A QUARTERLY OF ART AND CULTURE ISSUE 28 BONES CABINET US $12 CANADA $12 UK £7 cabinet Cabinet is a non-profit 501 (c) (3) magazine published by Immaterial Incorpo- 181 Wyckoff Street rated. Our survival is dependent on support from foundations and generous Brooklyn NY 11217 USA individuals. Please consider supporting us at whatever level you can. Contribu- tel + 1 718 222 8434 tions to Cabinet are fully tax-deductible for those who pay taxes to Uncle Sam. fax + 1 718 222 3700 Donations of $25 or more will be acknowledged in the next possible issue, and email [email protected] those above $100 will be acknowledged for four consecutive issues. Checks www.cabinetmagazine.org should be made out to “Cabinet” and sent to our office address. Please mark the envelope, “See? Wishbones do work!” Winter 2007–2008, issue 28 Cabinet wishes to thank the following visionary foundations and individuals Editor-in-chief Sina Najafi for their support of our activities during 2007. 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Subscriptions are also available online at www.cabinetmagazine.org/subscribe or through Paypal ([email protected]). For back issues, see the last page of this issue. Errata: Cabinet regrets the following errors and omissions in issue 27. Page 11: The dimensions of Mercury’s craters provided in the list were in kilome- Institutional subscriptions are available through EBSCO or Swets, or via our ters, not meters as stated. Mercury is much, much larger than Brooklyn. website. Different rates apply. Page 17: The photograph of the Orange County Government Center designed by Paul Rudolph lacked an acknowledgement of its source. The photograph was Advertising taken by Sean Khorsandi and appeared courtesy the Paul Rudolph Foundation. Email [email protected] or call + 1 718 222 8434. Page 38: There was a production error in Morgan Fisher’s artist project on this page. To receive a corrected version of this page, please send a 9” x 12” self- Distribution addressed, clasp envelope bearing sufficient return postage and containing a Cabinet is available in the US and Canada through Disticor, which distributes stiff piece of cardboard to the Cabinet office. both using its own network and also through Ingram, IPD, Armadillo News, Ubiquity, Hudson News, DDRS, Small Changes, Last Gasp, Emma Marian Ltd, Cover: Plate 36 of Osteographia, or The Anatomy of the Bones, by William Cowley, Kent News, LMPI, Media Solutions, The News Group, Newsways, New- Cheselden, 1733. Courtesy the National Library of Medicine. bury Comics, Don Olson Distribution, and Chris Stadler Distribution. If you’d like to use one of these distributors, contact Melanie Raucci at Disticor. Tel: + 1 631 Page 4: Paul Kane, Child in the Process of Having Its Head Flattened, 1847. 587 1160, Email: [email protected] During a journey through the Canadian west, the Irish-Canadian painter Paul Kane documented the practice of head-flattening among certain tribes. Cabinet is available in Europe and elsewhere through Central Books, London. Mothers, he observed, carry their infants on a stiff board with a smooth Email: [email protected] piece of bark tightly strapped to their foreheads. After a period of eight to twelve months, the skull assumes the form of a wedge, with a steeply sloping A version of Cabinet printed as a book (and sporting an ISBN) is available through forehead. It is, he writes, “from amongst the round heads the Flatheads take D.A.P./ Distributed Art Publishers. Tel: + 1 212 627 1999, Email: [email protected] their slaves, … the flat head being considered as the distinguishing mark of freedom.” Courtesy Stark Museum of Art, Orange, Texas Email [email protected] or call + 1 718 222 8434 if you need further information. Contents © 2007 Immaterial Incorporated and the authors and artists. All rights in the magazine reserved by Immaterial Incorporated, and rights in the works Submissions contained herein reserved by their owners. Fair users are of course free to do See <www.cabinetmagazine.org/information/submissions.php>. No paper their thing. The views published here are not necessarily those of the writers and submissions, please. artists, let alone the boneless editors of Cabinet. COLUMNS MAIN 7 Colors / MaUve 19 Haunted MaZeS Shelley JackSon Joe MilutiS Disappointment and opportunity Inside the labyrinth 10 A Minor HiStOry of / Odd SyMpatHy 27 artiSt PrOjeCt: Tree DraWiNgS JoShua Foer tim KnowleS All together now 32 The ONion 13 IngeStion / MOre ShoeS! MOre BootS! implicaSphere MOre GarLiC! Peeling back the layers Jeffrey KaStner Werner Herzog’s gastronomic bet 34 CyaNea ArCtiCa louis Agassiz 16 InveNtOry / WaNted aNd UnwaNted at Not unlike jelly tHe Zoo clem Blakemore 36 OrgaNiZed Water I’ll trade you a freckled duck for a spiny terrapin richard SieBurth On Agassiz’s flowing prose 39 On BeiNg tHe RigHt SiZe J. B. S. Haldane The scale of nature 44 tatLiN, or, rUinopHiLia Svetlana Boym The avant-garde and the off-modern BONeS aNd 53 The Museum of tHe Dead pOStCARD: Bone-SettiNg ManneqUiN roBert HarBiSon Monochrome macabre bookMark: Bone Tower eugene Von Bruenchenhein 58 SaCred BoneS mark C. Taylor What remains 64 Like a Hole in tHe Head chriStopher Turner The trepanation-state 69 The Anti-NarCissiStic Origins of Art Svetlana Boym Athena and the music of bones 70 The Fate of His BoneS colin Dickey Sir Thomas Browne and the craniokleptic impulse 73 Bone Play michael Sappol & Eva Åhrén The anatomist’s games 76 CongeNital Human Baculum DefiCiency Scott F. GilBert & Ziony Zevit The generative bone of Genesis 2:21–23 78 A BUried HiStOry of PaLeontology Brian Selznick & David Serlin The remains of Waterhouse Hawkins 81 CUttiNg tHe WOrLd at Its JoiNtS: An Interview with D. GraHam BUrNett Sina NaJaFi Comparative anatomy on trial 89 artiSt prOjeCt: CHaraCter StUdy michael PauluS 93 UnnatUral SeLeCtion: An Interview witH tHe National Fish aNd WiLdLife Forensics LaboratOry colBy ChamBerlain Crime and punishment in the animal kingdom 96 MarkiNg TiMe daniel RoSenBerg Alexander Marshack and ossified time 101 Os InnomiNatum thomas Zummer The self beneath the skin contriButorS Tim Knowles is an artist based in London. His work has been included in numerous exhibitions in the UK and abroad, including the Jerwood Drawing Prize and the Hayward Gallery touring exhibition You’ll Never Know. In 2007, Eva Åhrén is a historian working on the cultural and scientific history of he completed a series of new works in collaboration with the Royal Mail. He anatomy and the body. Her current research project is on displays, spaces, has been commissioned by the Contemporary Art Society and the Econo- specimens, and models in the anatomy museum of the Karolinska Institute mist to produce a new work for the Economist Plaza in February 2008. in Stockholm, Sweden. Joe Milutis is a writer, media artist, and assistant professor of art at the Louis Agassiz (1807–1873) was a Swiss-born zoologist and geologist who University of South Carolina. He is the author of Ether: The Nothing That relocated to the United States in 1846 and became one of the nation’s first Connects Everything (University of Minnesota Press, 2006).