tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-45473162940632971372024-03-13T07:06:50.533-04:00Medieval Meets Worldmedieval art history, navel gazing, horizon scanningAnnehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02067391488336878220noreply@blogger.comBlogger253125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4547316294063297137.post-19679453101088778732016-04-11T02:19:00.000-04:002016-04-11T02:22:01.231-04:00DePauw Dialogue 2.0Last Wednesday, DePauw University hosted its second Day of Dialogue, in which the campus becomes the classroom and the entire community comes together to learn. I was honored to give welcome comments before the day's keynote speaker: the <b>Rev. Dr. Jamie Washington</b> (whose incredible work you can see <a href="http://washingtonconsultinggroup.net/jamie-washington/" target="_blank">here</a> and <a href="http://libguides.depauw.edu/ctl-inclusivity/JamieWashington" target="_blank">here</a>, and which is transformative and powerful). In response to several requests which themselves do me honor, I provide my comments here. It's my first post since becoming Vice President for Academic Affairs, a position which does not lend itself to the kind of musings I was doing out here - but for this, for that day, for the joy and commitment of saying these words out loud to two thousand people, I am grateful for this space. Thanks for reading, and long live the liberal arts and their connection to social change.<br />
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Welcome to
DePauw Dialogue 2.0</span></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Thank you--All who participated in making this
day happen---Please stand<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Symbol; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Staff, Students, and Faculty who did the sub-committee work:
structural, logistics, pre- and post-planning committee, advertising and
mobilization<span style="background: white;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br />
<span style="background: white;">I stand before you today in partnership with the
incredible members of our community who shaped this day. We have come together
today – speakers, presidents, trustees, alums, students, staff, and faculty. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">We have gathered here today to have conversations
we have rarely allowed ourselves to have. Because, as a community, or as
individuals, we were too busy, or we were too afraid, or it was too new, or it
was too old, because we didn't know how, or because we knew only too well. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">We are here to talk with each other. We are
here to build our community by speaking across our differences.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">We are at an incredible moment, one highlighted
by professor Joe Heithaus at this year's Convocation when he read the work of
the Syrian poet Adonis titled "The Beginning of Speech." <u>We are at
the beginning of speech.</u> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">We are like the character invited in the last
three lines of Adonis's poem:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Child who once was, come forth—<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">What brings us together now,<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">and what do we have to say?<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">We are at the beginning of a conversation
that starts over and over again - with each Convocation, with each first class
day, with each introduction…</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
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<!--[endif]--></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><o:p></o:p></span></h1>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">It's been 30 years since I was a college
student. Some things are different and some aren't.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"> O<span style="background: white;">ur nation is different; I see
fear, anger, and a frustration I have never seen before:</span><br />
<span style="background: white;">-fear of change</span><br />
<span style="background: white;">-anger because of change</span><br />
<span style="background: white;">-anger because of not enough change</span><br />
<span style="background: white;">-frustration because of absences and silences
when we need fullness and presence</span> <br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The DePauw bubble is not - and should not be -
protection from our society or our world--it is the place we <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">address</i> the world in our study, in our
work, and in the lives we lead to transform the world – starting with our
community <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">as</i> a community.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">We are here to be intentional about engaging with
one another- and with difference.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
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<!--[endif]--><span style="background: white;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">This is our day - we have dedicated this day to
listen and learn differently.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
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<!--[endif]--><span style="background: white;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">We are giving each other this day to have
conversations we can take back to our homes and our dorms and our classrooms, conversations
that give forth to those same spaces of our lives. What comes out of those
conversations is an opportunity to lead, and to lead from within this
institution, this experiment filled with hope and energy for the world, this
university.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The values of our liberal arts education shape
this day:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">-to create access to knowledge and each other<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">-to collaborate across difference<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">-to live in creativity fostered by curiosity<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">-to deepen and dignify the human experience in
its interconnectedness with the world<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">-I deeply value this education because of its
intensity, its seriousness of purpose, its difficulty, and its joy.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">- I believe that it is the education that
fulfills the promises of equity and opportunity of democracy<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">-I think that it produces strong leaders – the
kind that change the world in all its complexity because they value a multitude
of perspectives and experiences<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">To me, the leadership the emerges from
conversation leads you <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">-to pursue knowledge and expertise<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">-and to recognize your own strengths and
weaknesses <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">-but also the value of people and their
contributions<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">We know this, right?<br />
<span style="background: white;">Leadership is not about having the highest GPA
or having people report to you<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">We know that it's bigger than that.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">That leadership is <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">-about recognizing that when you think you have
looked wide, you look wider still.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">-That it's about how well you motivate people
to bring the best of their abilities<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">-That it’s about listening<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">-That it’s about valuing others and their
unique experiences<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br />
<span style="background: white;">I challenge each and everyone of you to be that
person, to lead and step out of your comfort zone, not only today, but after
today, and every time the conversation starts again.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br />
<span style="background: white;">We can only be at our very best when all of us
have an opportunity to contribute.</span><br />
<span style="background: white;">The very best results come out of engaging in
difference:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">different
experiences in different thoughts shaping different ideas.</span></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br />
</span></i><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">To foster a culture that embraces difference we
must value one another <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">and</i> our
differences <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">and</i> our similarities. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">We must understand what we mean to each
other.</i></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br />
<span style="background: white; color: #222222;">When we are <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">all</i> valued and respected for the contributions that we provide and
make to our community, then, yes, we let us say<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="background: white;">We. Are. DePauw.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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Anne F. Harrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09817277664812733936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4547316294063297137.post-41342270315299753342015-06-02T23:45:00.000-04:002015-06-03T08:59:45.103-04:00Of "Lithic Coils" and "Petric Pregnancies" - _Stone; an Ecology of the Inhuman_ by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen<div style="text-align: left;">
</div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wvs7OGZTfFM/VW2p_koJRwI/AAAAAAAABOQ/-M8hRDdxaCw/s1600/12-8Fossils.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wvs7OGZTfFM/VW2p_koJRwI/AAAAAAAABOQ/-M8hRDdxaCw/s200/12-8Fossils.JPG" width="150" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Fossils in Viollet-le-Duc's<br />
gargoyles of N-D Paris</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
I've just closed the pages of <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Stone-Ecology-Jeffrey-Jerome-Cohen/dp/0816692629" target="_blank">Stone, an Ecology of the Inhuman</a></i>, a book written (given, it feels) by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. And so this isn't a review of the book, with measured time and thinking and synoptic thought. This is the desire to stay in the book, to remain readerly and to not quite re-emerge from the "lithic coil" (87) wherein Albertus Magnus finds himself when thinking about the tiny fossilized shellfish he sees in the limestone of medieval (and modern (see image!) in the persistence of stone) Paris; to keep walking on the beach with Augustine as he makes temporal and theological sense of a fossilized tooth he finds in Utica (93); to think of Merlin as "an artist of estranged materialities" (176); to consider how many of the works of art I study I might conceive of now as "deracinated souvenirs," (204) objects wrenched from one world and triumphed into another; to never stop reveling in the "petric pregnancy" (240) of the stone <i>paenita</i> as described by Marbod of Rennes. The gifts of words rapt of stone gleam throughout the book. Within its entanglements and enmeshments, language and the lithic are both immemorial to the human perception of time - and yet both immediate to our perception. To make stone present through words, to make words as present as stone: this is one of the many wonders of the book.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-qhaZf9mer5o/VW2n2O_d9YI/AAAAAAAABOM/fXLSHwJEEYs/s1600/12-18CailloisCollection.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="150" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-qhaZf9mer5o/VW2n2O_d9YI/AAAAAAAABOM/fXLSHwJEEYs/s200/12-18CailloisCollection.JPG" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Caillois's collection at the<br />
<a href="http://www.mnhn.fr/fr/visitez/lieux/galerie-mineralogie-geologie" target="_blank">Galerie de Minéralogie,</a> Paris</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
It's hard to leave the book because it's hard to leave its fellow travelers. You enter a company of strugglers: those who have come up against stone and tried to understand intimacies, scales, and narratives provoked in the encounter; those who have come up against the uses and abuses of stone: when to lapidify is to racialize, when metaphors of stoniness curtail the human, when stone is reduced to resource. Understanding sifts down through layers of stone and becomes proposition, meditation, legend, strange love, unresolved science, enduring activism. Bennett, Latour, Bogost, Deleuze and Guattari, Joy, Alaimo, Morton, Iovino and Opperman join Geoffrey of Monmouth, Gower, Chrétien de Troyes, Noah, Gerald of Wales, John Mandeville, William of Newburgh, Marie de France, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Chaucer and the fellows in the previous paragraph and others and others and others join Roger Caillois (whose collection you see gathered here) and Jean Kerisel (who heard stones suffer, who invites <i>their</i> struggle) join the efforts of the builders of Stonehenge, the architects of cathedrals, the designers of the Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas in Berlin, and the builders of hearths in Iceland. A good deal of the sense of companionship, I think, comes from Jeffrey Cohen counting himself as one of those strugglers. Each "Excursus" did not, for me, wander from the path of the book: each excursus marked the way for thinking as completely and vulnerably as one can upon the very hardest things. It's within each excursus that I began to think of the companionate struggle of stone and human, that I was able to fold back that thinking into the powerful claims of the chapters: that, for marvelous example, "stone invites a more ethically generous mode of worldly inhabitance" (250), that "every stone desires" (237), that stone is "always on its way to artwork" (135).<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Zzt2oxTIR80/VW4LCpKubjI/AAAAAAAABOk/AvKJe_8WCZ0/s1600/AMETHYST.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Zzt2oxTIR80/VW4LCpKubjI/AAAAAAAABOk/AvKJe_8WCZ0/s200/AMETHYST.JPG" width="150" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A persistent amethyst<br />
Sainte-Chapelle Treasury</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
This book, with which (even in writing this I realize) I will live and think for a long time, leaves me in a quandary that I relish puzzling through. In clearing space for stone, Cohen writes "This book, however, takes as its focus stone that may be hewn but has generally not been domesticated into cornerstone or sculpture, into a display of human craft." (13) How do I, as an art historian and a beholder and teacher of medieval visual objects, keep them <i>and their materials</i> <i>from which they are not separate </i>from being domesticated? not only by human craft but by iconography and symbolism and transcendence - by all the disciplinary tricks we have come up with to control and still images. The works of art that have persisted since the Middle Ages have a hold on the human imagination that escapes its control. For the book convinces me absolutely that stone (and bone and ivory and all the searching materials that come into visual form) is harder to domesticate than we have led ourselves to believe, even in our finest mimesis, even in our grandest constructions. Theologians may make pronouncements on art about anagogical readings and ladders of transcendence, but romances and lapidaries tell very different tales of vibrant matter. A work of art isn't enduring because it has been infused by some human or divine force; it endures because it <i>matters</i> - this will have to be argued, I know. My own work now has me thinking more of the impress of material upon artist than that of artist upon material. The amethyst above, carved with Caracalla's portrait and inscribed with Greek letters, surviving the fall of the Roman empire to resurface in the Treasury of the Sainte Chapelle where it was inserted into the cover of a magnificent Gospel book - how can I think through its own domestication of its human handlers? How can I pursue the material persistence, the unruliness and "allure" (133) of stone (and ivory and paint and parchment and all the media fervently emerging in the Middle Ages) <i>within</i> "human impress"(13)? Is (isn't?) the divide between raw material and wrought form a human one? Maybe there is a way to think of the transformation from the raw to the wrought as a series of enmeshments and beholdings - this is certainly the project of my work. And so I am so grateful for the calls of this book - to "materiality in action" (228), to "a life of embeddedness, artistry, and ethical relation" (192) and to the phenomenal meditation on art and nature provoked by Albertus Magnus as he suggests the "force and inspiration of the stars" on both, and Cohen writes so beautifully of "humans and rocks... stirred to action by astral magnetism" (170-1).<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-cl5LIxKqqGc/VW5WR4NgJOI/AAAAAAAABO0/NxQivoBURzU/s1600/Montneuf%2B3.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="150" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-cl5LIxKqqGc/VW5WR4NgJOI/AAAAAAAABO0/NxQivoBURzU/s200/Montneuf%2B3.JPG" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Montneuf, always</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
I will also miss the spaciousness of <i>Stone</i>. One of the elations of reading it was how spatial it was, how often I found myself thinking through expansive places: on the beach with Augustine (a long, long walk, fossil in hand); in the forest of Broceliande in Brittany (its stones bedecked in moss and hosting wonders); near and far and in and around Stonehenge (and there and back again with Geoffrey of Monmouth); in medieval and modern Paris (and Jeffrey's writing is generous, it invites your own imaginings and memories); in Scotland perched atop Arthur's Seat; and, magnificently, at the end, in Iceland. Stone calls forth in these expansive landscapes not as boundary, but as dense world, memory holder, portal, witness, survivor, fluid and fragile within a temporal expansiveness that defies human perception, powerful to us in our tiny time, companion, fellow traveler, presence. This book - its gifts and struggles, the company it keeps, the trouble it bears, and the beauty it gleans - I hope that you will read it, that you can join its endeavors and "plumb the petric" (10) with its wondrous author.Anne F. Harrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09817277664812733936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4547316294063297137.post-65833765824473083132015-05-17T20:33:00.000-04:002016-04-11T02:19:18.650-04:00"Lost in Thought" at KalamazooJust returned from a truly wondrous Kalamazoo medieval congress. Not quite able to let go of the powerful experience of speaking on the "Lost" panel, gathered by Jeffrey Cohen and peopled by an intensely attentive audience and speakers who shared beautiful ideas and writing with a gladness and vulnerability that will stay with me for a long, long time. Here was my contribution.<br />
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">There's a phrase in French when you're
out at a restaurant and the food is too salty: "The chef is in love!"
Growing up in Switzerland, I remember older aunts and uncles, stunned at the
sting of their super salty fresh lake perch, saying "Ah ben là, le chef
est amoureux!" For a long, long time, I would think of love as a salty
thing, a surprising too much that shocked older relatives and awakened a
winking secret. It was only much later that I understood the scenario behind
the phrase, the chef in love over-salting the food because of being lost in
thought – mind gone to blissful memory or sublime fantasy, while body performed
mundane tasks in repetitive rote for ordinary things like people and food; a Cartesian
divide in the kitchen.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">But what if it's not a divide? What if
it's a trust? What if it's the body's desire to be suffused with memory or
fantasy? The mind's yearning to materialize touch and daydream? And objects,
then, become portals, agents of transfer, from one time and scale to another.
When Chrétien de Troyes's Lancelot follows the lady-in-waiting off trail in the
forest, he is "<u>pest</u> de son panser qui molt li <u>plest</u>"
("<u>lost</u> in his thoughts which <u>please</u> him very much"). He
is completely taken with the ivory comb he finds upon a rock, its gleam glinting
with the flaxen strands of hair intertwined within it, and he stands there,
"molt longuemant," holding it, feeling its weight, thinking the
weightlessness of the hair. He stands there so long that the horses start to
paw the ground and the lady-in-waiting laughs – and teases him out of his
reverie and into a delirium when she reveals that the hair is Guinevere's.
Lancelot almost loses it, almost faints, is almost really lost in thought – but
the maiden catches him before he falls from his horse, brings his body and his
mind back to their here and now, and they continue in the forest.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">We joke about being lost in thought, or
gently laugh at those who are, calling them back, because the thought of being
truly, irrevocably lost in thought is pretty scary. Those we can't call back,
those who don't return to find themselves in the mainstream of time and space,
are deemed… different, unabled, mentally ill. My father lived the last eight
years of his life with a brain injury that left him lost, deep in thought, his
body mis-guided by his mind soaring in all directions. At some point in
conversations with him about North Carolina waterways, the Hong Kong dollar,
Fidel Castro in the hills, the not-so-zen paradox of being lost only if you can
or want to be found again, came to me. Are you really lost if you've forgotten
to be found? My father's wanderings, his ramblings and roamings, and his circumlocutions
(and that's a technical term of traumatic brain injury, but it's also what I
love most about what we're all doing here at Kalamazoo in gathering and
tendering words to each other), his circumlocutions, were rationalized for us
with various metaphors: "His mind and his brain are just taking off in
different directions;" "He has all his marbles, they're just
scattered" – metaphors meant to create a rational distance between our
normal and his weird. There <u>was</u> one that truly helped: "He can't
see the forest for the trees." I tried to be lost with him, no longer
beholden to a big picture, to walk with him among endless metaphorical trees
free of the discursive frame of forests: elephants on the beaches of Ceylon,
bringing buttermilk to someone named Solomon, snatches of Portuguese, his long
silences. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">And so when Jeffrey's lost pine branch
came to me in the mail, I felt for the first time I think, the collapse of
metaphor into reality. This twig was, might as well be, from my father's
expanse of forestless trees. This twig could skip, might as well travel,
through arboreal generations and literary time, and elide with those in the
paths of all those knight errants stumbling through forests: dear delusional
Don Quixote brushing up against trees, scattering needles; the Fisher-King
brooding by the shore, the trees of his domain parched and barren behind him;
Yvain sleeping on twigs and branches in an endless forest, eating hermit's
bread. Sometimes, the allegory reaches up for the reality: in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Book of the Love-Smitten Heart</i>, René
d'Anjou's dreamer and his Heart are two knighted companions on a quest for Lady
Mercy. They wander lost in the Forest of Long Awaiting, tricked by Jealousy;
Desire comes to give them companionship and encouragement, and helps the Heart
disarm and lay aside his sword. And Desire and the Heart, lost in the forest,
talk long into the night beneath an aspen tree.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">In her book, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Field Guide to Getting Lost</i>, Rebecca Solnit offers her take on
the etymology of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">los,</i> the Old Norse
word meaning the disbanding of an army. "This origin suggests," she
writes, "soldiers falling out of formation to go home, a truce with the
wide world." Loss, lost, losing, loosening – that moment of disbanding,
not necessarily to find home again, maybe just to wander a wide expanse, to get
lost in thought. There are those who seek to be lost: the mystics lost in the
thought of Christ, the author of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Cloud
of Unknowing </i>- persistent questers of lostness.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">The Judeo-Christian tradition begins in
the mind of a brooding God, hovering over everything, sweeping over the waters.
What unknowns stretch out within its hesitation? Maybe the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">tehom</i> of the deep in the original Hebrew, the etymological
descendant of "radiant Tiamat" of Mesopotamian creation, was so beguiling
and wondrous that God stopped rushing in, stilled the wind, and remained
suspended – a lost god, unsure. A doubtful, distracted, day-dreaming deity
before the time of days, poised over the deep, intimate with darkness, lost in
thought, without sign, or referent, or scale. And then God stopped trusting His
lostness, and started making distinctions and divides.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Later, much later, after the tree and the
apple and the accusations and the denials and the wailing and the leaving,
there would be gathering around a fire, and dazed by survival, we humans would
start to stare into the hearth: its crackling warmth, its mesmerizing dancing
flames, its complicated light. Gaston Bachelard, in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Psychoanalysis of Fire</i>, prized the <u>reverie</u> we enter when
we stare into the fire and become lost in thought. He called it a
"hypnotized form of observation," wanted us to think about it as a
way of seeing the world. In reverie, we might well see the world in all its
salty love and grief among trees and forested wanderings; we might well re-emerge
within the trust to be lost in thought.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Anne F. Harrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09817277664812733936noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4547316294063297137.post-12920831274424752752015-05-06T21:47:00.001-04:002015-05-07T10:28:04.390-04:00By the river with 7th graders, Mary Oliver, and Fafnir<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-jukZuANTEBI/VUqNugmcyMI/AAAAAAAABK4/loAIv1Koze8/s1600/P1220629.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-jukZuANTEBI/VUqNugmcyMI/AAAAAAAABK4/loAIv1Koze8/s1600/P1220629.JPG" width="200" /></a></div>
There was an outing today. 150 kids, the entirety of the 7th grade, a drive out of our small town, and through Amish country to one of our glorious state parks. Warm, breezy, clear air redirected by cries of glee and teasing, kids running ahead, kids lagging behind, the incredible energy of this age. So here, a few impressions of working with these children who live on a thrilling cusp, somewhere between wonder and self-consciousness, moving across the gulf from 12 to 13 years of age. Mac said it beautifully, about what it was like for some of them to read <a href="http://www.phys.unm.edu/~tw/fas/yits/archive/oliver_wildgeese.html" target="_blank">the poem by Mary Oliver</a> with which we started - "It's as though some of them didn't want the words to be fully in their mouths." They spoke hurriedly, brushing over the sounds of their own voices - feeling (maybe) the words too strange, the idea of standing by the river in a circle reading one line of the poem each too disorienting. Much rejoicing at the invitation to make structures. The river was too high for us to have access to the stones that make good cairns, so we expanded our materials. The circle above of big and little standing stones surrounding seashells was made when the mud was still soft in the morning. We all loved thinking about how far the seashells had come - to wash up in crazy, misplaced plenitude on these inland shores.<br />
<br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ZSaSkTs4SvM/VUq7h001U6I/AAAAAAAABLI/Xg1X_ksvV-A/s1600/P1220656Meditation.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ZSaSkTs4SvM/VUq7h001U6I/AAAAAAAABLI/Xg1X_ksvV-A/s1600/P1220656Meditation.JPG" width="200" /></a></div>
The science teacher had suggested this next idea, which was an intense one, actually: stand blindfolded for five minutes and observe the environment around you without the sense of sight. I started thinking "There's no way that I could do this with college students" and I'm still not entirely sure I could put my finger on why. Bigger discussion, but I am wary of making my students too vulnerable - somewhere between 7th grade, and college, hurts and distrust accumulate. Here, there was willingness - and these kids' trust was very poignant to me. Those who wanted to stand in the quiet rush of the river were the most still. I thought that that was so cool: to purposefully stand where the ground would shift beneath your feet. Then, after big gasps of air as the blindfolds came off, they wrote (of birds and water and sensing others nearby and many many things).<br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ZodNbBbeGmg/VUq_PY9lveI/AAAAAAAABLg/wPmNFfUU6OA/s1600/P1220637Sigfrid.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ZodNbBbeGmg/VUq_PY9lveI/AAAAAAAABLg/wPmNFfUU6OA/s1600/P1220637Sigfrid.JPG" width="200" /></a></div>
There were three Sigfrids, one for each group of kids who gathered to hear the tale from the <i>Völsunga Saga</i>. Each time, when Mac called for a hero, one stepped forth. And a human Fafnir and a dragon Fafnir, and birds and Ragnar and Otter and the Other Brother and more. Sometimes (here) a crutch was the sword, others a stick long dead. Each time, Fafnir met his doom and then we'd all line up on the beach and throw rocks (Fafnir's gold) into the river at the same time, the sinking stones' expanding circles disassembled by eddies swirling past. The third time we did it, Sigfrid from the second group came back to join in the story again - to hear once more about gold making men mad, and dragon's blood revealing the language of birds, and wild throws by the river's edge.Anne F. Harrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09817277664812733936noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4547316294063297137.post-18694519652388098432015-05-04T12:02:00.001-04:002015-05-04T12:08:01.474-04:00A Concerted Effort<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-64xNCzzDCrY/VUeXLgqO4ZI/AAAAAAAABKI/20l4DzHKXOg/s1600/5-4WomenGeometry.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-64xNCzzDCrY/VUeXLgqO4ZI/AAAAAAAABKI/20l4DzHKXOg/s200/5-4WomenGeometry.jpg" width="180" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A predecessor of my wonderful<br />
biochem professor, teaching<br />
geometry (key for structural<br />
diagrams!) in a 14th c.<br />
Euclid mss. (British Library)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Today was the last day of Biochemistry for me. The students will valiantly review for their exam on Wednesday, and I will be walking away with my head full of a new language. It's been very interesting to learn the language, rather than the practice, of biochemistry. I have not spent time in the lab, spending the past month thinking about the work (operations) of art (really, visual surfaces) in Chaucer's dream poems, and the idea of being "lost in thought" as well as the insistence of matter in medieval art. But I've consistently been trying to find my footing within biochemistry's language about the structure and function of proteins. Having studied amino acids and enzymes and carbohydrates and all kinds of saccharides and lipids and finishing up with RNA and DNA, I walk on the very dynamic ground of millions of biochemical reactions a second. Looking at these reactions up close, in human time and scale, I can understand how a protein folds, how RNA can be self-folding - all sorts of things. I can understand that there is a tremendous amount of randomness and reactions that go nowhere, and I can understand that what makes my body work is an enormous series of things "recognizing" each other, and fitting together to produce the reactions that we call living.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-9KpVljHGGfA/VUeXuX0V_fI/AAAAAAAABKQ/21oyhZBssHM/s1600/5-4BerryZodiacFigure.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-9KpVljHGGfA/VUeXuX0V_fI/AAAAAAAABKQ/21oyhZBssHM/s200/5-4BerryZodiacFigure.jpg" width="153" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Zodiac Figure within<br />
cosmological and<br />
molecular possibility;<br />
<i>Très Riche Heures</i>, 15th c.<br />
(Bibliothèque Nationale)<br />
<br /></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Where wonder supplants perception is in my inability to conceive of these millions of reactions happening all at the same time, <i>and in concert</i>. I know that they are happening, as I think and type, but I cannot possibly keep track of them all. And yet, because reactions at the cellular and molecular level are happening in concert, I live and breathe. A comment made by my collaborator on this article about how humans live with/overcome/negotiate the (poignancy of) the limits of human perception comes back with full resonance now: cellular reactions don't stop happening with death; cellular activity is as frenetic and energetic as in life - but now, the effort is no longer concerted. Death is, indeed, disconcerting. The idea that hydrophobic amino acids keep right on clustering inside the cell, that carbons are still looking to attach or disconnect, that proteins are still probably somewhere folding is different for me to think through than decay and decomposition. Those two sad terms are written from the point of view of human life. We would need other words to describe cellular activity once it is no longer in concert for the sake and experience of human life. Metabolic persistence? Molecular stamina? Cellular reactions keep happening arguably forever after death. They are eternally persevering in their energy and randomness; they "recognize" each other, however, for purposes other than human living. <u>There is perhaps no greater presence of the post-human than in our own cells. </u>We are always (yes, already) displaced by the energy that preceded us and will endure beyond us. Knowing more about how enzymes operate in antibiotics and laundry soap (for example), opens up thousands of other questions, blunt questions asked obviously. What are the biochemical reactions in operation when I cry? when I feel pleasure? when I'm tired? when I remember? How can I begin to conceptualize the permeability of what I call my body to biochemical reactions in my environment? (microcosm-macrocosm is a start but after that? we are very, very permeable indeed - at all times, in every moment). What are the worlds (let alone proteins) unfolding within the concerted effort of my person without my knowledge or control? How much of my existence is beyond my perception? That one we've been asking for a while, but it really never gets old, and there are always new answers.Anne F. Harrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09817277664812733936noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4547316294063297137.post-31429364690781722322015-04-14T12:30:00.004-04:002015-04-15T12:36:09.659-04:00Taking Leave of a GodOne of my sabbatical treats to myself was to read an entire issue of <i>Speculum</i> because (true confessions), I have never done so. It was a great thing to do: felt a bit like going to a dinner party where each guest is pretty fantastic and brings great stories (here's the <a href="http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=SPC" target="_blank">current Table of Contents</a>). Christopher Abram's essay, "Modeling Religious Experience in Old Norse Conversion Narratives" opened up the confusion and intensity of conversion of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallfre%C3%B0r_vandr%C3%A6%C3%B0ask%C3%A1ld" target="_blank">Hallfreðr</a>, an Icelandic poet, dubbed "troublesome" by the Norwegian king, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olaf_Tryggvason" target="_blank">Olaf I</a>, who converted him to Christianity in 996. Abram's essay goes well beyond what Hallfreðr is known for: the five so-called "conversion verses" in which he struggles with his leave-taking of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odin" target="_blank">Odin</a>, the god he's known his whole life. It was my first time reading them, though, and I can't quite leave them. [Here's a link to <a href="http://sydney.edu.au/arts/medieval/saga/pdf/556-whaley.pdf" target="_blank">an article by the scholar who translated the poem in full</a> that provides the verses in translation].<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-EpqsFBegrTw/VS0p33vx8TI/AAAAAAAABIA/5Flh4N5WjW4/s1600/10-27VikingStele.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-EpqsFBegrTw/VS0p33vx8TI/AAAAAAAABIA/5Flh4N5WjW4/s1600/10-27VikingStele.JPG" height="200" width="150" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Viking Stele, 8th c.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
The conscious <i>and mournful</i> leave-taking of a god. That loss. <b>"It was different in former days, when I could sacrifice to the mind-swift... Odin himself."</b> I think of intimacy, and ritual gestures, and surges of emotions, of a god who is mind-swift, coursing through thoughts, quickening a consciousness. I think of the honesty of this loss, this staring into new voids - none easily replaced, all felt gone. I think of Hallfreðr's <i>having known</i> Odin, of his trying to put his intimacy and knowledge (and love and admiration and thrill) of Odin <i>somewhere. </i><u>Where does a god like Odin go when a king like Olaf comes?</u> Hallfreðr tries places. In words, which used to trip from his mind in praise of Odin. In sounds: I count how many times he says Odin's name in these verses meant to signal the god's negation. In memory, of course, in remembering ceremonies and pleasures that are now banned by Olaf, "the Sogn-men's sovereign." In the pathos of living with inexorable doom: <b>"All mankind casts Odin's clan to the wind" </b>- a god swept away, betrayed, longed for, dispersed back into a landscape (think of Iceland!) that waits to receive him. And it isn't just Odin, of course, it's the waft and weave of his clan, all the love and knowledge and fury and past of a god. <b>"And I am forced to leave <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nj%C3%B6r%C3%B0r" target="_blank">Njörðr's</a> kin, and pray to Christ."</b> In Hallfreðr, Odin and Christ co-exist. It's that simultaneity, which Hallfreðr maintains through the painful remembrance of what must somehow cease to exist for him, that keeps me circling around these words. It's Hallfreðr's knowledge of both, his intimacy with both; those two divine entities in one human psyche. It's this <i>simultaneity of beings </i>that also holds my fascination for the time when <i>two</i> genetically distinct hominid species interacted: when Neanderthal and homo sapiens were <a href="http://www.nature.com/news/modern-human-genomes-reveal-our-inner-neanderthal-1.14615" target="_blank">in contact with each other</a>, when two hominid entities existed in one ecological psyche. I've circled around that loss, too: around knowing that we weren't the only human species, around never knowing what it was like to experience or communicate with a proximate consciousness. There was no leave-taking of that other species, no good-bye in song (is this when we <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/10/at-5-neanderthal-you-are-an-outlier/263475/" target="_blank">debate Grendel</a>?), was there mourning? Two gods in one poet - it will be a long time before I stop thinking of Hallfreðr's trouble.<br />
<br />Anne F. Harrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09817277664812733936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4547316294063297137.post-320171909682343522015-04-02T14:13:00.003-04:002015-04-03T13:17:21.869-04:00Musca pictura<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-PB4RbQ_Bwtw/VR1ltFukbNI/AAAAAAAABHQ/R77pbez93Wg/s1600/4-2PetrusChristusFly.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-PB4RbQ_Bwtw/VR1ltFukbNI/AAAAAAAABHQ/R77pbez93Wg/s1600/4-2PetrusChristusFly.jpg" height="179" width="320" /></a></div>
A nice little slew of deadlines have successfully been met and thus an hour's play with an old friend opens up. The fly that sits (oh my goodness, where?) upon the painting, and the sill, and the frame, of <a href="http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/49.7.19" target="_blank">Petrus Christus's <i>Carthusian Monk</i> from 1446, now at the Met</a>, pulls us to strange margins. Its presence is both interference (a fly!) and mastery (a fly on a painting that measures 8.5" by 11.5" inches - yes, the size of a piece of American notebook paper!) - both pesky and prodigious. It is also simultaneously mimetic (fly shown actual size!) and in violation of every mimetic convention: its position performs a spatial morph between the actual world of the viewer and the represented world of the painting habitually granted to <a href="http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/459052" target="_blank">gold</a>, <a href="http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/jan-van-eyck-the-arnolfini-portrait" target="_blank">inscriptions</a>, or <a href="http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piet%C3%A0_(Giovanni_Bellini_Brera)" target="_blank">Christ's hands</a> in other paintings of this period. No matter how close you get (the closer you get), it's impossible (the harder it is) to pinpoint the place of the fly: the sill it sits upon is in the space of the monk and can belong to his world; the inscription it sits atop of is in (on?) that of the painting and puts a claim to the fly being in our world. It is, of course, in both - though we seem to notice it more than the monk does. Or (my favorite gambit) is the monk depicted <i>ignoring</i> the fly? - eschewing its disturbance with his penetrating gaze. And yes, there's a quick moral message that could be made about the grandiose human with his deep thoughts and the negligible fly with its mundane presence, but let's not reduce this marvel to a meaning - somehow Petrus Christus has used mimesis to make us question the surface, depth, space, and time of our mimetic abilities and expectations, and so (to attempt an anamorphic reach without anamorphosis), I'd like to try to have the fly's spatially- and temporally-complex point of view mess with my own.<br />
<br />
I wouldn't see the fly as temporally complex if it weren't for the following lines of questioning: 1) the persistent questioning of periodization that Jeffrey Cohen and Steve Mentz enact in their work (which makes the observational prowess Christus brought to the painted fly <i>not</i> the triumph of a moment in Renaissance time, but rather a continuous fascination with representation and illusion) and 2) the continuing shockwaves of reading Carolyn Dinshaw's <a href="https://www.dukeupress.edu/How-Soon-Is-Now/" style="font-style: italic;" target="_blank">How Soon Is Now?</a> (which will forever change how I think about any observation or knowledge that comes out of love and enthusiasm and is not meant for academic production)<i>.</i> Wait, add to that 3) Keith Moxey's brilliant meditation on painting and time in <a href="https://www.dukeupress.edu/Visual-Time" style="font-style: italic;" target="_blank">Visual Time</a> (which remembers the painted fly as part of an object that itself travels strangely through time, even as it sits now at the Metropolitan Museum in New York). All of these take the ephemeral alighting of Christus's fly and stretch it in time: to the painter's actual experience of a fly alighting on his work <i>and</i> to the painter's actual experience of deciding to paint a fly; to the monk's depicted experience of a fly alighting in his space <i>and</i> to the monk's willful or sincere ignorance of its presence; to the viewer's illusionistic experience of noticing the fly <i>and</i> to the viewer's struggle to place it, both visually and intellectually. That fly has no business being there, and so we feel compelled to find a business for it: a moral business (mundane fly, human devoted to heavenly thoughts), a historical business (Christus humbly vying with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeuxis" target="_blank">Zeuxis</a>)... It is very, very hard to just let the fly <i>be</i> there - in any kind of time. A fly in our lived experience is meaningless: an annoyance at best, a carrier of disease at worst. A fly in our experience of illusion is pulled to meaning: see above in an eternal loop of worry about under- and over-interpretation. Are simultaneities enough to break down binaries?<br />
<br />
The fly cannot know itself as I know it (insert something smart and snappy about Derrida and his cat here) (not an editorial note-to-self, just me eschewing an enormous series body of animal studies because I only have 10 minutes left to write). But I can use its spatial and temporal morphs to hear <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174972" target="_blank">Emily Dickinson</a> when I see Petrus Christus. I can go down the Linnean rabbit hole and revel in its scientific denomination: <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housefly" target="_blank">Musca domestica</a></i> - the only creature I've found thus far that has "domestica" as part of its scientific name ("musca" being just the Latin word for fly - "domestica" being then a scientific nomenclature based uniquely on the human experience of observing flies in houses). I can reach up and find that the constellation <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musca" target="_blank">Musca</a> shines in southern skies charted (and named) by explorers on the first Dutch trading expedition to the East Indies in 1595. I can marvel at all the flies I know (buzzing poetic illusionistic allegorical scientific stellar imagined sung avoided). I can continue to think on about resistance to meaning in the midst of wonder. Some of this is where the networked knowledge of Google takes my curiosity, some of it is old, old hauntings (I've never been able to shake that poem by Emily Dickinson). A lot of it is a moment very far away from anywhere else that is insistently here.Anne F. Harrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09817277664812733936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4547316294063297137.post-4472692077983982922015-03-31T14:42:00.000-04:002015-03-31T22:31:57.850-04:00Storied MatterThe past few days days have been a mess of eroding civil rights, further stratification, bad faith, false pieties, nasty politics, worse governing, and general awfulness. Here is an <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/03/what-makes-indianas-religious-freedom-law-different/388997/" target="_blank">excellent analysis</a> of why Indiana's so-called Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which was signed into law by our ignominious governor Mike Pence this past week, is so awful. Facebook has been alight with anger and frustration as our hopelessly jerrymandered state was twisted by its legislators into a place in which a business could now legally, in the name of its owners' religious "freedom" (ack! I can still barely write this nonsense), turn away an LGBT person. There's been much talk of "<a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/indiana-gov-mike-pence-controversial-religious-freedom-law/story?id=29985752" target="_blank">Christian florists</a>" and "Christian cakemakers" as of course this is a right-wing response to the thriving of marriage equality. There's been tremendous protests, and businesses pulling out of the state and events canceled, and lots and lots of call for repealing the law. We'll see. I'm very cautiously hopeful: it's clear the people of the state don't want it, but the legislators (Pence foremost among them), all have their sights set on political careers that might benefit from snuggling with the extreme right. Fools. Hateful fools. Pence backtracked a mile this morning (even claiming that he "abhors" discrimination, that he was a Democrat (gasp!) in high school, and that he's been to Selma - Lord), so maybe, maybe there's a turn coming. Again, we'll see. In the meantime, everyday life here sucks: there was doubt and mistrust everywhere over the week-end, as customers and businesses both are trying to figure out who is what to whom now. Being straight, I can ask if a business is willing to serve LGBT customers with impunity - a nasty privilege. Being <i>a decent human being</i>, I can't believe we are having to deal with this idiocy. A bright, weird connection was made for me this week-end to the theoretical issues of a paper I gave this past week-end in Minneapolis (more on the conference in another post) on "storied matter." The term comes from Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann's brilliant introduction to the spectacular collection, <i>Material Ecocriticism</i> and prizes the "configurations of meanings" that emerge in the interdependence of material forms. I was thrilled to find a resonance with this idea in Linda Seidel's <i>Legends in Limestone</i>, in which she characterizes the tympanum of Autun as "material narrative" - memory and story moving into matter. For me, this week-end, in the very mundane act of grocery shopping, the intersection of storied matter and identity came into painful contact. The food I eat, the people I've spoken to casually these past fourteen years of living here, the businesses and restaurants I've frequented with friends, for projects, in the company of the kids - all of them exist on shifting ground now; all of them are taking on another layer of story. With not a little anxiety, I composed an e-mail to the farmer of our CSA, who is a very devout Christian who home-schools his children (a sign of conservatism if coupled with Christianity around here) to ask him about his intentions around the law. His eggs and vegetables totally matter to our family - I know that something so small and mundane shouldn't (especially as I am inspired to think of these things out of a paper on precious objects), but in their smallness and mundanity, they shape the reality of our everyday lives, they shape the trust of our bodies. Before I could send the e-mail, the farmer sent out an e-mail to his entire CSA and spoke gladly of love and of not letting legislators dictate Christianity to him, of providing for all and of Happy Easter. I think that there will be more moments like that than the other kind, and maybe I don't have to fear that our little (really little, 10,000 people) town will pull apart, will polarize around this issue. None of this is over, as the state legislation gathers to "clarify" the language so that it does not allow for discrimination. In the meantime, I felt apple, asparagus, and bread come alive differently beneath my fingers, as I wondered about the beliefs of those who brought them into being. There's an intimacy, to food especially perhaps (and I think of the trust that we all bring forward when we sit down to share a meal in public or in private), that is startling here - that was amplified for me by the intersection of "making and becoming" that I talked about in my paper. If you have an especially big cup of coffee, you are welcome to stay for the paper. Otherwise, just please hope that <a href="http://freedomindiana.org/" target="_blank">civil rights and human decency</a> will prevail in Indiana.<br />
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<u><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Declarative Materiality: Inscription and
Artistic Process in Medieval Art”</span></u><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">
(I would now subtitle it: "Making and Becoming in Medieval Art")<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">"Letters are shapes indicating
voices.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hence they represent things
which they bring to mind through the windows of the eyes. Frequently they speak
voicelessly the utterances of the absent." When John of Salisbury made
this declaration in his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Metalogicon</i>
from 1159, he engaged the multiplicity of voices and identities involved in the
experience of writing in the Middle Ages. By no means confined to the
manuscript page, medieval letters projected the voices of authors, scribes, artists,
patrons, supplicants, saints, and God himself from an array of surfaces
including metal, stone, wood, ivory, and even gems. This dynamic of voice and
materiality exemplifies what Jeffrey Hamburger, in his book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Script as Image</i>, has called "the
plenitude packed into medieval representations of letters," (57). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">In many instances, inscriptions on
works of art spoke to the artistic process itself. For our work together, I
have chosen two inscriptions from the High Middle Ages, one of an intimate the
other of a communal scale, that are variants on a phrase of making: AELFRED MEC
HEHT GEWYRCAN ("Alfred had me made") and GISLEBERTUS HOC FECIT
("Gislebertus made this"). These inscriptions will hold our attention
because of the particular <u>placement</u> of the inscriptions upon the work of
art, and what it might reveal to us about the <u>act of making</u> by the
artist, and about the <u>event of becoming</u> for the image. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">Both inscriptions </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">occur at crucial transitional spaces of
the art object: wrought in gold as its frame, or carved in limestone to frame
two distinct spaces. Knowledge of gold-smithing, and sculpture are re-marked
upon by the presence of the inscriptions, and consequently draw attention to
the material process <u>and</u> boundary of the image. In occupying these
liminal sites, the inscriptions, I will argue, collapse a series of binaries we
have come to expect in art history, between subject and object, representation
and presence, animate and inanimate, human and non-human, and material and
discursive. The result, I believe, is a call for us to reconsider how being
attentive to the making of images can provoke a welcome entanglement between
artist, audience, and art. In seeking these moments of "entanglement"
provoked by inscriptions, I am inspired by the language and ideas of the material
ecocriticism of Serenella Iovino and Serpil Opperman, whose call for a
materially shared existence presents a productive way to keep the <u>making</u>
of art part of its perpetually emergent <u>becoming</u> – an art historical
mode to which I will return in my conclusion.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">THE
ALFRED JEWEL<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-APbBxkaXBno/VRrnpHwqX1I/AAAAAAAABE8/InOQCL5JPSY/s1600/AlfredJewel3Shots.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-APbBxkaXBno/VRrnpHwqX1I/AAAAAAAABE8/InOQCL5JPSY/s1600/AlfredJewel3Shots.jpg" height="135" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Alfred Jewel, betw. 871-899<br />
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">During his reign from 871 to 899, King
Alfred the Great of Wessex made a series of gifts to all the bishops in his
realm to invigorate, some have said to instill, readership in his leading
clergy. Accompanying King Alfred's own Old English translation of Pope Gregory
the Great's <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Cura pastoralis </i>(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">On pastoral care</i>), each bishop received
an <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">aestel</i>, a "little spear"
from the Latin <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">hastula</i> – a pointer
for reading. Designed to be both cradled in the hand, as well as slid along the
surface of the manuscript page, this pointer guided the reader across the
letters of sanctified writing and amplified the sacrality and authority of the
text. This remarkable <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">aestel</i> is now
known as the Alfred Jewel both for its material splendor and for its
inscription reading </span><span style="background: white; font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">AELFRED MEC HEHT GEWYRCAN ("Alfred had me made"). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ehpEoB4k910/VRroKF6lTsI/AAAAAAAABFE/EjkSfNvsMh0/s1600/AlfredJewelDragon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ehpEoB4k910/VRroKF6lTsI/AAAAAAAABFE/EjkSfNvsMh0/s1600/AlfredJewelDragon.jpg" height="200" width="150" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The letters are both binding and boundary
to a rock crystal from Roman antiquity re-carved to cover an enameled figure,
long thought to be Saint Cuthbert, but now, through iconographic corroboration,
more usually identified as the allegory of Sight. The wide eyes of the figure
of Sight are amplified by those of a dragon whose mouth would have held the
ivory, bone, or wood pointer that tracked the reading. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-lNJPBskUitY/VRro0kbno4I/AAAAAAAABFc/jcR--BfpMNQ/s1600/AlfredJewelSide.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-lNJPBskUitY/VRro0kbno4I/AAAAAAAABFc/jcR--BfpMNQ/s1600/AlfredJewelSide.jpg" height="150" width="200" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">To hold the Alfred Jewel is to join hands
with a master goldsmith working in 20k gold, a high level of purity of the
material that indicates its import, most likely from the Middle East, Spain, or
southern France. Anchoring his hold on the dragon's head with his fingers, and
feeling the rock crystal hub of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">aestel</i>
press against his palm, our bishop reader would have felt the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">aestel</i> 's insistent, and wondrously
transformative materiality, even as it guided his spiritual reading. The soft
bumps of the meticulous filigree that ropes around both the bottom and the top
of the inscription are reconfigured to become the texture of the dragon's skin in
the filigreed surface of its head animated by the reader's gestures dragging
the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">aestel</i> across the manuscript page.
The <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">aestel</i> is a "moving"
work of art in all sense of the word: it is seldom still, perpetually engaged
in the emergence of its own letters and forms, of the text beneath its pointer,
and of its owner as reader.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The letters of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">aestel</i> themselves are not only molded in a proportionate harmony
that stretches all the way around the rock crystal, they are also marked with
interior lines to accentuate their volume and fullness, materializing their
words in resonance with the materialization of the words enabled by the
medieval practice of reading which called for enunciation out loud, in contrast
to our silent reading today. Citing the notable difficulty and expertise of the
craftsmanship, Ben Tilghman has suggested that the inscription be translated
not only as "Alfred had me made" but rather as "Alfed had me <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">worked</i>" which aligns even more
closely with the old English <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">wyrcean</i>
(to work). The painstaking work of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">aestel</i>
may be not just a sign of luxury, but also one of labor, and the legible, tangible
traces of the artist's hand (in the expert work of filigree, re-carving,
setting, sculpting, and inscribing) project an expertise and a labor of <u>making</u>.
When considering only the static object stilled by a museum display, it is the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">aestel</i> itself that speaks most
immediately: "Alfred had me, the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">aestel</i>,
worked." But when the object emerges into its function as a pointer for
the reading of valuable text, the experiences and identities of the artist and
the reader are brought into play, and we can start to consider how the artist
was "worked" or "made" by such an important commission; as
well as how the bishop is being "worked" or "made" into the
reader King Alfred desires (nay, ordains) him to be. The knowledge of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">aestel</i>, in its intimacy with the text,
the knowledge of the artist, in his intimacy with the materials, and the
knowledge of the reader, in learning the content of the sacred text become
interdependent. Making is entangled with becoming; labor, effort, and expertise
materialize as endeavors shared by the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">aestel</i>,
the artist, and the reader. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-VYdaH5peZA0/VRroiQJbk-I/AAAAAAAABFU/zH37xVfl9-c/s1600/Alfred_Jewel_Ashmolean_2014.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-VYdaH5peZA0/VRroiQJbk-I/AAAAAAAABFU/zH37xVfl9-c/s1600/Alfred_Jewel_Ashmolean_2014.JPG" height="200" width="162" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Fluid ontologies, in which one thing
becomes another energize the poems that have come to be known as
"Anglo-Saxon riddles." Written down around the year 1000, but in
existence through oral tradition for generations before then, the riddles begin
with one state of being of a material and traces it through its manipulations
and manufactures as it becomes another entity entirely. Thus, Riddle 24 begins
in the voice of the animal whose hide is used to make a manuscript and ends in
the voice of the holy book that will save a man's soul. Throughout the poem,
the "I" is constant, even though the identity is fluid. So, too, I am
suggesting, the "me" of the Alfred Jewel fluctuates in identities,
even as it remains the same making a distinction between subject and object (between
artist, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">aestel, </i>and audience) moot. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-eRPqILj4zwU/VRroWZcUSAI/AAAAAAAABFM/7B-973fJ0Hg/s1600/640px-Alfred_Jewel.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-eRPqILj4zwU/VRroWZcUSAI/AAAAAAAABFM/7B-973fJ0Hg/s1600/640px-Alfred_Jewel.jpg" height="200" width="185" /></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The effort of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">aestel</i> in being made, that of the artist in making, and that of the
reader in becoming are entangled around the object so that, while here I can
hold them apart through analysis, in the act and gestures of reading, making
and becoming become enmeshed for all three. By picking up the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">aestel</i>, the reader becomes a part of a
community of readers, authorized by the king, sanctified by precious materials,
and sealed by knowledge.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">THE
TYMPANUM OF AUTUN</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The tympanum of Autun cathedral was
sculpted in limestone in the 1120s and 30s. Depicting a Last Judgment with a
Heaven and Hell frenetic enough to provoke the cathedral's canons to plaster
the entire surface over in the 18<sup>th</sup>-century, the material presence
of bodies writhing in apocalyptic agony was too insistent even 600 years after
their sculpting. Autun's tympanum continues to stir passions and provoke
controversies, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">few more passionate and controversial
than what and whom are meant by the inscription </span><span style="background: white; font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">GISLEBERTUS HOC FECIT ("Gislebertus made
this") which succinctly wedged itself amidst the words of Christ at the
Last Judgment. </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The 1999
publication of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Legends in Limestone</i> by
Linda Seidel questioned, and some will say over-turned, the heroic narrative
that a single artist is signified by the phrase, a narrative which had had
traction since it was first suggested by George Zarnecki and Denis Grivot in
1960. Wresting "Gislebertus hoc fecit" from the status of a signature
to that of an inscription, Seidel's research argued for the phrase carved into
the tympanum as a "stone charter" within what she calls a
"material narrative" – a heavily material inscription meant to evoke
the name of the last Carolingian duke of the late 10<sup>th</sup> century in a
region still tumultuously ruled by the Capetians in the 12<sup>th</sup>-century
of the cathedral's construction. Medieval art historians have been grudging
about giving up the unified identity of the "medieval Michaelangelo"
as Gislebertus-as-artist had been dubbed. Gislebertus-as-ancestor is a much
more fragmented identity, as Seidel's argument positions it, diffused across
memory and history. But even, or I would say <u>especially</u>, as an
inscription signaling a donor rather than an artist, "Gislebertus hoc
fecit" speaks to the effort of making as it elides with that of becoming
in the after-life.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-HhaSDxA2VSU/VRrpQAep6GI/AAAAAAAABF0/fNO4wE7lhH4/s1600/AutunHeavenDesperate.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-HhaSDxA2VSU/VRrpQAep6GI/AAAAAAAABF0/fNO4wE7lhH4/s1600/AutunHeavenDesperate.png" height="145" width="200" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">As with the Alfred Jewel, though on a
radically different scale, we stand before a work of art that announces the
effort of its making. The figures of Autun cathedral still sway and stretch
with detailed and unusual torment. There is writhing even in Heaven, as
resurrecting souls cling to angels' wings in escaping the call of a trumpet of
the Last Judgment, and seize the hands of St. Peter in a final plea. A
particularly burdened angel is embraced around the hips by a desperate soul
while hoisting another wriggling soul's insistently heavy "body" into
the architecture of Heaven above. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-LiChPhhw3-U/VRrpXb7jGiI/AAAAAAAABF8/JoJ0bHSJXys/s1600/AutunHellCallingOutFigure.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-LiChPhhw3-U/VRrpXb7jGiI/AAAAAAAABF8/JoJ0bHSJXys/s1600/AutunHellCallingOutFigure.png" height="121" width="200" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">One of the most poignant scenes in Hell
performs the sculptural and acrobatic feat of positioning a figure on the
supports of the Scales of Judgment, as he calls out (oh to hear those words!)
to the Heavenly side, leaning against the scale, willing and weighing the
scales to lean in St. Michael's favor against the grappling demons. In these scenarios
of reaching and striving, the <u>making</u> and carving of the limestone
sculpture is insistent in the weight and effort of the figures. Angels' wings
are thick with stone; hopeful souls are heavy as rock; saints' robes stretch up
in slabs. Once again, the effort of the artist is amplified, and identities
become fluid, not by and with a reader this time, but through the yearning
figures on display for a viewer hopeful or even fervent for salvation. The
figures of Autun exist in the dynamic tension between the transcendence of
reaching for Heaven and a world weighed down by pathos.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-16DbddzKRhU/VRrpiCWuO4I/AAAAAAAABGE/nzZTqbHgiJY/s1600/AutunChrist.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-16DbddzKRhU/VRrpiCWuO4I/AAAAAAAABGE/nzZTqbHgiJY/s1600/AutunChrist.png" height="136" width="200" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;">The stone inscriptions
speaking the words of Christ in this heavy Heaven take on a significant role as
the only element containing the emerging masses of resurrecting souls from
their heavenly or hellish destinations. Christ is framed by his own words on
the mandorla that encircles him: "I alone dispose of all things and crown
the just, those who follow crime I judge and punish."</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br /></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-AZRm6P-FpNI/VRrpsjgxICI/AAAAAAAABGM/5QrLCN4t2GE/s1600/AutunHeaven.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-AZRm6P-FpNI/VRrpsjgxICI/AAAAAAAABGM/5QrLCN4t2GE/s1600/AutunHeaven.png" height="141" width="200" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">"Thus shall rise again everyone who
does not lead an impious life and endless light of day shall shine for
him" reads the inscription separating Heaven from the resurrection. <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br /></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-LbArGOXRYdg/VRrpzzrOkYI/AAAAAAAABGU/Pn9PL1_f23s/s1600/AutunHell.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-LbArGOXRYdg/VRrpzzrOkYI/AAAAAAAABGU/Pn9PL1_f23s/s1600/AutunHell.png" height="132" width="200" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">"Here let fear strike those whom earthly
error binds. For their fate is shown by the horror of these figures"
stretches out beneath Hell, at one point punctured by the grasping claws of a
devil snatching a soul even before its judgment at the scales. These words
become material in their enunciation, for as they are traced with the eye or
read aloud by a voice, the internal rhymes of the disyllabic leonine hexameters
of the inscriptions emerge. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Omnia
disp<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">ono</b> solus meritoque cor<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">ono</b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Quose
scelus ex<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">ercet</b> me iudice pena co<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">ercet</b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Quiseque
resurget <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">ita</b> quem non trahit impia <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">vita</b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Et
lucebit <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">ei</b> sine fine lucerne di<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">ei</b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Terreat
hic t<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">error</b> quos terreus alligat <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">error</b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Nam
fore sic v<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">erum</b> notat hic horror spec<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">ierum</b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.25in;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-NsqgYhYQGbw/VRrp-FNB_II/AAAAAAAABGc/Hv4aDrKMjnE/s1600/Gislebertus.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-NsqgYhYQGbw/VRrp-FNB_II/AAAAAAAABGc/Hv4aDrKMjnE/s1600/Gislebertus.png" height="98" width="200" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.25in;">As the visual space is
crowded with figures, so the words around the tympanum are made thick with
rhyme. In the midst of this structured, rhyming language emerges
"Gislebertus hoc fecit" as a disruptive presence – neither rhyming,
nor coupled, unattached, a signifier floating more than ever since Linda Seidel
unmoored it from the heroic narrative of the solitary artist. Who speaks these
words? Would Christ interrupt Himself in thundering his leonine rhyme? The time
and place of the speaking remains open-ended, blurring distinctions of the
here-and-now and the hereafter, stretching across past time and future time,
sustaining multiple states of being. The Gislebertus inscription bridges words
and worlds, collapsing human and divine time and space, and offering immediacy
through the knowledge and insistence of its own heavy making.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .25in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">CONCLUSION<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">These two brief excurses
around inscriptions that speak (to) the making of their objects seek to expand our
understanding of the artistic process in medieval art, not just in the act of
creation, but in the lasting fascination with <u>making</u> and <u>becoming</u>.
Inscriptions keep works of art "in progress" – they keep the act of
making current and perpetual through their evocations of what I have called "fluid
ontologies," those identities and states of becoming (of artist, audience,
and art object) that gather around matter as it coalesces into event. In
articulating the ideas of "material ecocriticism," Serenella Iovino
and Serpil Opperman look to matter as a site of entanglement between what has
been kept separate as the human and the non-human (building on the work of
ecocriticism that seeks to undo the damaging binary of nature and culture). The
gold, enamel, rock crystal, and limestone we have been discussing this morning constitute
what Iovino and Opperman call "storied matter" – an "interchange
of organic and inorganic matter, the continuity of human and nonhuman forces,
and the interplay of bodily natures, all forming active composites." (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Material Ecocriticism</i>, 21). When, in the
solitude of his study, the bishop picks up his golden, enameled <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">aestel</i> encased in rock crystal and feels
the edges of the letters of its inscription in his palm, he engages the king's
favor, his own religious knowledge, and an intimacy with materials that join in
the concerted effort of <u>making</u> him (into) a reader. When, in the narrow,
crowded viewing space of the tympanum of Autun, the pilgrim looks up to the
bodies of souls yearning within stone and hears the inscriptions read aloud to
the community around her, she becomes entangled in the time and place of the
here-and-now and the hereafter, her own knowledge of Heaven and Hell made vivid
by weighty stone, and the potentiality of her <u>being</u> in salvation. "Storied
matter," here as highlighted by inscriptions but with a multiplicity of
possible applications to works of art, has great potential for art history in
the Material Turn, as the field opens up the concept of making to include the "shared
becoming" of artist, audience, and art.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Anne F. Harrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09817277664812733936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4547316294063297137.post-33309640176779579982015-03-24T16:08:00.001-04:002015-03-24T16:22:04.696-04:00On the Non-Mimetic Representation of NatureYou'll want to start with the evocative synopsis that <a href="http://stevementz.com/transition-scale-and-catastrophe-gw-memsi-32015/" target="_blank">Steve Mentz shares</a> of "Transition, Scale, and Catastrophe."<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-LT4wsjl_Vx4/VRG0qRp8A7I/AAAAAAAABEA/ESSj4KHITuo/s1600/3-24HandPrints.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-LT4wsjl_Vx4/VRG0qRp8A7I/AAAAAAAABEA/ESSj4KHITuo/s1600/3-24HandPrints.jpg" height="200" width="156" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px; text-align: center;">Borneo, Indonesia<br />
40,000 years ago</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Of the many memories entangling <a href="http://www.brooklyn.cuny.edu/web/academics/faculty/faculty_profile.jsp?faculty=675" target="_blank">Karl Steel</a> with oysters, <a href="http://english.uoregon.edu/profile/slemen" target="_blank">Stephanie LeMenager</a> with graphic novels, <a href="http://www.lynntomlinson.com/" target="_blank">Lynn Tomlinson</a> with Holland Island House, myself with Holbein's <i>Ambassadors</i>, <a href="http://stevementz.com/" target="_blank">Steve Mentz</a> with the Shipwreck of <i>The Amsterdam</i>, and <a href="http://www.uta.edu/english/alaimo/" target="_blank">Stacy Alaimo</a> with deep sea creatures, the recurrent problem / impulse / vortex / pleasure / challenge of <i>REPRESENTATION</i> continues to work away in both my sleeping and waking thoughts. My dreams have been vivid of late, perhaps because of multiple transitions (we leave tomorrow for the <a href="https://www.mahsonline.org/docs/FinalConferenceProgramAbstracts2015.pdf" target="_blank">Midwest Art History Society conference</a> in Minneapolis, for example), more likely because all of the entities I mention above had lives of their own in the beautiful writing of their thinkers. Oysters reached for shipwrecks and deep sea creatures, ambassadors in exile for sinking houses and graphic novels - and every kind of vice versa and combination thereof that emerged (and continues to emerge) from the ideas of each and all: the bare life and barely life of oysters; the no words and species feeling of graphic novels and art in space; the perpetual becoming and undoing of a house represented in clay on glass; the melancholy of mimesis, not just for the ambassadors; the acts and words and images of living in, not just or necessarily through, the shipwreck; the simultaneous discovery and destruction of deep sea life. These are the entities that keep coming together to ask insistently: and so how will you represent us? Not here, not in a blog post, or now - but <i>as a practice</i>. Our day keeps making me think of the mimetic modes of representation of (what has quite possibly become a separate realm precisely <i>through</i> these modes!) of nature (or Nature, or the natural world, or what we keep calling all of these things that exist in perspectival continuity and rupture with the human). And so, some specific challenges:<br />
<br />
<b>1) To think and represent non-mimetically.</b> To <i>not</i> assume perceptual continuity between myself and what is presented to me visually about a realm dubbed separate and natural. To look for what Steve Mentz called "mimetic breaks" - those moments when the oyster recedes from my perception and use into its own murky depths; those moments when I'm not sure what I'm seeing (as happened in Lynn's marvelous film, or Stephanie's descriptions of <a href="http://futurecoast.org/" target="_blank">FutureCoast</a>); those moments not safeguarded by what Stacy called "guiltless wonder." But instead, a way of seeing what has been called nature as hovering between the recognizable and the unrecognizable. Why on earth would this be productive, or even do-able, you ask? Because mimesis, the imitation of the visual world, exercises a control we have come to believe is real and absolute. Mimesis is marvelous (any detail of <i>The Ambassadors</i> can still send me); and mimesis is dangerous (it is an illusion of the perceptual world that we have taken as a reality). And so, I feel this call to think non-mimetically, or (as I tried to do in "Anamorphic Reach)" to think <i>beyond</i> mimesis. Right now, it's the handprints of Paleolithic cave painting that are opening up possibilities for me: perhaps because of their immediacy - these are not images that are mimetic <i>of</i> hands, these are images <i>by</i> hands: they acknowledge human intervention, they mark it and keep it, and sing of the meeting of human flesh and lithic surface mediated by paint. They witness <i>contact</i> as much as (more than?) representation; they are the traces of an entanglement between human and environment.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-1WwoJ6b8OBk/VRG_LyttG0I/AAAAAAAABEQ/hRS7psbZlUg/s1600/3-24GreeMan.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-1WwoJ6b8OBk/VRG_LyttG0I/AAAAAAAABEQ/hRS7psbZlUg/s1600/3-24GreeMan.jpg" height="128" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Green Man, Norwich Cathedral</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
The fluid ontologies of the Green Man, and many an image that falls outside the Western project of verisimilitude, could join this fray. Their fantasies, their narratives, their frights, their pleasures. We can continue seeking those moments when perspective and mimesis are not assured, when the human is de-centered, when the transition between human and environment is blurred, when we're just not sure. There was a strong appeal, all day during our day together, to a critical examination of narrative and mimesis both as <i>relational modes. </i>So to seek or create narratives with a narrative voice diffused over time, space, and/or subjectivities. To seek, as I will keep trying to do, mimesis that shifts the relation of human to environment from one of control to one of contact (and disorientation, and lost objectivity).<br />
<br />
<b>2) To think about the politics of non-mimetic representation.</b> Stacy's words continue to challenge me on this. Because in the disorientations of non-mimetic representation, might we not lose coherence altogether? Coherence needed for political action, for environmental policy, for <i>actions</i> in the world? This becomes the challenge, too, for me: how to do the important work of displacing human exploitation while asserting human stewardship. Stacy presented moments when fantasy narrative ("Jellyfish Gone Wild!" if you can believe it) meets scientific purpose (the connection between climate change and jellyfish swarms) at the <a href="http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/jellyfish/" target="_blank">National Science Foundation</a>. This entangled narrative/scientific mode is new - artists like Lynn are both in <i>and</i> representing unchartered waters. Her film thinks through rising sea levels from the point of view of a house abandoned and submerged. I've recently come to know the images of artist <a href="http://www.chrisjordan.com/gallery/rtn2/#bees" target="_blank">Chris Jordan</a>, which begin with the mimesis of a narrative or art image, and end in the objecthood of climate change - the incredible transition in scale culminates in the numbers of our environmental catastrophes. And please, <a href="http://www.lynntomlinson.com/recent/#/holland-island-house/" target="_blank">look at Lynn's film</a>, and please click on Chris's images (several of them!), and let's start thinking together about moving through mimetic breaks. Mimetic breakthroughs?<br />
<br />
World enough and time, I would ask here about the <i>non</i>-representation of nature. I would ask about the points of contact between human and environment in my dear friend's garden in Brittany - about labor and thought and materiality. And then I'd want to ask about the mimetic impulse of all the times his garden has been photographed and awarded; about the pull to narrative, to allegory even!, that his garden provokes. I could loop back to oysters and shipwrecks and ask again. But soon we leave, and so there's dinner and packing, and what has been deemed a necessary screening of at least a couple of episodes of <i>The Mary Tyler Moore Show</i> for the children's Minneapolis preparation. Onwards to other images always.Anne F. Harrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09817277664812733936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4547316294063297137.post-15397802627116935582015-03-18T13:35:00.001-04:002015-03-23T13:29:58.868-04:00Anamorphic Reach<div style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><br />
<br />
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-VFcwDVlVzYY/VQm3RI5TUTI/AAAAAAAABBE/OkNOIRZ2Mug/s1600/holbein-ambassadorsHUGE.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-VFcwDVlVzYY/VQm3RI5TUTI/AAAAAAAABBE/OkNOIRZ2Mug/s1600/holbein-ambassadorsHUGE.jpg" height="200" width="199" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><div>
<span style="font-size: small;">Hans Holbein. <i>The Ambassadors</i> </span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: small;">Oil on oak panel, 1533. </span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: small;">National Gallery, London.</span></div>
</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: xx-small; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: JA; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;">With all the thanks in the world to Jeffrey Cohen, to mathematician Christian Hoffland for consultation and companionship (and a smashing handout), and to those who shared their energy and the day at the "<a href="http://www.gwmemsi.com/2015/02/symposium-transition-scale-and.html" target="_blank">Transition, Scale, and Catastrophe</a>" Symposium at George Washington University</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: xx-small; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: JA; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: xx-small; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: JA; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;">This
is some of what we know of the painting. That the year was 1533, that it was
spring, that it was England, and that it was cold. That Jean de Dinteville, a
French ambassador to Henry VIII's court, commissioned the painting, and that
work on it was begun during the visit of de Dinteville's "intimate
friend" ("ami intime"), Georges de Selves, a bishop and himself sometimes
ambassador to the papal court in Rome; that after de Selves's departure, de
Dinteville described himself in a letter to his brother as "the most
melancholy, weary, and wearisome of ambassadors" ("le plus
mélancholique, fasché et fascheux ambassadeur"). That de Dinteville
commissioned the artist Hans Holbein to paint the picture during an embassy prompted
by the divorce of Henry VIII from Catherine of Aragon, and subsequent marriage
to Anne Boleyn, an embassy prolonged by the announcement of the new queen's
pregnancy. That the slashing shape in the bottom of the painting corrects to a
perceptible image if you look at it from a disorienting point of view. That the
instruments on the table chart time and space according to the sun and stars; that
the lute has a broken string; that the books represent actual publications of
the 1520s; that the floor replicates the mosaics of Westminster Abbey, and that
there is a small silver crucifix in the upper left corner.</span><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-oh00oSmC4Ow/VQ1nfpvc9tI/AAAAAAAABBs/I5YDX48MLss/s1600/Holbein_age_Dinteville.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-oh00oSmC4Ow/VQ1nfpvc9tI/AAAAAAAABBs/I5YDX48MLss/s1600/Holbein_age_Dinteville.JPG" height="110" width="200" /></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The painting is full of information. For
art historian Keith Moxey, the painting's crisp and relentless verisimilitude make
the painting emblematic of what he calls the "mimetic impulse"
thriving in the transition between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. This
compulsion to imitate, this fascination with a seemingly "naturalized"
(possible, recognizable, continuous) representation of reality has long had a
champion in perspective as the key mathematical tool needed to snap the picture
plane into coherence and correspondence with our own. The painting's scale
(6'9" by 6'10") and the placement of its persons and objects in its
mathematically lucid perspective (including the shifts necessary for the anamorphic
image to resolve into something recognizable to human perception) compel our
fascination to <i>know</i>, to decipher, and
otherwise figure out and, through our interpretation, master the seemingly naturalized,
viable reality so carefully and possibly laid out before us.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br /></span><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-78aNWnGyISs/VQ1nvQkQlrI/AAAAAAAABB0/6vM7OphRGTw/s1600/Holbein_Ambassadors_Lute.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-78aNWnGyISs/VQ1nvQkQlrI/AAAAAAAABB0/6vM7OphRGTw/s1600/Holbein_Ambassadors_Lute.jpg" height="180" width="200" /></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: xx-small; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: JA; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;">And so
scholars have plotted and calculated and charted and corresponded with the
painting. Jurgis Baltrusaitis's book on <i>Anamorphic
Art</i> devotes an entire chapter to Holbein's <i>Ambassadors</i> and works out the measurements of the shifts in scale and
perspective provoked by the pull of the anamorphic perspective; Elly Dekker and
Kristen Lippincott have calculated the precise places and times projected by
both the terrestrial and celestial globes, the pillar dial, the universal
equinoctial dial, the horary quadrant, the polyhedral dial, and the torquetum; the
restoration team of the National Gallery, led by Martin Wyld, was able to cite
the specific edition of the Lutheran hymnal open on the bottom ledge, as well
as the page that the <i>Merchants'
Arithmetic</i> book is open to; having assembled clues indicating the picture was
painted on Good Friday, April 11, 1533, John David North argues for a
correspondence between Holbein and none other than Geoffrey Chaucer, whose
Parsons' Tale Prologue provides the astronomical information needed for North
to find the date of April 16, that of the Good Friday of 1400, the year of
Chaucer's death. </span><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Obw5T1K3m2U/VQ1oer7kdCI/AAAAAAAABCA/SB6x2e22_ZI/s1600/Holbein_Skull_corrected.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Obw5T1K3m2U/VQ1oer7kdCI/AAAAAAAABCA/SB6x2e22_ZI/s1600/Holbein_Skull_corrected.jpg" height="196" width="200" /></a><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;">The painting's information
has the potential to fix it into a "right" interpretation. But the
painting resists with a series of assertions that don't "make sense":
the gnomons on the instruments all point to different spaces and times,
breaking up the possibility of spatial and temporal coherence; some shadows
project right, while others project left; the painted skull's slash causes it
to hover between representational depth and representational surface in one
bold mathematical stroke; de Dinteville asks his brother to keep George de
Selves's visit a secret, all the while that Holbein's preparatory drawings are
becoming the monumental painting we see today. And so we come to a standstill
when it comes to what we know of the painting. It is replete with information,
but information that folds back on itself to produce a wildly varying scale of
interpretation, from portraiture to alchemy, from the rise of humanism to the
Fall of Man. And so, the more you know </span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;">about</i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;">
the painting, the less you know where to look </span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;">within</i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;"> it for meaning; the less you 're sure what the painting is
about, the more you approach Jacques Lacan's claim, in his discussion of
anamorphosis and </span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;">The Ambassadors</i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;">,
that "painting… is first of all something that is organized around emptiness"
(136). In creating a "window" onto another world, perspective empties
out and negates the material support of the painting (its frame, its paint) in
favor of a spatial depth that is continuous with and </span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;">projected to be controlled by </i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;">the human imagination (this is how
Erwin Panofsky, in </span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;">Perspective as
Symbolic Form</i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;"> can simultaneously discuss the "rise" of humanism,
perspective, and landscape painting; this is how we might start to think of the
role of mimetic visual representation in our continuing ecological crisis;
beware the mimesis of the nature documentary). Anamorphic perspective (in its
disturbance of the depth of linear perspective) reveals this depth to be
constructed, to be empty, a human fantasy of continuity and control, willfully ignorant
of the life and agency of the representational realm. For Jean-François
Lyotard, the anamorphosis of </span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;">The
Ambassadors </i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;">exists as nothing less than an "ontological act,"</span><b style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;"> </b><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;">a coming-into-being of the skull, as
the viewer moves to the point of perception, an explosion of representation, and
a chance for the catastrophe of death (as both human and beyond-human) to "speak"
and act.</span><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-gghYzqeBZ1A/VQ1ox3gGd7I/AAAAAAAABCI/kj3i5nQJlfs/s1600/Tomlinson_HollandHouse_BirdsEyeView.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-gghYzqeBZ1A/VQ1ox3gGd7I/AAAAAAAABCI/kj3i5nQJlfs/s1600/Tomlinson_HollandHouse_BirdsEyeView.png" height="111" width="200" /></a><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span><br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;">In its undoings of the
expectations of constructed naturalism, I see </span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;">The Ambassadors</i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;"> in conversation with </span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;">The Ballad of Holland Island House</i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;"> by Lynn Tomlinson. In the shifts
of scales and perspectives, the multiplicity of non-human points of view, and
the revelations of and revels in realms that exist beyond human presence, these
two assemblages of images ask us to think with them beyond human perception,
into what I will call the "anamorphic reach," </span><u style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;">a representational
mode that pulls the human towards the non-human</u><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;">, towards those objects and
entities whose agency is occluded by the rationalized fantasy of perspective. From
the opening "bird's eye view" shot of </span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;">The Ballad of Holland Island House</i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;"> to its closing images depicting the
house refracted through water, Lynn's images, and method of pulling images into
being through clay, manipulates perspective and challenges perception. The
anamorphic reach of </span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;">The Ballad of Holland
Island House</i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;">, like that of Holbein's </span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;">Ambassadors</i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;">,
displaces human perception, and questions human mastery and knowledge.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;"><b><br /></b></span>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;"><b>What does this painting know?</b></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: JA; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: JA; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;">Wendy
Wheeler ends her marvelous essay, "Natural Play, Natural Metaphor, Natural
Stories," with a question that <i>Holland
Island House</i> and the <i>Ambassadors</i>
have been waiting for us to ask: "What does this painting <i>know</i>?" If we are to follow the anamorphic
reach of these images, we must try to give up interpretive control from the
human point of view. Wheeler continues, "This assumption, that the work is
like an organism that knows something – no matter how potentially alien the
knowing belonging to this way of life – is the <i>productive</i> question, the question that might bear fruit, because it
recognizes that the work has a life of its own, that minds and knowledges are
not confined to humans, and that we can (and perhaps should) get into
conversation and relationship with <i>all</i>
the life and mindedness we encounter around and about us, whatever form it
takes." (from <i>Material Ecocriticisms</i>;
ed. Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann. Indiana University Press, 2014: 78).</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;">And so, we will strive for
mingled epistemologies: there is what we know of the painting, and there is what
the painting knows (and perhaps even knows of us). Knowledge can here in other
settings than the disembodied, rationalized Cartesian mind, and I would like to
reach for three: it can be impressed, witnessed, and contained in </span><u style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;">materials</u><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;">;
it can be tracked and followed, letting the painting take the lead, as </span><u style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;">perspective</u><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;">;
and, most speculatively, the "life and mindedness" of the painting
can be projected in the </span><u style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;">melancholy</u><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;"> that surrounds it.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;"><b><br /></b></span>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;">Materials</b></div>
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-xvwarWntlsc/VQ6za_DY07I/AAAAAAAABCg/xpeD-srEKmM/s1600/Holbein_Ambassadors_XRay.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-indent: 48px;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-xvwarWntlsc/VQ6za_DY07I/AAAAAAAABCg/xpeD-srEKmM/s1600/Holbein_Ambassadors_XRay.png" height="196" width="200" /></a><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span>
The materials of </span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;">The Ambassadors</i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;"> announced themselves to
the restoration team of the National Gallery in London from 1993 to 1996. Under
X-rays and cleaning solvents, the painting became another kind of object: ten
planks of oak covered in a mid-grey priming adorned with patterns of linseed
oil mixed with pigments and small traces of gold. Dendrochronological analysis
of the wood locates it to the Baltic-Polish region and asserts 1524 as its
earliest felling date. The knowledge of human agency (whether it was Holbein or
de Dinteville or someone else entirely who insisted on importing the oak) is
lost, but the knowledge of the tree, its travails and travels across land and
water to reach England, is apparent. The Baltic oak was a sought-after hardwood,
strong and enduring; equally telling of the luxury of the painting it would
become, and of an emerging ecological catastrophe. The extensive deforestations
of England, analyzed in relation to artistic production in Vin Nardizzi's book </span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;">Wooden Os; Shakespeare's Theatres and England's
Trees</i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;">, had already begun, and this Baltic cousin of the English oak had
come to stand in for its kindred. Felled in 1524 for a 1533 painting, the oak
was young in the guise of wood and plank, but old as a tree. Its knowledge is
of multiple states of being: seed, tree, wood, plank, panel, painting – each
producing molecular changes, some revealing that the painting existed in a
flooded room at one time, all shifting the structure and function of the lignin
that had carried water from its roots to its leaves, and now seasons into its strength.
It shares a kinship of endurance with the oak from which Holland Island House
was built in the early-to-mid-19</span><sup style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;">th</sup><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;"> century, when the nearby
Chesapeake Forest flourished with oak and maple trees. Oak regeneration efforts
today led by the organization Forestry for the Bay speak to the continuing
mingled narrative of human and arboreal ecologies, the ebb and flow of human
exploitation and sylvan resurgence.</span><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-USMmvoWGd2I/VQ61c_M4DLI/AAAAAAAABCs/5TGqJCES6xU/s1600/Globe.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-USMmvoWGd2I/VQ61c_M4DLI/AAAAAAAABCs/5TGqJCES6xU/s1600/Globe.png" height="200" width="190" /></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br /></span>
The wood of the painting knows (it re-members)
its own ecological crisis of being felled. Every work of art is a re-membered
ecological crisis. It also knows the variant scales of the ecological
precariousness of England and the individual desire of its patron for a luxury hardwood.
Its materials witness extended histories and ephemeral moments both. It is as
well versed in molecules as it is in mimesis. In a mingled materiality lost to
measure, the painting bears the molecular traces of de Dinteville in the melancholic
sighs he expelled near the painting, as he gazed upon the countenance of his departed
friend and contemplated the months of his exile, drawn-out by Anne Boleyn's
pregnancy. The air around the painting, as its linseed oil took its days to dry
into the wood, may have been disturbed by the fluttering wings of the mosquito
carrying the parasite that would infect de Dinteville with a tertian fever,
whose torments de Dinteville would detail in the May 1533 letter to his brother
that disclosed de Selve's visit. The molecules of sighs and the air disturbed
by mosquito wings are not the stuff of history from a human point of view: they
cannot be measured or proven, plotted or fixed within a linear perspective;
they <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">are</i>, instead, the stuff of
anamorphic reach.</span><br />
<b><br /></b>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>Perspective</b></div>
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;">From a literal, figurative,
allegorical, and moral point of view, the anamorphic skull of </span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;">The Ambassadors</i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;"> is a catastrophe. A "strophe"
was originally the structural division of a poem, as denoted primarily by the right
to left movement of ancient Greek choruses on the stage. Simplified through
use, it means to turn. The Greek suffix "cata- takes us downward, or
against, it makes the turn a downturn. The anamorphic skull positions us to
look downwards if we are to see it as an image, if we are to recognize, even
briefly, its mimetic mastery. I invite you now to participate in the
perspectival displacement that the skull provokes. You will need to shift your
approach from the usual perpendicular one with which we approach almost all of
our images, to a lateral one. At this point, I recommend pulling your piece of
paper taut, with your right hand towards your body and your left hand out
before you – you need a flat surface that won't buckle (those of you who prefer
to do this on your smart phones will have the solidity, you'll have to cope
with the glare on your screen). You can now seek the point at which the two-dimensional
anamorphic slash resolves into a mimetically three-dimensional skull. It helps
to close your right eye, to shutter your human perception of three dimensions
and flatten your perception to that of the painting's two dimensions. Once you
"have" it (and go ahead and enjoy the cognitive thrill of seeing the
image resolve), you can move vertically up and down the plane and see the skull
distort downward as you move up and upwards as you move down; if you move
horizontally, you will see the skull experience much less change. This is
because, in anamorphic perspective, the axes of vision are independent of each
other, whereas they remain in proportion in linear perspective.</span><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/--JdA-uO53Jo/VQ61ranUTxI/AAAAAAAABC0/SKrsLImSfyY/s1600/AnamorphicPerspectiveNiceron.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/--JdA-uO53Jo/VQ61ranUTxI/AAAAAAAABC0/SKrsLImSfyY/s1600/AnamorphicPerspectiveNiceron.png" height="146" width="200" /></a><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;">Holbein performed his
anamorphic perspective after Leon Battista Alberti (in 1435) and Albrecht Dürer
(in the 1520s) had theorized linear perspective, but well before Jean-François Niceron,
and other early modern mathematicians had theorized anamorphic perspective in
the 1640s. The anamorphic perspective of </span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;">The
Ambassadors</i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;"> is simple compared to the extrapolations along </span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;">multiple</i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;"> planes in works such as this
one by Niceron in which faces of Turkish men coalesce into a portrait of
Ferdinand II, Grand Duke of Tuscany, when seen through a glass cylinder prism
(lost from the Museo Gallileo in Florence after a 1966 flood).</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: JA; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: JA; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;">But I
prize the relative simplicity of Holbein's anamorphic perspective because it
demonstrates how quickly our perception can be disoriented and unsettled, and
how symbiotic we become with the painting in our efforts to reorient ourselves.
The painting <i>draws us near</i> with its
anamorphic perspective; it <i>knows</i> our
desire to perceive, and displaces us from our usual point of mastery
perpendicular to its representation plane, to a lateral point of physical and,
given time and contemplation, emotional intimacy. The catastrophe of death is
disorienting, and we might be tempted to wrench ourselves away, back to
perpendicular mastery and away from the perils of anamorphic perspective. But
if we linger, if we stay disoriented and marginal, in transition between two
and three dimensions, moving between the outsized scale of the anamorphic
skull, and the proportional scale of the corrected image, we might start to ask
about the anamorphic skull's point of view, about what the painting would look
like if the skull was the originating point of perspective. This is at once a tremendous
mathematical challenge (lines would have to be redrawn and pulled), an epistemological
one (objects and persons would be unrecognizable to themselves from the point
of view of death), and perhaps even an ontological one (how <i>do</i> the dead, the inanimate, perceive and
experience the living? How, building on the work of Ian Bogost in <i>Alien Phenomenology</i> and W.J.T. Mitchell's
<i>What Do Pictures Want?</i>, might we visually
theorize them doing so?).</span><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-HIwPVTX2jiA/VQ612V_F1KI/AAAAAAAABC8/xFPRK0e4-eM/s1600/Tomlinson_HollandHouse_Graves.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-HIwPVTX2jiA/VQ612V_F1KI/AAAAAAAABC8/xFPRK0e4-eM/s1600/Tomlinson_HollandHouse_Graves.png" height="111" width="200" /></a><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Towards
the end of </span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">The Ballad of Holland Island
House</i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">, Lynn Tomlinson takes us to the vanishing point of human perception,
as the house and the graves become the only occupants of the island. The dead
and the inanimate</span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"> take the perspectival
vanishing point with them</i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"> as they plunge into the depth of the image, and
the thickness of its clay. In this still from earlier in the film, the house's
perception frames the scene, accompanied by the words, "I watched as they
worked on the water." The scene that is murky to the human eye is clear
and recognizable to the house. Lynn has not anthropomorphized the house's gaze
here; rather, in this image, we have the rare opportunity to see a work of art
perceiving another work art. </span><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-0focNmwYDHQ/VQ62y3qgSaI/AAAAAAAABDM/JqU1moOpkUA/s1600/Tomlinson_HollandHouse_Fishermen.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-0focNmwYDHQ/VQ62y3qgSaI/AAAAAAAABDM/JqU1moOpkUA/s1600/Tomlinson_HollandHouse_Fishermen.png" height="112" width="200" /></a><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">The scene of the fishermen that the house is
watching is pulled from an 1885 painting by Winslow Homer entitled </span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/25865" target="_blank">The Herring Net</a></i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"> now at the Art Institute
of Chicago. What does it mean for one work of art to know another? The
anamorphic reach of </span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">The Ballad of Holland
Island House</i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"> to </span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">The Herring Net</i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">
is practiced in the visual forms that Lynn refashions and retools, the curve of
the boat, the cascade of wriggling fish. A work of art knows another through
the practice and repetition of its forms. The life of forms is present in the
anamorphic reach.</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tN4u0hyoXFE/VQ62jE4XH3I/AAAAAAAABDE/qPHs7y5ba9k/s1600/Du%CC%88rer_Melancholia_I.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tN4u0hyoXFE/VQ62jE4XH3I/AAAAAAAABDE/qPHs7y5ba9k/s1600/Du%CC%88rer_Melancholia_I.jpg" height="200" width="156" /></a></span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span>
Scholars have long heralded
the correspondences of </span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;">The Ambassadors</i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;">
with Albrecht Dürer's 1514 engraving, </span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;">Melancolia
I</i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;">, noting the presence of measuring tools, musical instruments, and
mathematical calculations to be made, but only in terms of influence. We can think,
instead, of the life of forms practiced and repeated, polyhedrons and spheres
drawn again, numerals and manipulated perspectives amplified, brooding and
melancholy revisited.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;"><b><br /></b></span>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;"><b>Melancholy</b></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: JA; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: JA; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;">I am
pulled to take melancholy seriously not only by de Dinteville's
self-identification as "the most melancholic ambassador," but also by
experiencing the pull of anamorphic perspective as a temporal one: the painting
knows melancholy through time. De Dinteville was not just being rhetorical:
melancholy, already in his age, was perceived as a veritable epidemic, a
disease to be analyzed and understood, as Robert Burton would seek to do in
1621 in his monumental <i>Anatomy of
Melancholy</i>. The "Author's Abstract of Melancholy" at the
beginning of this volume interweaves the multiple ways that time can pass
(fleetingly, slowly, in joy, in sorrow, in Paradise). The painting knows
melancholy because it has been a persistent witness to time and in time – and in
this once again joins Holland Island House. <i>The
Ambassadors</i>' coming into being itself could be characterized as de Dinteville
and de Selves "killing time," waiting for Anne Boleyn's pregnancy to
come to term, which it would do only in September of 1533. Eight years later, in 1541, the painting would
come to know de Dinteville mourning de Selve's death; it would now contain and
project both memory and melancholy. His family having weathered a sodomy
scandal and a treason accusation, Jean de Dinteville himself would die in 1555
at his home in Polisy, France, where <i>The
Ambassadors</i> had also taken up residence, never having been married and with
no direct heir, initiating the painting's long trajectory from this Burgundian
region to the de Cessac property in the south of France in 1653, to Paris in
1787, to England in 1792, to the castle of the Earl of Radnor in 1808, and finally
to the National Gallery in 1890, a steady series of lawsuits and ownership
struggles trailing in its temporal and spatial wake.</span><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-j4MEALMUiao/VQ63IPjnRCI/AAAAAAAABDU/iAMFlNxAKkA/s1600/TordesillasLine.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-j4MEALMUiao/VQ63IPjnRCI/AAAAAAAABDU/iAMFlNxAKkA/s1600/TordesillasLine.png" height="200" width="197" /></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: xx-small; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: JA; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: JA; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: JA; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: JA; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: JA; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: JA; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;">Multiple
scales of melancholy exist in the passage of time witnessed by the painting,
and our time together draws short, so I will end with the painting's melancholic
knowledge of catastrophe ranging across a tremendously variable scale. Upon the
terrestrial globe, which is turned here for our legibility but requires human
viewers to disorient their gaze to read, a line stretches thinly across the
Atlantic Ocean, up the west coast of Africa and down the east coast of what is
now known as South America. Identified as "Linea Divisionis Castellanoru
et Portugallen," this fine line demarcates the division of New World
territories between Spain and Portugal as decreed in the Treaty of Tordesillas
of 1494, and sanctioned by Pope Julius II in 1506. This first cut of the ocean,
this first etching upon the globe presages unprecedented scales of conquest and
crisis, it signals the transition to the New World, and it persists as silent
witness on an intimate scale of the soon-to-come ecological catastrophe of
empire, and the continuing ecological crisis of globalization. In the pristine
and exact line of the Treasty of Tordesillas, I find the melancholy of mimesis:
the resolute and precise representation of reality coupled with the desire of
erasure, of representing a different world.</span><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-OVKIN5GnK0k/VQ63R7M61xI/AAAAAAAABDc/vP0fdmI4jq4/s1600/HolbeinAmbassadors.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-OVKIN5GnK0k/VQ63R7M61xI/AAAAAAAABDc/vP0fdmI4jq4/s1600/HolbeinAmbassadors.jpg" height="198" width="200" /></a><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><br /></span></i>
<i style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><br /></span></i>
The
Ambassadors</span></i><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #222222; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;"> and<i>
The Ballad of Holland Island House</i> each know melancholy <i>as</i> objects
that exist in time: from its wall in the National Gallery, <i>The Ambassadors</i> continues to reside in perpetual witness; in the
digital realm, <i>The Ballad of Holland
Island House </i>perpetually<i> </i>flows
through forms. Simultaneously, they project the melancholy <i>of</i> their represented objects in multiple temporal directions and on
a wild variation of scale (the past, present and future of de Dinteville and de
Selves as well as the fantasy and empire of a New World; the future that awaits
the Holland Island House, increasingly difficult for humans to perceive, as the
sea continues to rise above it). </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;">In
these intermingled ontologies and epistemologies, we can ask what the work of
art <i>and any other environment we can
perceive</i> knows. The answers will be anamorphic and elusive, fluctuating in
and out of coherence. And while </span><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #222222; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;">there is a profound melancholy in the vastness that
lies beyond human perception, the desire to understand and shift and change
thrives in the anamorphic reach that continuously pulls us beyond ourselves.</span></div>
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Anne F. Harrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09817277664812733936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4547316294063297137.post-32505492238122853092015-02-05T09:46:00.000-05:002015-02-05T13:53:56.257-05:00Biochemistry So Far<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-5W67ubE52Rs/VNNw00P3pEI/AAAAAAAAA-k/JihNNPrsoZA/s1600/2-5UrineChart.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-5W67ubE52Rs/VNNw00P3pEI/AAAAAAAAA-k/JihNNPrsoZA/s1600/2-5UrineChart.jpg" height="200" width="149" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ah yes, a urine chart</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
In the name of many things (curiosity, structure, new things, companionship, and a future project with a biochemist), I am taking CHEM 240: "Structure and Function of Molecules." I am storing away beautiful phrases: "the molecular logic of life," "biochemical unity," "chemical personality," and "stereochemistry." I am in love with new words: "zwitterion" (a molecule with two charged protons), "carboxy terminus" (the carbon end of an amino acid), and "nucleotides" (subunits of DNA). There is some irresponsible revelry here, some pure delight and fascination with form that has no understanding of content. But it's only been a week. Maybe I <i>will</i> memorize all twenty amino acids (Tryptophan is in the category of Aromatic - it's practically poetry), maybe I will understand pH balance and buffering ranges. I will certainly try. It's very interesting to learn something without immediate application. That sounds absurd because to almost anyone else, chemistry is the field of immediate application and art history is, well, not. But the future project mentioned above continues the challenge set forth by BABEL-Boston 2012 ("Cruising in the Ruins: the question of disciplinarity in the post/medieval university") to "<span style="background-color: #f9f7f5; color: #444444; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.0049991607666px; text-align: justify;">re-sound our disciplinary wells, while also, inevitably, </span><em style="background-color: #f9f7f5; color: #444444; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.0049991607666px; text-align: justify;">bumping into</em><span style="background-color: #f9f7f5; color: #444444; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.0049991607666px; text-align: justify;"> each other and occasionally </span><em style="background-color: #f9f7f5; color: #444444; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.0049991607666px; text-align: justify;">hooking up</em><span style="background-color: #f9f7f5; color: #444444; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.0049991607666px; text-align: justify;">, like </span><a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/democritus/" style="background-color: #f9f7f5; color: #4265a7; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 18.0049991607666px; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none;">Democritus</a><span style="background-color: #f9f7f5; color: #444444; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.0049991607666px; text-align: justify;">’s atoms." </span>Oh man, I love this call so much, here's more: "<span style="background-color: #f9f7f5; color: #444444; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.0049991607666px; text-align: justify;">Holding on to our disciplinary objects and methods and ways of knowing, while also keeping them open to futurity and the surprise of the stranger, let’s </span><em style="background-color: #f9f7f5; color: #444444; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.0049991607666px; text-align: justify;">cruise</em><span style="background-color: #f9f7f5; color: #444444; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.0049991607666px; text-align: justify;"> each other. Let’s swerve, without steering, through the movement-filled “void” that is the university, cyberspace, society, the world. Atoms, monads, particles, singularities, seeds, souls, kernels, cells, events, appearances — gathering in molecules, crowds, assemblages, drifts, swarms, parliaments, strikes, clouds, hives, cascades, collisions, waves, one-night stands, spontaneous acts of metempsychosis, a fine spray of perfume through the atomizer, hanging in the night air." </span><a href="http://babel-meeting.org/2012-meeting/" target="_blank">Here's the full call</a> if you want to have a great day/life.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-te7VeS0C3so/VNN1Exn4OOI/AAAAAAAAA-w/Xo2uLCmiqKI/s1600/2-5UrineChartFoldable.gif" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-te7VeS0C3so/VNN1Exn4OOI/AAAAAAAAA-w/Xo2uLCmiqKI/s1600/2-5UrineChartFoldable.gif" height="200" width="190" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This one folds up for easy referral</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
So I'm working with this biochemist on a paper on (for now let's say) the limits of perception and the strategies for seeing what we can't see. There's a range of possibilities from metaphor to the mesoscale (which you can size up <a href="http://www.mesoscope.org/home" target="_blank">here</a>, and is well explained <a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v421/n6921/full/nature01404.html" target="_blank">here</a>). For now, though, I am seeing all sorts of new things. I feel the world revealed. I understand much better why my dad died so soon after he stopped drinking water (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Chatelier%27s_principle" target="_blank">Le Chatelier's Principle</a> (lovely phrase, isn't it? assuages the fear of our fragility) helped me see how devastating the loss of equilibrium of water is to cell and then very quickly organ function), though he hadn't eaten food to speak of for weeks and weeks. When we worked through a case study of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renal_tubular_acidosis" target="_blank">Renal Tubular Acidosis</a> (to understand acids and bases), I better understood the delicate pH balance that must be maintained in the blood by the kidneys. I think about urine a surprising amount (it's used all the time to fix colors in medieval stained glass and, it turns out, in a lot of metalworking - and you bet I'll be asking the professor about what's going on there) and so perhaps it was inevitable that medieval urine charts came to mind, and have become my image for biochemistry right now. They're beautiful images in their shape and color variation, they're instantly recognizable though not necessarily easily decipherable, and they were used (the one pictured here folded into the stitching of its manuscript) as a means to understand what the body might be saying about its own demise. Plus, as my children pointed out, it looks like a decoding ring. There's a lot to that. Eventually I'll be writing a lot about proteins, but for now, there's one statement I keep turning over in my mind: with a protein function follows form (this is a neat reversal of the aesthetic principle, form follows function). A protein can have the <i>exact same genetic material</i> but if it folds differently than the way it is supposed to (if its form changes) its function changes dramatically (whereas you can change the form of a house lots of different ways, ask architectural history, and it's still a house). That fascinates me no end because proteins fold at mind-blowingly (not a scientific term) rapid speeds, and how do you track that kind of veering? Anne F. Harrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09817277664812733936noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4547316294063297137.post-88683484107599436762015-01-22T09:45:00.001-05:002015-01-22T10:21:34.355-05:00All Directions in Time<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-mXH9OnM451c/VMEHa0QGpPI/AAAAAAAAA9c/R66VdyI9UIs/s1600/HolbeinAmbassadors.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-mXH9OnM451c/VMEHa0QGpPI/AAAAAAAAA9c/R66VdyI9UIs/s1600/HolbeinAmbassadors.jpg" height="198" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Holbein's <i>Ambassadors</i>, 1533<br />
National Gallery, London</td></tr>
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This is a reality check post, a looking at the landscape post, a brief state of the work post. This is my first full year sabbatical and it is entering its second phase. The first was the no-sleep-'till-Brooklyn (or Paris) Paris five-month stay, and the second is the spring semester in my office processing it all. The fall produced a proposal for a collaborative project, two essays, a talk, and a mountain of photographs and exhibition catalogues from multiple multiple on-site and museum visits (The Haul). The spring calls forth four talks that will take me in four quite different directions (from agentic objects in Tolkien, to the materiality of artist inscriptions, to (the limits of) perception in Hans Holbein's <i>Ambassadors</i> in terms of scale, transition, and catastrophe, and back to art is Chaucer's dream visions). Three essays are due in September, also in three different directions (the iconography of narrative, the dream vision talk in essay form, and an exploration of the word "tend" in the context of <i><a href="http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2014/11/catching-up.html" target="_blank">Veer Ecology</a></i>). There's a book review to finish and an essay to revise in there. And an on-line course about manuscripts to follow. And a book project is taking shape in a one-step-forward, two-steps-back pace (but forward, and I'll be writing about it in pieces out here). And then I'd like to read everything and process images - always good for the design and redesign of classes.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-dKZ7q74XBbY/VMEKZfvya_I/AAAAAAAAA9o/NuzC6Gv2OG8/s1600/1-22Virgo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-dKZ7q74XBbY/VMEKZfvya_I/AAAAAAAAA9o/NuzC6Gv2OG8/s1600/1-22Virgo.jpg" height="183" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Virgo, from this lovely<br />
<a href="http://blog.metmuseum.org/cloistersgardens/2009/08/14/threshing-it-out/06v_09r-august_bttm_full/" target="_blank">page at the Met</a></td></tr>
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And so the inner virgo is out and about tidying things up and making calendars and generally feeling lucky and overwhelmed-but-with-the-luxury-of-time-all-is-possible. And most mornings, I feel as though I could take off in any number of directions, even though I have my little study schedule all written out; and most afternoons, I see where I might be going after all. All fall our mantra was "this is the chance of a lifetime" - and it was, never to be repeated, and (Iris counted) of the five months, we were home seven days. I realize that this stretch of time is the chance of a lifetime, too. Summers, inimitably inaugurated by the Kalamazoo conference, are stretches, but I haven't had time like this since I was a graduate student. Right now my response is to run in all directions within the existential freedom. I hope that I get more disciplined, but connecting Viollet-le-Duc to environmental activism, Holbein to early physics, and all the really interesting thinking about time (especially Dinshaw's <i>How Soon is Now?</i> and Moxey's <i>Visual Time</i> and all of the heterochronic questioning of Moxey and Wood and Nagel) makes it feel like the ideas are in charge, taking me from one place to the next. How something as basic and fundamental as time becomes a luxury is a process to trace: the resources that have to be put in place to "afford" the time - both absurd and privileged. (The impossibility of a "Right to Time" movement). Reading the news cycle going back through the lives of the Paris attackers, seeing a German right-wing organization head step down because of a Facebook post from 2012, thinking about the work of art history and medieval studies - time gets less linear all the time. Mostly my time is incredibly linear, lived within the forward march of the academic calendar. So here goes a 7 month experiment in living in non-linear time, really going deeper into work time via reading, thinking, and writing - I know that there will be products at the end, but I hope for some kind of strange effect upon my person as well.Anne F. Harrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09817277664812733936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4547316294063297137.post-77638999136416252132015-01-18T09:39:00.001-05:002015-01-18T16:47:57.088-05:00Viollet-le-Duc Wanted to Restore a Mountain<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-g5Kfc7xLe_k/VLutNLwiOLI/AAAAAAAAA8Q/lr_nIGIlULU/s1600/1-18MontBlancDrawings.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-g5Kfc7xLe_k/VLutNLwiOLI/AAAAAAAAA8Q/lr_nIGIlULU/s1600/1-18MontBlancDrawings.JPG" height="150" width="200" /></a></div>
Towards the end of his life, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Viollet-le-Duc" target="_blank">Viollet-le-Duc</a> (1814-1879) wrote an architectural study of the Mont-Blanc, a high peak of a massive mountain range that rears up to grip the borders of France, Switzerland, and Italy. He gathered the measurements and findings of eight summers of observations, over 500 drawings and sketches, and a lifetime of hiking into this <a href="http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5400922n.planchecontact.f6.langEN.vignettesnaviguer" target="_blank">marvelous work</a>, which sings with his precision and conviction. In these days, when everything is symptomatic of my most embroiled feelings about France, I can simultaneously marvel at the hubris of the project, and be moved almost to tears by his simple, poetic admission that "Nous sommes si petits." (<span style="color: #3d85c6;">"We are so very small."</span>) In these days, when I am thinking about scale on, well, multiple scales, and when I am fully engaged in the Counting Down of Days until the appearance of Jeffrey Cohen's much-anticipated book on <i><a href="https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/stone" target="_blank">Stone; an ecology of the inhuman</a></i>, a few minutes' foray into Viollet-le-Duc's calls out.<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-8_zO0bD-Los/VLu2USnSrCI/AAAAAAAAA8g/RAnsI5aeprM/s1600/1-18V-le-DCover.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-8_zO0bD-Los/VLu2USnSrCI/AAAAAAAAA8g/RAnsI5aeprM/s1600/1-18V-le-DCover.JPG" height="200" width="150" /></a></div>
The image above is from the fantastic, exhaustive, and beautifully documented <a href="http://www.citechaillot.fr/fr/expositions/expositions_temporaires/25622-viollet-le-duc_les_visions_dun_architecte.html" target="_blank">exposition</a> up at the Cité de l'Architecture et du Patrimoine in Paris until March, 2015 (and which we were able to see just before we left). The emblem of the exposition is this cool poster depicting Viollet-le-Duc as a kind of steam punk hero (a brilliant resonance with the futuristic (and very steampunk-y show, <a href="http://www.citechaillot.fr/fr/expositions/expositions_temporaires/25655-revoir_paris.html" target="_blank"><i>Revoir</i> <i>Paris</i></a>, which is up concurrently at the Cité), and indeed, the show focuses mostly on his urban and architectural projects. In its small room devoted to Viollet-le-Duc's love of nature and hiking and plein-air sketching, it re-opens the wild possibility of an architectural study of a mountain. In the introduction to the study, he has the mountain speak to its human interloper - which reminded me of Cohen's brilliant move in giving the mountain a voice in his <i>postmedieval</i> essay, <a href="http://www.palgrave-journals.com/pmed/journal/v1/n1/full/pmed20091a.html" target="_blank">"Stories of Stone,"</a> which considers (and radically shifts) both temporal and physical scale - something Viollet-le-Duc explores and asserts, even as he uses rational, extrapolated measurements to bring the mountain "down" to human scale, or at least to a scale available to human perception. When up in the mountains, Viollet-le-Duc writes of being "au mileu d'un monde qui n'est pas fait pour lui" (<span style="color: #3d85c6;">"in the middle of a world that was not made for him"</span>) - I remember this feeling so vividly as a kid growing up in Switzerland and going on hikes (never up the Mont Blanc - heavens! - but in many of its foothills). That here was complete, breathable alterity or (in my kid brain) that I was on another planet altogether while walking on my own. In Viollet-le-Duc's introduction, the mountain mocks the human (calls him "chétif!" - sickly), and mocks his dams and tunnels especially, these small attempts to get around the vivid, solid truth of the mountain. It ultimately tells the human to be on his way, that there is nothing for him here. And yet, Viollet-le-Duc asserts, we climb. He admires England and its willful, crazy climbers, attaining to heights whence they too often never return. He wishes France had more of them. His final life's work will be to perform a meticulous architectural study of the parts of the Mont Blanc annexed to France (oh the riches of critique here!).<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-xpeb_vV72Ac/VLu66Cp7BrI/AAAAAAAAA8s/IARDSsegAQ0/s1600/1-18V-le-DMontBlanc.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-xpeb_vV72Ac/VLu66Cp7BrI/AAAAAAAAA8s/IARDSsegAQ0/s1600/1-18V-le-DMontBlanc.jpg" height="83" width="200" /></a></div>
I love the work both for its folly and for its science. It's one that I'll be reading with my geologist friend over the next few weeks, as the text is the meeting of many worlds (and <a href="http://www.amazon.ca/Viollet-Duc-massif-Mont-Blanc-Pierre/dp/2601030402" target="_blank">a study</a>, and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Architecture-Historical-Imagination-Viollet---Duc/dp/0754633403/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1421584897&sr=8-1&keywords=architecture+and+the+historical+imagination&pebp=1421584900365&peasin=754633403" target="_blank">a new chapter</a>). His statements about perception and scale flashed out at me: "Puis il faut dire que de fréquents séjours sur les hauteurs donnent aux yeux une expérience de l'échelle réelle des objets que ne peut posséder le voyageur visitant pour la première fois les altitudes. C'est en cela que le dessin l'emporte toujours sur la photographie." (<span style="color: #3d85c6;">"It has to be said that frequent journeys to the mountain heights furnish your perception with an experience of the real scale of the objects, one that a first-time visitor to these heights wouldn't have access to. It's in this that drawing will always carry the day over photography."</span>) Answering the question of an imagined interlocutor as to why an architect would busy himself with a geological structure, he answers: "Analyser curieusement un groupe de montagnes, leur mode de formation, et <i>les causes de leurs ruine</i>... c'est, sur une plus grande échelle, se livrer à un travail méthodique d'analyse analogue à celui auquel s'astreint l'architecte praticien et archéologue qui établit ses déductions d'après l'étude des monuments." (<span style="color: #3d85c6;">"To turn an analytic curiosity upon a group of mountains, their means of formation, and <i>the causes of their ruin</i>.. is, on a greater scale, to give yourself over to a work of methodical analysis analogous to that which a practicing architect and archeologist strives for in establishing claims after the study of monuments."</span>)<br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-KXcl-AVpWZU/VLu9il5kt5I/AAAAAAAAA88/lyKKefTFAnk/s1600/1-18V-le-DWhatCouldBe.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-KXcl-AVpWZU/VLu9il5kt5I/AAAAAAAAA88/lyKKefTFAnk/s1600/1-18V-le-DWhatCouldBe.JPG" height="150" width="200" /></a></div>
That "les causes de leurs ruins" caught my eye and I looked for why he would claim that as part of his study. I found it in the very final pages of the work, in an impassioned eco-activist speech against the diversion of water flow, the building of tunnels, and the excess of hiking parties. The juxtaposition of the two drawings at the head of this post is not so much a before-and-after as a "what is now" and "what could be." And so here is what could be if the human could understand the mountain. In the end, Viollet-le-Duc reveals, his study exists so that the human can understand the mountain not just to leave it alone, but no, rather to help it do what nature won't do and the human aggravates: "La nature, rigoureusement fidèle à ses lois, ne fait pas remonter la pente au caillou que le pied du voyageur a précipité dans la vallée, ne resème pas la forêt que notre main imprudente a coupée, lorsque la roche nue apparait et que la terre a été entraînée par les eaux des fontes et des pluies, ne rétablit pas la prairie dont notre imprévoyance a contribué à faire disparaître l'humus." (<span style="color: #3d85c6;">"Nature, rigorously loyal to her own laws, does not make the pebble roll back up the mountain once it has been kicked in the valley by a traveller, it doesn't resow the forest that our imprudent hand has cut down, when the naked rock appears after the soil has been eroded by water sources and rain, it does not re-establish the prairie which our improvidence has robbed of its fertile ground."</span>). And so all of those calculations and observations and drawings are purposeful and activist science. "Si ces pages peuvent contribuer à éveiller l'attention du public sur ces questions... si elles peuvent provoquer chez les ingénieurs une attitude attentive et pratique de l'aménagement des cours d'eau dans les montagnes, si elles font admettre dans les administrations compétentes que ce n'est pas dans les bureaux, mais sur le terrain, qu'il faut essayer de résoudre ces problèmes, nous nous considérerons comme largement payé de nos fatigues, de nos peines et de nos sacrifices." (<span style="color: #3d85c6;">"If these pages can contribute to the awakening of the public on these issues... if they can provoke an attentive and practical approach in engineers to the issue of the sustainability of water ways in the mountains, if they make competent administrators realize that it's not in offices, but rather on the ground, that we need to resolve these problems, then I will consider myself largely repaid for my fatigue, my effort, and my sacrifice."</span>) The transposition/transition from care and restoration of architecture to that of mountains appears seamless in the mathematics of Viollet-le-Duc's calculations - the transition of scales is elegant and rational - but his claim to care for and restore a mountain (I can't say "remains unfathomable" because it's anything but after all those calculations) continues to defy expectations. Good for him.<br />
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<br />Anne F. Harrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09817277664812733936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4547316294063297137.post-15900820664818898132015-01-16T11:40:00.003-05:002015-01-16T11:45:46.528-05:00Discover/Uncover<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-j_4QpNtpqQY/VLkw5hbCquI/AAAAAAAAA7s/cN-Srb8YQ0o/s1600/1-16Plassac-Rouffiac.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-j_4QpNtpqQY/VLkw5hbCquI/AAAAAAAAA7s/cN-Srb8YQ0o/s1600/1-16Plassac-Rouffiac.jpg" height="140" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Saint-Cybard at Plassac-Rouffiac, <br />
12th-century (Charente)</td></tr>
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I'm getting ready to re-read a book written by my advisor, Linda Seidel that I've taught but haven't read since graduate school. I'll be reading <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Songs-Glory-Romanesque-Facades-Aquitaine/dp/0226745147" target="_blank">Songs of Glory</a></i> to think about scale and the movement (that her book negotiates so beautifully and provocatively) between small and large scales. What do we do when we make mountains out of molehills? What is going when he's got the whole world in his hands? Our language dances around this through imagistic phrases but scale (and the ability to shift scale) is one of those human habits/inclinations that we do without quite understanding. Dear us, we lose perspective all the time. And I mean really lose it: not just ignore it for something near or far, but lose our bearings. It's one of the most unnerving and glorious things we do: unfix our viewpoint, dislocate our point of view. The minute you engage in metaphor (that linguistic trick that carries us from one place to another), you're starting to shift scale. Clearly, our nightly screenings of <i>Cosmos</i> (and yes, last night was black holes and the bending of space and time and spacetime) are having their effect.<br />
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Today is the first day that I am able to look up from <i>Charlie Hebdo</i> covers, to think about other horizons of France. I've always been keenly aware of my distance from events in Paris and how that is shaping my perception of what they might mean or signify. Conversations with friends near and far have added layers (the protests by children of immigrants in the1980s for full inclusion in French society, the betrayal of the political left, the long tradition of caricature in French society, the difference between a caricature and a racist caricature). Those layers in turn are having a double effect of discovery and uncovering. Here, again, I marvel at the English language and its two distinct words (in French, there is only "découvrir" for both). Discovery here, would be the presence of something new in the public sphere (the Isaiah/Jesus/Mohammad image, the <i>Charlie Hebdo</i> images, for examples); uncovering would be the revelation of something that has been there all along but has been hidden from the majority public sphere (the exclusion and racism that, now, generations of immigrants experience in the suburbs of Paris and cities in France; a questioning (at least) of who has the freedom to ridicule whom and on what terms; the impossibility of a racist caricature of a white person in a white-dominant society, racist caricature relying as it does on an exaggeration (a shift in scale) of ethnic traits that are held up for ridicule). Both discovery and uncovering are happening in France and on the global media stage, I would imagine in scales ranging from new security measures at your local Monoprix store to a re-evaluation of the operations of poverty and exclusion to re-affirmations of the very best of French humanist principles.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-YdLG1rYl1aA/VLk3YcgmDxI/AAAAAAAAA78/c4WKx1nDt9E/s1600/1-16Plassac-Rouffiac_BirdsEyeView.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-YdLG1rYl1aA/VLk3YcgmDxI/AAAAAAAAA78/c4WKx1nDt9E/s1600/1-16Plassac-Rouffiac_BirdsEyeView.jpg" height="150" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Plassac-Rouffiac on a different scale</td></tr>
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And so today I'm going to give myself over to thinking through professor Seidel's statements and explorations of Romanesque façades throughout the Aquitaine and, in looking at the images first as I always do, I'm enticed to think of the discovery or the uncovering of a small town like <a href="http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plassac-Rouffiac" target="_blank">Plassac-Rouffiac</a>, a village in the Charente that has seldom boasted more than 500 souls since census-takers started counting in 1793. Positioned on the ancient Roman road, it existed in the constant potential of scale-shift that being part of an empire entails - no matter how small and distant the village, Rome (and whatever it meant to be Roman or a subject of the Romans) was never farther than the invitation of the road to "lead to Rome." The Roman(esque) arches on the façade of the parish church of Saint-Cybald attest to the pull of the imperial center and its ability to shift the scale of the margin. France is its own center now, with the pull of Paris felt in both Plassac-Rouffiac and <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/15/world/europe/crisis-in-france-is-seen-as-sign-of-chronic-ills.html?_r=0" target="_blank">Clichy-sous-Bois</a> - it's our ability to understand differences and shifts in scale, and what these uncover, that will matter so much now.<br />
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<br />Anne F. Harrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09817277664812733936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4547316294063297137.post-60968692115128692792015-01-15T06:56:00.003-05:002015-01-15T07:57:09.977-05:00Seeing Through<div style="text-align: left;">
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-0KMPpJdY3ME/VLemMGYHZ0I/AAAAAAAAA7U/t4HyxenYB2Q/s1600/1-15MohammadPreaching15th.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-0KMPpJdY3ME/VLemMGYHZ0I/AAAAAAAAA7U/t4HyxenYB2Q/s1600/1-15MohammadPreaching15th.jpg" height="119" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Mohammad preaching, 15th c.<br />
Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris</td></tr>
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Something happens to an image in a time of crisis. It gets pulled in every different direction; it gets seen right through. The <i>Charlie Hebdo</i> cover remained a racist retrenchment for me, no matter how many self-titled "free speech absolutists" I read, no matter that its 3 million copies sold out in minutes. But I'm here, far away in the U.S. and that's all I can see. Imams in London calling for "patience and tolerance," asking Muslims to remain calm while their religion and Arab ethnicity are insulted; and American news outlets blocking the image (the NBC News guy holding it rolled up like a rolling pin - I thought that was savvy) - they must have seen the image that way, too. But watching a tiny bit of news and seeing the long lines outside of kiosks and the enthusiasm with which people were buying the paper, I caught a glimpse of what else the cover might mean - not the cover, really, but something much more material and immediate: the paper itself, the physical reality of the paper coming out a week after the attacks - some kind of impossible resurgence after horror. And of course people right there in Paris, in France are living this physically, radically differently from my virtual experience of it all. Racist or rallying; divisive or unifying - those are very different directions for the image to go. We're all seeing through the image. I see through its caricature to systemic problems of racism and exclusion that are <i>not causal</i> of the attacks, but symptomatic of the difficulty of surviving them as a unified culture and nation. I imagine now, that purchasers of the paper might see through the image to their own survival, to the possibility of carrying on and being defiant. Or, it's a way of honoring the very specific victims of the attacks. Or, they're buying a piece of history, they're getting a relic of a terrible time, getting a hold of an object that will keep them connected to a host of things they might still not understand. There might be 3 million different reasons to buy that paper. And 2 million more as a reprint gets started for the week-end.<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-RiA9nt9RLBM/VLemVcq-YQI/AAAAAAAAA7c/BBP-JM-IxGk/s1600/1-15JesusAndMohammad.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-RiA9nt9RLBM/VLemVcq-YQI/AAAAAAAAA7c/BBP-JM-IxGk/s1600/1-15JesusAndMohammad.jpg" height="148" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Isaiah, Jesus, and Mohammad, 14th c.</td></tr>
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In the midst of all this, is the image of Mohammad. In <i>Charlie Hebdo, </i>it's<i> </i>not just represented, but represented in vicious racist stereotype. Meanwhile, images of Mohammad such as the one above, that are respectful, beautiful even, <i>do</i> exist in Paris - in the national library, in its Arab manuscript collection - but they do exist. And they can make connections, they can open things up. The <a href="http://www.louvre.fr/expositions/le-maroc-medieval-un-empire-de-l-afrique-l-espagne" target="_blank">medieval Morocco show at the Louvre</a> had a 10th-century preaching chair like the one Mohammad is preaching from - it made history, discourse, striving immediate and palpable. The image to the right is pulled from<a href="http://www.newsweek.com/koran-does-not-forbid-images-prophet-298298" target="_blank"> a piece in <i>Newsweek</i></a> well worth reading, explaining the variations of images of Mohammad, and the recent changes in the perceptions of and practices around his image. It's from a 14th-century Iranian manuscript now in Edinburgh and represents Isaiah's vision of Mohammad on a camel and Jesus on a donkey. I've never seen an image of Isaiah, Jesus, and Mohammad together before, and the newness makes it impossible for me to see through the image to something else right away. I am stopped at the image's surface by its novelty - I am asked to think new thoughts. As it becomes familiar, I will go further into the image, into the possibilities that it holds forth of thinking about the intertwined histories of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. This is not a tired caricature pulled in every direction in a time of crisis, used for multiple means in an emergency. This is an image re-emerging with new realities of old, remembering possibilities.<br />
<br />Anne F. Harrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09817277664812733936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4547316294063297137.post-27990362048101692642015-01-14T06:49:00.001-05:002015-01-14T06:55:04.432-05:00RetrenchmentThe new <i>Charlie Hebdo</i> cover isn't doing anyone any favors. It's right back to the racist caricature of Mohammad. Didn't skip a beat. <i><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/13/charlie-hebdo-cover-right-image-prophet-muhammad-right" target="_blank">The Guardian</a></i> has an excellent series of op-ed pieces debating the cover - some for, some against. Joseph Harker's piece sizes up perfectly how the racist caricature is not a grand moment of freedom of expression, but just more bullying of an already heavily-discriminated against minority in France. "Yes, of course Charlie Hebdo has the right to do this; but why would they want to, given the symbolism of Sunday's gatherings across France? Surely now is the time to move forward, to isolate the extremist murderers and bring the nation together; not to trumpet your rights by trampling over others' sensitivities, losing friends in the process." Everyone's seeing this, now that they've taken a closer look at <i>Charlie Hebdo</i>: sure, they "go after everyone," but they <i>really</i> go after Muslims. (And, depending on how you choose to read the "All is forgiven" line, the degree of "going after" varies.) You don't have to be an extremist to be offended by the images. They're wearisome.<br />
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There's a phrase in English that takes apart the absolute quality of satire and considers who is speaking about whom. "Punching up" is when someone with less power satirizes someone with more; "punching down" is when someone with more power satirizes someone with less. When you look at all of the photographs of the white men at the cover-release press conference yesterday, you can start to consider their power - which they have heavily asserted a week after the horrible attacks. When you read their comment in <i><a href="http://www.lemonde.fr/actualite-medias/article/2015/01/12/a-quoi-ressemblera-le-prochain-charlie-hebdo_4554645_3236.html" target="_blank">Le Monde</a></i> that (roughly translated) "We trust people's intelligence, the intelligence of humor, a second degree [not sure how to translate this, but definitely indicating a higher, more subtle degree] intelligence. The attackers lacked a sense of humor and are at the first degree. We have to find/carve out a place for the second degree in the world in which we live." - you see who has the power to be elite about intelligence and humor. You see they're punching down. Is this consideration of the power dynamic between satirist and satirized possible within the discourse of the absolute right of satire? (Is satire a right? Is it seamlessly aligned (the veritable litmus test) of the freedom of the press?).<br />
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<a href="http://www.vox.com/2015/1/12/7518349/charlie-hebdo-racist" target="_blank">Max Fischer in <i>Vox</i></a> performs a meticulous breakdown of a particularly gross <i>Charlie Hebdo</i> cover. He represents the cover, unpacks its critique (which is ultimately a leftist critique of the rightist government) and does a savvy comparison with the infamous July 2008 <i>New Yorker</i> cover depicting the Obamas as radicals. He gets at the "second degree," the critique behind the joke. But he also argues that the subtlety of the second degree doesn't erase or justify the racism of the joke. "Charlie Hebdo's biggest problem isn't racism," reads a sub-heading, "it's punching down."<br />
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As everyone writes, and must keep writing, no one and nothing justifies the attacks of last week. That isn't what the critiques of <i>Charlie Hebdo</i> in the English and American press are about. The critiques, to my mind, are about how we live with the attacks now; how we live with the loss of life and security and understanding. Going right back to business as usual seems like a willful ignorance that Paris and France might actually be changed by the horrors of last week. Something to commemorate the dead might have been more, well, peaceful. But. That's not what <i>Charlie Hebdo</i> is about. A piece that came out last week (so, to be clear, <i>not</i> in response to this week's cover) by <a href="http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/former-onion-editor-freedom-speech-cannot-be-killed" target="_blank">former <i>Onion</i> editor Joe Randazzo</a> stays in my mind because of his mention of the Middle Ages. "Even in the most repressive medieval kingdoms, they understood the need for the court jester, the one soul allowed to tell the truth through laughter." It's a well-worn rhetorical use of the Middle Ages (of a dark time left behind by modern society, so if "even they" did something, we ought to be ashamed not to - and yes, medievalists critique this false divide). But the court jester worked <i>for</i> the king; he was in his employ. And was the jester's standard the truth? He might mock the king (within limits), but he mostly mocked his enemies. So. Enemy lines have been redrawn. <i>Charlie Hebdo</i> normally published 60,000 copies a week. This week, they're printing 3 million. Will they all sell?Anne F. Harrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09817277664812733936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4547316294063297137.post-55440211946681184642015-01-13T08:32:00.002-05:002015-01-13T08:43:56.120-05:00The Lutetian Age, then and now and again<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">In the very living rock</td></tr>
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Watching al-Hazen on <i><a href="http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/cosmos-a-spacetime-odyssey/" target="_blank">Cosmos</a></i> last night felt good. I'd studied him (via <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_C._Lindberg" target="_blank">David Lindberg</a> (oh my goodness, who just passed away) and his marvelous book, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Theories-Vision-Al-Kindi-Kepler-Lindberg/dp/0226482359/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1421152260&sr=8-1&keywords=Theories+of+Vision+from+al-Kindi+to+Kepler" target="_blank">Theories of Vision: from al-Kindi to Kepler</a></i>) and the kids loved the call for curiosity and questioning. It became another occasion to think about the endless, tumultuous combination of rational process and passionate accident (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_deGrasse_Tyson" target="_blank">Tyson</a> takes the time to see the happenstance and the waywardness of scientific inquiry), and the importance of scientific method, which somehow in our conversation became linked to civil discourse and Paris (again? always?). And so this morning, I'm underground, in the pell-mell space of the Catacombs - a space that is both freak show of the macabre in becoming an enormous ossuary in the 18th century and bedrock (yes!) of geoscience and the discovery of the geological period now known as Lutetian. But we'll be at the top of Notre-Dame by the end.<br />
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The time of the Catacombs is very queer indeed (she said, finally reading <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/How-Soon-Now-Medieval-Queerness/dp/0822353679/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1421152794&sr=1-1&keywords=how+soon+is+now%3F" target="_blank">How Soon Is Now?</a></i>), and loops back through human ambition, need, and curiosity. It was when sinkholes started swallowing buildings whole in Paris that Louis XVIth created the General Inspectorate of Paris Quarries. The year was 1777, and by 1813, the Inspectorate passed a decree forbidding any further quarrying under Paris. It turns out that roughly 1/10th of the city sits atop limestone quarries that had bountifully provided building materials throughout Roman antiquity and the Middle Ages. The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ar%C3%A8nes_de_Lut%C3%A8ce" target="_blank">amphitheater of Lutèce</a>, as Paris was then known, was built of the stuff. <a href="http://www.notredamedeparis.fr/" target="_blank">Notre-Dame</a> was built of it, as was the <a href="http://www.chateau-vincennes.fr/" target="_blank">Château de Vincennes</a>. The carving you see above was done in the living rock from 1777 to 1782 by a man named Décure, who was one of the first surveyors of the Inspectorate. He commemorated his imprisonment in the barracks of Port-Mahon by carving it out of the stone. That was one of the first responses to the re-appropriation and the re-discovery of this site, and it's one of the first things you see when you walk through the Catacombs. I wouldn't want to forget it, nor Décure, who died in a cave-in shortly after he completed his oeuvre. He was putting in a ladder to connect the Catacombs, some 28m below ground to the upper reaches.<br />
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It was when they reached the bottom of the quarrymen's work that the geologists of the Inspectorate realized they were looking at something new. Seashells, tropical ones, line the quarrymen's marks in the rock. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Baptiste_Lamarck" target="_blank">Lamarck</a> came down and collected hundreds of fossils that added to his ideas of evolution (which went well beyond the theory of acquired characteristics for which he has been pushed aside for Darwin - another matter). A solid one hundred years later, the realization that this was a distinct geological period, one in which Paris had been awash in a salty sea, resulted in its naming: the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lutetian" target="_blank">Lutetian</a> age, 48 to 40 million years ago, in the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eocene" target="_blank">Eocene</a>, that dawn of all eras. The part that resonates because it doesn't fit neatly is that the efforts of discovery and labor were <i>simultaneous</i> with the conversion of the quarries into an enormous ossuary to house the millions of remains which had accumulated in the Innocents and dozens of other urban cemeteries. Paris unearthed one era as it buried another. When the Catacombs were opened to visitors in the mid-19th-century - after all the bones had been arranged in patterns, and after citations about death and the afterlife from Virgil and other noble souls had been carved in plaques throughout - in those early days, geological specimens were on display in "cabinets minéralogiques" and you could marvel at and debate both human death and the geologic time.<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-pUTDpsfoFqI/VLUYsxlWO7I/AAAAAAAAA6Q/NAnj8VSjuTs/s1600/12-8Fossils.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-pUTDpsfoFqI/VLUYsxlWO7I/AAAAAAAAA6Q/NAnj8VSjuTs/s1600/12-8Fossils.JPG" height="200" width="150" /></a></div>
Down in the Catacombs, you're not allowed to touch the bones (thank goodness), but you can touch the walls in certain places. When the Romans were here, these were above-ground quarries. As Paris built itself up from its own limestone (and increasingly that of nearby quarries at <a href="http://www.igc-versailles.fr/yvelines.html" target="_blank">Yvelines</a>), the quarries went underground, taking light and their fossils with them. I'm uncertain as to what their state was when Notre-Dame was built - probably a combination of contact points. I do know that the quarry tunnels that we walked during the Catacombs visits were probably carved out in the 15th century. And there are miles and miles of them. And so to touch that stone became to think on <a href="http://www.catacombes.paris.fr/fr/expositions/la-mer-paris" target="_blank">Paris under the sea</a>, and Romans quarrying and Notre-Dame being built, and geologists looking closely, and sites of science and commemoration co-existing. And it made me wonder very much about whether or not Viollet-le-Duc went down there. And it made me wonder even more about his building materials for the restoration of Notre-Dame. He knew about the gorgeous, white Pierre de Saint-Leu limestone that comes from the Paris-area quarries (still found in the Catacombs and as far out as Yvelines) - he wrote about it in his <i>Dictionaire</i>. In his tenacious pursuit of authenticity, did he use the same limestone (I would think from another quarry, such as Yvelines) that the medieval builders he so loved used? I really had to ask myself these questions when I was up close with his restored gargoyles. I had started climbing the steps in homage to my advisor Michael Camille, who had a memorable picture of himself taken with one of Viollet-le-Duc's gargoyles. I wondered, too, then, what Michael must have thought of all of the little shells and crustaceans stuck in the bodies of the gargoyles. Is that a Lutetian close-up we're seeing in the image here? The temporal looping gets heady here: Viollet-le-Duc using the same stone for restoration as for the original building. Notre-Dame has then never been medieval as much as it has never been modern; even in its modernity/restoration it is made of stuff as ancient for us moderns as it was for the medievals. Our commonality with the Middle Ages is instantly created in the realization of the enormity of time that separates us both from the Lutetian period whence we have all carved and recarved our monuments.<br />
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And so Paris, folding time through its constructions and reconstructions. Because this isn't just the juxtaposition of the old and the new, of Notre-Dame's gleaming Pierre de Saint-Leu limestone and the Pompidou's bright blue and red externalized tubing. It's the restoration of both buildings now; homages to materials that have long sustained the city, and which now/always need attention, need care. Viollet-le-Duc was on to something when he made his gargoyle contemplative.<br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-lmCD0FwJu44/VLUc7uuVneI/AAAAAAAAA6o/G0RLF4_eTb4/s1600/P1220074LaDe%CC%81fense.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-lmCD0FwJu44/VLUc7uuVneI/AAAAAAAAA6o/G0RLF4_eTb4/s1600/P1220074LaDe%CC%81fense.JPG" height="150" width="200" /></a></div>
Little could he have known that the gargoyle's gaze would today be turned to La Défense - the designated space for skyscrapers; where nary a wicker chair nor an accordion player, let alone Esmerelda and Quasimodo, are to be found; our neighborhood when we lived there. There's some kind of vector to be drawn between the gargoyle's ancient materiality and the projection of its gaze into Paris's image of its future self now. A complex geometry of curiosity and the desire to know in multiple times and dimensions.Anne F. Harrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09817277664812733936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4547316294063297137.post-88587749241378737122015-01-12T08:34:00.000-05:002015-01-12T09:10:23.619-05:00To Sceaux<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The scene at Sceaux</td></tr>
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Or not. Because maybe all the hand-wringing and the tabulation of sins and blaming this or that is beside the point, because there are so many active points now (freedoms, security, integration, unity). I keep coming back to what I admire most: that France has made a go of a secular humanist society; that it has (initially very violently, then insistently through all its means) made religion a private matter with no say in the public sphere. Of the many things last week's attacks have done, it's reaffirm the importance of civil discourse, of treating difference rationally, of making religion so private as to not <i>be</i> a difference in the public sphere (my understanding is that the French census makes no mention of religious affiliation, for starters). Living in a country, as I do, in which the public sphere - its politics, its morality, increasingly, its science - is being invaded/eroded by a religious discourse to spurns rational thinking and civil discourse, I can continue to admire France's commitment to keeping religion out of public discourse, and making religion a private, spiritual matter. Mysticism and religion have their place (although this will be debated), but it is private. And I write all this well aware of the contemporary critique of rationality (basically: how's that rationality working out for you? how is it actually relieving human suffering? how are WWI and WWII the "logical" conclusions of rational, pragmatic thinking?). And I also write this well aware of the opinion that the attacks had nothing to do with religion, that they are about economics and disenfranchisement and global politics. Nonetheless, for now, a brief embrace of the hope for a civil society in every sense of the term.<br />
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I have Sceaux up because it is an image of rationality, even though its history is anything but. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Baptiste_Colbert" target="_blank">Colbert</a> (Louis XIV's finance minister, not the other one) bought the property in 1670 and brought the grandest architectural and painterly talent (notably the royal painter Charles LeBrun) to the project. I love that architecture can be deemed rational (classicism) or irrational (medieval). If it stands, it's rational, no? No. Straight line good, curved line bad (decadent, ornamented, exotic). Sceaux abounds in straight lines that cut through even the thickest fog and assure you that you'll find your way. Colbert's son made grand park avenues that liken the property to a walk-able Versailles. Then the domain was given to Louis XIV's illegitimate son, the Duke of Maine, whose wife a) legitimated him by being of royal blood and b) ran famously fabulous musical salons: it wasn't just the age of Enlightenment, it was the age of Sparkle. An unsustainable age, and after the Revolution and its confiscation, the domain becomes the property of one of the sons of one of Napoleon's military marshals. It's demolished and rebuilt (another twist, another turn) in the 17th-century style of Louis XIII. Willful nostalgia also proved unsustainable and by 1925, Sceaux had become the romantic ruin every photographer dreams of.<br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-qT1t0m3Clbw/VLPFqzuxpRI/AAAAAAAAA5U/CrXvs-yLssU/s1600/1-12AtgetSceaux.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-qT1t0m3Clbw/VLPFqzuxpRI/AAAAAAAAA5U/CrXvs-yLssU/s1600/1-12AtgetSceaux.jpg" height="200" width="159" /></a></div>
At least Atget dreamed of. He was there a good deal in 1925 and took dozens of photographs. This image is from a <a href="http://www.nga.gov/feature/atget/works_park.shtm" target="_blank">National Gallery of Art show of Atget's parks and gardens</a>, and one thinks, on a different scale, of the photographer and his equipment going from place to place in the strange time after WWI. All of those parks and gardens built before an irreversible turning point, all of those statues silently witnessing change through the creep of vines within their stone. It was shortly after these images were taken that the state took over the domain of Sceaux and restored things to order. It's within Atget's images that rationality starts to look quixotic: rationality will always be overtaken, if it's ever even rational at all - all the more reason to treasure it, to hope for civility in the midst of the mess.<br />
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You can visit Sceaux now, unless the personnel is on strike, which it was the day we were there. The guard behind the sign very nicely let us in for 20 minutes so that Mac could at least get a look at the show of WWI drawings inside (drawings very rarely on display, an exceptional moment, much earnest pleading on our part). "Tout s'arrange" (everything works out) is a phrase we heard over and over again during our stay when a sticky situation was resolved by bending the rules or talking it through. That can't be the feeling in France this week, save that the country has been weathering its own irrationalities, very great and (like Sceaux) quite small, for centuries. Religion does not have exclusive rights to irrationality; irrationality seems quite pervasive to the human condition. Maybe it's how imaginatively we can strive to be rational in the midst of ourselves and our differences that I admire.Anne F. Harrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09817277664812733936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4547316294063297137.post-41023669874440934662015-01-11T08:41:00.000-05:002015-01-11T08:53:31.505-05:00Gather AgainToday, there are huge gatherings in Paris and throughout France - "rassemblement" (a strong word: a re-assembly, a re-gathering) to stand together, to re-affirm the core values of the Republic: yes, liberté, égalité, fraternité. Out to dinner with a friend and colleague last night, the conversation turned around the core value of a free press no matter what. The bottom line, my friend said: "If you don't like it, if it's gross or racist or awful, just don't look at it, walk away." Point: true, we don't have to consume and approve every image we see, we can turn the channel, click off the website, not buy the newspaper. Other point: once an image exists, it exists - it's in your mind, it does its work. At the bottom of all of this is the conceptualization of images: are they or are they not <i>material</i> to the events around them? I think that images can be put out of one's mind more easily for some than others. My friend's point also was: censor the images you don't like yourself, lest the government do it for you. Ah. I stopped looking at Charlie Hebdo images because, well, they're gross and racist, but also because they were starting to cloud the issue, starting to obscure the human beings in the greater tragedy of what was happening. Are the events of the past few days about images? about assimilation? about economics? Every field will have an answer, and it would actually be good if we all worked together to keep figuring it out. To keep using all of those rational powers of deduction so prized by the Enlightenment and the Republic which claims it.<br />
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In Brittany, people <a href="http://www.ouest-france.fr/charlie-hebdo-la-liste-des-rassemblements-republicains-dans-louest-3103809" target="_blank">are gathering</a> as well - they've been gathering, my friend there tells me. 500 people in a small town yesterday, and a long silence, and then la Marseillaise is sung and no one said to. A song of being embattled, a song now layered by its own history of having been sung at embattled moments in France's history. I think that this is one. I hope for the safety of everyone marching today, for the rassemblements to reaffirm human dignity, for a bit of peace. I keep listening to <a href="http://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2015/01/10/mon-frere-etait-musulman-il-s-est-fait-abattre-par-des-faux-musulmans_4553499_3224.html" target="_blank">the statement made by Ahmed Merabet's brother </a>- his beautiful remembrance gathers family to Republic, and Republic to ideals, and I want to follow that courage.Anne F. Harrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09817277664812733936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4547316294063297137.post-38119828354362700492015-01-10T10:24:00.000-05:002015-01-10T13:02:20.230-05:00Monuments<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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On our last day in Paris in December we went to the Parc Floral's mini-golf, whose website promised a fun time cruising a little ball through 18 of the city's most famous monuments. Despite the website's invitation and all other research, the mini-golf was of course closed (until April) and so we stood outside the gate and the kids named off all of the monuments that they knew and we took pictures of the tiny renditions of the Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower, Notre-Dame, etc.: all of the icons that had anchored the glorious fabric of the city for us for five months. That was the first thing one of my daughters put together about yesterday's attacks in Paris: "Wait, isn't Porte de Vincennes near the mini-golf?" It is: the Parc Floral is behind the Château which is itself a couple of metro stops down from the Porte. I imagine that millions are performing quick, relational geographies as they try to follow and begin to understand what is happening in Paris. Getting a bearing since the attacks started on Wednesday has not been easy. Being far away makes the city both more vulnerable and more formidable - all of it a grand, permeable theater in which the horrors of the shootings unfolded. Lives and principles are being mourned simultaneously: Charlie Hebdo holds the names of the political cartoonists killed on Wednesday and becomes the rallying cry of a free press and what it takes for a society to have and keep one; #JeSuisAhmed memorializes the police officer shot defending, as so many have pointed out, the press's right to carry out the critique and mockery of everything, including his own religion of Islam; signs of <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/10/french-forces-search-ex-girlfriend-hostage-siege-gunman#img-1" target="_blank">"Je suis juif"</a> are up at the kosher grocery, site of yesterday's attacks, this morning.<br />
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Disparity becomes the measure. The poverty and exclusion of the attackers' childhoods in France; the promise of prosperity within a society that treasures and legislates for human dignity. The material presence of cartoons as pen on paper and fleeting though infinitely reproducible images; the brutality of weaponry and methodical killing. There are more; so many as to rend that fabric we were just beginning to think we understood when we lived there. The fabric of secular humanism, that prizes rational thought and seeks to mock mystical, magical thought into oblivion. The American press is doing a lot more hand-wringing about the political cartoons than the French press is. Within our endlessly elastic language, I have read prescient phrasings of the limits of the freedom of the press: just because we have <i>the</i> right [to make vicious, racist political cartoons] does that mean that it's <i>right</i> to do so? just because we <i>can</i> [draw incendiary, provocative political cartoons], <i>must</i> we? The American press has said no (well, no, think about whom you're offending and why and is it worth it?), and very often blurred out images of the covers of Charlie Hebdo; the French press has answered yes (yes, yes, absolutely yes, freedom is a principle to defend not a condition to be occasionally enjoyed).<br />
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I think very much about the slow but resolute fall from grace that the virtue of Prudence had between the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Enlightenment: its pragmatism and appreciation of condition made it one of the four cardinal virtues of the Middle Ages with applications to political theory, and then eventually made it reprehensible to an age of absolute principles. The old middle school social studies adage of "your freedom ends where others' begins" gets hazy. It's too early yet to find French press critiques of the freedom of the press, but there are many American press pieces doing just that ("what's the line between satire and racism?" is the big, pertinent question being asked - for example in this <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/01/charlie_hebdo_the_french_satirical_magazine_is_heroic_it_is_also_racist.html" target="_blank"><i>Slate</i> piece</a>, and, with queries about uses of the word "freedom," in this <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/unmournable-bodies" target="_blank"><i>New Yorker</i> piece</a>. (And I keep asking myself about the line between the freedom of the press, and the privilege of the press - who has the freedom/privilege to satirize others - a question historically elaborated in <a href="http://paper-bird.net/2015/01/09/why-i-am-not-charlie/" target="_blank">this piece</a>). And no, no one should be gunned down, even for the most virulent racism. This <a href="http://www.taz.de/Kommentar-Je-suis-Charlie-Hebdo/!152463/" target="_blank">German piece</a> claims: the second you add the conditional "but" to a condemnation of the killings, you condone them. Freedom of the press: conditions may or may not apply. And here's the thing: of the many things I've read and scoured the past three days looking for news, mourning what happened to all those lives and loved ones, realizing that Paris will be changed, thinking about things to share out here, I'm not going to link to a particular French satirical show's take on the attacks because part of it is really offensive. (And, like the relational geography being performed by millions, I think of all the decisions people and institutions are making <a href="http://www.bnf.fr/fr/la_bnf/anx_actu_bib/a.hommage_charlie.html" target="_blank">on varying scales</a> to commemorate the dead and protest the violence). At the same time, this particular French satirical show is one of the few shows that's mentioned the Boko Haram massacre (and done so with a compassionate commemoration of its victims), a massacre which has barely made the mainstream news because of events in Paris. More damn disparity.<br />
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I <i>will</i> link to an American medievalist whose <a href="http://rickgodden.com/2015/01/08/charlie-hebdo-and-neighborliness/" target="_blank">excellent piece</a> has had me thinking a great deal, in particular a quote and a statement about the intertwined histories of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Oblivion and erasure are dangerous fantasies of any order that seeks to create a new world, be it jihad or secular humanism. I don't know how jihad (or any earnest struggle) co-exists with satire, nor how secular humanism (and its principled demands) co-exists with mysticism (you can hear the responses: "they can't!" "they must!"). All those little monuments at the mini-golf keep popping into my head: tiny, whitewashed markers of an imagined city in a dormant park. At the end of these very long days the images (and there are so many images - proliferating, emerging, seizing, saying a great many things) - the images of human beings afraid, dead, alone continue to raise a call for comfort and protection. May these be found.Anne F. Harrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09817277664812733936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4547316294063297137.post-75091292991201453582014-11-28T03:49:00.000-05:002014-11-28T03:49:13.772-05:00Thanksgiving 2014<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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A moment in a busy time of friendship and art and knowing there's only a month left in Paris to say "Happy Thanksgiving" and record-to-remember the feast we had at our place. Expat Thanksgivings are always wonderful, with this secret feeling as the rest of the world glides past you on their ordinary Thursday. Almost all of the food merchants knew of the holiday, though, having provided countless Americans with precious vegetables and meats to pull off this feat feast. All of them asked what it was <i>really</i> about and, because I was shopping at the market on a Wednesday and thus there wasn't a huge crowd, we talked. Many of them thought that it was a war remembrance meal - thankfulness for survival, for the war being over, more likely WWII since Americans lost more young men there. One merchant was surprised: "So, a celebration of the invasion of the Americas?" Could be that I didn't explain it well. And by that, I mean that I find it complicated to define: the deep love for the food and the gathering and the time that Thanksgiving brackets out for by-then exhausted Americans, and the wincing at history. I should have quoted Robert Reich who, in his infinite wit and wisdom, put it this way (the passage is available on his Facebook page):<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #141823; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;">In the autumn of 1621, a group of people who had long inhabited this land sat down with a group of immigrants calling themselves Pilgrims to celebrate a successful harvest. Initially, the native born had been suspicious of the new immigrants. The newcomers had come from across the sea without permission and without any rights over the land they occupied (you might even call them undocumented). The</span><span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #141823; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;">y dressed oddly, had a different color skin, spoke a language the native born didn’t understand, and appeared to have few practical skills (they were nearly hopeless at hunting and fishing). Nevertheless, the native born shared their knowledge with the immigrants -- of local crops, planting and harvesting, and navigation – and thereby helped the immigrants survive.<br /><br />In that first Thanksgiving, three hundred ninety-three years ago, the two groups joined together to express gratitude and mutual respect. It seems fitting that today we honor subsequent generations of hard-working immigrants, as well as the native born who have welcomed and helped them succeed in this bounteous land.<br /><br />Happy Thanksgiving.</span><br />
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I've been thinking so much about immigration and who comes to what lands under what circumstances during this semester in Paris, and so of course Reich's words resonated with me. They also resonated with me because of the shame of Ferguson, and the sorrow and the rage and the loss of so much. There's little room in there for a "sincere" or "simple" explanation of Thanksgiving, of what we are thankful for. It's complicated; makes more for gladness than exuberance.<br />
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And we were glad, very very glad to be together with friends from far and wide and near and close. A decision was made early on to maybe not do turkey, and to go the way of duck instead. And so we did and were richly rewarded. We spent all day at the Pompidou (and Frank Ghery's hyper-realities of architecture, and Jeff Koons's cheek, and the permanent collection's insistent testament to striving for better was also intertwined in these Thanksgiving thoughts), and then came home to cook:<br />
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Magret de Canard with a red wine orange sauce (<a href="http://www.bordbia.ie/consumer/recipes/christmas/pages/panfriedduckbreasts.aspx" target="_blank">here</a>)<br />
Everything else was from the <a href="http://www.goodhousekeeping.co.uk/" target="_blank">UK edition of Good Housekeeping</a><br />
Brussel Sprouts with Garlic Butter<br />
Potatoes Roasted in Duck Fat<br />
Ginger-Roasted Root Vegetables<br />
Cranberry Sauce with Candied Ginger and Orange<br />
Apple Marzipan Tart<br />
Orange-Chocolate Panettone Pudding<br />
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And so, to wellness and to discussion and to change and to hope and to gathering.Anne F. Harrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09817277664812733936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4547316294063297137.post-62947191661276610152014-11-12T02:14:00.002-05:002014-11-12T02:35:48.413-05:00Of Scale and Remembrance<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-gvR7OxtjaoM/VGMJZZXG4uI/AAAAAAAAAzc/bkgIHgyQ_4U/s1600/11-11ArcDeTriopmhe.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-gvR7OxtjaoM/VGMJZZXG4uI/AAAAAAAAAzc/bkgIHgyQ_4U/s200/11-11ArcDeTriopmhe.JPG" width="200" /></a></div>
I've started thinking about scale a good bit lately, and <a href="http://thematerialcollective.org/scale-challenge-sand/" target="_blank">Asa Mittman and Ben Tilghman's wonderful meditation on scale and sand</a> was with me as I stood at the Armistice Day commemoration at the Arc de Triomphe yesterday. Scale seems to bring with it an awareness-otherwise-not-to-be-had (what's the word for <i>that</i>?) of proportions, and for me, this is very immediate around the enormous Arc de Triomphe. Commissioned by Napoleon (but finished by King Louis Philippe in 1836, long after Napoleon had stopped celebrating his victories), that muscular stretch of triumph changes radically in scale and meaning in 1920, when the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is created beneath it. The flame that has burned without ceasing since then, already dubbed eternal in the need to know commemorations will continue, starts to stretch time and <i>its</i> scale and proportions around the monument as well.<br />
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The Arc has now stood longer over the Unknown Soldier and the commemoration of the Grande Guerre which changed war and modernity and society and bodies and everything else, than it had stood without him. These small, fragile remains, in combination with a flame that is never let out, and a solemn and grand ceremony every year has pulled the triumphalism of the Arc down to remembrance and loss and commemoration. This scale seems more human (I think I might mean more humane, too) than the celebratory proportions of Napoleonic assurances of victory. The cavalry shifted scales as well: an anachronism that somehow made the commemoration timeless, and made it stretch out across all wars - these horses held still and in formation, their energy and beauty rendering the feat beautiful.<br />
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But it would be this little object, this "bleuet" (a wild blueberry flower or a cornflower) that would make itself known all day. We arrived at the Arc de Triomphe RER stop and all the exits save one were closed. Thus we actually got to the Champs Elysées by walking around the Arc from the back. This proved to be absolutely beautiful, as the back the Arc is still stunning but little populated. We met a woman and her son who were canvassing for <a href="http://www.bleuetdefrance.fr/index.php" target="_blank">Les Bleuets de France</a>, an organization founded by two French women after WWI which raises money for veterans ("ceux qui restent") especially the wounded. In exchange for our donation we were given small, blue pins and Mac and I immediately put ours on. For the rest of the day people asked us where we had gotten our "bleuets" and for the rest of the day we harkened back to the ceremonies at the Arc de Triomphe. The little flower kept pulling us back, even as thoughts were already on Armistice Day and WWI - with Mac's scholarship so deeply involved in the War and with the incredible show that we would see later the same day at the Invalides, <a href="http://www.musee-armee.fr/programmation/expositions/detail/vu-du-frontu-du-front-u-du-frontu-du-front-u-du-frontu-du-frontu-du-frontu-du-front-representer-la.html" target="_blank">Vu du Front</a>, featuring representations of WWI from soldiers in every media possible. The "bleuet" in France and the poppy in England (because of <a href="http://www.greatwar.co.uk/poems/john-mccrae-in-flanders-fields.htm" target="_blank">the poem</a>, but also because of the incredible <a href="http://www.musee-armee.fr/programmation/expositions/detail/vu-du-frontu-du-front-u-du-frontu-du-front-u-du-frontu-du-frontu-du-frontu-du-front-representer-la.html" target="_blank">commemorative art project</a> in the moat of the Tower of London) have become emblems for the Great War that defied all scale of loss - they are radically small and ephemeral objects that stand for (oh my goodness and with and against and have withstood) the enormity and presence of war.Anne F. Harrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09817277664812733936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4547316294063297137.post-5198900980357325242014-11-10T15:54:00.000-05:002014-11-10T15:54:11.567-05:00Fake Nature Real Noise<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-4i6rLftz27o/VGEcwJFpQrI/AAAAAAAAAx8/CIC96E-d_6s/s1600/MeButtesChaumont.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-4i6rLftz27o/VGEcwJFpQrI/AAAAAAAAAx8/CIC96E-d_6s/s1600/MeButtesChaumont.jpg" height="150" width="200" /></a></div>
Here I am at the Buttes Chaumont: Baron Haussmann's last project, a rural terrain then in what is now the bustling 19th arrondissement, ex-quarry/pig farm, present-day fantasy wonderland of fake nature. But really, by the 19th century, is there any other kind? That's an unfair question for about 20 reasons, but there is something delicious about reading Baron Haussmann's sentiments that Parisians, as of the 1867 construction of the Buttes Chaumont, need no longer fatigue themselves by leaving Paris, for he will have brought a better nature, an orchestrated nature to them. And yes! There are waterfalls and valleys and little mountains (made much nicer with a temple to the Sybil on top) and this cavern <i>with</i> a waterfall. And everywhere the bridge railings are carved in wooden forms, and there are planks, but they're all from molded concrete. It's just incredible. All arranged, all staged, all choreographed for maximum Romantic flânerie et appeal and yet - and yet and yet, when you're there, you find yourself breathing deep and staring at waterfalls and feeling very good indeed. It's not like other parks somehow - there's something a little wilder, you get lost more easily, the green is more willful, the water has more presence. I stood and smiled with Oliver and said to him, over the roar of the waterfall, "This is the only place in Paris, France where you can scream with impunity" - and his eyes gleamed and so he did: a full, rending scream, long and loud, his mouth wide open and his head thrown back. He was <i>ecstatic</i> when it was over - "I haven't done that in <i>five months!</i>" he said which a) made me wonder where he goes to scream back at home and b) made us both laugh that somehow, that - screaming - had been missing from our time in Paris.<br />
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This resonated with dinner conversation tonight which rehearsed the conversation that Mac and the kids had the Louvre this afternoon (I was "en bibliothèque") about these two entities. The one in the foreground is a taxidermied deer to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Musée Nationale d'Histoire Naturelle. It is positioned across from a 19th-century bronze of the Genie of the Hunt which (I hope (or maybe I don't) that you can make it out) features a stag brought down by said Genie and his dog who is pinning the deer by dragging it down by the ear. The deer bellows, mouth open, eyes wide, tongue swollen. The big debate that ensued was "which is more real?" Not entirely surprisingly, the girls went with the taxidermied deer (closer to the physical real) and Oliver with the sculpture (the experiential real). The kid who screams in fake waterfalls and feels an ecstatic release isn't going to let a little bronze get in the way of the Real.<br />
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I want to end (better brief than nothing) with this marvelous image. It's two highly stylized waves from a Viking stele which was featured in the "Voyager au Moyen Age" show at the Cluny (check out the awesome <a href="http://www.musee-moyenage.fr/media/documents-pdf/action-culturelle/parcours-jeu-expo-voyager.pdf" target="_blank">itinerary for children</a> that you can download before you go). I'm going to show the entire stele in just a few lines, but here, I wanted to focus on this patterning, this stylization of waves - the crisp new wave to the left in tight interlace, the wave starting to crash upon the shore with its crest coming undone, its interlace in loopy disarray. And the bodies of the waves themselves thick as stone, joined and rearing, barely tempering. Whoever carved this knew their sound.<br />
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Here is the full stele. A stone carved to look like stone, with the warrior it commemorates astride his horse, his wheeled shield propelling him forward. Then a boat, then those waves - and wall text about final journeys to an afterlife. I've been doing a great deal of writing and thinking and reading these past few days, but none of it about these simulacra of the natural and their real effects. Oliver's scream in the midst of Baron Haussman's confection, the taxidermied deer staring at his bronze opposite, and these stony interlaced waves undone wind these strange elements around my thoughts and have me thinking about how the real will out in noise.Anne F. Harrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09817277664812733936noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4547316294063297137.post-4138072371115947102014-11-01T06:57:00.000-04:002014-11-02T01:12:22.516-05:00Mystery Imposed/Mystery Revealed<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Pause</td></tr>
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I follow in my children's footsteps a great deal these days. They know the way more often than not now and we all have that sense of each other as we walk streets and metros (no child/parent left behind, is our motto). I've become aware of these shapes we trace only recently when, returning from beloved Brittany, Paris's rhythms were thrown into sharp relief. Today being Toussaint, and everything (really, nearly everything) being closed for this day of remembrance, there is a little more time to think on things like this, on intimate perception in public space, on simple and complex mysteries (and yes, that is a little pot of melted chocolate that Oliver enjoyed within his hot milk while the girls were at the Bollywood dance lessons).<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Critic Happy</td></tr>
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It starts with the <a href="http://www.mep-fr.org/evenement/tim-parchikov/" target="_blank">Tim Parchikov</a> exhibit at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie de la Ville de Paris (because long museum titles really are a specialty here). The show (one of four currently up) is entitled "Suspense" and I was thrilled because it was highly narrative - images of moments of suspense in a darkened room with eerie, slightly repetitive, music playing. But instead of wondering about what came before or after the moments in the photographs, I kept noticing Oliver getting more and more impatient (sighs, walking rapidly), and the girls getting more and more agitated (stage whispers, hugs). Ok, what's up? "It's just so artificial! None of these are actually suspenseful - it's just the dark room and the music. He's <i>imposing the suspense</i> on the images; the images themselves aren't suspenseful at all!" So I jumped in and Oliver and I started talking about where suspense comes from and what's an authentic image anyway, and how much of a photograph's effect should emerge only from the photograph itself and how much from setting. Oliver was having none of it (about the effect of a photograph coming from its surrounding rather than the photograph itself) and I found myself defending the images even as I felt my enthusiasm for them wane. Maybe Oliver's resolute modernism (art/Art is all within the frame!) was taking effect on me. I didn't really understand what he was saying until we walked into the next show, one by <a href="http://www.mep-fr.org/evenement/alberto-garcia-alix/" target="_blank">Alberto García-Alix</a>, filled with shadows of birds and strangely angled figures. "Here!" says Oliver, "<i>This</i> guy - he takes what wasn't mysterious and shows us that it actually is mysterious. But the other guy took what wasn't mysterious and tried to make us believe it was." I've been thinking about that ever since, this duality of mystery imposed and mystery revealed. I've been thinking of it in relation to both art and the craft of art history - nourished as I've been by seeing a different art show almost every day here, and working down as I have been to the materiality of medieval works of art, that phenomenon where the mundane and the wondrous meet.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-3V_Fd7fVgSU/VFSX4H8_CvI/AAAAAAAAAww/Xz9JQ62Zyg8/s1600/10-19Vault.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-3V_Fd7fVgSU/VFSX4H8_CvI/AAAAAAAAAww/Xz9JQ62Zyg8/s1600/10-19Vault.JPG" height="150" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Newly discovered!</td></tr>
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All of which (inexorably? at the very least insistently) brings me back to Brittany. As recently as 2011 (for a site listed with the Monuments Historiques as of 1931!), medieval works of art are still being discovered, or at least uncovered, there. Plaster had whitewashed this fantastic set of images on the vault of the two-aisled church of St-Gilles in Malestroit until its uncovering and restoration in 2011. Upside down and at the top, a lioness/ panther/ unicorn (as she is identified by the laminated sign propped up on the chair below) rears up; continuing clockwise, a centaur stretches out, and then down below, a marvelous marvelous elephant carrying a fortress on its back.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-mNCdM9mgIyw/VFSZAt3Bi2I/AAAAAAAAAxA/Q80_xufoSAc/s1600/10-19Elephant.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-mNCdM9mgIyw/VFSZAt3Bi2I/AAAAAAAAAxA/Q80_xufoSAc/s1600/10-19Elephant.JPG" height="150" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Truly, an elephant!</td></tr>
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There, that's better. Now you see it in its full dappled, soft-hooved, short-tusked, lumbering glory. I love the tumult of mystery imposed/mystery revealed here: a wondrous animal made more mysterious (or more ridiculous, if you asked the kids) by this depiction whose origins and motivations remain a mystery and whose effect is well, yes, mysterious. Malestroit abounds with fantastic creatures (on its façade and all the way into its city streets with secular carvings that my beloved advisor Michael Camille loved to write about) which is really quite amazing for this tiny town of 2500 people (less in the Middle Ages) deep in the heart of the Morbihan, that most forested region of Brittany. Mystery mysteriously appearing in a mysterious place.<br />
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All of which brings me to music.<br />
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Specifically, the music of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobus_Gallus" target="_blank">Jacob Handl</a> (1550-1591) and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Tallis" target="_blank">Thomas Tallis</a> (1505-1585) and other searching composers brought into bright, vivid, spellbinding life by my wondrous friend David Stein who knows this music so intimately and chose it for the program of an unforgettable concert at the church of St-Gilles at Malestroit, and directed the choir that made it shine. I remember being stunned when Kant proclaimed music the perfect art (grad school, I think, or when I used to teach art criticism; it's hazy but the temporality of visual art and the transcendence of music were suddenly opposed), but I'm not stunned to think on it when I hear the music that David wills forth. That's Handl in the clip above, the "Duo Seraphim" which splits the choir into two and took the audience's breath away as a second set of voices floated up from we knew not where in the way that medieval architecture has of confusing sound. And by confusing I mean intertwining and enveloping and making the known (the sure contours of architecture you can perceptually trace) the unknown (the fluid trajectory of sound that always eludes stillness and capture). It's hearing early modern music in medieval space that makes me realize the <i>weight</i> (heft, force) of music, the love and effort of the choral director lifting the music <i>and sustaining it</i> in the space as it starts to fill with sound and mercy, wonder, love and loss.<br />
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I've always been fascinated with where music exists as art: in the composer's head, in the score, in the voices of the singers, in the director's guidance, in the audience's emotions. In this, I can think on both music and medieval oral tradition (especially meeting in troubadours and secular poetry). <i>In</i> this, I marvel at how spatial music is, how spatially involved it is. In this, I perceive how a space can amplify sound (how David can somehow lift music from the page and into his choir's voices and offer it up to the space all around that receives it and embraces it and <i>nourishes</i> it), and how it <i>can be</i> amplified (how it can shimmer into something so much bigger than what I can see). How the elephant is transformed in its complicity with the wonder of this music. And doesn't Tallis and his "Lamentations of Jeremiah" above somehow make this happen?<br />
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Because what is this music, what was this wondrous afternoon, save the resonant oscillation of a most common element (our human voice, modulating sound unceasingly for millennia) with one most rare (the ephemeral alignment of voice, space, sound and all the love and survival that that alignment entails)? I felt this most when David led "Shir Hama'alot" by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salamone_Rossi" target="_blank">Salamone Rossi</a> (1570-1630). Was this the first time the elephant had been enveloped by voices tracing Hebrew sounds into the air to be held by the vault in which it was painted? It was, when Salomone Rossi wrote the music, the first time that Jewish liturgical music had been set to the Baroque idiom. It creates, every time, a marvelous commonality between early modern synagogal space and wherever it is heard forever after. It reveals mysteries in their joy.Anne F. Harrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09817277664812733936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4547316294063297137.post-64230984916124925882014-10-10T02:36:00.001-04:002014-10-10T02:36:32.659-04:00Fayum Friend<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Sd84tFb_NS0/VDQSPgotiZI/AAAAAAAAAt4/hXsrM1yP7ug/s1600/10-7Fayum.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Sd84tFb_NS0/VDQSPgotiZI/AAAAAAAAAt4/hXsrM1yP7ug/s1600/10-7Fayum.JPG" height="150" width="200" /></a></div>
Lasting presence abounds in the descriptively dubbed <a href="http://www.louvre.fr/en/opening-galleries-devoted-east-mediterranean-roman-empire" target="_blank">East Mediterranean of the Roman Empire galleries</a>. The Fayum portraits are their emblem and immediately place you in this end-of-an-era hybridity - it's the end of the Roman Empire as you know it, and at least some people are feeling fine. The Fayum portraits are this incredible encaustic decision to paint portraits of the diseased for their mummy casings. There are still masks (gold-painted not gold itself anymore, terra cotta or painted fired clay mostly) but it's the Fayum portraits that have seized the imagination in their lifelikeness, in the memory of their subjects seeming so fresh.<br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-60eDENenJgI/VDdq_UNg8dI/AAAAAAAAAuQ/GvvOmxNh48k/s1600/10-10FayumEleanor.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-60eDENenJgI/VDdq_UNg8dI/AAAAAAAAAuQ/GvvOmxNh48k/s1600/10-10FayumEleanor.JPG" height="200" width="150" /></a></div>
I had invited the kids to find a "Fayum friend," a person whose portrait would make you want to be friends with them. This was initially critiqued by Iris, who pointed out that judging the possibility of friendship by how someone looks is superficial. She's right, of course, and so made me think more about what I was going for. What is it about any one particular portrait that reaches out to a viewer? That "speaks" to us and makes us want to know more about that person? And why do the Fayum portraits do it so incredibly well? It's not just shadows and gleaming eyes and the curve of cheeks - there's something else that makes a viewer stop and connect and I don't know what it is. Once I was able to convince Iris that this was about what made her as a viewer curious (as opposed to her as a potential friend accepting), then we were good to go. Here is Eleanor with her Fayum friend, the mystery of the connection palpable.<br />
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The mystery is what remains (for me, for others, but there are experts who can explain the details) when it comes to the Mithraic cult, a mystery cult concurrent with that other, better known mystery cult, Christianity. Mystery here means underground both literally and figuratively, and also the suspicion that maybe the rituals mean more than just their act. Mithra, Persian god, is a reminder of how big and permeable the Roman empire is from the 1st to the 4th centuries C.E.. So much so that a zodiac (there's Aquarius, Pisces, Cancer) all around the sacrifice of the bull - that valiant diagonal, that murderous thrust.<br />
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Oliver was beside himself with excitement - so was I. Teaching the Mithraic materials at San Clemente in Rome (with <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Imperial-Rome-Christian-Triumph-100-450/dp/0192842013/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1412918591&sr=8-1&keywords=jas+elsner" target="_blank">the great teaching text by Jas Elsner</a>) is one of my favorite moments in the survey class, and I still daydream about a "Rome 400" class (whenever the world started to go upside down for the Roman Empire and so many things were possible). Oliver loves it when I do, and we'd visited the <a href="http://www.ancient-origins.net/ancient-places-europe/mithraic-mysteries-and-underground-chamber-san-clemente-001951" target="_blank">Mithraic temple beneath San Clemente</a> (worlds upon worlds). To find this many statues devoted to Mithra all so beautiful and complete and all positioned together like that was incredible. It was utterly unexpected and yet there they were one after another, strange creatures bedecked by their mysterious symbols, gathered in some still potent assembly.<br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-C6OEcS7A1Vk/VDd0MH2DVvI/AAAAAAAAAus/eWyiEZrGW2M/s1600/10-10AbbotMena.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-C6OEcS7A1Vk/VDd0MH2DVvI/AAAAAAAAAus/eWyiEZrGW2M/s1600/10-10AbbotMena.JPG" height="150" width="200" /></a></div>
This is a terrible photograph of a beloved icon - I've never taught it, but now I have a frame of mind for it. You find the icon, and <i>an entire recreated room</i> of the site of Bawit monastery where it was excavated by (the Frenchman) Jean Clédat in 1901-5. You find all this (and it's all incredible: there are shoes and chasubles, doorways of wood and stone, wall paintings, and this <a href="http://www.louvre.fr/en/oeuvre-notices/christ-and-abbot-mena" target="_blank">marvelous marvelous icon,</a> from the 8th century, possibly the oldest Coptic icon remaining) if you just keep walking through the end-of-the-Roman-Empire galleries. Isn't that smart? It wasn't a seamless transition, of course, from the Roman Empire to the period marked by an emerging Christianity (Christian cultures, really, there were so many), and the trajectory of the rooms takes you from one time to another and actually <i>makes</i> room for departures from the transition, like the Mithraic material. The Coptic trajectory is brief (curtailed by the advent of Islam in Egypt in the 8th-10th centuries), more of an offshoot than an arrival, and yet the layout of the galleries is such that it comprises the final rooms of that section of the museum. Smart. Gives you pause. In this sense, the Louvre layout is more about departures and ruptures than about continuity and transition - which I like. The <a href="http://musee.louvre.fr/expo-imaginaire/baouit/en/index.html?" target="_blank">monastery of Bawit itself </a>was founded in the late 4th century and continued to thrive until the 8th century. By the 10th century it was abandoned, stilled until its intersection with the mission that Clédat had been given to find Christian sites in Muslim lands (and oh my yes, there's a tale to be told there, and yes, it ultimately involves the Suez Canal). Somewhere in the monastery site (and Clédat's notes don't reveal where), this icon of Christ with his arm around Abbot Mena was found. I immediately think of Peter Brown's "friend," of Christ as companion (and oh my goodness, doesn't <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Through-Eye-Needle-Christianity-350-550/dp/0691161771/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1412921926&sr=8-1&keywords=peter+brown" target="_blank">Brown's new book</a> look amazing???). The stillness of this piece has always fascinated me, made me think about all sorts of stillnesses, because in this stillness is a kind of intimacy. Christ emerges (yes, seamlessly) in the 8th century to put his arm around Abbot Mena, this older man, this reigning caregiver of the monastery. Why was the portrait made? One thinks of the 8th century as a time of change, at Bewit marking the beginning of the monastery's decline, throughout Egypt as a time energized by the advent and appeal of Islam. Stillness here does not mean eternity. In that sense, this icon is very unlike the concept of icons and their transcendental stillness and eternity. In that sense, this icon is wonderfully poignant. Its stillness (I love to think about this so much I'm going to write it again) offering an image of intimacy. The painting is small (57cm x 57 cm) - you could hold it in your hands (oh!). It's painted on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ficus_sycomorus" target="_blank">sycamore fig wood</a>, a material of physical, Biblical, and even <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke%2013%3A6-9" target="_blank">parabolic</a> (!) availability. Was it simply part of a much greater arrangement of figures? An iconostasis? Or was it already isolated in this intimacy? The gesture of Christ marking a space around the Abbot Mena and that which, in the cliffs overlooking the Nile where his monastery lay, he held dear? Anne F. Harrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09817277664812733936noreply@blogger.com0