt could destabilize the meaning and and that is how I wanted to use it. I think those pieces hold up intention of the original network program. The attempt to as markers of a certain moment in time, not unlike the origi- change context was very naive but very honest. We were trying nal series that they come from. They give you a window into to change things by permeating different territories. By 1979, a specific preoccupation we had with mass media – and our Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger were also working in that feelings of being controlled by it. We wanted to respond by direction in their artwork, but they were not invading the terri- breaking down the “control” of the industry and to allow for a tory of television. I thought that this was the most important ter- space for altering views and representations. It was impor- ritory to invade. In the early 80s, many artists working directly tant to talk back and resist the passivity of reception, both in with video thought of cable TV as different from broadcast TV. relation to the mass media’s dominant forms and its ideolo- It seemed less regulated and controlled, even though it was gies. Of course, like everything else in this society, years later already developing into a big business. Its structure was differ- the tapes I made came down themselves to be saleable objects, ent in relation to commercial advertising and how that affected and that is the way they are distributed now. I did not escape my programming. The regulations that demanded that color cam- own copyright. era studios for production be made available to the public, for local programming in the public interest, gave many people a opposite: Covers of Radical Software. Courtesy Paul Ryan and Davidson Gigliotti basis for production without great expense. The other regula- tions that guaranteed programming time to such local and artis- tic production allowed a window for more experimental work and ideas. It was possible, for a moment, to live out a more Ben- jaminian ideal of becoming producers, rather than spectators. In addition, there was a terrible need for product – software – to temporarily fill the gap presented by these new spaces of trans- mission. Even though it was also a big business, at that moment it represented a potential space for art practice. Now it is much more difficult to tell cable and broadcast TV apart.

Looking at it from today, do you think that works like Wonder Woman still have a critical potential? Or do they get absorbed in the logic of commodifying nostalgia? Well, it marks a moment in time when I felt I had to capture that idealized vision of a woman, with a perfect body, wrapped in the American flag. This was a horrendous image for me. In the year that I made the videotape, Wonder Woman bathing suits were the hottest-selling items for girls. I couldn’t go and join Lanesville’s community television. I felt that I had to take on the task more directly. If Bush has his own “axis of evil,” then that image was mine. The reason why his recent quote of the “axis of evil” is so immediately assimilated is because it has the potential to resonate in all of us, as based upon a historical past. For me “the evil” was and is the industry – an industry that men dominated, where they could form a commodified, corporate image of women.

The feminist politics of the piece are very much alive, but this still does not answer the previous question. Both Kojak and Wonder Woman are today a 38 cherished part of many people’s childhoods.

40 Thaddeus Cahill’s “Music Plant” generated the instruments tones. Each generator rotor pro- Brian Dewan duced a , and the 60-foot chassis held 145 rotors. Cahill described his instrument as a “Music Plant.” Crowds were eager to hear the new instrument demon- The trouble about these beautiful, novel things is that they inter- strated. Inside Telharmonic Hall, eight telephone receivers fit- fere so with one’s arrangements. Every time I see or hear a new ted with paper horns were hidden behind ferns, Doric columns, wonder like this I have to postpone my death right off. I couldn’t and lobby furniture. One of the company’s electricians sug- possibly leave the world until I have heard this again and again. gested connecting the Telharmonium’s current to the overhead — Mark Twain arc lamps, knowing that the lamps would resonate with the instrument’s frequency and produce a “singing arc.” A spokes- The new wonder that Mark Twain described was the Telharmo- man for the Hall announced that trolley cars could have music nium, a pioneering and immensely ambitious electrical musical piped into them using their overhead power wires. Cahill pro- instrument, the first to synthesize sounds from electrically gen- posed that “telharmony” could even be used to relieve boredom erated waves. Conceived in the early 1890s by Thaddeus Cahill in the workplace, and he advocated “electric sleep-music” in the – whose original name for his invention was the Dynamophone home that could be switched on at any hour of the day or night – the instrument produced sound with dynamos that generated to cure nervous disorders caused by modern life. alternating currents. Because the sound was generated electri- Though the Telharmonium enjoyed immediate success, cally, it was possible not only to synthesize sound but also to it was mired in difficulties. The special intonation keyboards transmit it over telephone lines, making it possible to provide were difficult for most musicians to play, and Cahill struggled to music to thousands of hotels, restaurants, and home subscrib- overcome the problem of “robbing” (the decrease in volume as ers. additional notes were played at once) and “diaphragm crack” (a Thaddeus Cahill was born in Iowa in 1867 and grew up in distorted percussive attack from the telephone receivers). The Oberlin, Ohio. In his early teens he was employed as a court ste- current required to drive the speakers was much greater than nographer, and he invented improved mechanisms for steno- that of a regular telephone signal; consequently, there were graph machines and typewriters, one of which he named a “syn- frequent complaints about interference as the Telharmonium’s thesizer.” In addition he invented improved keyboard actions music bled into telephone conversations through the wires. for pianos and organs. In his youth, Cahill had read Helmholtz’s AT&T’s head engineer, Hammond Hayes, though impressed On the Sensation of Tone, and the analysis of musical timbre with the instrument, decided that even with special circuits it as combinations of tones in the harmonic spectrum excited would disturb regular phone service. In addition, because the his imagination. He conceived of an ideal instrument that pos- technology was prohibitively expensive, investment in it would sessed the virtues of all musical instruments and none of their remain unprofitable. Hard economic times, and AT&T’s reluc- limitations or, as he wrote, “defects.” tance to allow The New England Electric Music Company to use Cahill patented the Telharmonium in 1897 and in 1902 he its conduits and manholes, turned the popular modern wonder and his two business partners founded the New England Electric of the Telharmonium into an untouchable business enterprise. Music Company. The Telharmonium was first publicly demon- Cahill and his siblings financed the endeavor themselves even strated in Holyoke, Massachusetts, in 1906, and later that year he after Cahill’s partners fled the company. The advent of radio at had it moved to New York City. It weighed 200 tons and required 30 the end of First World War spelled the end for the Telharmo- boxcars to ship. Cahill installed it at Telharmonic Hall at 39th Street nium. Before 1920 it was removed from Telharmonic Hall and and Broadway, where visitors could sit on a plush circular sofa and scrapped. No recordings of it are known to exist today. listen to electrically generated renditions of classical music while In the mid-1930s, much to the Cahill family’s consterna- the enormous dynamos whirred in the basement below. When Tel- tion, Lawrence Hammond patented the first electrically ampli- harmonic Hall opened amidst much public excitement, one article fied organ, which was a simplified Telharmonium in miniature. declared, “In the new art of telharmony we have the latest gift of Hammond did not acknowledge the influence of his prede- electricity to civilization, an art which, while abolishing every musi- cessor (whose patent had not yet run out), but in the 1950s cal instrument, from the jew’s-harp to the cello, gives everybody electronic music pioneers Hugh LeCaine and Robert Moog cheaply, and everywhere, more music than they ever had before.” regarded Cahill’s invention not as a failed business venture but On the main floor at Telharmonic Hall, two to four musi- as a seminal acheivement: not only did he create the first signifi- cians seated at the control console operated the Telharmo- cant electric instrument, he had created the unprecedented art nium. The console had uniquely arranged keyboards, each of music synthesis. manual having four banks of 84 keys each, with 48 keys per octave. This made it possible to play using just intonation. For further information, see Reynold Weidenaar, Magic Music from the Telharmonium, The pressure sensitive keyboard employed an evenly alternat- (Metuchen, N.J., and London: The Scarecrow Press, 1995). ing pattern of white and black keys, unlike a conventional organ keyboard. Below the manuals there was a pedal keyboard to be played with the feet. Timbre was controlled by adding harmon- ics in varying combinations. A separate musician controlled the volume in discrete steps from a piano keyboard and had a set of timbre controls and four expression pedals. The entire opposite: Musician playing at the Telharmonic Hall. The photograph originally 41 floor below housed the electric power station that appeared in Gunther’s Magazine, June 1907. Courtesy Reynold Weidenaar To be looked at, from a distance, with eyes crossed dan wolgers

These pictures are from a photo booth with two lenses. If you try to meet my gaze in the two pictures by crossing your eyes, a third picture emerges in the middle. If you focus on it, it becomes three-dimensional. Hello, nice to meet you, do you want to diplomats “going native” – a derogatory term for when a dip- go to Holland?: A conversation with lomat relinquishes his or her post and becomes a resident in Robert Kloos and Mónica de la Torre said country (official diplomats are supposed to rotate every Regine Basha 3 years or so to other countries, the location of which is unknown to them). The idea is that local employees, most of whom are Having just completed two years in the position of Cultural professionals in their fields, can better guide the department Affairs Officer for Visual Art and Music at the Canadian Consul- locally and provide valuable built-in contacts. ate in New York, I’ve been thinking about the ambiguous role of the “cultural attaché” and how foreign governments use culture RB: When were your departments installed in New York and to further national and political agendas. The following conversa- what were the agendas? tion grew out of several encounters I had with two of my former counterparts – Robert Kloos, the Director for Visual Arts, Archi- MT: The Mexican Cultural Institute of New York was estab- tecture and Design at the Consulate General of the Netherlands lished in 1991 along with thirteen other institutes in various in New York, and Mónica de la Torre, the former Director of Litera- cities in the United States as part of a program to build official ture and Visual Arts at the Mexican Cultural Institute of New York. links with Mexican immigrants abroad. As stated in the Insti- Since we all have strong convictions regarding the limitations of tute’s annual report, its main purpose was to “nurture a sense our roles as cultural attachés, we compared the demands of our of national identity among people of Mexican origin living in respective posts here in New York. the US by organizing events that celebrated Mexico’s history There seems to be no global standard regarding the and traditions” – an idea that came directly out of the admin- appointment of a cultural attaché or the official presence of a istration of former president Carlos Salinas. It was said that cultural department abroad. Each country has its own agenda there might have been an electoral motive to the foundation of and approach that depends on the popularity and economic these Institutes whose primary function was to reinforce patrio- demand of each of its unique “cultural products” (i.e., Italy tism. Over the years the Institute evolved into a cultural center pushes fashion and food, Holland pushes design and architec- that catered to a very different audience than the one originally ture, Sweden pushes furniture, etc.). conceived. Here in the United States, the presence of a foreign gov- ernment’s cultural department is usually contingent upon that RK: Traditionally, the Dutch Embassy in Washington and the country’s economic strength and its own domestic cultural Consulates in several cities had so-called Press and Cultural priorities. For instance, because many European countries Affairs Departments staffed by career diplomats with little (such as Holland, Sweden, Germany, France) have histori- or no background in the arts. In 1990, The Ministry of Foreign cal systems of government support for the arts at home, their Affairs struck an agreement with the Ministry of Culture to foreign policy includes a stronger cultural diplomacy effort create a new office that would work nationally through New abroad. Of course, some countries might choose to direct their York and be staffed by people with specific cultural back- cultural promotion toward countries other than the United grounds in all the arts disciplines. Over the years the agenda States. For instance, Canada puts more effort into self-promo- has changed from importing pre-packaged projects to the tion in France and England than it does in the US (budgets are United States (such as exhibitions, concert series and the like) higher, there is a gallery space, etc.). Japan has as much pres- to a way of working where we try to stimulate American insti- ence in Australia as it does in the US. In the cases of countries tutions to make their own informed selections of Dutch artists with less economic reach, culture may not have been given and/or exhibitions produced in Holland. You could say that we a special envelope of funds (or special status); it tends to be changed our job description from salesmen to information bro- part of the trade department along with other exportable prod- kers and matchmakers. ucts and is handled by a generalist rather than a specialist – such is the case with New Zealand’s Trade Office in New York, RB: As for Canada, officers for culture in its foreign missions for instance. began taking posts as early as 1966, but these early positions As the hegemony of US culture spreads throughout the were taken by career diplomats. It was really the culture-savvy world, the desire of other countries to protect and disseminate Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau who understood the importance their own cultural agendas on American turf becomes all the and value of cultural affairs abroad and left a legacy that lasted more urgent. These sanctioned assertions of national cultural from the late 70s well through the 1980s. His efforts even sup- identity tend to compete on the island of Manhattan. The ques- ported a consulate-run gallery, The 49th Parallel, from 1980 to tion, then, is how effective are they and how does the cultural 1992 in New York. Yet by the early 1990s, the Department of attaché negotiate this role? Foreign Affairs suffered serious cutbacks and had to close the Through our discussion we found that the role and effec- gallery space. So now that we all seem to have an official “cul- tiveness of the cultural attaché is shaped almost entirely by tural policy” or “cultural diplomacy,” what does that mean for the personality of the individual occupying the position. In your job? some cases, they are hired locally (as dual nationals or citizens) rather than from their own countries in order to develop dual RK: The involvement of governments and governmental bod- allegiances. This proves to be a more cost-effective plan for the ies such as consulates and embassies in international cultural department, since the local officer does not need to exchange has traditionally been a complicated issue. Often it 43 relocate. It also relieves the ever-present danger of is not clear what the main goal is: furthering the exchange of the arts, which is quality based, or using the arts to propagate national identity in a day and age of globalization, where coun- tries feel the need to protect their cultural heritage. Our office supports professional artists from all over the world who have been living and working in the Netherlands for at least three years. For example, in the recent past we were mostly involved in projects with artists that are not Dutch nationals, such as Carlos Amorales (Mexico), Meschac Gaba (Benin), Moshekwa Langa (South Africa), Ebru Ozsecen (Turkey), Fiona Tan (Indone- sia), etc. Artists will undoubtedly bring baggage from their cul- tural backgrounds, but it is the current locality that has become much more important for the understanding of their work. I would like to shed the windmill, tulip, and wooden shoes men- tality, and focus on the art itself.

RB: Yes, there are issues about how to guage the degree of the artist’s nationality: Should it be by years spent in any given country? By citizenship? By visibility and virtual presence in that country? What seems to happen at a certain level is that the notoriety of an artist translates into an opportunity for the country to brand itself. The artists or personalities then turn into cultural products, almost like logos, regardless of where they are based. For instance, in Canada’s case, someone like the news reporter Peter Jennings has been out of Canada for years, but the Consulate still points to him and announces that he’s a Canadian and includes him in high-profile official events – whether he considers himself one or not. Or take, for example, Jeff Wall, whose work has come to epitomize Canadian art in a way: dry, conceptual, classical. These traits tend to parlay into positive stereotypes when placed in the context of cultural pol- icy. I wonder how much of that has influenced the funding flow for him and for other Canadian artists who follow suit. You could say that there is a strange consensual agreement going on and it can become very convenient for artists to participate. So when is it appropriate for the Consulate to accentuate national- ist traits?

MT: What you’re saying reminds me of a strange thing that used to happen to me when I’d find out about certain events in New York that took place without us, the Institute, knowing. My personality would split; I clearly developed an institutional persona, from which I’m glad to have freed myself. When there was some prominent event with Mexican artists (an exhibition or reading, for instance) happening without my involvement, I’d actually feel like the people organizing it were chipping away at the Institute’s territory. I’d even say that the Institute itself got competitive about it. Of course the opposite happened as well. Many times we tried to avoid having our logo associated with certain events. Once there was a tribute to Octavio Paz cel- ebrated at the National Arts Club; on the stage hung a poster of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Before the poetry reading some danc- ers performed an Aztec dance. Paz must have been rolling over in his grave! On the other hand, there might have been certain instances in which artists preferred not to involve any Mexican officials. I’d understand if they’d feel embarrassed to have the Mexican Consul offer a speech at their opening. We shouldn’t forget that in the case of Mexico, where there has been a lot of political turmoil in the last decade, culture 44 is not easily disassociated from politics. At some point around 1999 there was a group of pro-Zapatista activists based the idea of being a friendly, helpful neighbor to the US (but not in the South Bronx, I believe, that frequently organized protests as market- or consumer-driven as the US), a vast, resourceful outside of the Consulate. When things heated up, the Consul country with a more open immigration policy than the US, pos- General at the time responded in typical Mexican fashion. sessing a dry humor – somewhere between British and Ameri- There’s a reason why the PRI managed to stay in power for over can. Internally, though, there are of course thorny, unresolved 70 years! He decided to organize a symposium, in conjunction issues – especially with Quebec’s Francophone identity vis-à-vis with the Mexican Cultural Institute, about the pros and cons of English Canada and the autonomous rights of First Nations, or the Zapatista uprising. The leading voices representing both indigenous people. The relationship Canada has with the US is sides were brought from Mexico. The panels took place at The very strange: on the one hand, there is a strong desire to distin- New School, a neutral space. The auditorium was packed. The guish itself from the US; on the other hand, there is constant Consulate presented a view of Mexican institutions that was emulation, especially on the part of corporate Canada and very open and democratic; by doing this it neutralized opposi- Canadian pop culture. The reality is that many artists leave for tion. If I’m not mistaken, protests did diminish, in part because the US and are not interested in being called Canadian—this is the Consul’s move paralleled the way the Mexican government called the “brain-drain” – and you wonder if for some, it’s just a in general began dealing with the Zapatistas. As we know, in citizenship and not a nationality. the end this didn’t work for the PRI. When Fox won the presi- So, a few years before I had started, there was a new enve- dency in 2000 a sense of hope about the possibility of true dia- lope of funding that was designated as “Public Diplomacy.” It logue was kindled. was basically a glorified PR budget, not the usual support grants that we would give to venues and individual artists. It was sup- RB: Yes, that’s cultural diplomacy. Certainly there were times posed to be used for the highest-profile New York events and when a particular “cultural” project made the Canadian Consul- promotional material – big names only. It was used at one point ate nervous, especially when it seemed overtly political. Last to enlist a PR firm to shape an image for the Consulate. The PR year, when the Americas Summit opened to huge crowds of firm developed the image of the “Can-Apple”: a green apple, protestors in Quebec City, an officer at the Consulate wanted to symbolizing New York, with a red Canadian maple leaf on it. invite the controversial author Naomi Klein, an anti-globalist, to give a talk in New York. Of course without ever saying it directly, MT: Yes! I know that apple very well. We used to receive the the Department of Foreign Affairs expressed discomfort in Canadian Consulate’s newsletter and, better yet, it was our regard to her politics and put up barriers to the realization of the model for how things should be. The press office at the Mexican program. In the end she came anyway, but was forced to coun- Consulate produced a monthly newsletter with listings of cul- terpoint with another Canadian right-wing journalist in order to tural events that unfortunately would not get to people until the deflect any possible accusation of biased politics on the part of middle of the month. So tell us more about the apple. the Consulate. RB: An artist was commissioned to build a three-dimensional MT: I have a question before you go on. What is “Canada in a version of the apple out of the Public Diplomacy budget. It’s Suitcase”? transported to events like a mascot of the Canadian Consulate. It once went to an event and got damaged (the leaf chipped) RB: Actually, the idea for this conversation came up because of so the Consul General decided to make another one – a proxy “Canada in a Suitcase.” When I started at the Consulate, there apple – that would travel while the original would stay at the was a certain kind of acclimatization that took place. After Consulate. The apple, by the way, has already appeared on that I came to realize that the Consulate is basically a PR firm scarves, coasters, mouse-pads, and ties, which are given in disguise. away as gifts. The Consulate’s newsletter is called The Upper- northside, the idea being a friendly neighborhood within New RK: And you went into shock! York next to the Upper East Side or Upper West Side. Included in the listings are famous Canadian celebrities that appear in RB: Yes, it was a culture shock! In Canada, I don’t recall having New York regularly – and don’t really need our publicity or fund- this need to promote Canadian-ness in any way. In my job at the ing. As for “Canada in a Suitcase,” basically it is a Saidye Bronfman Centre for the Arts in Montreal, if visitors came box fashioned into a suitcase that contains a video, mini-flag in from abroad, there were no added implementations to justify pins, tourist pamphlets, and general information about Can- what’s Canadian or not. Also, because government funding ada’s resources, economy, diverse cultures, and arts. One is for the arts is a given in Canada (as with Mexico and Holland), expected to take this around on “outcalls” (meetings). there wasn’t much need to promote the government in general. Here it was very evident that there were strategies in place to MT: What seems really weird to me is that this apple is present- define what Canadian-ness is in a unified, generalized way and ing the institution and not Canada. to import it, package it, and promote it to the US— which felt to me like a very American thing to do. RB: That’s exactly right! The criticism was that it serves to pro- mote the Consulate itself as if it were a venue, and it’s not! I RK: So what are those characteristics? mean, if there was a space… maybe.

45 RB: To the office here, it’s a certain political neutrality, RK: In the beginning I thought I wanted to have an exhibition RK: But even these trips need to be thought out more. It is not space to present Dutch art, but pretty soon I changed my mind. enough to support a curator’s visit to a country once and think It would not provide the necessary context and environment for that he or she, from that moment on, has a perfect understand- the work. It segregates it from the regular New York art scene ing of what is going on there. It’s tempting to fall into the “Hello, and underlines the Dutch-ness of the work. I’d much rather see nice to meet you, do you want to go to Holland?” trap. I want the Rineke Dijkstra presented at Marian Goodman than at a venue curators to come more often and to stay longer and enter into a that only presents Dutch art. serious dialogue with Holland. On the one hand, I cannot deny These promotional tools you are mentioning are mis- that I have to carry out my country’s national cultural policies, guided. First of all, they are not about cultural promotion but but on the other hand, I would rather have my role be superflu- about national promotion. The newsletter heaps all kinds of ous. I am constantly trying to find a balance. unrelated information together and disperses it among an indiscriminate audience instead of a target audience. Also, it MT: One can think of our roles in terms of infiltration, in the gobbles up a lot of money that could otherwise be used for the sense that you first trace this map and know more about them support of the arts. than they think. Then you make yourself a prominent figure A few years ago I devised a system that we call the “fact- in the art world, but you never overtly push any artists or any- file” project. It contains a database and archival system that thing. You become someone who people can trust. Of course maps the cultural field in the United States and records infor- this is much more effective than walking around with cata- mation about organizations, their mission, programming, and logues or slides in your portfolio. interest in international exchange. Furthermore, it documents the work history our office has had with these organizations, RB: But the position itself demands that you be a double-agent; what projects we collaborated on, etc. Initially I conceived of to the artists of the country you must, by default, promote and this system to prevent the huge information loss that occurred service their needs, while to the local institutions you are the every three to four years when diplomats are replaced with a provider of funds. It is unnerving to be in that double role. newcomer that has to reinvent the wheel. We do not use gen- eral communication tools such as brochures, websites, public- opposite: Canada in a Suitcase. Photo: Regine Basha ity kits, and the like, but instead favor one-on-one contact and direct dialogue.

MT: Going back to the issue about whether it’s good or not to have an exhibition space, I’d like to say that in principle I do agree with you, Robert, that it’s better not to have one. But I’ll tell you what the rationale is. Perhaps you didn’t have this prob- lem, but if you’re at the Mexican Cultural Institute in NYC, do you know how many Mexican artists show up at your office every week? Some of those artists we couldn’t immediately dismiss. Sometimes we had to, or we wanted to, help them show their work in New York but didn’t feel that there were many chances that a mainstream gallery or museum would be interested in it. The art market plays by its own rules and many artists either can’t or simply don’t want to adjust to them. We thought that by giving these artists a show in our own space we could do some- thing good for them and for others by expanding the range of things that get shown in New York. This might have been ideal- istic, but we never thought that our job was comparable in any way to that of a Chelsea dealer. Also, in 1999 we moved to a new building that had a pretty good gallery space. We decided to start a new exchange pro- gram that consisted of inviting independent curators to come up with exhibitions for the gallery. In some instances we also gave them grants to go on scouting trips to Mexico and meet with different artists. If they needed lists of artists to meet with, we would provide them, but we never told them whom to see. They could include whomever they wanted, if they at least included a couple of Mexican artists. This was inspired by a series of very successful exhibitions we had done in Mexico City and New York curated by Kenny Schachter. These programs worked well because they truly promoted lasting ties between artists of both Mexico and the United States. 46

Save Your Family Jay Worthington

In the last issue of Cabinet, we invited readers to send in fam- ily photographs taken by photographers who died before 1933. These images were your responses, and their contributors can sleep easy because under current American law these pho- tographs are now copyrighted until 2047. Had they not been published by the end of this year, they would have entered the public domain on January 1, 2003. Who cares? Probably nobody. Given that few people knew that these images existed before we published them here, there was little demand to make copies of them – an irony of this provision of copyright law is that it will release into the public domain only unpublished work, the sort of material it’s hard to imagine the public gaining access to, or even being aware of, in the first place. By the time this issue is distributed, it will be down to America’s libraries and archives to get busy and let us (the public) know what we have actually been given. But what about all the unpublished writing of someone famous, like Mark Twain? For students and publishers of such celebrated writers, the release of old unpublished work into the public domain may well be meaningful. The Mark Twain Proj- ect, however, is as aware of copyright law as we are, and last year they published a three-microfilm set containing an esti- mated 500,000 pages of (mostly) unpublished writing by Mark Twain. The microfilm set is not cheap – actually, at $50,000 each, nobody’s bought one yet – but they are published. Until 2047, then, anyone wishing to pen the definitive Twain biography will have to obtain the Twain Project’s permission. Oh well.

Thanks to: Ariel Apte, Ibrahim Ba, David Berqvist, Denis Blot, Doris Brickhouse, Robert and Lynn Burress, Samantha Cranko, Sarah Crowner, Michael Hargrove, Sara Harris, Jason Hashmi, Peter Johnson, Ronald Joseph, Jane Melamed, Katie McMullen, Edward Nostrand, Frances Richard, Peter Rockefeller, Richard Sawka, Phillip Saxe-Coburg, Ayal Shlomo, Debra Singer, Robert Smith, Agnes Vertucci, Bonnie Williams, Cherma Wildman, Jay Worthington, Charles Yabba, and Josephine Zywicki.

48 columns

maIN

childhood Fröbel and the Gifts of Kindergarten Norman Brosterman

Kindergarten has been around so long, and is so thoroughly familiar, that it is natural to assume personal expertise on the subject. But kindergarten for us, and for most of the genera- tions born in this century, is a distortion, a diluted version of what Friedrich Wilhelm Fröbel (1782-1852) originated as a radical and highly spiritual system of abstract design activities developed to teach the recognition and appreciation of natu- ral harmony. Kindergarten has always included singing and dancing, as well as observation of the workings of nature — the growth of plants, the symmetries of crystals and seashells. One’s teacher was usually a woman and she led the class in activities that would have been considered play outside the school. But long abandoned, and thus hardly known today, is the practical and philosophical heart of the system— Fröbel’s interconnected series of twenty play “gifts” using sticks, col- ored paper, mosaic tiles, sewing cards, as well as building blocks, drawing equipment, and the gridded tables at which the children sat. The son of a Lutheran minister, Fröbel was born in Ober- weissbach, a forest town in central Germany. A lonely boy with a neglectful stepmother and distracted father, he formed an unusual kinship with nature that blossomed into spiritual exal- tation during the height of the Romantic era. The works of his contemporaries Goethe and Schiller added to Fröbel’s intuited cosmology, and he fashioned a personal philosophy of Unity — embracing the spiritual potential within a person, relations children would be immediately comprehensible in specific between people in a free society, the place of the individual visual form. So, for example, “L2B3” might mean a short diago- in relation to the nature that surrounds and includes him, and nal followed by two long horizontals. Like quirkily-coded ver- the life force that controls growth in all things — as both a per- sions of Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings, the system was inherently manent goal and working gauge. confusing and short-lived. The names Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and Christian Fröbel’s first visit to Yverdon was in 1805. Two years later, Weiss may ring no bells today, yet through the agency of their after acting as a private tutor in Frankfurt, he returned to teach mutual pupil Fröbel, their influence was profound. Pestalozzi under Pestalozzi and stayed until 1810. At Napolean’s defeat in (1746-1827) was one of the first educators to abandon the stan- 1814, after stints as a forester, teacher, and soldier, Fröbel took dard instructional practice of interminable lectures followed by an assistant’s job at the Mineralogical Museum of the University student recitation in favor of more active, hands-on activities of Berlin under Professor Christian Samuel Weiss (1780-1856). and what he termed Anschauung —”object lessons,” or direct, From 1811 to 1815, coincident with Fröbel’s tenure in the concrete observation. At the school he opened in Yverdon, museum, Weiss was in the process of formulating the theoreti- Switzerland, in 1804, Pestalozzi’s success with orphans and cal parameters and objective techniques of modern crystallog- the previously disenfranchised children of the working class raphy, changing the field from a branch of natural philosophy to altered the course of modern education. an exact mathematical science. Before the 20th century, when The traditional educational activity of drawing was greatly the existence of atoms was finally confirmed with the invention emphasized at Yverdon, as Pestalozzi considered it of primary of X-ray diffraction, the naturally occurring forms of crystals importance in the teaching of writing and comprehension of were correctly assumed to be external manifestations form. Recognizing that children manifested a natural “taste for drawing,” and just as commonly, an aversion to the study above from top: Unknown kindergartner’s paper folding album. Philadelphia, ca. of letters, Pestalozzi developed techniques that incorporated 1875; Eighteenth gift ( for folding), Milton Bradley Company, Springfield, a combination of both. In their joint publication of 1803, ABC Mass., 1920; J. Hemmelmann’s paper cutting album, Germany, ca. 1875; Abbie der Anschauung, his assistant Johannes Buss went so far as A. Herrick’s paper Beauty forms. Westfield, Massachusetts, 1875; Thirteenth gift to construct an experimental “alphabet” of form consisting (papers for cutting). Milton Bradley Company, Springfield, Mass., ca. 1920. of various segments of lines drawn in the squares of a grid- All images except overleaf are from Inventing Kindergarten © 1997 Norman ded matrix.1 Abstract and unintentionally iconographic, the Brosterman. Published by Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York. Used with permis- ABC was a tool developed to facilitate observation and the sion. All rights reserved. learning of writing by fragmenting letters and pictures into overleaf: Vasily Kandinsky’s Composition 8 from 1923, recreated with kinder- their basic components. Pestalozzi hoped to create a garten gifts number 7 (paper parquetry), 8 (sticks), 9 (rings), 14 (weaving), 15 51 method whereby any series of letters called out to little (slats), and 16 (jointed slats) 52 53 In 1816, Fröbel declined a professorship of mineralogy in Stockholm in favor of founding his first small school for children. After teaching around Germany and Switzerland for another 20 years, he concluded that when many children began school at the officially mandated age of seven, a rigid dullness was too often already fixed within them. In 1837 in the spa town of Blankenburg, Fröbel opened his first institution for the very young. Two years later, he exultantly fixed upon a brand-new word to describe his revolutionary invention, “kin- dergarten,” which encapsulated in a single clever neologism two related ideas: its organizational model (the children’s gar- den) and its spiritual foundation (the garden of children). After formulating the explicit lesson of kindergarten (growth and interconnectedness), Fröbel designed physical tools (models of natural crystals, or the gifts) that he theorized would lead to its comprehension. He simultaneously created a methodology that when properly utilized, provided children with an infinite number of conceptual links between the two— exercises in what were usually called the “Three Realms.” In short sessions of directed play, the geometric gifts were used to create pictures or structures that fit loosely into each of three fundamental categories— forms of Nature (or Life), forms of Knowledge (or Science), and forms of Beauty (or Art). Unlike of the regular arrangement of minute particles in three- the building blocks, mosaic toys, and traditional crafts that dimensional matrices. It was the genius of Fröbel’s mentor were their forbears, the gifts were never available for entirely Weiss to recognize that the number, type, and relative direc- “free play.” Always tethered in some fashion to the forms of tion of a specimen’s observable geometric symmetries dis- the three realms, their use was subordinate to the greater tinguished its unique internal structure, and would ultimately whole, which was Unity. reveal its specific chemical composition. The life forms were tangible: chairs, trees, people; the Fröbel worked each day for almost two years in a “locked knowledge forms mathematical: 2x4=8, 4+4=8; the beauty and perfectly quiet room” organizing the diverse and dazzling forms were usually symmetrical patterns, as Fröbel felt symme- samples of the mineralogical museum’s splendid omnibus col- try was most comprehensible as beauty to little children. Equiv- lection.2 The shapes of crystals in particular—the systematic alency was kindergarten’s foundation and it was expressed variations in the design of their forms, planes, and symme- in all things and at all times. For four-, five-, and six-year-olds, tries—provided an obvious structure for the categorization of transforming the very same materials into something new mineral classes, ultimately leading to Weiss’s discoveries. each day, as the class shifted from gift to gift and from realm For Fröbel, inclined as he was to view nature as a great to realm, the ultimate lesson of kindergarten was straightfor- work of design by a higher power, this intense and prolonged ward. In slightly different guise, the world, mathematics, and occupation with the geometric handiwork of God had a pro- art were interchangeable, and their perceived borders were found and lasting impact. He began to perceive “transforming, misleading, artificial constructs. A chair might become num- developing energy” in the smallest fixed forms of nature’s infi- bers, numbers art, and art either or both. With extremely simple nite palate and learned to recognize people, plants, and crys- means, former crystallographer Fröbel effectively assembled tals as equivalent consequences stemming from the same laws all the components of the universe into his training program of growth: “And thereafter my rocks and crystals served me as for infants. Children could make anything they saw, perceived, a mirror wherein I might descry mankind, and man’s develop- or imagined, and while doing so would enter the world—and it ment and history.… Nature and Man now seemed to me mutu- would enter them. ally to explain each other, through all their numberless various The original kindergarten spread successfully around the stages of development.”3 What once seemed obvious to Fröbel world in the decades after Fröbel’s death in 1852. It was partic- about living things—that their essential growth was governed ularly popular in Holland, Italy, France, Switzerland, Great Brit- by fixed laws from above—now also resonated in mere stones. ain, Japan (the first school opened in 1876), Canada, and the Furthermore, and more significantly for the generations to United States. Publicly banned in Germany as a result of the follow, he discovered forms of symbolic unity that could, with failed revolution of 1848, it was maintained there in private, pencil and straightedge, be transferred to paper and bound liberal, and Jewish schools until its complete acceptance in the into books. Simply put, Fröbel postulated that since the shapes early 20th century. Through the efforts of missionaries, it soon of crystals— combinations of triangles and tetrahedrons, squares and cubes—are the outcome of the same natural laws top (clockwise): Perforating cushions, Milton Bradley Company, Springfield, that also result in the growth of children, people, and entire Mass., ca. 1900; Kindergartner Gina’s (last name unknown) Nature forms societies, handling these forms correctly would reveal made by pricking paper. United States, ca. 1900; Kindergarten teacher Abbie A. 54 and illuminate the mind of the creator itself. Herrick’s Beauty form, Westfield, Mass., 1875. Photograph: Zindman/Freemont became a fixture in almost every country on earth, and the the general populace. While focusing on kindergarten’s many German word “kindergarten” is still found in the dictionaries of a educational and social benefits, they overlooked a potentially great number of totally unrelated languages. radical outcome of their efforts that is obvious in retrospect— The original function of Fröbel’s system as a spiritual guide kindergarten taught abstraction. In its explicit equivalency to the “music of the spheres” was bastardized in some coun- of ideas and things it taught abstract thinking, and in its tries and certain schools from the time of its inception. Yet all repetitive use of geometric form it taught a new way of seeing of the gifts remained essentially unchanged and in general use that was utterly unfamiliar to the preceding generation. In until at least 1910, and in some areas, well after. From 1860 on, 1882, Marie Matrat, the Inspectrice Générale of the French millions of little children in Europe, North America, and Japan national kindergarten system, or écoles maternelles, declared began their education in Fröbel classes, and significantly, their in exasperation: parents did not, so that the generation that came to maturity Even the best headmistresses have visible form as their before was comprised of the prime recipients of first concern! Rather than resorting to a few random exercises, the original crystalline kindergarten, before a few of them grew which might even be called improvised, they have made it into up and invented abstract painting and modern architecture. the dominant portion, and the actual objects surrounding the Because 19th-century children in countries from Aus- children remain forever forgotten. In a word, these games, tria to Australia were required to learn a new form language rather than being preparation, are the actual teaching. as a requisite of kindergarten, the system’s proliferation Three little sticks held like a fan is a vase of flowers; a col- resulted in unforeseen consequences tangential to, but sig- lection of triangles, laid out according to a given pattern, is a nificantly removed from, Fröbel’s explicit lesson of Unity. By factory, a tomb, a log, the mechanism of a windmill, a hundred connecting the gift plays to an abstract mode of expression, the things the child has never seen, which he cannot represent using early kindergarten pedagogues in effect created an enormous these trinkets, except by using fantasy. Such representation so international program designed specifically to alter the vision of little resembles the real object that even with the best of inten- tions, for me it was impossible to ever recognize the object.4 above: Children’s garden, unidentified kindergarten, Los Angeles, ca. 1900. 56 While it is probable that Frank Lloyd Wright began his Particulaire of La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland run by one of kindergarten training years before his mother supposedly the first graduates of the new state-mandated Neuchâtel Frö- “discovered” the gifts at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial, belian Normal School, Mlle. Louise Colin. After three years there is no question about the system’s profound effect on his in this private kindergarten, Jeanneret took the equivalency architecture. As one of the few kindergarten kids to write about examinations that allowed him to enter the public primary his early experiences, Wright’s words are extremely valuable: school, which, as per an 1889 law, was also structured along Fröbelian lines.6 Mother learned that Frederick Froebel [sic] taught that chil- The grid of the kindergarten table became a very real dren should not be allowed to draw from casual appearances of model of a type of inquiry that drew from multiple sources, cut Nature until they had first mastered the basic forms lying hidden across and connected seemingly divergent data, and had the behind appearances. Cosmic, geometric elements were what potential to result in more than one “correct” conclusion. In should first be made visible to the child-mind. its tacit acceptance of abstraction, kindergarten taught - Taken East at the age of three to my father’s pastorate near lectual diversity and the value of unconventional reasoning. Boston, for several years I sat at the little kindergarten table-top And due to the configuration and particulars of play with the ruled by lines about four inches apart each way making four- gifts, the daily activities in any average kindergarten exhibited inch squares; and among other things, played upon these “unit- affinities with nothing so much as an introductory course in the lines” with the square (cube), the circle (sphere) and the triangle mechanics of art and architecture. The children thus exposed (tetrahedron or tripod)-these were smooth maple-wood blocks. might have been expected to eventually focus these primary Scarlet cardboard triangle (60°-30°) two inches on the short experiences toward art, and some definitely did. Yet paradoxi- side, and one side white, were smooth triangular sections with cally, while mimicking some of the traditional activities of real which to come by pattern—design— by my own imagination. art making, the specific forms of the kindergarten were inher- Eventually I was to construct designs in other mediums. But the ently ill-suited for actually emulating European art and archi- smooth cardboard triangles and maple-wood blocks were most tecture of the late 19th century, or for that matter, any other important. All are in my fingers to this day. epoch. But crowded around the grid of the kindergarten table Also German papers, glazed and matte, beautiful soft color in their lace and velveteens, what the first great kindergarten qualities, were another one of the “gifts”— cut into sheets about generation could do well, and what they all did to some degree, twelve inches each way, these squares were slitted to be woven was to systematically transform the gifts into the kind of crys- into gay colorful checkerings as fancy might dictate. Thus color talline expressions associated with another art; a new art that sense awakened. There were also ingenious “constructions” to would become the next art, early modernism, the art of their be made with straight, slender, pointed sticks like toothpicks or future. jack-straws, dried peas for the joinings, etc., etc. The virtue of all The Victorian childhood of the seminal Modernists coin- this lay in the awakening of the child-mind to rhythmic structure cided with the development and widespread embrace of a in Nature—giving the child a sense of innate cause-and-effect radical educational system that was a catalyst in exploding otherwise far beyond child-comprehension. I soon became sus- the cultural past, and restructuring the resulting intellectual ceptible to constructive pattern evolving in everything I saw. I panoply with a new worldview. It was never fodder for artistic learned to “see” this way and when I did, I did not care to draw argument over absinthe and Gauloises in Montmartre cafés, casual incidentals of Nature. I wanted to design.5 nor was it taught at the tradition-bound academies. It has been If Wright were the only important 20th-century respon- largely ignored because its participants — three- to seven-year- dent to the kindergarten pedagogy, we would still owe a debt olds —were in the primary band of the scholastic spectrum. It to Fröbel’s persistent dream. But there were others. Vasily was the seed-pearl of the modern era and it was called kinder- Kandinsky attended one of the very first Italian kindergar- garten. tens in Florence, where he was living with his parents in 1870. Fröbel’s twenty gifts, which deliberately deconstructed nature 1 Johannes Buss & Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, ABC der Anschauung, oder Anschauungs- from solid to plane to line to point and back, bare a close resem- Lehre der Massverhältnisse (Tübingen: J. G. Cotta, 1803). blance to the components of his Bauhaus paintings. Johannes 2 Friedrich Froebel, Autobiography of Friedrich Froebel, translated and annotated by Itten, first Master of Form at the Bauhaus and creator of its Emilie Michaelis and H. Keatley Moore (Syracuse, NY: C. W. Bardeen, 1889). revolutionary Vorkurs, was a Fröbelian kindergarten teacher in 3 Ibid. Vienna before Walter Gropius invited him to Weimar in 1919. In 4 Marie Matrat, “Les Ecoles Gardiennes de La Hollande,” in Revue Pedagogique (1883), 1889, at the age of 17, Piet Mondrian won his license to teach p. 312. drawing in Dutch primary schools like his father before him. 5 Frank Lloyd Wright, A Testament (New York: Horizon Press, 1957), pp. 19-20. Pedagogical drawing for little children in Holland at that time 6 See Marc Solitaire, “Le Corbusier et l’urbain: la rectification du damier froebelian,” in entailed the systematic construction of increasingly complex H. Allen Brooks, ed., La Ville et L’Urbanisme après Le Corbusier (La Chaux-de-Fonds: geometric designs on right-angle grids. It was identical to the Editions d’En Haut, 1993). netzzeichen (net drawing) Fröbel first proposed in 1826 as a response to Pestalozzi’s ABC der Anschauung. It was also kin- dergarten gift number ten, in public use in Holland along with opposite top: Unknown kindergartner’s beauty form made with the fourteenth gift the rest of the system since 1860. On 1 September 1891, even (paper weaving), US, ca. 1890. Photo: Zindman/Freemont. before his fourth birthday, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, opposite bottom: Kindergartner Alice Hubbard’s beauty form made with the four- 57 the future Le Corbusier, began his studies in the Ecole teenth gift, Providence, United States, ca. 1892. Photo Zindman/Freemont. School Year Helen Mirra

Artist Helen Mirra’s project uses Friedrich Fröbel’s eleventh (perforating), fourteenth (paper weaving), and eighteenth (paper folding) gifts for kindergartners. pages 59-60: Fall - paper folding, orange leaf, 2002 pages 61-62: Winter - paper pricking, white branch, 2002 pages 63-64: Spring - paper weaving, green bud, 2002

58 59 60 61 62 63 64 Where the Wild Things Were: were scholars. One of them was a philologist; the other was a An Interview with Leonard S. Marcus librarian. They were interested in delving into the origins of Ger- David Serlin & Brian Selznick manic culture, of recording it and capturing the part of it that was disappearing as Germany turned into a literate society. As Children’s literature—or more specifically, writing catego- sometimes happens, you publish a book with one audience in rized as children’s literature—is often described as a benign mind but it finds a different audience instead, and the Grimms’ (if often commercially aggressive, as in the case of the Harry fairy tales were received by the German middle class as a work Potter phenomenon) enterprise that revels in escapism and primarily for children. The adults were not all that interested in fuzzy feelings, offering a comfortable buffer zone between reading about things that could never be, because they were innocence and experience. But as Leonard S. Marcus, a lead- very focused on succeeding in the modern world. ing authority on the history of children’s literature, describes, the history of children’s literature is complex and often contra- Scholars who study 19th-century literature often describe it as dictory, full of misanthropic philologists, modernist image-mak- the “golden” period of the novel. Is there an equivalent “gold- ers, and fanatical librarians. en” or “classical” period of children’s literature among people Marcus is the author of Ways of Telling: Conversations on who study children’s literature, or among children’s writers the Art of the Picture Book (Dutton, 2002) and Storied City: A and illustrators themselves? Children’s Book Guide to New York City (Dutton, forthcoming You can talk about different periods that were particularly 2003). David Serlin and Brian Selznick spoke with Marcus in good for the different kinds of books that fall within the September 2002. larger category of children’s literature. In England, for exam- ple, published his Book of Nonsense Verse in Historically, is there a moment when “children’s literature” as 1845; in that same year, in Germany, the book known in Eng- we know it emerges as its own separate category? lish as Slovenly Peter, by Heinrich Hoffmann, was published as The work often cited as the first book written deliberately for well. published Alice’s Adventures in Wonder- children is a non-fiction book by Johannes Amos Comenius land 20 years later, in 1865. What those three authors had in called Orbis Pictus, which was published in Nuremberg in 1662. common is that they were reacting to the didactic “how to be It was a cross between a picture dictionary and a picture ency- a good little boy or girl” kind of literature which was domi- clopedia. There were little illustrations of things to be recog- nant at the time. They believed that children were reasonable nized, like a key or a dog, and the word that corresponded to beings and that perhaps what people most wanted at that the picture was printed along side it in both German and Latin. time in their lives was a chance to laugh at and question author- Thirty years later, in his Thoughts Concerning Education, John ity, including their parents, teachers, and all of the people Locke wrote that children respond more readily to illustrated who stood over them. So the middle of the 19th century was texts than to unbroken blocks of type. That observation became a golden time for what is often called nonsense literature. one of the basic principles for children’s literature. Orbis Pictus For a variety of reasons, the mid- to late 20th century, in the was a very popular book, and was published in the English- US, turned out to be golden age of realistic fiction for children, speaking world in the 18th century. and of the picture book. In London in the 1740s, John Newbery was the first person to make children’s books a viable commercial enterprise aimed Is there a connection or parallel development between theo- at the entertainment as well as the education of young people. ries of what kinds of books are appropriate for children and Newbery was a printer, bookseller, publisher, sometime writer, various theories about children’s education, child rearing, or as well as a seller of patent medicines, which was not unusual child development? for the time since merchants very often had two or more trades. You can trace a connection, all the way back to Comenius, Newbery printed, published, and sold his own books, and com- between theories of education and the kinds of children’s missioned writers like Oliver Goldsmith to write for him. More books that were being published. In the early 1800s, Louisa than Germany, England is where children’s literature as we May Alcott’s father, Bronson, ran an experimental school in know it got started. As the epicenter of the Industrial Revolu- Boston—until he was closed down for bringing in a black girl. tion, England had the largest numbers of new middle-class par- Alcott was aware of the European theorists of education of his ents who were eager for their children to be educated and get own and earlier times, and their ideas found their way into chil- ahead in the world. dren’s magazines of the day with which the Alcotts were associ- ated. You can trace the influence of those ideas directly to what It sounds as if the emergence of children’s literature is roughly happened in New York City starting in the 1910s at the Bank concurrent with the emergence of what we think of as the Street College of Education, which is where, among others, modern novel. Margaret Wise Brown, the author of Goodnight Moon and many It’s interesting because we see a splitting off between what was other picture books, got her training as a writer for children. considered “children’s literature” and what were considered Edward Steichen was inspired by Bank Street to create appropriate kinds of storytelling for adults. For example, at the two unusual photographic picture books for children. These beginning of the 19th century in Germany, the Grimm brothers books, although well reviewed, did not become especially collected their very well known fairy tales. But the first edition popular in their time. The Whitney showed some of the pho- was not published as a children’s book. The Grimms tographs at an exhibit about ten years ago and has collabo- 65 were not thinking of children as their audience; they rated in the re-release of the one called The First Picture Book. There’s a clear resemblance between some of Steichen’s com- mercial work and his photographs for the children’s books. He was working from the Bank Street theory that one- and two-year-old children are most attuned to their immediate surroundings, respond to images of things they already know, and feel validated by the experience. He photographed toys, telephones, clocks— things that would be found in almost any home, in a straight-on way with a minimum of shadow. There’s no chiaroscuro effect going on; he was pretty much eye-to-eye with the object, placing each of those pictures across from a blank page that was left for the child to do with as he or she pleased. Nearly all contemporary “board books,” which are printed on durable cardboard for the very youngest children, follow from the concept and design of that book, whether knowingly or not.

There seems to be a relationship between the kinds of work that Steichen was doing for these children’s books and other kinds of modernist techniques or themes that we would iden- tify in much more experimental, “adult” works. That’s true. Steichen would photograph a seashell in order to reveal a universe in the swirls of the shell. Edward Weston would do a close-up of a machine to show that traces of the infinite could also be found in man and in the things of man. Of course, it’s also a major theme of 20th-century experimental art that the child is a kind of touchstone for seeing the world as it really is. The child as “primitive,” and the dream life of children, were ideas that mixed and merged in the minds of some of these artists. André Breton talks directly about children in his Mani- festo, and claimed Lewis Carroll as one of the proto-Surrealists. Quite a few Magritte paintings appear to be based on scenes from Alice. When I taught children’s literature at the School of Visual Arts here in New York, I gave a slide lecture in which I “illustrated” Alice entirely with paintings by Magritte and Dali, M. C. Escher graphics, and collages by Max Ernst.

By the 20th century, there seems to be a split between those who want to create art to empower children’s imaginations and those who prefer to sentimentalize children as vulner- able beings who need protection from their own desires. Do you think that those two attitudes are in some kind of dialogue with each other? That’s a good question. Around 1900, in the US, public librar- ies began to hire specialists in children’s literature and to open special reading rooms for children’s use. You can think of those rooms as “secret gardens.” They were walled off from the rest of the library. One reason why libraries created those rooms was to keep children away from the adult literature that they didn’t want them to have access to. If you think of the musi- cal The Music Man, the townsfolk use “Balzac” as if it were a dirty word. The fear is that the children of River City are going to play pool and read Balzac and turn into lecherous, European- style perverts! The River City library was too small to have a children’s room, but that’s what was happening around the United States at that time. This had the effect of cordoning off children’s literature itself from the rest of literature. You find, after the turn of the 20th century, very few major literary

Illustrations courtesy The Donnell Library, The New York Public Library publications showing any interest in children’s books, whereas seemed, to a very limited extent, to become more integrated in the 19th century The Nation and The Atlantic Monthly than before. reviewed children’s books on a regular basis. But this is all a There was a new psychological realism in children’s little hard to pin down. You’ll find one of the most powerful of books, too. Remember that it was during the 1960s and 1970s the librarians— the New York Public Library’s Anne Carroll that psychology for the first time became a popular course of Moore —showing those protective and very proprietary tenden- study at the undergraduate level. More people were finding it cies some of the time but also loving a new children’s book by acceptable to go into therapy than ever before. It was against Gertrude Stein, which in 1939 was pretty far-out. that background that the insights of psychology and psycho- analysis began to find their way into children’s books. We know that there was a tradition of proletarian children’s literature in the former going back to the Can you give me an example of a children’s book that was revolution. Was there a similar tradition of children’s books directly influenced by psychoanalysis? written by people in the United States who identified as Well, Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak, for one. socialist or communist? Having a story about a small child throwing a tantrum for the Publishing was so connected to the library world, up through benefit of his mother was not a story you were going to find the 1960s and 1970s, that very often the editors at publishing in children’s literature before the 1960s, because children houses were former librarians, and the largest part of the chil- weren’t supposed to yell at their mothers. The idea that chil- dren’s market was the library market. So publishers were mak- dren experience rage and that it’s a natural part of their psyche ing books for the libraries more than for anybody else. There was a new idea to children’s picture books. This is why some wasn’t a whole lot of interest in politically radical literature. people were afraid of Where the Wild Things Are when it was In the 1940s, Jerrold and Lorraine Beim wrote picture books first published. It was initially quite controversial, a fact many about friendship between black and white children, and did so people have forgotten since it was given the Caldecott Medal from a consciously political perspective. The Beims’ career is that year. pretty much forgotten now (and in fact their books have only an About a decade later, in a bizarre twist, Bruno Bettelheim historical interest today, not a literary one). But their work filled condemned Where the Wild Things Are in his column in Ladies’ a certain void. Home Journal as being too violent for children. He said that chil- An important children’s book editor of the 1940s and 50s, dren of three and four would be too upset to be given a story Elisabeth Hamilton, was a pioneer in this regard and certainly in which another child was deprived of food. He thought it was was not politically naïve. She was trying to change society a damaging story. I think these comments of his were more a through the books she published, first as an editor at Harcourt reflection of Bettelheim’s confused psyche than of his theories. Brace and then as the founding editorial director of the chil- They don’t hold true to the central argument of his book The dren’s book imprint at William Morrow. Hamilton’s father, Louis Uses of Enchantment, which was published not long afterward, Bevier, had been the dean of Rutgers University during the time in 1976. when Paul Robeson was admitted there, and he took Robeson under his wing. Hamilton published the Beims as well as North How does the collector’s market for children’s books or the Star Shining (1946), the first children’s history of the “Negro” illustrations created for children’s books compare to the col- people, by Hildegarde H. Swift, and illustrated by Lynd Ward. lector’s market for art and books in general? Hamilton also discovered Beverly Clearly, so there is a really Until recently there weren’t many collectors who took chil- clear line of social concern. dren’s books seriously – apart from those books from the more distant past. People didn’t attribute value to them, and were Is there a connection between these kinds of works and generally dismissive of the art and writing in children’s books. some of the social realist books for young adults published in There was little awareness of a connection to the rest of art and the 1970s like Dinkey Hocker Shoots Smack! or A Hero Ain’t literature. In the 1940s, a medical doctor living in Washington, Nothin’ But a Sandwich? D.C. named Irwin Kerlan began collecting original art from con- The 1960s were a turning point for children’s literature. For one temporary picture books and founded the Kerlan Collection at thing, it was then that most editors and librarians finally real- the University of Minnesota. In those days, there was no market ized that most children’s books were about the life of the white for contemporary original art of that kind. An artist who met Dr. middle class. An article in the Saturday Review of Literature Kerlan and got one his fruitcakes for Christmas was very likely in 1965 entitled “The All-White World of Children’s Books” to feel like giving him the stuff just because he was someone caused a lot of people to think about what they had been who really appreciated it. doing. Until then, the children’s book world had been so self- enclosed, with middle-class book publishers selling their That’s hard to fathom, that the art from even a successful books to middle-class librarians. A few years earlier, in 1962, children’s book would not be recognized as even worth a a picture book called The Snowy Day, by Ezra Jack Keats, had nominal amount. been published for very young children. It was set in Brook- Well, think about art photography. In the 1950s, the Limelight lyn and showed a little black boy walking out in the snow and Gallery in the West Village was the only gallery in New York having a great time. It had nothing to do with being black, but City that sold photographs. You could buy the best photo- the fact that he had dark skin made it unique for its graph by Edward Weston or Ansel Adams for between 10- 67 time. Other books followed, and suddenly picture books 25 dollars. And the woman who ran this gallery had trouble paying her rent! So photography is another art form that used to be valued differently than it is now.

Is there a book that gets the gold star for being the most con- troversial, or among the most controversial, children’s book ever published? Slovenly Peter, published in Germany in 1845, became one of the most popular children’s books in history throughout the world. There have been at least 600 editions of the book, as well as numerous parodies; it was translated into English at least three times, including once by Mark Twain. It’s a kind of litmus test—or perhaps a Rorschach test—in that about half the people who have read the book or had the book read to them as children think of it as hilarious, and the other half think of it as scary as hell. Slovenly Peter is either a cautionary tale meant to scare you into behaving properly, or it’s a send-up of a caution- ary tale, and people disagree as to which of those two things it is. For that reason, it’s a very controversial book. I don’t know outside of Germany how widely read it is read anymore but for many years it was a book that was hotly debated. Garth Williams’s The Rabbits’ Wedding is a picture book, published in 1959, about a black rabbit and a white rabbit who fall in love and get married in the end. Williams denied that he intended a message about racial matters but the book was banned in the south and for a while made international head- lines. It’s kind of hard not to read it as an allegory. The Story of Ferdinand, published in 1936, was controversial because it came out during the Spanish Civil War and some people inter- preted it as a pro-Franco fable advising, “Don’t fight! Don’t resist!” Again, the authors denied that they were commenting on the situation in Spain, but some people were convinced otherwise. Even Goodnight Moon was controversial. Many librarians hated it because there was no story, and for them a good picture book was one that you could read during story hour at the library to a hushed audience. Until recently, librar- ians didn’t want very young children coming to the library, so they weren’t very attuned to books for very young children. Some saw it as a list of words; they didn’t recognize it as having literary merit. Plus, it grew directly out of the Bank Street theo- ries about small children being interested in their immediate surroundings as opposed to fairy tale, never-never land. It was one of the archetypal works that drew people to one side or the other in the debate about realism versus fantasy. I think that often what happens with children’s books is a by-product of the that is required to reach their primary audience. I was reading the fourth and most recent of the Harry Potter books out loud to my nine-year-old son and there’s a supernatural figure called Voldemort who is the center of evil in the book. We were down to the last forty pages of the book on September 11. The section we were reading turned out to be about the return of Voldemort, this violent, ter- rible figure rising up out of the ashes to come back and haunt the good guys. Without my intending it, the book seemed to comment on some of the things that were happening in the world just then. Obviously, the author couldn’t have intended this. But children’s books have a way of resonating with real experience in unexpected ways. And the children’s books we remember make sense in precisely that way.

A Pack of Blind Sniffing Dogs in a histaminic haze. To the extent I can smell anything here in Byron Kim Wyoming, it smells too clean, altogether too aired-out. I miss my family, our sniffy, claustrophobic world. Addee: I just farted. My wife Lisa told me a few days ago that Addee has been Lisa: Congratulations. saying that I am dead. Yesterday, I climbed about 450 ft. up Ella: You win the Nobel Prize! to the top of a nearby butte (the only place I can get a strong phone signal) and asked to talk to her. Usually, a phone conver- Ella (sniffing Emmett upon his return from a sleepover): You sation with Addee lasts a matter of seconds before she gets smell like Emilio. distracted or her sister elbows her offline. Yesterday we talked a solid thirty-five minutes. I stayed on until she was good and Zane (Addee’s best friend, walking up the stairs at the start of a ready, until I had been resurrected from the dead. She told me playdate): Something smells. about her new pet fish Sweetheart (a birthday gift), about Kelly, Addee: That’s my room. It stinks. her new best friend, about how she didn’t cry today after nap time at her new school, about Ella’s first piano lesson and latest My family is obsessed with smells, especially our own. “You soccer exploits. Mostly she wanted to know if I really climbed a stink,” passes for a term of endearment in our home. Adeline mountain just to talk to her and did I really leave a message for (four years old and known as Addee) frequently holds her nose, her the other day from the top of that same mountain. And, of not with her fingers, but by blocking the air passage through her course, she was worried that I might fall off. nose with her glottis, a kind of olfactory denial. She does this I have been hoping to work with the kids remotely. Asking most frequently during her long trips to the toilet which inevi- them to send me their renditions of Sweetheart, the Red Fish. tably end with the announcement, “Daddy, Ibe dud!”, which And especially trying to establish e-mail correspondences with means, “I’m done,” which really means, “Daddy, come wipe Emmett and Ella. Predictably, it isn’t working out. The new me.” school year has its demands, and it’s becoming clear that my Adeline has a comprehensive term for the conditions kids can sniff out and kill anything resembling a project with that cause her to hold her nose. The word is “sniffy.” It has no Pops. direct correlative in standard English, though its first definition So this may seem like a cop-out, but my collaboration would have to be “stuffy.” The origins of “sniffy” can be traced with Emmett, Ella and Adeline has turned out to be the same to a warm day circa late spring 2000 in our cluttered sedan collaboration we have every day. We just follow each other when baby Addee, firmly secured in her claustrophobic car around like a pack of Brooklyn waterfront dogs. It’s astonishing seat, exclaimed, “Roll dowd by widdow! It’s sdiffy!” And so, after how much stuff our kids’ lives produce. Lisa and I throw virtu- some minor translation, it was established that cars are sniffy, ally all of it out when they’re not looking. So I sniffed out a few except in the dead of winter. choice scraps along the way and forwarded them to the mag- Sniffiness is synesthetic. It is essentially a sense of dwin- azine. I wonder what they’ll choose and I wonder if they’ll fol- dling space brought on by warmth and stale odors. When I was low through on my request to toss the stuff once they’ve made asked to collaborate with my children for this issue of Cabinet, 6000 copies of it. All except for that fine piece of needlework my mind immediately went to scratch ‘n’ sniff. What better I made. That shit is art. way to bring smell to print? I thought I would turn the kids on to a bunch of unidentified scent samples and ask them to create visual counterparts. Alas, scratch ‘n’ sniff turned out to be too costly. And as I tried to come up with another project, it was also becoming clear to me that the last thing I wanted to do with my children was some sort of “project.” I discovered this while working with Ella (six years old), who loved the idea of putting something in a magazine–who just loves making stuff, period. Whenever we set aside time to make something, it didn’t quite work. She tried her best, and that was just the problem. Our attempts were too intentional, too full of effort. I found myself foisting my ideas on Ella, and she, in turn, kept trying to make Art. For artists with one child, it often seems the child itself is a project, an object of artistic doting. Maybe these kinds of families can make art together, but with three kids, forget it. Again, the last thing I wanted was art, because everyone knows that what children do is especially beautiful because they aren’t really trying. As I write this, I am in the middle of four weeks at UCross, an artists’ residency in rural Wyoming. I left New York a few days after school started; the day after I arrived was Addee’s fourth birthday. The next day was the first anniversary 70 of September 11. The last of the sage bloom has put me

Picturing Innocence: An Interview with Anne Higonnet Sina Najafi

At no time in history have pedophobes had it worse than now. Images of children are everywhere; on calendars and Christ- mas family cards, in advertisements for banks and toilet paper, on keychains and in office cubicles. Grinning at us in that sac- charine way that profitmakers love, these images speak of an age of innocence not yet tainted by politics, economics, moral failure, disappointments, class frustrations, ill health, and, worst of all, knowledge of one’s mortality. The sheer numbers of such images are staggering. Of the 25 billion photographs taken in the US every year, about half of them feature the very young. According to the Wolfman Report of 1992, 38 percent of amateur photographs deemed important enough to be framed were of children.1 The ubiquity of images of children may not tell us anything about the variety of images we produce and circulate but it is symptomatic of contemporary Western obsessions with childhood. In her book Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood, Anne Higonnet, professor of art history at Barnard College, traces the history of the images that helped shape this contemporary relationship to children as it first emerged in the 18th century. Sina Najafi spoke to her by phone.

Your book sets out to do two things. First, you trace the history of the Romantic paradigm of the innocent child that emerged in the 18th century. Second, you show how we are today witnessing the breakdown of this paradigm in favor of an alternative relationship to childhood which you call “Knowing Childhood.” What was at stake in this two-fold project? The two-fold approach was necessary to make particular argu- ments. One issue was to estrange us from images of children, photographic and otherwise, that seem natural, normal and real, and the other was to present a set of alternative possibili- ties, the greatest and most cumulative of which is happening now: an extremely widespread cultural alternative being pre- sented first and most confrontationally in the art world. I started the book project with a question that came out of the current political situation, a child pornography case called Knox v. the United States. The legal problem of Knox hangs on the question of whether you can legally define the one true meaning of a photograph, which made me understand that what I thought was an art historical question was more funda- mentally in the present a legal question. However, I also under- stood that as an art historian I had a kind of argument to make about child pornography that was not being made even at the level of the Supreme Court, which is the historical contingency of any image of childhood, including the most basic assump- tion about the absolute innocence of childhood. I knew from the most cursory examination of differences between 17th- and 18th-century art that in the 18th century a set of very talented and academically eminent artists led by Sir Joshua Reynolds engaged in a brilliant visualization of new concepts of child- hood that were radically different from concepts of 72 childhood before. When did historians first examine these shifts in the concep- that and the proof of that, because so much of his theory is based tion of childhood? on the importance to the psyche of what happens in childhood, The model of a rupture in the 18th century was first set out in even though Freud is debunking the notion of a childhood sexual 1973 by Phillipe Ariès in Centuries of Childhood. It has been con- innocence. But Freud is also the person who tells us about denial, tested since by other historians who ask that we understand displacement and repression, which is how the idea of absolute that there are elements of continuity in the history of childhood childhood innocence is still maintained. as well as epistemic ruptures. Have Marxist historians addressed the 18th-century redefini- Even at its moment of conception, this new concept of child- tion of childhood? You point out in your book that paintings hood seems to have been suffused with nostalgia. by people like Gainsborough and Reynolds are also working A very powerful force shaping our ideals of the innocent child- to eradicate the class component of previous portraits of hood is the force of nostalgia. It’s about adults who want to look children. back on a time before their own lives which was supposedly less I think what a Marxist would say is that the notion of inno- complicated, more pure and worthy, and one of the symptoms cent childhood is a means by which the middle class at once of that is how repeatedly an ideal childhood has been cast with represses any awareness of the conditions of working-class life the signs of a time past in relation to the present. For instance, and simultaneously consolidates its own identity. As the middle children’s fashions for a very long time were the most nostalgic class became by far and away the dominant class in Anglo- and most resistant to change of all Western dress. Saxon culture, the concept of childhood became correspond- Even back in the 18th century, one of the iconic paintings ingly more important. One explanation for the idea of innocent of childhood was Gainsborough’s Blue Boy, which became, not childhood being so predominantly Anglo-Saxon is that it is pre- coincidentally, the world’s most famous painting in the 19th cisely a middle-class concept. century. Already in the 18th century, the blue boy is dressed in In the 19th century one sees the way that progressive 17th-century costume and is a figure of nostalgia, both social reforms wider than childhood find a rallying point in this notion and personal. of childhood innocence. Some of the most effective early labor reforms are demands for the elimination of child labor. Some What was the conception of childhood preceding Roman- of the most effective reforms of the judicial system in the 19th tic childhood, and why is there this shift in the 18th century century are demands for a separate justice system for children toward the Romantic innocent child? and for adults. One of the surest markers that we are entering The crucial dimension of the pre-Romantic notion is that the into yet another dramatic change in the notion of childhood child is born into sin and gradually learns to become pure and is that the concept of a separate justice or different standard righteous. Moral purity is attained, not something one is born for children is now being called into question in the US, as the with. The overwhelming majority of children are introduced into majority of states are now demanding that many children be the sexual and working world of adults right from the moment tried as adults. of birth. People from different fields tend toward different explana- But there is also a paradox insofar as child pornography laws tions of why the shift occurred. There is a demographic expla- are structured to increase the chasm between adult sexuality nation. In a brutal sense, a model of childhood prior to the 18th and childhood innocence. century is one of likely death. As infant mortality begins to be What one could propose is that much of the anxiety and guilt curbed, parents develop expectations that the child will live and over issues about the boundary line between childhood and they attach a greater emotional significance to each and every adulthood is being crowded, overcrowded, into the domain of child. There is also a very significant religious shift that goes on the visual. My job then became to fill in the gap between the in the 18th century as a more evangelical and personally spiri- 18th century and the present and to figure out what happened. tual Protestant religion spreads; the idea of an innocence here It turned out that all of the high art images to which I would on earth becomes increasingly important as a spiritual concept have instinctively turned to explain the history of the image of so that the Catholic concept of a child born into sin is replaced childhood have become decreasingly relevant. I learned that by a much more Protestant concept of an innocent childhood. as the 19th and 20th centuries went on it was popular and By the 19th century, those who speak about childhood—Lewis mass-reproduced images that increasingly acquired the ability Carroll is a very good example—speak of it as a golden inno- to define cultural assumptions of what childhood looked like. cence before the shadow of adult sin. Another factor that’s pointed to, at least in terms of the Is that a simple question of those kinds of images reaching increasing pace with which the issue of childhood becomes more people? important, is the one that Freud points to—if not in some kind Most basically, yes, but there is also a gender factor involved. In of transcendentally analytical way, at least in a locally descrip- the 19th century, women were tracked toward the representa- tive way. As the family becomes more intensely nuclear, the tion of childhood because it was considered suitably feminine emotional issues around parent-child relationships become and so what happened in the 19th century was that a dispro- increasingly important in society. It’s not just that you have a portionate share of artistic talent was being devoted, paradoxi- change in the concept of childhood but that the whole notion cally, to the simplification and popularization of a commercial of what childhood is becomes increasingly important. 73 You can say that Freud in a way is both the describer of opposite: Maud Humphrey Bogart’s 1900 drawing of her son, the future Bogey. image of childhood. By the end of the 19th century and begin- ning of the 20th, there are some extraordinarily gifted women who find themselves creating an extremely culturally powerful visual ideal.

To understand how widely images circulated before the appear- ance of the modern media, is it possible to state who would have seen a painting like The Blue Boy, for example? In the 18th century, it would have been known through very small-scale but public painting exhibitions. These exhibitions were free. Then in the 19th century, the painting hung in an aristocratic collection that was sometimes open to the public. The middle class could have seen the painting if they made an effort. The Blue Boy then begins to be reproduced in the form of prints. By the second half of the 19th century, you can talk about a mass reproduction of prints; then at the beginning of the 20th century the painting is sold to the American collector Henry E. Huntington, and that sale is the occasion for tremendous media exposure which brings out the way in which the picture taps into ideas about childhood, as well as the way the terms of popular culture are ceasing to be controlled by Europe and are being taken over by the US. If you track the most popular and influential images of childhood, you can see in the 19th century that those images are overwhelmingly European, in particular English, whereas in the 20th century they are overwhelmingly American.

As are some of the major challenges to the traditional repre- sentation of innocent childhood. When Sally Mann started contradicting stereotypes of child- hood in the late 1980s, she was like a one-woman force and everyone rightly focused on her as someone who was breaking all the rules about the representation of childhood. As it turns out, a decade later, she is completely vindicated; she turns out to have been announcing a kind of widespread change in how people think about childhood. Her work belongs to a very par- ticular and crucial moment. There are many people working in that field now, but one of the things Sally Mann was up against was the claim that not only that her images were wrong, but that the subject was trivial.

Your book discusses at length the role that women illustrators like Jessie Willcox Smith and Kate Greenaway played before and during the Golden Age of Illustration (1880s-1920s) in pro- ducing images of children. Were there men in the field? Yes, there were some great 19th-century children’s book illustrators who were men: Randolph Caldecott and Arthur Rackham, for example. The whole commercial image-making realm opens up in the last quarter of the 19th century because of technological changes in printing as well as the develop- ment of a child audience for books. There is a lot of debate as to whether there is such a thing as a “child consumer,” partic- ularly in the field of children’s literature, and about whether it is all about their parents’ tastes. But certainly a child audi- ence develops at that time. So there are new ways of making a above: Kate Greenaway, “Ring-a-Ring-a-Rosies,” 1881. opposite: Hipgnosis and Hardie, detail of cover of Led Zeppelin’s Presence, 1976. living as an artist that did not exist before. That is one of the and yet they were not threatening any gender conventions. On reasons why women are attracted to the field. There are the contrary, their talents were being used to confirm an iden- ways of making a living in the field that are less closed to them tification of women with maternity. Every single one of these than the high-arts realm of painting and that’s how you get a women illustrators said they were very strongly encouraged to disproportionate share of female talent working on the subject specialize in the subjects of maternity and childhood. of childhood. But then something must have happened in the period since Do the women receive their training as painters at art acad- the late 18th century because Reynolds’s or Gainsborough’s emies or do they go to specialized schools for illustrators? representations of childhood were presumably considered Both. Some receive the academic art training and some go masterpieces of the first order. directly into an illustration training school. A place in the States Absolutely. Childhood was becoming simultaneously popular- where a woman would be trained in the high arts and then would ized, commercialized, and feminized by the late 19th century. be shunted off for commercial work would be the Pennsylvania Academy of the Arts. Thomas Eakins, who taught there, was It is kind of odd that this would not have already happened by very active in encouraging women, but some of them ended up the 18th century. working in illustration. And then there was the “Brandywine” Prior to the 18th century, maternity was one of many diverse School of Illustration coming out of the Howard Pyle School of occupations and obligations that fell to women. As you get the Art in Wilmington, Delaware. The school produced Jessie Will- split between consumption and production in the Industrial cox Smith, Violet Oakley, Elizabeth Shippen Green, and also N. Age, women become increasingly relegated to the home and C. Wyeth, the first of the great Wyeth line. In general, women that home becomes the site of a much more nuclear family. The went wherever there was a teacher who would accept female mother-child relationship became increasingly close and ideal- students. ized in the course of the 19th century.

The financial success these female illustrators were having is By the time the women of the Golden Age of Illustration are astonishing. Your book mentions that when Maud Humphrey active in magazines, there also seem to be many more prod- Bogart, future mother of the actor, married in 1898, she was ucts on which the motifs could be replicated. There are things making $40,000 a year doing illustrations of children. But what like kitchen towels, tablecloths, greeting cards, etc. is even more surprising was the critical success they were Now we are getting to a “chicken or the egg” question between accorded by people like Ruskin, who was a great supporter of technology and ideology. Only when you have the mass produc- Kate Greenaway’s work. tion of goods and the mass reproduction of consumable images For many critics, this was a very happy outcome for a gender can you even begin to conceive of a popular commercial image. dilemma. Women were being given an outlet for their talents Once those images begin to be produced, once you have what we call tie-ins to books and visual advertisements for products, then the process begins to feed on itself and one generation of commercial illustration is the foundation on which the next will work. Commercial imagery becomes based on its own tradition of imagery, and less tied to a high art tradition.

Your book delineates five major visual archetypes for repre- senting the Romantic child that the illustrators picked up from art history and which are still with us today. Yes, it is really astonishing to see how every single image of childhood to which we still cling at the beginning of the 21st century was invented or perfected in late-18th-century England and was already in place in the popular but unique oil paintings of mid-19th-century Victorian culture. All five types in some way proclaimed the innocence of the child, which meant concentrating on the body paradoxically in order to diminish its corporeality. The categories are mother with child; child with pet; child dressed up in a fancy costume; angel child; and children posing as adults.

How does illustration lose its primacy as the medium for rep- resenting children? Between the 1880s and 1920s, illustration had a gigantic audience compared with any other previous audience for images and had very little media competition. But as it became possible and affordable to reproduce photographs, commercial illustrations were slowly replaced. From the start, women had more opportunities in pho- tography than they did in the more traditionally prestigious media. In fact, that was even more true with photography than it was with commercial illustration. From the very start there were women like Julia Margaret Cameron who demanded that photography be considered a fine art. There was a niche for women, going all the way up to art photography and even up to the present. The single most successful image-maker of children today is Anne Geddes. It remains true that an over- whelming number of people who address the subject of child- hood seriously are still women. The representation of childhood and the relationship between masculinity and femininity are always to some extent tied together. It is only in the 19th century that childhood begin to be associated with maternity and takes a conventionally fem- inine role. However as the 20th century unfolds and feminism makes demands for femininity to be reconceived, the tension between the sexual feminization of children and the infantiliza- tion of adult women has become one of the most fruitful sub- jects for contemporary artists to address. I would also say that while women are under the strongest cultural pressure to believe in a happy, idyllic notion of maternity, there are aspects of their personal experience that lead them to question that conventional, stereotypical image of childhood. There is nothing like being with a toddler 24 hours a day to make you think that toddlers are not always angels.

Even though you think that the crisis of ideal childhood is coming to a head now, you also provide historical examples of images of childhood that we can now see already implied a different relationship to children. Lewis Carroll’s photographs are an obvious case, but you also include someone like Julia Margaret Cameron. Julia Margaret Cameron began photographing when her chil- dren were already grown up. The camera was given to her by one of her children in an attempt to console her for her empty nest. However you interpret Lewis Carroll’s relationship to chil- dren, it was certainly very intense and ongoing, whereas Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographs were in a way nostalgic images of relationships to children. Some sensitive photo histo- rians like Carol Armstrong or Carol Mavor now think that Cam- eron and Lewis Carroll produced equally complicated images of childhood.

Lewis Carroll’s photographs have been discussed in terms of the desire of the photographer for the child but we also need to address the sexual knowledge of the child him- or herself, of what you call the knowing child. What is the relationship between these two desires? That is a very important issue because, in our efforts to protect children from adult society, we’ve relied for a great deal of time on this idea of childhood innocence. The way the rationale went is: “Children are innocent, and in particular they are sexually innocent; therefore they deserve to be protected.” Once we all start listening to Freud or looking at Calvin Klein ads, we might say, “Maybe children are not so sexually unknowing, and maybe adults have very complicated sexual feelings about children.” Does that mean children no 76 longer deserve to be protected? I think that the most well-meaning opponents of child pornography use that as their Can you comment on this? strongest argument: “We need to defend the idea of absolute I hope I accurately predicted in my book that the issue is an sexual innocence in order to justify any kind of protection of increasing strain between real actions perpetrated against real children.” I feel so strongly that children should be protected children and completely fictionalized situations. It seems to me from the consequences of adult society that I don’t believe the that a case about completely artificially created images should sexual feelings of either children or adults should in any way be easy to decide, because real children are not at stake. To me, compromise the protection of children. that clarifies the pornography controversy insofar as there is a categorical, philosophical, and, I would hope, judicial difference Of course it is easier to legislate adults than to control children between representations, on the one hand, and actions against themselves. real children, on the other. Yes, but my feeling is that our judicial system should be vigilant This is a difficult moment in which people’s anxieties over about real things that adults do to children. radical change are causing them to make very hasty and dra- matic decisions and this is a period of great anxious flux. Of The alternative conception of childhood acknowledges the course I hope and believe it will all sort itself out soon, but I don’t complex relationship that children have with the world around believe these things progress in a linear way. them, and that adults have with children. But the sexual dimen- sion of that complexity is something that capitalist culture seems to have sniffed out very quickly and we now see many ads that feature the post-Romantic knowing child. For one thing, children are being sexualized at speeds and in ways that are astonishing. This is where I would like to substitute the word objectify for the word sexualize. To the extent that the sexualization of the child is an objectification of the child, it is a strategy of a consumer culture that leaves children vulnerable, and which I think is exploitive. However, I do not believe that all sexualizations are objectifications. I think there are many different kinds of sexual- ization and some forms endow a subject with a sense of power and personhood, which is the opposite of objectification. Some of Nan Goldin’s images of children are subjectified without being sexualized. And I think we all know examples of children who have been objectified through their innocence. That is just as insidious as any other kind of objectification. My other comment is that this issue is so culturally and his- torically subjective that while one, at every moment in time, can try to defend the welfare of some very young people, I think it is extremely difficult to do so on the basis of some transcenden- tal definition of childhood. Here is one tragic example. Human rights organizations try to address the global sexual traffic in children, as well as the use of children as soldiers. Of course they come up against culturally different notions of childhood, which makes us want to enforce an absolute definition of child- hood, for a change.

How does one square the cultural knowledge you bring to your book and the kinds of decisions needed to put legislation in place? Once we’ve understood the complicated relationship between adults, children, and the representations we produce of them, then there is no certain place we can go to. That is a two-pronged project. First, you leave representations alone because they belong to the province of free speech, and you concentrate on action. And then some admittedly arbitrary decisions will need to be made on the basis of age.

The recent Supreme Court case, Ashcroft v. The Free Speech Coalition, overturned large parts of the Child Porn- ography Protection Act of 1996, most importantly the sections banning any “virtual” images that 77 implied that a minor was engaged in a sexual activity. opposite: Glen Wexler, cover for ’s Balance, 1994. Does a Proletarian Child Need a Fai- rytale?: The Soviet Production Book for Children Alla Rosenfeld

In the aftermath of the 1917 Revolution, the Bolshevik regime regarded children’s books as major vehicles for transmitting Soviet ideology and influencing the new generation. Children’s literature would impress upon young readers of the post- Revolutionary epoch, many of whom belonged to the working class and peasantry, the need to become active participants in the building of the Communist state. On 1 November 1917, the People’s Commissariat of Education (Narkompros) decreed that the Soviet state should achieve general literacy as soon as possible by introducing obligatory and free education.1 As discussed in “The Forgotten Weapon,” published in a February 1918 issue of Pravda, children’s literature would serve an impor- tant function in the class struggle:

In the great arsenal with which the bourgeoisie fought against Socialism, children’s books occupied a prominent role. In selecting cannons and weapons, we overlook those that spread poisonous weapons. So focused on guns and other weapons, we forget about the written word. We must seize these weapons from enemy hands.2 The issue of children’s literature engaged Communist that it was “a political catastrophe in the upbringing of a new Party leaders at the highest levels, including the Commissar of generation” for children to have a sympathetic attitude toward Education, Anatoly Lunacharsky, and Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda this heroine.4 Krupskaya. It also captured the imagination of leading Soviet To replace the disgraced fairytale, Soviet writers intro- avant-garde artists, such as Vladimir Lebedev, El Lissitzky, Alek- duced a new genre: the child-oriented production book. The sandr Rodchenko, and David Shterenberg. Throughout the production book addressed themes that reflected the impor- 1920s, such figures designed highly experimental children’s tance of modernization in Soviet society, focusing on science books that embraced the principles of contemporary art move- and technology, the central components of the First Five Year ments such as Suprematism and Constructivism, and were not Plan, construction and urbanization, and the conquest of nature. only propagandistic tools but also innovative artworks in their Several thematic groups developed within this genre, including own right. stories about mass production, various professions and trades, Discussions about children’s books were carried out different types of machinery, and agriculture. Many Soviet crit- within the broader context of the spectacular transformation of ics argued for the social importance of the themes. The most the Russian educational system in the aftermath of the Revolu- highly regarded theme was industrial development, while top- tion. American pragmatism, in particular the theories of John ics such as the production of cosmetic powder or women’s fans Dewey (1859-1952), greatly influenced the Russian school were dismissed as unworthy of treatment in book form. programs of the early 1920s. The Soviet adherents of Dewey’s Another requirement for production books was that they theories claimed that the task of the school was not to educate celebrate technology’s progressive potential. This feature but to create the conditions for the development of useful skills. would help distinguish Soviet publications on modernizing, Courses in religion, ancient languages, and ancient and medi- industrial themes from their pre-Revolutionary predecessors eval history disappeared from the curriculum. and Western counterparts, which, the Soviet critics of children’s In the pre-Revolutionary era, children’s literature primarily literature presumed, described the oppressive and alienating consisted of fairytales, legends, and fantasy stories. However, labor of capitalist societies. In 1935, the Soviet critic G. Eikhler as if in response to the tremendous social changes that accom- wrote: panied the Bolshevik upheaval, the years following the Revo- The first and primary requirement for Soviet children’s lution saw a rapid, marked decline in such themes. While folk books on science and technology is a clear demonstration of legends and fairytales constituted approximately 25 percent of the principal difference between socialist and capitalist technol- all children’s books in 1918, they represented only 5 percent of ogy.… The blast furnace of the Communist state is totally different them the following year. from the one of capitalist society since in the West it furthers the The appropriateness of fairytales for Soviet children’s exploitation of the working class while in the USSR it is a means books was a subject of intense debate during the 1920s and of strengthening Socialism.5 1930s. Many Soviet educators deemed fairytales incapable of accomplishing the tasks assigned to children’s literature in the › › › new epoch, while others defended their social value. The for- mer condemned the fairytale as emblematic of the old regime, During the second half of the 1920s, the production book regarding it as a literary genre that contained elements of became one of the most important art forms of the Construc- mysticism and religiosity and led children into the world of tivists, many of whom, unable to implement their innovative dreams—impediments to the goal of introducing young read- ideas in industry and architecture because of material scarci- ers to the themes and subjects of contemporary life. Opponents ties, turned to graphic design. Their works combined ideas also believed that fairytales reflected the ruling-class ideol- from abstract painting with experimental typography to cre- ogy of the eras in which they were created. Since many tales ate a new visual language of Soviet children’s book design. preached loyalty to kings and included religious superstitions, Among the first successful experiments was the work of two numerous Soviet pedagogues regarded it as virtually criminal -based artists, Galina and Olga Chichagova, who in the to introduce proletarian children to ideals that had no place in 1920s were students of Aleksandr Rodchenko at VKhUTEMAS a socialist society. (Higher Artistic Technical Studios). Between 1923 and 1929, In her 1925 book Does a Proletarian Child Need a Fai- the Chichagova sisters produced around 20 books, many in rytale?, the pedagogue E. V. Yanovskaya, one of the leading collaboration with the writer N. G. Smirnov. Often created with a authorities on preschool education, focused on the fairytale’s role in child development from the perspective of class con- opposite (counterclockwise from top): Cover of Patrols of the Harvest (Mos- sciousness. She argued that the fairytale acted as an obstacle cow: Detgiz, 1934), Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts (RGALI), Mos- to the child’s understanding of historical materialism and called cow. Design for Moscow Has a Plan (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia/OGIZ, 1932), for the abolition of the genre. Describing fairytales’ improbable Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts (RGALI), Moscow. (occasionally impossible) plot developments—old men turning Cover of Moscow Has a Plan (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia/OGIZ, 1932), The Nor- into young men, stupid people turning smart, and poor men ton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union, The becoming rich—she concluded, “The bourgeoisie needs these Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum (ZAM), Rutgers, The State fairy tales to support their exploitation. Fairytales are needed University of New Jersey. so children who are hungry and cold can escape into the world Illustration for Morozhenoe (Ice Cream) (Leningrad: Raduga, 1925), The Riabov of fantasy and feel imaginary happiness.”3 Criticizing Collection , ZAM, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Acquired with the 79 the story of Cinderella, for example, Yanovskaya argued Irene Nintzel Memorial Fund. compass and ruler, the sisters’ designs embraced the Construc- tivist machine aesthetic, featuring straight lines and schematic, elementary forms that resembled technical drawings and cor- responded to mechanical printing. In the 1924 book Where Do Dishes Come From?, they depicted the stages of dish production. Although the workers are mentioned a number of times in the text, they are absent from the Chichagova sisters’ illustrations, which focus on machinery and production tools. While one con- temporary reviewer described the book as “quite boring” and “lifeless,”6 another reviewer, Anna Grinberg, herself a children’s author, praised it as “precise and to the point,” “devoid of senti- mentality,” and “capable of holding a young reader’s interest without resorting to fables.”7 Another Smirnov-Chichagova book, The Newspaper Explained to Children, describes the process of newspaper pro- duction and features the front page of an actual issue of the Soviet newspaper, Izvestiia. The book’s illustrations, which

are strongly reminiscent of Rodchenko’s advertising designs, adhere to the typographic principles developed by the Construc- tivists, employing a rigid geometrical organization, asymmetry, and sans serif lettering. Only one of its images features a specific individual rather than a generalized type—a photo-portrait of Leon Trotsky woven into the text that mentions his name. The illustrations of Vladimir Lebedev, another Soviet artist who produced important children’s books related to technology, emphasized the two-dimensional nature of the page. In his 1927 promoted during the later 1920s and 1930s, a time when many illustrations for Samuil Marshak’s How the Plane Made the Plane, publishing houses organized business trips for their artists to the artist reveals the structure of the plane’s parts: some of the industrial centers and collective farms. The artists Olga Deineko instruments are depicted in cross-section to show their interior and Nikolai Troshin participated in these excursions, making the components and demonstrate their uses or processes. In the preliminary drawings for their production books directly at the cover design, the topographical character is dominant to the factories they visited. Deineko and Troshin’s books informed exclusion of any decorative feature. young readers about metric units or explained where their cot- Yesterday and Today paradoxically uses the form of the fai- ton clothes, bread, shoes, and sugar originated. rytale to address the industrialization of Soviet society and the Soviet children’s book illustrators commonly employed victory of progressive technology over traditional ways of life. found photographs as figurative elements, often utilizing the Lebedev’s illustrations for the book promote modernization, avant-garde technique of photomontage. For his illustrations to featuring poetic images of the new objects that are produced by Nikolai Mislavsky’s book, Dneprostroi, which demonstrated via contemporary technology to replace the old ones. short stories and numerous photos the ongoing construction of Lebedev supervised a group of artists working at the a hydroelectric station, Lantzetti appropriated various archives Leningrad State Publishing House for Children (Detgiz) who of press photographs. completely changed the face of the new Soviet children’s The most successful production book for children about book design. These artists included Evgenia Evenbakh, who the First Five Year Plan was written by Mikhail Ilyin in 1931 and illustrated with photomontages by Mikhail Razulevich. This book, entitled Moscow Has a Plan, explained to its thirteen-year- old readers the processes of Soviet Socialist construction, rep- resenting the events described in the book through documen- tary photographs. Ilyin consistently compares the capitalist and socialist systems in favor of the latter. For example, one chapter of the book, entitled “Crazy Country,” criticizes the overproduc- tion of food and consumer goods in the American economic sys- tem. A caption under a photograph depicting a pile of smashed cars reads: “Among this pile of used cars there are perfectly good ones. These used cars were bombed from an airplane so they would become totally unusable. It happened in Chicago, USA.” Those benefiting from burning the harvest, throwing out food, and destroying used cars are “Mr. Fox and Mr. Pox,” Ily- in’s fictional American capitalists. In contrast to these greedy, wasteful figures are the Soviet workers and peasants, who are pictured as happy individuals, proud of their active participation in the building of socialism. The latter’s portrayal is enhanced by Razulevich’s cover design, which depicts workers as tower- ing, powerful figures seen from below in the manner of Rod- chenko’s photographs. A whole generation of Soviet children received their introduction to socialist and capitalist economics by reading Ilyin’s book. The book was translated into English, Chinese, and Japanese, and published in over 20 countries. It caused somewhat of a stir in English left-wing circles. Other important subjects of photo-illustrated children’s books of the 1930s were the struggle for the collectivization of Soviet agriculture, the protection of the harvest, and the Young Pioneers’ important role in the achievement of these goals;

opposite (counterclockwise from top): Cover of How the Plane Made the Plane (Leningrad: Raduga, 1927). The George Riabov Collection of Russian Art, The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum (ZAM), Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Acquired with the Irene Nintzel Memorial Fund. based many of her illustrations on close observations of Cover of How Beets Become Sugar (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, objects and production processes. When Evenbakh worked 1930). on a cover design for the 1926 book Market, she bought a pike Cover of The Newspaper Explained to Children, 1926. at Leningrad’s Andreevsky market and made many sketches Photomechanical illustration (after a photograph) for Dneprostroi (Leningrad, of it. In order to create her illustrations for the book Porcelain GIZ, 1930), The George Riabov Collection, ZAM, Rutgers, The State University of Cup, Evenbakh carefully studied the process of porcelain pro- New Jersey, David A. and Mildred H. Morse Art Acquisition Fund. duction at the Lomonosov Porcelain Factory in Len- Illustration for Where Do Dishes Come From? (Moscow/Petrograd: Gosizdat, 81 ingrad. This type of intimate engagement was widely 1924). these themes are presented in P. Postyshev’s Patrols of the Har- vest (1934). The book’s cover image contains a photo-portrait of a Young Pioneer intensely watching a collective farm field. The Pioneer’s facial expression exemplifies the political atmo- sphere at that time, with the constant search for “enemies of Soviet people.” As early as 1927, the Committee of Children’s Literature prohibited the release of 81% of the children’s books by Raduga, the most experimental publishing house, since, according to the Soviet authorities, they were contaminated by harmful bourgeois ideology. In 1934, the First Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers in Moscow mandated Socialist Realism as the only acceptable artistic method for Soviet literature and art. For book design, this signified a return to traditional, non- experimental typography and design. In the following year the Communist Party issued a decree that placed all publishing houses specializing in children’s literature under the super- vision of the Central Committee of the Komsomol (the Young Communist League), which established a system of strict censorship over children’s publications. The 1936 Pravda article, “About Artist-Doubters,” initiated a severe reaction against avant-garde experiments in children’s book design and forced them to employ more realistic and figurative styles.8 That same year, an editorial in the Children’s Literature journal severely criticized Lebedev for his formalist approach: “Instead of concrete images of realistically rendered distinguished workers of the Soviet Union, Lebedev depicted schematic lifeless mannequins. In his drawings, the images of dull monsters have nothing in common with the most productive workers of the Soviet Union.”9

A previous version of this paper was presented at the ’s symposium “The Russian Avant-Garde Book, 1910-1934” on 30 March 2002. 1 Sbornik dekretov i postanovlenii rabochego i krestianskogo pravitel’stva po narodnomu obrazovaniiu (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo APN, 1947), p. 156. 2 L. Kormchy, “Zabytoe oruzhie,” (O detskoi knige), Pravda (Moscow),17 February 1918, p. 3. 3 E. V. Yanovskaya, Nuzhna li skazka proletarskomu rebenku? [Does a Proletarian Child Need a Fairytale?], (Kharkov: Knigospilka, 1925), p. 35. 4 Ibid. 5 G. Eikhler, “K voprosu o nauchno-tekhnicheskoi literature dlia detei,” Detskaia literatura (Moscow: Izdanie kritiko-bibliograficheskogo instituta), no. 3, 1935, pp. 1-3. 6 Z. Dreizin, “Retsenziia: Otkuda posuda? N. Smirnov, G. Chichagova i O. Chichagova” in E. I. Stanchinskya and E.A. Flerina, eds, Iz opyta issledovatel’skoi raboty po detskoi knige (Mos- cow: Doshkol’nyi otdel Glavstsvosa, 1926), pp. 44-45. 7 Anna Grinberg, “Knigi byvshie i knigi budushchie (dlia malen’kikh detei),” Pechat’ i revoliut- siia, nos. 5-6 (June–September, 1925), pp. 252-253. 8 “O khudozhnikakh-pachkunakh,” Pravda, 1 March 1936; Quoted in Detskaia literatura (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia), no. 3-4, 1936, pp. 40-42. 9 Editorial, “Protiv formalizma i shtampa v illustratsiiakh k detskoi knige,” Detskaia literatura (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia), no. 3-4, 1936, pp. 43-44. clockwise from top: Cover of Porcelain Cup (Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1925), The George Riabov Collection of Russian Art, The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Illustration for The Travels of Charlie, (Moscow/Leningrad: Gosizdat, 1924). Cover of Vchera i segodnia [Yesterday and Today], (Leningrad: Raduga, 1925), The Riabov Collection, ZAM. On Reading Wendy Ewald

I have a son who is learning to read. Like any parent, I am fas- cinated by his development. At what point would those marks on a book page turn into a readable pattern? What if that didn’t happen so easily? What would that mean? What would we do? When I was an ArtConText artist-in-residence at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum recently, Michelle Silvia, a special education teacher at Carl Lauro Elementary School in Providence, invited me to become a member of her class. Most of her third- to fifth-grade students struggle with reading and writing. I asked each of them to read for me in a makeshift studio in the literacy coach’s office. I was interested in seeing the students’ physical reactions as they tackled a new book. We rigged my son’s bicycle helmet with a tiny video camera, which was pointed at the students’ eyes as they read. Afterwards, each drew a web describing what reading means to them.

The Doll Games cannot be understood without reference to the larger public SHELLEY & PAMELA JACKSON discourse in which they took place. The Doll Games held up a funhouse mirror to their times, This excerpt from the Jacksons’ unfinished collaboration is and what survives of them are historical documents of a wob- edited and introduced by J. F. Bellwether, Ph.D. bly, comical sort. But the Doll Games transcend their epoch. Intricate, obsessional, moral, violent and sexual, funny and The Doll Games are a ground-breaking series of collabora- tragic, the Doll Games propose doll games as a true folk art tive improvisations by Shelley and Pamela Jackson that took form, renewing itself with every performance. Obedient to no place in a private home in Berkeley, California, in the first half rules except those its practitioners invented for themselves, of the 1970s. completely collaborative, the Doll Games was a genuinely inter- The Doll Games cannot be precisely dated. 1970 and 1976 active art form. In this theater of two, every audience member are generally understood to mark the limits of the period of was a co-creator. greatest energy and invention, though any attempts to iden- “The Doll Games” is also the title of a project the adult tify an inaugural moment are defeated by the nebulous nature Jacksons undertook to document their childhood collabora- of the phenomena under discussion. The Doll Games did not tions. It was conceived at different times as, variously, a mul- spring fully formed out of a Mattel box, but evolved by degrees timedia art extravaganza, a work of postmodern cultural criti- out of earlier games (stuffed animals, “Kleenex dolls,” Kiddles). cism, an open-to-the-public celebration of and clearing house When did the Doll Games begin? As Babette Jackson has said, for foul-mouthed ex-little girls, and a collection of thoughtful “That depends on how you define the Doll Games.” The ending and rather poetic autobiographical essays. It is no wonder that point of the Doll Games is easier to locate, though too much it became none of these things, but languished as a collection weight has been placed on Shelley Jackson’s famous dictum of poorly copyedited fragments in the files of the Jacksons, (1976): “People are more interesting than dolls.”1 while they went on with less ambiguous projects—until I, as The Games themselves, as well as the numerous docu- a tenacious admirer and scholar of the original Doll Games, per- ments and artifacts they generated, borrowed freely from liter- suaded them to abandon their files to the ministrations of my ary and consumer culture. To make up a cast of characters com- jiggling keyboard. As an independent scholar I have studied the prised of swashbuckling heroines, tender heroes, bumbling Doll Games for some years; I feel immensely privileged to intro- he-men, whores and roués, the Jacksons used whatever mate- duce this curious little world to a new audience. rial came to hand with bold directorial instincts and a sense of It is up to the reader to say whether a Doll Games config- identity fluid in the extreme. Barbie’s kid sister Skipper got a ured and, yes, perhaps disfigured by an epigone can succeed butch haircut and later, clay breasts, and became the dashing where, by their own admission, the adult Jacksons’ own “Doll heroine Aina; baby dolls were reimagined as obese adults; Little Games” failed. That abandoned project has been for some years Red Riding Hood, sporting a moustache, became the lecherous a ruined edifice housing a ruined edifice: a mystery inside an wolf Harvey, the Doll Games’ enduring antihero. enigma. It has haunted me. This fossil, this derelict, I have done Similarly, the Games’ highly conventionalized narratives, my best to disensepulcher, and even, in so far as it is possible employing stock scenarios such as “pirates,” “the orphanage,” for one not privy to the secrets of the Doll Games first hand, to “the rebel princess,” and “running away,” appropriated and restore. I consider myself in the light of an archaeologist work- remixed elements of the epic, comedy, romance, and farce. ing two sites at once: a ruined city, and the ruined city it was (Tragedy and gothic horror, though deliberately excluded from built upon. Perhaps this work of mine will itself fall to ruins and the doll world, visited the Doll Games from without, a point I become the object of a future archaeologist’s course of study, make in “Laurie Reborn: Death, Resurrection, and the Chaste and perhaps the opus that results from that study will fall to Hermaphrodite in the Doll Games of Shelley and Pamela Jack- ruins in turn and await a still more future scholar of endeavors son.”2) Giving the postmodern pastiche a comradely nod but past, and so on. Or perhaps in my own investigations I will pene- eschewing its cynicism, the Doll Games have confused some trate so far into these worlds within worlds that I will find myself critics. Never afraid of acknowledging wish-fulfillment as examining the back of my own head, having come full circle. narrative’s primum mobile, the Doll Games presented a reso- Not the least peculiar object that has come down to us lutely cheerful Weltanschauung, leading some scholars to dis- from that late, decadent period of the Doll Games so particu- miss them as naïve. However, this scholar would argue that this larly rich in artifactual droppings, is a doll-sized mirror. A crude optimism was a radical gesture, given that the values the nar- moustache, eyebrows, and shaggy “do” have been cut from ratives affirmed were in stark contrast certainly to playground electrical tape and arranged on the face of the mirror in such a norms, but also to those of the larger society around them—a way that a doll (or her handler) sees her face transformed. This contrast of which the artists were very much aware. influencing machine, fashioned with who can say what degree The Doll Games emerged in Berkeley, California, at a time of knowingness about the theatricality of gender, this all- when gender, politics, race, and sexuality were fiercely and pub- purpose Duchamp, is already tremulous with the implied licly debated. Indeed, as the dolls were taking their first steps moustache of Harvey, but—mise en abyme— when Harvey toward literary history, the artists’ family was opening a femi- himself is the Narcissus, becomes delirious with the double nist bookstore just down the street from People’s Park. The Doll spectacle/specularization of the moustache-implicit antago- Games’ privately staged confrontations between androgynes nizing and defeating the moustache-explicit. Which latter, and “dainty ladies,” their outlaw utopias and anarchic to add exquisite layers of irony, is itself a disguise and a 86 child societies, and their uncompromising moral vision, supplement, so that the transfigured Harvey in the mirror might look to him/herself, if you will pardon this fancy that bestows sight on a doll, rather more feminine than usual, in his/her redu- plicated facial decorations, because more like any other female in a false moustache, and therefore both less like him/herself (“Harvey”) and more like him/herself at once, restored to the Little Red Riding Hood that is hidden inside every wolf. As, in my mind’s eye, I look at a little girl looking at a doll looking at a reflection of a doll disguised—and unveiled—in the candid duplicity of this most extraordinary mirror, I may be excused, I hope, for experiencing a moment of vertigo, espe- cially if I inform the reader that I too have a moustache, and for a moment seem to glimpse my own image in the glass. Is it pos- sible that I am neither the critic nor the audience, but just the latest dummy of the Jackson girls—that those pint-sized ven- triloquists are throwing their voices out of the past, not to reveal their secrets, but to play yet another Doll Game? –J. F. Bellwether, Ph.D.

1 I argue this point at greater length elsewhere; see “Did the Doll Games Ever End?” Post- modern Culture, MDXIXVIIIIIX. 2 Per/forma 11, Summer 1998.

87 Aina Laurie Josh McBig Barbie

Aina Josh McBig Presented to S. Jackson under the name “Fluff” in Christmas of 1970 or 1971, The Doll Games’ archetypical “manly man” with action arm, originally used to Aina became the Doll Games’ first and finest heroine. A cheeky tomboy with chop a plastic log (now lost). His name seems to gently parody his original iden- cropped hair and a wide smile, Aina led the games through most of their finest tity as brawny lumberjack, “Big Josh.” In spite of his muscled torso, moustache, years together with Laurie, her sidekick and romantic partner, playing such roles and the mature bulge in his plastic underwear, all of which marked him as as runaway princess, orphan girl, and pirate apprentice with pluck and panache. masculine “other” to the youthful androgynes Laurie and Aina, and no doubt Aina acquired a second head some years after the first, and alternated between to the young Jacksons, Josh had a vulnerable quality. His legs dangled weakly the two thereafter. She was supplanted by identical twins Mara and Melanie in from his loosely jointed hips, and later began to loosen and fall off, as did his the later Doll Games; this is generally considered to mark the beginning of the hands and even eventually his left foot, making him a source of comedy, espe- decadent era, and of the Doll Games’ eventual decline. cially in the late farces, but also transforming him, in the end, into what we can only see as the Doll Games’ sorrowful, suffering Christ. Laurie The Doll Games’ most beloved boy hero and its martyred saint, born into the Barbie Barbie family as little sister “Skipper,” passing into the hands of P. Jackson on Long snubbed by the Doll Games, a “found” Barbie was finally admitted in the Christmas of 1970 or 1971, and recast soon thereafter as Laurie, androgynous late classical period, on the condition that she suffer her trademark blonde hair twin and chaste lover of Aina. Sensitive, lithe, comely, with flowing hair, Twist to be dyed black, and her legs to be amputated just below the knees. Unfortu- ‘N’ Turn body, and poseable wrists, Laurie embodied the Doll Games’ romantic nately, the offensive “blackface” and ungainly leg stumps that resulted from male ideal. Tragically mutilated during a makeover, the circumstances of which these operations made her a laughingstock, and she never found a lasting place remain shrouded in mystery, his body, and perhaps some part of his spirit, lived in the Doll Games; her name, if she was given one, has been forgotten. on in his sometime rival, Jesse. Dawn Harvey Matron Jesse

Dawn Matron Dainty, wasp-waisted, and vain, reviled for her showy breasts and cheap The Doll Games’ Sadean baby doll, a cruel voluptuary who presided over the feminine allure, Dawn was cast as the trashy “bitch/slut” of the Doll Games. orphanages and boarding schools of the so-called “nasty” games, corrupting Insinuating herself into the chaste plots of the virtuous heroes and heroines in virtuous boy dolls and jealously tormenting rivals Aina, Mara, and Melanie. At order to seduce them into vice, Dawn was ritually vanquished and “put in her once mother-substitute and gargantuan infant, Matron was a key element in the place” as the Doll Games’ cheerful moral order reasserted itself at the end of Doll Games’ studies of the “maternal grotesque” as well as the “infant whore,” each game. A tendency, in keeping with her crass exhibitionism, to split in half, while the surrogate families she ruled became Oedipal laboratories in which the leaving her hips and legs naked on the ground, was deterred by a thick bandage Doll Games conducted many of their boldest experiments. of medical tape wrapped about her waist. Jesse Harvey Dreamy, gentle Jesse entered the Doll Games as a disembodied head, plundered Poet and libertine, the Doll Games’ “horny fop” was originally a Little Red Riding along with Aina’s second head (or Aina2) from a matched pair of Scandinavian Hood doll of unknown make. The combination of delicacy and swollen obscenity costume dolls. Initially sharing Laurie’s body and taking turns with him, just we see in his curious physique was matched by his personality: Harvey was as Aina2 shared the body of Aina1, Jesse took over Laurie’s body and his role at once tenderly lyrical and crudely predatory, both a hapless Romantic with at Laurie’s death. Much remains to be examined in the original foursome, that perfumed hair and a goatish lout. His eternal amorous pursuit of the unreachable intriguing set of doubly matched pairs in which we can see the “twinning” motif Mara and Melanie, interrupted by ferocious rutting with the likes of Dawn and of the Doll Games worked out in its most complex and fatal form: one of these Sue, was one of the great comic motifs of the late Doll Games. four blonde lovers/rivals, the lamented Laurie, perished in an attempt to dye his hair black that was seemingly motivated by the wish to differentiate and de- couple him from his siblings. 1 2 3 4

1 4 Bathroom commodities in molded “plastic wood” decorated with magic marker Padded bra of molded white gum adhesive covered in white medical gauze, with to resemble name brands, including Desitin lotion (in pump dispenser), Stridex straps of yellow telephone wire. The practice of building prosthetic breasts and medicated pads, Secret deodorant, Noxzema, Band-Aids, Johnson’s Baby Cream, penises out of clay probably arose in response to the needs of the “sexy” games Suave Shampoo, Johnson’s Baby Powder, Coppertone, Sucrets, Johnson’s Den- of the early late classical period, rather than out of a more general concern with tal Floss, [brand illegible] nasal spray, Buffered aspirin. Emblematic of the way anatomical correctness. Either way, clay parts were nearly universal in the later the Doll Games consumed the larger culture, transforming and reconfiguring it Doll Games, as no male doll was originally endowed with a penis, and female for its own purposes, these jewel-like miniatures, none more than half an inch leads Aina, Mara, and Melanie had the smooth torsos of the pre-adolescent Skip- tall, are the products of thoroughly American dreamers. per and Fluff. This removable prosthesis is particularly interesting for the way it highlights the fundamentally theatrical nature of gender, which like this breast- 2 laden bra can be donned or discarded at the dictates of desire and story line. Single platform sandal of blue styrofoam with straps of yellow and blue tele- phone wire securing the toe with an X but loose at the ankle, up which they are 5 possibly intended to be crisscrossed, Roman style. This artifact exemplifies Camera. Rectangular block of wood painted black with a white strip accenting the Doll Games’ strategic appropriation and ironic framing of elements of the the front, where a nut and washer together form the lens. The viewfinder win- dominant culture (in this case, popular styles of the disco era). The care put into dow is indicated on this side by a small rectangle of silver metallic paper or tape crafting an article that would have been spurned by the Doll Games’ androgy- inset in the white strip and outlined in black. On the top of the camera the head nous heroines shows the complex interplay of desire and scorn in the Doll of a small nail driven most of the way into the body of the camera represents the Games’ ongoing interrogation of femininity. Just whose foot did the cobbler have shutter release. On the back of the camera a small strip of yellow paper is glued in mind? Like the bewildered prince in the fairy tale, we are left with a shoe and to the center. On it is printed “1 – 1” to represent the exposure number. This a question. camera, loaded with self-reflexive implications (and a full roll of film), also points to the voyeurism/exhibitionism so characteristic of Doll Games plots. 3 Lot of three daggers. 6 1. Steel dagger made of a round-headed nail, half of which has been hammered Eight assorted handbags, one purse and one backpack. The Duracell purse, flat to make a straight, narrow blade; the sheath is faux leather, folded and semi-transparent purse on small brass bead-chain, was made from a container stitched up one side with telephone wire, the end of which is left loose to serve for hearing aid batteries. All others are of faux leather, most stitched with as a strap. telephone wire. Two contain paper “money,” white rectangles each bearing a 2. Aluminum dagger made of a length of wire hammered flat. circled numeral 1 in pencil/black marker. Paradoxically, although the Doll Games 3. Bamboo dagger, whittled flat and tapered toward the tip. The grip is colored showed a utopian disregard for money and a high scorn for the conventional green on one side; a short hand-guard is affixed to the blade with white medical appurtenances of femininity, purses were manufactured in quantities rivaled cloth tape. The blade fits snugly inside its sheath, which is real leather folded and only by daggers. Was the vaginal purse—pictured here in an almost military joined with more cloth tape. A thin strip of fraying green cloth is taped to the top array—waging a war with the phallic dagger over the contested territory of the of the sheath; this once formed a loop for hanging, but is torn close to the sheath Doll Games? on one end. Daggers, not all of them as finely crafted as these, were de rigueur for the heroes and heroines (above all the spunky Aina) of the Doll Games’ “Pirate” and “Out- law” scenarios. 5 6 7 8

7 Tin “SUCRETS” box containing the assembled writings of the dolls in various Ah... Mara... styles and formats, including literary efforts (Dawn’s “A true-life romance”, to feel you, warm and yielding Harvey’s “Moments with Mara” and “Parakeet—A flash”), self-help publications against my strong chest, (“Dieting the Easy Way, by Dawn,” “Madame Dotrovthnile’s Hairdressing Book”), is bliss and romantic ephemera from Dawn’s busy love life. Sucrets, a throat lozenge, Ah... Mara... was popular with the orally fixated Jacksons for its candy-like sweetness. Note The glorious oneness I feel that the only written texts generated within the primarily oral tradition of the with your innocent lips Doll Games are preserved in what one might call a “voice box”! The resemblance upon mine, which I never of Sucrets to secrets will not escape the attention of the careful reader. feel otherwise, (except when it’s Melanie’s, Dawn’s, Philisses, anne’s [sic] or Jenny’s lips) 8 Ah... Mara... “Moments with Mara” by Harvey to feel warm and peaceful, Poem printed in pencil (verse) and red magic marker (chorus) on inside of folded after fucking long & vigorously index card and signed by Harvey in pencil. On the other side of the card is a with you, vivid semi-abstract mixed-media drawing (pencil, magic marker and white-out) is an experience I will never with distinct sexual overtones, signed in purple marker by Harvey and with the forget title, “Mara and I” printed on it in red marker, as well as a redundant legend in Ah... Mara... My fair queen purple identifying this as a “picture (abstract)”. The poem is a stellar example of of love... that combination of sentimentality and ribaldry so characteristic of Harvey. I adore you. Displaying his gift for drawing as well as poesy, and signed on both sides, this may be the most precious item in the collection.

Homo Bulla: An interview with Sabine How did you become in interested in the theme of bubbles? Mödersheim I was interested in how the playing child is depicted in emblem Kris coue books and other items that have emblematic or allegorical content. My research stays in art history and cultural history, The year 1789 was revolutionary in more ways than one. It was though. It ends with the Pears’ soap advertisement from the late the year that Andrew Pears arrived in London to start manufac- 19th century, the first time an artwork depicting a child blowing turing and selling soap through his shop on Gerrard Street in bubbles was used in an advertisement. the fashionable London suburb of Soho. But his soap was not only less abrasive on the skin: it also produced bubbles that When do children and their games enter art history? lasted longer. Blowing bubbles had long been a childhood Children were depicted in artworks from the 15th century on. pastime but the longer lasting bubbles of Pears’ soap made It’s the Renaissance that pays attention to children for the first bubble blowing more worthwhile. A century later, street ped- time. Children are depicted in earlier times but they are not dlers and pitchmen were selling bubble-blowing kits as toys. At shown as children; they are not shown playing. So the child as that time, the most common instrument used was a pipe. a theme comes very late in art history, mainly in the 15th, 16th The well-known modern instrument—a circle on a stick and 17th centuries. And even then, it’s more as an allegory of attached to the jar cap—was pioneered in the early 1940s life or one stage of life. For the early modern period, there is a by Chemtoy, a chemical company that manufactured clean- very circular and static idea of history or the circle of life; child- ing supplies. Chemtoy was acquired by a larger company, hood is a very defined moment in the order of the world, in the Tootsietoys, who put the bubble making toys into full-scale cycle of life. retail distribution by the latter part of the same decade. Bubble For the early period as well the Middle Ages and the early solution is still one of the best selling toys in the world today. modern period, the child is actually a small adult. The child Bubbles are made of very little, almost nothing, and it would have been considered deficient in the qualities that might seem that these evanescent, translucent nothings are define an adult or an adolescent. All the qualities are there but not appropriate vessels for a range of heavy metaphysical they’re still weak so their qualities and characteristics have not meanings. But Sabine Mödersheim, professor in the German developed, although it would be inappropriate to use the word department at the University of Wisconsin, has been examin- develop because that’s a later concept that comes into peda- ing the very different meanings that bubbles have had in art gogy in the late 18th century through people like Rousseau and and cultural history in the past three centuries. Kris Coue spoke through reform pedagogy of the late 18th century. to her by phone. What we find, especially in the late 18th century, is that

92 people start thinking of childhood as a different, enviable stage of life where civilization has not yet regulated the person’s life: it’s carefree and innocent, and that plays into the depictions of children. We have a dramatic change in the fabric of the fam- ily at that time. Earlier, children were a part of the adult world. They would just be around and learn whatever they had to learn but they were part of that environment. What we see in the late 18th century, with the families becoming smaller and, most importantly, with the father’s occupation being separated from the house so that the workshop is no longer in the same place as the house, is that we have a separation between the lives of the women, mothers, and children and the fathers who provide for the family. That’s a radical shift that takes place in the 18th century in terms of how we see motherhood and childhood. Now children have to be schooled; they have to learn how to interact and they have to learn all the skills they used to learn by doing and watching.

Was playing in general considered in a negative light? It was. It was seen as idleness and we don’t yet have the modern idea that children learn through play. Most children wouldn’t have had proper toys. They would find a stick or something. For example, in Dutch genre paintings, we see peasant and burgher children using things like pigs’ bladders, which they would fill with little peas and stones to make a rattle. The manufacturing of toys starts much later and proper toys are something that only the upper classes are able to afford. That is why soap bub- bles were popular. They were available and cheap.

How do these shifts affect the way bubbles are represented in the various periods? In 16th-century art and especially in Dutch 17th-century paint- ing, bubbles are a moralizing emblem. The child is actually not at stake. The bubble blowing activity is what is important and the bubble is an allegory. It’s very telling and probably surpris- ing for someone today to see how children and bubbles were initially connected to death. The emblem was used as an alle- gory of fleeting time and the shortness of life, and as a reminder of futility and death. This is the emblem of Man as a bubble, homo bulla, which stems from the Roman adage coined by Varro and Lucian and adapted by Erasmus for his famous collec- tion of proverbs “Adagia,” published in 1572. The proverbial say- ing refers to the brevity of the individual human life compared to Creation, history, and eternal life in the eschatological sense. It is a very common motif and you find example after example on its own or as part of a larger vanitas still life. The motif begins to show up all of a sudden but there are some prominent examples. Hendrik Goltzius’s engraving Quis Evadet (1594) is typical of the genre: It shows a putto, lean- ing on a skull, who is blowing bubbles—one of them already bursting—with a small pipe in his hand that is stretched out into the air, holding a shell with soap water in the other hand. Smoke is rising from an altar in the background, and the inscrip- tion Quis Evadet (“Who escapes?”) is on a stone that looks like a gravestone. opposite: David Bailly, Still Life, 1651 above: Sir John Everett Millais, Bubbles, 1886 below: Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, The Soap Bubble, c. 1739 When are bubbles relieved of this heavy metaphysical bur- den? The shift is clearly marked by the Chardin painting The Soap Bubble from 1739. It’s much more about personal melancholy, mourning one’s own childhood being gone rather than the gen- eral idea of vanitas and fleeting time. This is a melancholy that was not possible in the 13th century, say, because childhood was a stage of deficiency that had to be overcome as quickly as possible. It was very common at that time to have a copperplate engraving made after a painting for larger distribution. The French copperplate of the Chardin has an inscription and a poem. The poem is far more conservative than what the pic- ture allows. It’s not clear who chose the apparently anonymous poem but it tries to make sense of the painting in the old way as a symbol of futility. But the shift is already there. The painting depicts children at an age where they might start regretting that their childhood is over. That’s already built into this painting.

And is the Pears’ soap advertisement the culmination of this revaluation? Yes. The ad used Bubbles, an 1886 painting by Sir John Ever- ett Millais depicting his own grandson. The painting was never meant to be commercialized but it was bought for publication in a newspaper and then sold to the Pears’ Soap company. The company sought permission from the painter to use it in an ad. Some artist historians say it was the first time an artwork was used for a mass advertisement. There was a moral outcry on the part of other artists that Millais was selling out, blurring art and commerce, etc. It’s hard to say what Millais thought. He pretended at least that he didn’t want this to happen but he did give his permission. Pears’ also wanted to enter a soap bar into the painting so that there are two versions of the painting. I think they used the original as a model for a new painting. We still have the original without the soap bar.

How successful was the advertising campaign? Immensely. It is a very clever combination of two motifs. You have the childhood motif and nostalgia; the little boy’s clothes are actually from the late 18th century. But it was not too mel- ancholic. It’s one of the paintings where you see the shift to the depiction of childhood innocence. And the advertisement is still available today as a poster so its appeal has not worn off.

pages 95-98: Marcel Dzama, untitled drawings, 2002 95 96 97 98 Finders Keepers poet who had had his day in the sun and then toppled off the Michael Witmore map before reaching the tender age of 15. Later it was rumored that “Le Petit de Beauchasteau” made his way to Persia, which Whenever I look at rare book auction catalogues, I feel an odd, for “Enlightened” Europeans stood nearly at the vanishing point sentimental kind of despair. Old volumes appear in inventories of myth and history. like basketed children, newly delivered from some ancient The book, on the other hand, still exists (and has not, as far stream. Just as the bundles come within reach, they disap- as I know, been purchased). For a mere $2,500, you can “own” pear into the anonymous hands of a collector or the stacks of what Cromwell could never quite get his hands on: the legacy a research library. They go on to careers as precious objects of a youth who possessed both virtuosity and courtly fame. In or simply sit there in the rushes, waiting for someone to pick doing so, you would join an illustrious line of keepers who may them up. have pondered the mystery of the child’s disappearance while As an academic, I am used to this feeling. I don’t buy old studying the engraved portraits of 17th-century “worthies” that books; I read them. But that doesn’t mean I don’t occasionally are interspersed among the poems. Particularly striking is the want to pluck them from the stream, especially when they are brightly colored frontispiece that depicts the author, at age 11, as fabulous as the book I saw up for auction recently: as the young Apollo surrounded by adoring (if somewhat star- tled) muses. In the background, just to the right of the child’s strangely glowing head, one can glimpse the stand of Olympian BEAUCHASTEAU, FRANÇOIS MATHIEU CHASTELET DE. through which “Le Petit de Beauchasteau” must have La Lyre du jeune Apollon, ou la Muse naissante du Petit de Beau- crept on his way to oblivion. chasteau. Paris: [Nicolas Foucault] for Charles de Sercy & Guil- The possibility of true disappearance, forestalled by the laume de Luynes , 1657. existence of this pretty little book, was just as real for other child Two parts in one volume, 4°, [45] leaves (including prodigies of the age. Christian Henri Heinecken, for example, engraved title, engraved frontispiece representing the author at the “wunderkind” from Lübeck, was only three and a half when age 11, and printed title in red and black), [1] leaf (half-title), 280 he amazed the king and queen of Denmark with his elegant dis- (numbered 262) pp.; [4] leaves, 143 (numbered 127), [1] pp., quisitions at court. At the time of his death (age four), Christian [9] leaves, and 26 engraved portraits, one half-page allegorical had studied sacred and profane history, geography, genealogy, plate and two armorial headpieces. Modern full calf blindtooled anatomy, French, and Latin. In an image commemorating his in period style; mounted on title verso is the armorial bookplate, demise, the young genius sits at a writing desk while a skele- dated 1701, of Algernon Capell, earl of Essex, Viscount Maldon, ton reaches over his shoulder to grasp a paper that reads: vivi- and Baron Capell of Hadham; the Lucius Wilmerding copy (his tur ingenio, cetera mortis erunt (“through genius one lives, all sale, New York, 29 October 1951, Lot 84). One quire browned the rest will pass away”). Like the young Apollo, the child from due to quality of paper. Lübeck is destined to fade into the mist, but perhaps the leg- FIRST EDITION of this remarkable collection of poems in end of his accomplishments will remain. With a little help from praise of the most eminent men and women of the time, com- death, he will hop off the high-backed chair and step smartly posed by the author between the ages of 8 and 12. into the garden behind him, never to return. › › › When you want a book, the argot of its description becomes irresistible in its clinical precision. “Leaves,” “frontispiece,” Children, like legends and rare books, are often on the verge of “quire,” and—prepare yourselves, bibliophiles—a period, full disappearing, and it is for those who have left the kingdom of calf cover that has been “blindtooled.” (I imagine some Tire- childhood—that high-walled garden whose gate has always sian artisan-sage working steadily in his bookbindery…) At this been left swinging in the background—to wonder where point, it doesn’t really matter that “one quire is browned due to they’ve gone. Perhaps this is why a book like La Lyre de jeune the quality of paper.” Apollon commands such a high price today. Granted, prices for The author of the volume, known in French as “Le Petit 17th-century books are already high because of their obvious de Beauchasteau,” was one of the most celebrated child historical value. But La Lyre is of particular interest to cultural poets of the 17th century. I came across the description of historians because it documents another age’s fascination with his book by accident while doing research on child prodigies marvelous events and persons. Seventeenth-century libraries in 17th- century England. The French craze over “Le Petit de were full, in fact, of books and pamphlets breathlessly describ- Beauchasteau” was matched, it turns out, by his enthusiastic ing fiery armies gathering in the sky, corpses speaking out reception in the English court in 1658. Apparently the child, against their murderers, and children prophesying in the middle then 13, was one of the favorites of Lord Protector Crom- of the night in strange tongues. The 17th century was not afraid well, the Puritan general who governed England during the of marvels; they were the tabloid stuff of gossip as well as the aftermath of the Civil War. The English court invited the child elevated subject of scientific inquiry. (along with his father or perhaps an ecclesiastical “keeper”) It is said, for example, that King Charles I was thrilled to to visit London that year, where the boy flattered his hosts by examine a man who had been brought to court to prove Wil- abjuring the Catholic religion. Cromwell was deeply impressed liam Harvey’s theory of the circulation of the blood. The man’s with the boy and wanted to keep him in London. But “Le Petit de chest had been blown open in battle, but the wound had healed Beauchasteau” slipped through his fingers and returned without entirely closing. At the direction of Harvey, the king 99 to France. Three years later he disappeared, a young carefully placed his fingers inside the wound to feel the beating heart, which thanks to a paucity of nerve endings was virtually Another child prodigy, Jacqueline Pascale (sister of the anaesthetized. (The story may be apocryphal.) We also hear sto- mathematician Blaise), made her way to religion later in life. Also ries of Robert Hooke—a celebrated member of London’s Royal known as “Sister Euphemia” because of her piety in the convent Society—combing the woods for pieces of glowing tree bark in at Port Royal, Jacqueline Pascale began as a poet who wrote order to demonstrate the phenomenon of phosphorescence. her first epigrams and rondeaux at the age of twelve. Anxious Prodigies of all sorts were the prizes of curious minds, a reward to see her charge advance, Jacqueline’s benefactor financed for looking beyond the usual course of events for something the publication of a collection of her poems (now lost) entitled truly spectacular. Vers de la petite Pascale [Poetry of the Little Pascale] (1638). A man whose beating heart can be touched with the As proof of her talents, the collection is said to have included hand. A piece of bark that glows in the night. A child who several epigrams that the girl had composed in an ante-cham- writes and rhymes like an adult. Such phenomena were not ber while waiting to meet queen Anne of Austria. Suspected so different for early modern Europeans. Child prodigies were as an imposter, the young poet was asked to demonstrate her yet another example of the way in which nature (via human talents to the ladies of the court at St. Germain before she could reproduction) could occasionally surprise observers by pro- be presented to the monarch in person. She acquitted herself ducing something unusual. Like comets in the night sky, handily with the following poem, composed spontaneously for ultra-precocious children were a startling aberration from the a Madame de Hautefort: “usual course of nature,” even if their overzealous parents were the most visible cause of their appearance on the world stage. Beau chef-d’oeuvre de l’univers, But it seems that such extraordinary talents were destined to Adorable object de mes vers, fade. While many prodigious children grew up to become even N’admirez pas ma prompte poésie. more talented adults—witness Mozart’s dizzying ascent in the Votre oeil, que l’univers reconnoît pour vainqueur, European courts—any particular childhood would always be on Ayant bien pu toucher soudainement mon coer, the wane. A pu d’un meme coup toucher ma fantasie. How long can a child prodigy remain a child? “Le Petit de Beuachasteau” may have been destined to disappear into an [Beautiful masterpiece of the universe, imaginary Persia, since it was only there that his fabulous tal- Adored object of my verse, ents could be preserved without parallel. But, just as easily, his Do not admire my impromptu poetry. childhood could have been understood as already passed, since Your eye, which the world recognizes as its conqueror, prodigious children were already adults in crucial ways. As one (Able to strike suddenly at my very heart) of his admirers wrote in the volume: Was able, in the same stroke, to touch my imagination.]

A le voir, on le croit enfant, Once admitted to the royal audience, Jacqueline became the A l’ouïr, on voit sa vieillesse. darling of the royal couple and her verses survive in letters describing her exploits. She also proved a charming actress, a [To see him, one would think him a child, skill which proved invaluable a year later when—while acting But hearing him, one recognizes that he is old.] in a child troupe for the powerful Cardinal Richelieu—Jacque- line utterly charmed the man who had recently taken measures The idea that children already possessed the knowledge and against her father for sedition. “Voilà la petite Pascale,” the Car- experience of those far older was already ensconced in the dinal exclaimed when she approached him (somewhat timidly) literature of the middle ages. Centuries before Wordsworth after the performance. Standing before the great eagle-eyed declared the child father to the man, medieval writers were prelate, she recited the following poem: celebrating the character of pueri senes or “wise children” who had superior powers of reasoning and theological discernment. Ne vous étonnez pas, incomparable Armand, Quite often it was the young Jesus who was the source of this Si j’ai mal contenté vos yeux et vos oreilles: image. The adolescent deity, confidently lecturing his skeptical Mon esprit agité de frayeurs sans pareilles, audience on the steps of the temple, illustrated for medieval Interdit à mon corps et voix et mouvement, readers the sovereignty of knowledge when it was uncorrupted Mais pour me render ici capable de vous plaire, by sophistry or greed. Rappelez de l’exil mon miserable père. A series of child preachers and prophets would follow in the God-child’s ancient footsteps throughout the late 17th [Do not be shocked, excellent Armand, and 18th centuries. When rural Protestants in France lost If I have not contented your eyes and ears: their nerve and converted to Catholicism, for example, their My soul, troubled with incomparable fears, children berated them in the middle of the night with long Has inhibited my body, voice and gestures, sermons about righteous long-suffering. Like conduits for But if I am capable of pleasing you here, unconscious guilt, the rustic Enfants de Dieu or “Children of Recall from exile my miserable father.] God” lectured all comers in several languages during their midnight trances, denouncing their parents to crowds of The voice of the young poet apparently melted the Cardinal, who onlookers and, eventually, to doctors and ecclesiastical ended up inviting her father to return from hiding without fear of 100 authorities sent from the city to investigate. harassment. (Why don’t the publicly disgraced enlist children in In the albumen print portrait of Cousin that resides in the Getty collection, any trace of whimsy or sentiment has been banished. The philosopher’s right hand is tucked, like the Emperor’s, into the side of his buttoned suit. He is the visual opposite of the child prodigy: aging, grim, marked by the knowl- edge that life is short and scholarly work is long. Like Richelieu, Cousin seems to possess an implacable, probing eye. Here is the finder of lost words, the curator of childhood past. “What- ever is lost in childhood” his expression seems to say, “can be found again.” But found where? In books of course, like the one about “La petite Pascale.” When Cousin sits down to write his biography of young Jacqueline, he is creating an object that has already, in some crucial sense, gone missing. Books, like any particular child- hood, are precious because they are only passingly present. They are written, in fact, at the moment when their contents are about to disappear. Which is why Cousin’s attempt to retrieve Jacqueline’s life and poems is so beguiling, even if it is ulti- mately misguided. He knows that books are tangible things— they have blindtooled covers, glorious illustrations, faulty bind- ings and missing pages—whereas childhood and memory are not. In the face of oblivion, the facts of youth must be gathered, accounts must be made. “La petite Pascale” will reach out to her audience once more, he thinks, this time from the bending the project of public rehabilitation today? Where are the cheru- leaves of a philosopher’s tome. bic defenders of Martha Stewart and Kenneth Lay?) Jacqueline’s remarkable encounter with Richelieu can be Bibliography repeated only because it appears in books—the true keepers of François Mathieu Chastelet de Beauchasteau, La Lyre du jeune Apollon, ou la Muse nais- childhood. Books grow old but they stay the same, and like the sante du Petit de Beauchasteau (Paris: [Nicolas Foucault] for Charles de Sercy & Guillaume impromptu poetry of “La petite Pascale,” they lead their keepers de Luynes, 1657). For sale by E. K. Schreiber. back to the unsupervised nurseries of legend. Perhaps this is Victor Cousin, Jacqueline Pascale: premiéres études sur les femmes illustres et la sociéte why Jacqueline, Henri, and Matthieu de Beauchasteau became du XVIIéme siècle (Paris: Didier, 1869). more poignant as child prodigies when their exploits were con- Victor Cousin, Madame de Longueville: la jeunesse de Madame de Longueville (Paris: Didier, nected with “lost volumes” or “rare editions.” Those volumes 1853). became pathways, lines of flight: swinging gates to ancient gar- Victor Cousin, Du Vrai, du beau et du bien (Paris: Didier, 1853). dens that had been summarily abandoned. Michèle Sacquin, ed., Le Printemps des geniés: les enfants prodiges (Paris: Biliothèque But what of the adults who read, write and collect these Nationale/Robert Laffont, 1993). books? These exiles from the garden are an inverted form of the wise child—aged in years but precociously infantile, attached to desires that cannot be fulfilled in the wide, wide world of adulthood. Consider, for example, the life of Victor Cousin, a 19th-century philosopher and scholar who collected all available records of Jacqueline Pascale’s performances and assembled them in a volume entitled, Jacqueline Pascale: premiéres études sur les femmes illustres et la sociéte du XVIIe siècle [Jacqueline Pascale: first studies of famous women and the society of the 17th century]. Cousin was as an intense man who, according to some, was romantically obsessed with one of his older and more risqué 17th-century subjects, the Duch- ess de Longueville, also known as the “sinner of the Fronde.” Once the editor of the works of Descartes and Plato, Cousin spent the later years of his career chronicling famous and infa- mous females of the 17th century. The Paris wits registered their disdain of Cousin’s barely concealed longing with the mock epitaph: “Here lies Victor Cousin, the great philosopher, in love with the Duchess de Longueville, who died a century and a half before he was born.” Perhaps he should have stuck with above: Frontispiece of Beauchasteau’s book showing him as Apollo surrounded lecturing on truth and beauty. by the Muses. 101 overleaf: Aura Rosenberg, Praxis Dr. Kössendrup, 1999.

103 Skabbetti, Peas, Apple cake, and Ice Cream: recipes by children

Skabbetti Ice Cream

41 sausages as big as your ear 6 inches of cream 41 meatballs not as big 6 inches of milk 41 orange potatoes or tomatoes 41 skabbetti Put everything in a box. Put it in the freezer for one whole 41 clean oil half a hour. Then it starts turning into ice cream because that’s how First you decide what will it be tonight—sausages or it’s made. meatballs? Then you could eat it, but I wouldn’t. I would put it in a When your father tells you which one, then you cook. Mix truck and bring it to a milk store, and I would sell it to all the sauce in the blender so your elbows don’t hurt. When the people for real money. the skabbetti is done from the cooking in the broiler (2 degrees or maybe 3), get it in the silver pan with holes in it by your spoon with holes in it. Then spread out the sauce. It serves your whole family and all your father’s friends.

Apple Cake

10 pounds of white food coloring 1 gallon of lovely good cake frosting Peas 2 gallons of sugar 2 and 3 gallons of milk 3 potatoes 1 gallon again of water 2 big chickens (30 pounds) 1 nice apple cake from the store 1 roast beef 2 packages of corn Put them all together in a bowl. Mix it with a spoon on a 2 big pumpkins long stick so you don’t get your hands down in the dip. Stir it for a gallon long. Cook them one at a time. Pour it in a round pot, and put it on the right side of the stove—till the big hand is on the six. Then take them out and put them all together and we’ll have cake. It makes the number of pieces for a party or for dessert— because remember— the cake is the same size as the pan.

Note: If you don’t like the frosting—just scrape it off—and no fussing!

Source: Smashed Potatoes, ed. Jane G. Martel (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). The book is a compilation of recipes by children at the Francis J. Muraco Elementary School in Winchester, Massachusetts. Juvenilia a series of Maoist experimental films, featured the twins in his film Poto and cd curated by Brian Conley & Christoph Cox Cabengo. Gorin’s film includes this excerpt from a hospital observation film, in which Grace (Poto) and Virginia (Cabengo) are heard speaking to one another 1 CATHARINE ECHOLS, “BABY BABBLE” (1:41) while playing with utensils and baking pans. “I made this recording primarily because my 14-and-a-half-month-old daughter Tessie’s babbling was so expressive. I conduct research on language develop- 7 HOLIDAZE, “WHAT ARE YOU AFRAID OF?” (1:52) ment and find the babbling interesting from a scientific as well as from a personal The band Holidaze was formed by Gen Ken Montgomery to keep himself enter- perspective. One reason that period of babbling (researchers describe it as tained when he visited his family on holidays. With the exception of Ken, the ‘jargon’) is of interest is that babbling exhibits influences of the native language oldest member (Ann Marie, the lead singer) was 8 years old. The band jammed during that period, both with regard to contour (i.e., ‘prosody’) and the particu- and made noise, creating songs as they went along. “What are you afraid of?” lar vowel and consonant sounds; these effects are fairly subtle, however, and was created on the spot—the genius of children. Ann Marie Kling (vocals), John wouldn’t necessarily be apparent to the average person. Additionally, I find that Kling (percussion), Tina Kling (noise), Gen Ken (guitar). Recorded in 1982. type of babbling intriguing because it sounds so much like a real conversation, but without real words. It seems as if children get the conversational patterns 8 JULIA LOKTEV, “DADABABIES (EXCERPT)” (5:42) (or ‘tune’) of language even before they have words. Moreover, there seem to be Excerpt from a radio adaptation of Tristan Tzara’s First Celestial Adventure of individual differences, such that some children produce that type of babbling for Mr. Antipyrine, Fire Extinguisher (1916) read by a group of 12- and 13-year-olds a longer period of time and actually may be particularly focused on the tune of under the direction of Julia Loktev. For this piece, the dadababies rewrote por- language (what one researcher has described as a ‘gestalt’ approach to language tions of the text and added stories, fragments, and sound effects of their own. learning), whereas other children seem to focus more on producing individual Produced in 1991 for CKUT Montreal. words (an ‘analytic’ approach). I was curious about where Tessie might fall into those classifications as her language developed, and indeed she did show some 9 GREGORY WHITEHEAD, “SCRATCH PEACE” (5:10) tendencies associated with the ‘gestalt’ pattern, though, like most children, she “A lone voice out of the dark. The song fragment was recorded on an old wax cyl- fell between the two extremes.” inder, and found its way to me through a series of accidents and digressions. The tone is ruptured innocence, with undertones of dread. Who’s there?” 2 LUNA MONTGOMERY, “WASHING MY HAIR” (2:58) Three-year old Luna Montgomery recorded in Pennsylvania in 1993. This piece 10 GEN KEN MONTGOMERY 1998, “MASSIMO (MAX)” (2:46) was later incorporated into “Washing The Hare,” which appeared on Psychogeo- From a 1998 recording made at La Scuola, New York City, documenting a work- graphical Dip (GD Stereo, 1998). shop for 2nd graders. Here, a boy enacts a miniature sonic drama, complete with sound effects and dialogue. Originally released on Sound and Silence in the 2nd 3 QAUNAK MARTHA MEEKEEGA & TEMEGEAK PITAULASSIE, “ASSALALAA” Grade (ATMOTW Records), www.generatorsoundart.org. (0:37) Assalalaa is an Inuit children’s game in which the participants wiggle and flop 11 TEDDY FIRE, “HOMEWORK” (2:03) their limbs about while holding their breath. The one who lasts longest wins Boston native Teddy Fire composed “Homework” as a response to a third grade the game. Performed by Qaunak Martha Meekeega and Temegeak Pitaulassie assignment that called for students to compose two haiku. His first effort of Kinngait (Cape Dorset) and recorded by Nicole Beaudry in 1974. Originally received no comment from the teacher, the second only the admonishment: released on Inuit Games and Songs (UNESCO, 1991). “Try harder!” In 1987, 10-year old Teddy set his poems to music, backed by his half-brother Pablo Cuba on percussion and Phil Scher on guitar and bass. “Home- 4 ELLEN BAND, “SWINGING SINGS (EXCERPT)” (3:31) work” first appeared on Teddy Fire’s debut 7” record, released by Eary Canal Ellen Band’s compositions often feature recordings of everyday sounds that are Plates in 1989. layered and orchestrated to produce what she calls a “sonic surrealism.” “Swing- ing Sings” uses the sounds of squeaking swings as the raw material for violin 12 JOHN OSWALD & SUSANNA HOOD, “ALPHABIT” (1:56) improvisations by Band and Adele Armin. Originally released on 90% Post Con- Susanna Hood performs an alphabet song, produced by John Oswald, that cross- sumer Sound (XI Records, 2000), www.xirecords.org es a children’s insult song with the phonic contortions of sound poetry. Recorded in 2002 at the Mystery Lab in Toronto, Ontario. 5 EDMOND DEWAN, “KIDS AT A RESEARCH LAB CONSOLE” (2:39) Edmond Dewan’s son Brian explains: “The tape was recorded by my father 13 THUUNDERBOY, “AND THEY CALLED IT PUPPY” (3:13) Edmond in 1969 at a research laboratory in Massachusetts. The children at the A dual turntable improvisation by 22-month-old Ted Conrad, a.k.a., Thuunderboy, console are myself, my brother Ted Dewan, Scott McLeod, and Philip Petschek. recorded by his father, Minimalist music pioneer Tony Conrad, in 1973. The piece The machine was not made to be a musical instrument; it was an apparatus used features Ted’s then-favorite record, Donny Osmond’s chart-topping hit “Puppy in a speech lab. The children, 5 to 8 years old, threw switches and turned knobs Love.” Originally released on Thuunderboy! (Table of the Elements, 2002). See willy-nilly. The recording is the fruit of this activity.” www.tableoftheelements.com.

6 POTO & CABENGO. “PUTAYTUTAH” (1:05) 14 LUNA MONTGOMERY, “ANSWERING MACHINE MESSAGE” (1:17) In 1977, at the age of 6, identical twins Virginia and Grace Kennedy were brought Eight-year-old Luna Montgomery calling from Coney Island, New York, to relay to Children’s Hospital of San Diego for observation. Their parents reported that, her adventure with a jellyfish. Recorded in 1998. while the girls clearly understood both English and German (their mother’s native tongue), they spoke only to one another and in what seemed to be a private 15 LANGLEY SCHOOLS MUSIC PROJECT, “SPACE ODDITY” (5:24) language. A year later, French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin, who had In 1976 and 1977, grade-school music teacher Hans Fenger recorded hundreds of 105 recently arrived in San Diego after working with Jean-Luc Godard on students in a gymnasium in rural British Columbia, performing poignantly flawed renditions of pop classics by the Beach Boys, Paul McCartney, the Eagles, Fleet- Yao, Sánh Chi, H’Mông and people of other tribes coexist. They are often seen wood Mac, and others. Here, the Langley kids give what David Bowie deemed an throughout the region planting rice in the rocky terrain or coaxing their horses “earnest, if lugubrious” rendition of his 1969 meditation on extraterrestrial alien- and carts to market. To pass time when things get slow, the Nùng have ation. Produced for commercial issue by Irwin Chusid on The Langley Schools developed a dialogue game (sli) as a form of public entertainment. One or two Music Project: Innocence and Despair (Bar/None, 2001). For more informations, couples sing and engage in coy flirting back and forth all afternoon while a crowd see www.keyofz.com. Track courtesy Bar/None Records. gathers to admire the double entendres and potential for embarrassment. Hà Leu is a repertory of five two-voiced melodies to which new lyrics are improvised on 16 MAGGIE GREY & JESSIE TOMASSIE, “AQAUSIQ” AND “KATAJJAIT” (1:30) the spot. Since the new texts are sung simultaneously, there Katajjait (singular: katajjaq) are competitive “throat games” performed by the is a gap between verses while the singers whisper to each other, conferring to Inuit of northeast Canada. Two performers (usually women) stand close to one decide the next lyric. Skilled singers are quick at inventing new words and can be another, their faces almost touching, and volley words or vocables into each devastating when their wits are sharpened. In this recording, made by other’s mouths. The game is over when one of the performers laughs or stops for Philip Blackburn, a pair of seven-year-old girls have learned Hà Leu in the tradi- breath. These games are often played in groups; and performers are evaluated tional way, from their parents who have taught them standard phrases, before both on their endurance and on the tone quality they produce. Each of the two learning to invent new texts. From Stilling Time: Traditional Musics of Vietnam kattajait presented here are based on the aqausiq (children’s song) that pre- (Innova Recordings, 1994), www.innova.mu. cedes it. They were performed by Maggie Grey and Jessie Tomassie of Kangirsuk (Payne Bay) and recorded by Denise Harvey in 1975. Originally released on Inuit 21 JOHN HUDAK, “MUSIC FOR BABIES” (10:00) Games and Songs (UNESCO, 1991). “My son, Kaspar, was born on July 1st, 1997. I had been listening to a lot of clas- sical music, and wanted to make something that would be static and calming 17 HELEN MIRRA, “PAPER INTERLACING” (3:08) to play while I was sitting with him . . . something that wouldn’t excite him, but In the 1830s, kindergarten inventor Friedrich Fröbel created a set of materi- would be interesting enough for me. I started recording some short sequences als and activities that he called “gifts,” basic natural and geometrical forms with a toy piano I had bought at a church sale. I then pieced together parts of (spheres, cylinders, rings, cubes, sticks, needles, strips of paper, etc.) intended the sequences into loops, so they repeated in similar, but varying patterns. The to foster discovery through experimentation. Helen Mirra uses Fröbel’s gifts as resultant piece wound up having what I would call a ‘timeless center’ . . . where sonic and musical devices, recording the sounds of the activities themselves it could go on and on, ad infinitum. I also wound up playing the piece a lot for my and interpreting them on musical instruments (guitar, cello, nyckleharpe, and daughter, Ursula, who was born on July 18th, 2000.” Recorded in July 1997. kemençe). This piece, centered on the activity of folding a long strip of paper, fea- tures Mirra on guitar and Fred Lonberg-Holm on cello. Originally released on Field 22 EGNEKN’S DAUGHTER, “THOSE MYSTERIES” (5:00) Geometry (Explain, 2000). Written by Ron and Russel Mael. Engineered by Bob Schaeffer. Luna Montgom- ery performing vocals, Michael Evans on pots, pans, and backing vocals, Lary 7 18 BILL FARRELL, “RAT PUP ULTRASONIC VOCALIZATIONS (SLOWED DOWN)” on toy pianos, bass, and backing vocals, Gen Ken Montgomery on (2:53) laminator and backing vocals. Recorded at Plastikville in 1999. Vocalizations recorded from 6- to 8-day-old infant rats during isolation from their mother and littermates at 15 degrees centigrade. These vocalizations are typi- cally 40 to 50 kHz in frequency and hence fall well outside of the human hearing range. Mother rats, however, can hear these sounds. Here the sounds are played back at approximately 1/20 their normal speed, rendering the vocalizations audible to humans.

19 CATHARINE ECHOLS, “STIMULI” (0:49) “These sounds are from a study in which I’m investigating how infants extract words from the stream of speech. That’s a task that doesn’t seem especially difficult to adults; we tend to think of spoken language as being like written language, with pauses between words. Speech actually is continuous (of course there are pauses between sentences and sometimes within sentences, e.g., when the speaker takes a breath, but certainly not between each of the words in a sentence). One gets a better sense of this when one listens to an unfamiliar language; it’s difficult to tell where one word ends and another begins. I have argued that infants may break into the task of identifying words in speech by first extracting the most salient syllables and ignoring the rest, rather than trying to identify boundaries between each of the words in a sentence. To test the predic- tion that stressed syllables are particularly likely to be extracted from speech and stored by infants, 9-month-old infants hear two ‘sentences’ of nonsense words. (We use nonsense words to make sure that it really is a segmentation task for infants, that is, so that there is no way that they can solve the task by recognizing previously heard words.)” CD engineered by Daniel Warner. Thanks to Maria Blondeel, Irwin Chusid, Jean-Pierre Gorin, David Scher, Walter 20 Minh Huê & Nhu’ Qùynh, “Quang Hòa, Cao Bang” (1:47) Wilczynski, and Neil Young. 106 Along the rugged, mountainous northern border with China, Tày, Nùng CD photograph found on a street in Brooklyn.

Model Child: An Interview with Max And during the parts where we had to be really close up to the Berger hot light, people would be melting. The makeup would be drool- Joseph R. Wolin ing down their faces. The last scene, we’re all singing, “The hills are alive with the sound of music,” and we’re all kneeling in In 1998, Max Berger starred in his fifth-grade production of The the light in front, like the lights they use for portraits in photo- Sound of Music. His mother took pictures of the performance. graphs. Imagine that right up in your face. And we’re all really This would have been unremarkable save for the fact that Max’s sweaty, and really melting. We’re all done, and then, then you mother is New York-based photographer Barbara Pollack, and get to take your bow. Bowing is nice. I like the bowing. ‘Cause this was merely the latest in a series of works that take Max as then you’re done. their inspiration. Pollack’s signature photographic style—all blurred move- When your mother comes to your school and does a series like ment, disorienting lack of focus, and saturated, almost lurid The Sound of Music or Dance Party, what happens? color—seems to embody an uneasy relationship to the world. Well, at the time she photographed Dance Party, some people Her vision is myopic, verging on miasmic. That vision has devel- would point around and say, “Hey, Max, is that your mom?” And oped over the course of the last decade and a half or so, as has I’d say, “Yeah, I’ve got no clue what she’s doing here.” And then Max. I’d go up to her and ask, “Mom, what are you doing here?” And The Family of Men, an installation from 1999, portrayed a then she’d answer, “Oh, I’m just taking photographs for this pre-school Max and his father, Joel, as a suffocating family unit. project. Just pretend I’m not there.” And then she’d continue Dance Party (2001) captured the awkward interaction of his taking pictures of me. And then I’d say, “Well, if it’s supposed to middle-school dance. Pollack has also made Max the subject of be a project of the dance, why don’t you take pictures of other her videos. We see him as a small boy hounded by his camera- people at the dance besides me and my friends? Why don’t you wielding mother in Game Boy (1996/2001), as an adolescent leave me and my friends alone?” So then, of course, she would intent on video-game murder in Perfect Dark (2001), and as a take lots and lots of pictures of other people. But then when teenager, dissing Britney Spears with his friends, in Stronger it came down to eliminating the pictures, it usually ended up (2002). being the ones of me and my friends. Max, who just turned 15 years old, was interviewed at his home in Greenwich Village on 30 September 2002. And when you saw those pictures what did you think of them? I thought they were pretty cool. I mean, I like the way how all the So, The Sound of Music was four years ago. What grade were light and hectic-ness of the party all goes into the pictures, like you in? the glowsticks and the lighting effects and all those dust and Fifth grade. It was the leaving-school school play, graduation smokescreen and all that stuff gets all blurred into one. But you school play. still see the people.

Because you went to middle school after? Do you think in general your mother’s pictures represent your Yes. life? Oh, yeah. When I see the pictures, I think about a lot of stuff in And you were the star? my life. Because also it seems to me there’s one show per era I was the guy star. of my life. So, her first show, Family of Men, that’s before I was in school. And the next show, The Sound of Music, that’s ele- And did you know that your mother was going to photograph mentary school. And when I see those pictures, I remember all you when you were in the play? my friends and all the people I knew from elementary school. Well, I thought she was going to take some pictures, which Then there’s Dance Party. It shows all the hectic-ness of middle were like pictures that you put in a family photo album and say, school. Then I see all my friends from middle school. And I only “Oh, he was so cute,” not the kind-of blurry pictures. assume that maybe sometime there’ll be a show on high school, probably. Do you think the pictures are a good representation of what you experienced being in the play? Do you remember when you first became aware that your Well, I don’t think any pictures of the play would actually show mother was taking pictures of you? what the play is really like. It doesn’t capture the nervousness Oh, that goes way back when. Maybe four years old, I pieced it of the kids. It just shows a still of the play. If you saw one still of a all together. I figured out that she had this system where I would movie could you really know what the entire movie was about? always crawl out my crib and I would open the door to get into my parents’ room. And then when I opened the door, immedi- No, but I think that the way your mother takes pictures gives ately a flash of light would go off in my eyes. Like she knew I you a feeling of being nervous in a school play, a lot more than was going to be there. And then later, my mom would be taking a regular, in-focus photograph would. Well, yeah, I guess that’s true. It’s just that a normal still previous page (left): Barbara Pollack, Sound of Music #6, 1999 wouldn’t really show nervousness, but since she has the blur- previous page (right): Barbara Pollack, Sound of Music #1, 1999 riness in there: blurriness, sweating. The truth is, the opposite: Barbara Pollack, Sound of Music #5, 1999 110 lights in The Sound of Music were really, really hot. Courtesy Esso Gallery me to these things, which later I learned were called “openings,” and there would be pictures of me about to open a door, with a flash in my eye!

And did you think that was unusual? Well, I didn’t think it was that unusual. I thought it was just normal pictures.

Why is it, you think, that you inspire your mother so much? Because she created me. I came from her. She went through nine months of pain and suffering, so…

That was fifteen years ago. But you’re still a compelling subject for her. Why do you think that is? Because. What would she rather take pictures of than her own son? Some Relics of Childhood school at Syon House Academy, Shelley was exclusively in Rodney Phillips the company of women, in particular his adoring sisters who (like his wife Mary afterward), occasionally collaborated with Saved by mothers, fathers, siblings, teachers, and by accident, Shelley on his projects. Elizabeth was the Cazire of the book they the letters of children are ubiquitous and almost never inter- published together in 1810, at ages 18 and 16, Original Poetry by esting. Never, that is unless the child evolved into an adult of Victor and Cazire. Amusements of the young Shelleys included genius. Then they seem endlessly fascinating, immediately storytelling and ritual fires for ghost summoning. Shelley was attractive documents, predicative of the future and redolent also given to using his sisters in a variety of “scientific experi- with the talent that was to be, or poignant indicators of later ments,” including curing them of colds and flu by passing elec- tragedy or psychopathology. Paper relics, they sometimes hold tricity through their bodies. (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was an almost holy remembrance of golden ages, better times, fun- inspired, in part, by a parallel interest in galvanism.) In his later nier faces. “Let each child have that’s in our care/ as much neu- years, this prodigy of freethinking was given to writing “demo- rosis as the child can bear,” quipped W. H. Auden, who as a wist- crat, great lover of mankind and atheist” after his name on hotel ful grownup was always conscious of his happier childhood ledgers. as a sort of Eden in limestone. Baudelaire, of course, felt that It’s not a great leap from Shelley to Christopher Isherwood, “genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood as Isherwood’s childhood was in many ways similar to Shel- equipped now with man’s physical means to express itself.” Oth- ley’s, including adoring parents, an Elizabethan mansion, and ers would look at the relationship between childhood and art education at elite boarding schools. Like Shelley’s, Isherwood’s (drawing, writing, painting, etc.) as less useful, or even entirely childhood was beset by visitations of ghostly figures and a hindering. Samuel Butler, in his appropriately titled The Way of secret, haunted attic. Perhaps this explains the eerie drawing All Flesh, was extreme in his association of childhood with the of his baby brother, Richard, in Christopher’s letter of January less-than-perfect: “Could any death be so horrible as birth? Or 1912 to his mother. The eight-year-old was writing from Marple, any decrepitude so awful as childhood in a happy united God- his grandparents’ estate, where at least two of his early visions fearing family?” In equally merry misanthropy 300 years later, occurred. His landscapes of the frozen park are smartly, if a little Dorothy Parker exclaimed: “All those writers who write about dissonantly placed to liven up the letter to his mother, who was their childhood! Gentle God, if I wrote about mine you wouldn’t presumably visiting Isherwood’s father at the military base in sit in the same room with me.” In any case, writing and child- Ireland where the family was soon to move. In 1914, Christopher hood seem inevitably entwined, arising from a common source, left Ireland to attend St. Edmunds Preparatory School in Surrey, which is not quite the same as believing everything is every- where the next year he met the “grubby” Wystan Auden. thing. It is much more hopeful. For his part, the young W. H. Auden was an inveterate There is probably no more perfect specimen of all this than rambler and hiker in the landscapes of Surrey. In any number the child/poet , who was indeed a privi- of photographs of the young Auden and his brother, they are leged example of both conditions, being the only male among posed in a field, near a tree, beside a cliff or in another natural five offspring of Sir Timothy and Elizabeth Shelley, newly environment. Auden’s childhood was, like Isherwood’s, gener- wealthy Sussex landowners. Some might claim that Shelley ally happy, and included a mother who kept journals and notes remained a child until his early, tragic death by drowning at age about her children. She was a great encourager of her son, 30. And there are many who would aver that this is a good thing writing down his first “works” (The Adventures of a Daddie and (remaining a child, not dying) and the source of his powerfully Mummie: I and II) for him when he was four and five years old. In affecting art. another journal, written in the spring of 1917 on a trip to the Isle The earliest surviving poetry by Shelley is a piece entitled of Wright with her two sons, Constance Rosalie Bicknell Auden “A Cat in Distress,” written, according to a note on the extant has pasted her handmade “Programme for a Grand Concert.” manuscript (penned by his sister Elizabeth), at “10 years of age.” on 24 April 1917. The program includes a series of piano works, Elizabeth, who would have been eight at the time, drew the played by the ten-year-old Auden, and several duets with his illustrating cat as well. The poem comes down to us through a mother. The earliest extant piece of Auden’s writing is also in younger sister, Hellen, who described it in a letter to Thomas J. the same notebook. Hogg, Shelley’s friend and early biographer: “I have in my pos- On another plane altogether, the childhood of Jean-Louis session a very early effusion of Bysshe’s, with a cat painted on “Ti Jean” Kerouac in Lowell, Massachusetts seems gruesomely the top of the sheet, I will try and find it: but there is not promise American. The child of French-Canadians Leo and Gabrielle Ker- of future excellence in the lines, the versification is defective.” ouac, his upbringing was strictly working class. Kerouac wrote Perhaps, but there is evidence of the themes and variations of his first “novel” at age 11, probably in February 1933. He also cre- his later work, including a somewhat imperious, radical con- ated horse-racing newspapers and a complex group of records cern with the welfare of the local tenant farmers. The young and statistics surrounding his own fantasy baseball league. poet’s interest in the fauna of the country estate is reflected, as Obsessively devoted to his mother, to whom he sent are his budding republican feelings. many handmade valentines, Kerouac describes his relation- That this poem was addressed to one sister who copied it ship with her and his brother in the introduction to Lonesome in order to give the copy to another sister not only adds charm Traveler, a collection of road-trip related pieces: “Influenced by to the document, but is representative of the of the close-knit older brother Gerard Kerouac who died at age 9 in 1926 when family of siblings, of whom Shelley was the oldest. In I was 4, was great painter and drawer in childhood (he was)— 112 fact, before the age of 10, when he was sent to a boys’ (also said to be saint by nuns)—(recorded in novel Visions of

Gerard). — My father was completely honest man full of gaiety; easily and was too intense in her studies. Of course the five- soured in last years over Roosevelt and World War II and died foot-nine-inch fifth grader was taller than most of the boys in of cancer of the spleen.—Mother still living, I live with her a kind her class, and she went on to a triumphant series of accomplish- of monastic life that has enabled me to write as much as I did.” ments during her years at Philips Junior High School and Brad- The earliest surviving example of his writing is a crayon ford High School. But the neurotic child remained, to reach her valentine to his mother, February 14, 1933. He was 11, the age apotheosis as Ariel. at which he wrote his first “novel.” He also created horse-rac- ing newspapers and a complex collection of records surround- Sources ing his own fantasy baseball league. These include a group of W. H. Auden, “Letter to ,” The English Auden: Poems, Essays, and Dramatic team cards, drawn in pencil and colored pencil on paper some- Writings, 1927-1939 (New York: Random House, 1978). time in 1936. Kerouac was 14 when he created these cards, but Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” section 3, L’Art Romantique (Paris: had been playing the game for years, and was to play it until Calmann-Lévy, 1885). the end of his life. The names of the players, like those of the Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh, first published 1903, (New York: Houghton Mifflin, teams, appear to be fictional—except for Pancho Villa, whom 1964). Kerouac placed on the Boston Fords in center field. His story Thomas Jefferson Hogg, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley (London: Edward Moxon, 1858). about a rookie pitcher, “Ronnie on the Mound,” which appeared Jack Kerouac, Lonesome Traveller (New York: Grove/Atlantic, 1972). in Esquire in May of 1958, even included names of fantasy base- Dorothy Parker, interview in Writers at Work, First Series, ed. Malcolm Cowley (New York: ball league players and managers. Paris Review, 1958). Kerouac’s obsession with the Fords and Cadillacs seems Sylvia Plath, “Ocean 1212-W,” 1962, first published in Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams to fit his literary personality, but it is hard to imagine Sylvia (London: Faber and Faber, 1977). Plath as a child drawing large cats. The cat and dog she drew (at an age between 10 and 12) for her brother Warren, who was apparently sick in bed, seem neither comforting nor com- fortable. On the other hand, there is ironic awareness in her previous page (above): Christopher Isherwood’s letter to his mother, January self-caricature as one who “smiles and is polite.” She was at 1912. this point, still the perfect A student and perfect daughter, previous page (below): Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “A Cat in Distress,” ca. 1804. despite that her father’s death in October of 1940 must have Courtesy The Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and his Circle, The New nearly destroyed her childhood world, transmuting her early York Public Library.. years into a “beautiful, inaccessible, obsolete, a fine white fly- above: Sylvia Plath’s drawings, ca. 1943. ing myth.” This drawing was made sometime during the period opposite (left to right): Kerouac’s Valentine’s Day card to his mother, 14 February when the Plath family lived in Wellesley, probably the most dif- 1933; Team cards from Kerouac’s fantasy baseball league, ca. 1936; Portrait of ficult time of Sylvia’s childhood. Her mother had her the Beatnik as a young boy. 114 put back a grade, believing that she didn’t make friends All images courtesy The New York Public Library.

Sculpture from Drawing Christo & Billy Halloway

As a professional modelmaker, I have spent 25 years turning other people’s two-dimensional drawings into three-dimen- sional objects. When working with an artist, my job is often to interpret his three-dimensional intention from a two-dimen- sional sketch. Working with my son Billy was exciting for me for many reasons, especially because he is an extension of myself. I have watched him draw and create things over the past few years, and the rate at which he develops is phenomenal. I try to not dominate or influence his choice of project or medium but instead provide as many options for him to work with as pos- sible. He has a wide array of interests, but his staples seem to be trains, whales, ships, planes, and dinosaurs. Billy will frequently start work on one project only to have it transform into another. For example, he will begin to draw an engine for a new variety of train but it will transform into a dinosaur. At the end of the day, however, the dinosaurs have actually become whales in disguise, and the train has become a new, more technologically advanced Concorde plane flying to the moon. Because of our close relationship, there is a lot of exchange of ideas. He is very outspoken and stubborn about his likes and dislikes. Once I finished the sculpture, he knew exactly how it should be painted—black with red spots. I disagreed. —Christo Halloway

The drawing is of a T-rex. His name is Tirano Terry Ferry. He used purple because the marker he found was purple and he wanted Tirano Terry Ferry to be purple. He likes the sculpture but not the final color. He would like to do this again, possibly of a blue whale. He plans to be a paleontologist, a marine biologist, a train engi- neer, or a policeman when he grows up. He is looking forward to seeing the magazine so he can show it to his teacher and friends. —Billy Halloway, as related by Christo Halloway

Cabinet wishes to thank Vincent Mazeau for coordinating this project.

116

118 The Rough Guide: Favell Lee Mortimer’s The Countries of Europe Described GERMANY. The ladies are very industrious, and wherever they Todd Pruzan go, they take their knitting. They are as fond of their knitting- needles as the gentlemen are of their pipes. The number of Great Britain has boasted countless offbeat children’s authors stockings they make would surprise you. How much better to over the centuries—Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear and C.S. Lewis knit than to smoke! When they are at home, the ladies spend a come to mind—but today, few scholars know much about the great deal of time in cooking; they also spin, and have a great one who may have been the very weirdest of all. In the mid- deal of linen of their own spinning, locked up in their great 19th century, Favell Lee Mortimer published 16 bestselling chests. Can they do nothing but knit, and cook, and spin? Yes, educational, evangelical books, eventually selling millions of they can play on the piano, and the harp, and sing very sweetly. copies, and terrifying Protestant children in 38 languages. Her But they are not fond of reading useful books. When they read, innovative second-person voice evoked the Sunday lecture of it is novels about people who have never lived. It would be bet- a severely absolutist teacher, and her mission—teaching Prot- ter to read nothing than such books. estant children about their world, and spreading Jesus Christ’s word—was offset by a worldview that today seems intolerant, ICELAND. In the country, as you travel along, you will often see and even cruel. a farm-house, with a church, and a few huts near. The farm- “How kind of God it was to give you a body! I hope that house looks neat outside; but if you go into the house, you will your body will not get hurt,” Mortimer admonished in the soon wish to run out again—it is so dark and dirty. If you grope opening chapter of 1833’s The Peep of Day, her first and best- along the dark passage, you will come to a room at the end known book. “Will your bones break?—Yes, they would, if you full of beds, and full of litter. The people heap wooden dishes, were to fall down from a high place, or if a cart were to go over spinning-wheels, and old clothes in confusion upon the beds; them.… If a great box were to fall on your head, your head and they never dust the furniture, nor scrub, nor even sweep would be crushed. If you were to fall out of the window, your the rooms. The little windows in the roof, not bigger than neck would be broken.” Such passages led Mortimer’s own your hand, will not open. The house is never aired. What an grandniece, Rosalind Constable, to recall The Peep of Day in unpleasant place! The New Yorker in 1950 as “one of the most outspokenly sadis- tic children’s books ever written.” ITALY. What sort of people live in Italy? They are very dark, The Peep of Day and its 1837 sequel, Line Upon Line, because the sun shines so much. They have dark hair and are the only Mortimer titles widely available today. The text of eyes,—not those bright, merry, black eyes you see in France, Peep’s 2000 edition, published by the Scottish house Chris- but more sad and thoughtful eyes. They may well be sad, for tian Focus Publications, is still true to Mortimer’s hair-raising their country is in a sad state. It is full of fine houses and pal- original. “I’ve had a little chuckle myself at one or two things,” aces—empty and going to decay—but that is not the worst notes Catherine MacKenzie, children’s editor at Christian part—the people are ignorant and wicked. Focus, in an e-mail. “But it was written for children from a dif- Their religion is the Roman Catholic. ferent century.… Her material is Biblically accurate.” It is dreadful to think what a number of murders are com- The same cannot be said for three guidebooks Mortimer mitted in Italy. Even boys, instead of fighting with their hands, published later in her career, blasting the foolish customs and take up stones to throw at each other, and men take out their filthy habits of virtually every culture in the world in 1849’s knives and cut each other. Others, instead of showing their The Countries of Europe Described, 1852’s Far Off: Asia and anger at the time, keep it in, and watch for an opportunity of Australia Described, and 1854’s Far Off: Africa and America murdering their enemy. Described. Her “you-are-there” format belies the evidence The houses are very dirty, especially the staircase and that she never set foot beyond England’s green hills, but she the doorway; but the Italians think more of painting their ceil- offset her lack of reporting skills with an unassailable author- ings and placing statues in their halls than of keeping their ity about Christ’s love—even for “the poor Negro slave,” “the houses clean. The English think a clean home is better than a wild Indian,” and “the stupid Hottentot.” Mortimer’s writing on pretty one. Europe (later retitled Near Home) might amuse adults unearth- ing rare copies today; even contemporary kids, weighed down PORTUGAL. No people in Europe are as clumsy and awkward with global trivia, might find Mortimer more entertaining than with their hands as the Portuguese. It is curious to see how frightening: badly the carpenters make boxes, and the smiths make keys. The carts are very ill-made; they are drawn by two oxen, and IRELAND. What sort of people are the Irish? The merriest, as they move slowly along, the wheels make a loud creak- drollest people in the world. They are very kind and good- ing noise, which almost stuns people of other countries; but natured when pleased, but if affronted, are filled with rage. the Portuguese do not mind the sound, and say it is of use, The poor men are fond of drinking, and keeping company with for then there will be no danger of two carts meeting in the their friends; but they often quarrel with them, and then they narrow roads. call them names and throw things at them, and cover them with bruises. You see they are passionate; though they wish opposite: Emil from Germany. to be kind, they forget themselves and act in a very next page: Deta from Switzerland. Dolls by Annette Himstedt. 119 wicked manner. Photos: Enver Hirsch. More nationalities available at annettehimstedt.com Portugal, like Spain, is filled with robbers; the laws are Even England’s increasingly urban Protestants could not not obeyed, and the wicked often escape without being pun- escape Mortimer’s harsh glare. Her intentions of bringing ished. religion to “ragged children” may have been pure—but today, The religion is Roman Catholic, and the people are very the world her guidebooks brought to young readers seems to ignorant. A traveller once sat down by a stone fountain close have been a very lonely planet. to the road, that he might talk to all the people who came there to draw water. He went there every day, and talked to a great many; and he found that few had ever heard that there was such a book as the Bible, and none had ever seen it. How ignorant people must be, who have never been taught what God says in the Bible! They do not know who can keep them safe, or make them happy.

TURKEY. This land is very different from all the other countries in Europe—and this is the reason: it has a different religion. All the other countries are called Christian, but Turkey is a Mahomedan country. What is that? Once there was a man named Mahomet, who told people he was a prophet sent from God; but he was a false prophet, and a wicked man. He wrote a book called the Koran, and filled it with foolish stories, and absurd laws, and horrible lies.

THE JEWS. The Jews are not idle like the Poles, but try in every way to get money. It is they who keep all the inns—and wretched inns they are, because the Jews are very dirty. See that large shed under which horses and carts are kept. At one end there is a sort of house. It is the inn. Go in at that low cov- ered doorway, taking care not to hit your head (unless you are only a little boy or girl). The floor has no carpet, nor even boards—no—nor bricks—it is the bare earth. There are boards in one corner with some straw on them. Would you rather sleep there or in that little dark room beyond? Look in; it is full of dirty beds, and children of all sizes. When will the Jews believe in Him who came into their land eighteen hundred years ago? It is because they do not believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, that God allows them to be so unhappy.

Mortimer’s distrust for those who worshipped differently betrays her fear of the unknown, a phobia that extended beyond religion and actually embodied Britain’s 19th-century industrial-agrarian tensions. Mortimer, born into society, was ill-suited to the country life she chose. In the Times of London in 1933, her nephew recalled how her eccentric care killed several animals at her western England orphanage: She once tried washing a donkey by driving it into the sea (with its cart attached), and later dried a freshly bathed lamb by burying it up to its nostrils in sand. Still, Europe’s increasingly urban destiny horrified Mor- timer—particularly near home. “Is London a pleasant city?” she instructed her young readers. “No; because there is so much fog and smoke. This makes it dark and black.… The poor peo- ple live in narrow alleys or streets, and in close places called courts, into which no carriages can drive. There are schools for little ragged children—such as could not go to a neat Sun- day school. These children have been taught at home to steal, and lie, and swear; but some of them listen to their kind teach- ers while they are telling them about God, and Christ, 120 and heaven and hell.” 121