What you learn from Archives

Recently, Old Ken went on a visit to the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena to see some of the object files. What might be in these files, you ask, and what could anyone possibly want with them? Well, let's take an image like this one of a geographer and find out.

If we consult the object file for this painting, we find that it was purchased by the collector Norton Simon at Sotheby's in London in 1968 for 2500 GB pounds (or what was then $5,974). Incidentally, at the same auction, Simon also bought one of the Chardin still lives now in the Museum's collection for 4000 GBP.



Purchased as an anonymous work and credited only to the fictional "School of Caravaggio," several attempts have been made to make a secure attribution of this "Geographer" to a particular artist. As early as January 1971, Alfred Moir (a professor of art history at UC Santa Barbara) had assigned the painting to the obscure Baroque painter Pietro Paolini, whose "Achilles Among the Daughters of Lycomedes" (ca. 1625-30, now in the Getty) is above. Offered in correspondence to Simon, Moir's assessment was made on grounds such as the following:

"it [the painting] seems conceived in terms very close to Ribera, but the dress and to a certain extend the face seem to be handled in a manner similar to Valentin's. [...] It occurs to me, however, that their influence, and hints of a responsiveness to the style of G.B. Caracciolo, together with the general coloring and handling of the picture, would not be inappropriate to Pietro Paolini, and tentatively I would suggest this as the appropriate attribution of the picture."



Above, and also now in the Getty, is a specimen of work by this "Valentin" mentioned by Moir (the French Baroque painter known as Valentin de Boulogne) - - a "Christ and the Adultress" from ca. 1620. So, according to this connoisseurial way of thinking, attribution or the assignment of a creator's name to the object is of central importance and this is to be done by identifying the visual similarities of the work to some pretty obscure figures and then advancing a "likely candidate" from amongst them.

Now, copies of the Museum's old labels indicate that Simon clearly accepted Moir's attribution; from "School of Caravaggio," this painting was then assigned to Pietro Paolini. By the late 1980s, however, the "School of Caravaggio" label still had some currency as the Museum appealed to Edward Maeder, Curator of Costumes and Textiles at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, to try to identify from whence the costume may have come, and thus the likely nationality of the artist. In response, Maeder suggested the following:



"I would agree ... that the costume is indeed of Eastern European origin. The ties on either side of the collar at the neck of the white shirt are typical for the first three-quarters of the 16th century. ... The 'frogs' or front closings of applied braid are typical for Hungary and Poland in the late Renaissance. ... The biggest problem from the point of view of the costume historian seems to be the fur-lined coat with long sleeves. Am I correct in assuming that the sitter's left sleeve (the viewer's right) ... is a different color from the sitter's right sleeve (the viewer's left)? This would indicate that he is wearing the fur-lined over garment on this right arm and holding in place beneath his left."

The logic here seems to run in the following way: by identifying visual resemblances between the "typical" products of various known (if very obscure) artists and imagining what they might look like if inflected by certain erudite artistic influences, it becomes possible to place this mysterious painting and its maker in a likely space and time. Equally, the depiction of costume is taken as an index of what was "normal to" the geography and time-period in which the painting was made. All of this must neglect the possibility that the painter might have asked the sitter to dress in archaizing clothing (or vice versa) or that the artist executed this one picture as a radical departure from his conventional mode of painting. The intellectual-parlor-game-dimension of this attribution fun is then taken to an even higher pitch by Leonard J. Slatkes, late Distinguished Professor of Art History at CUNY Queens, who claimed - - solely on the basis of visual inference - - that "the work was probably executed in Rome during the first third of the third decade of the 17th century. The artist was most likely from the Southern Netherlands"!

I would hasten to emphasize that through all of this very learned discourse, not a single line had yet been wasted on exactly what it is that the geographer is shown doing or what we might make of the strange objects represented around him. The image is certainly suggestive in these regard; although the volume opened before the geographer is rendered as an opaque block merely suggesting legibility, other features are depicted in detail. Drawn to our eye by the diagonal, ivory slash of the quill pen, the inkwell in the foreground, for example, is a fascinating form. It appears to be a triangular box with corners decorated by the heads of elephants whose curving trunks form loops.

This sixteenth century Italian inkstand, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, offers an interesting parallel. It too is supported by three animal heads (in this case, rams), which appear to carry the ink in a central reservoir. Perhaps further research could identify a much closer approximation of the inkwell we see depicted in the Norton Simon painting - - not to mention what we might learn by trying to identify the globe or even the kind of calculation signaled by the gesture and mode of discourse being conducted by the geographer himself.

If nothing else, then, what is fascinating about reading through these archives is just how different the questions the contemporary interpreter (or at least this contemporary interpreter) are from those that were the primary interest of art experts only a few decades ago.

Xmas in Joshua Tree

Different people do different things for the holidays. So I have heard.



This year, Old Ken's Christmas was in Joshua Tree National Park.



Now, back in the late summer, you may recall, some people had passed through the park, which was then blazingly hot.



It was pretty different over Christmas. Foggy ...



... cold ...



... even snowy on mountain peaks, although this isn't a mountain peak.



Still, warm enough for picnics, as we see here.



And when the sun agreed to come out, the colors were pretty magnificent.



This is getting toward spring in the desert.



So, in a few months, much of this landscape will be in bloom.



One of our hikes was out to 49 Palms oasis, as seen here.



Apparently, an errant campfire had burned several of the palm trees back, as the blackened trunk at center suggests.



Presumably the oasis would have looked liked this collection of wooly mammoth legs prior to that.



All in all, a strange and wonderful place!

Winter in the Southland

Believe it or not, we get some winter time in So Cal. Palm trees now have to jostle with snow-capped peaks as seen in Pasadena above.



Dramatic sunsets, like this one from the Getty Center, arrive in the late afternoon.



The Pacific does indeed look a little chilly when seen as here from WIll Rogers State Park ...



... and the clouds do some amazing cotton-candy-esque stunts over the city and its curious multiple downtowns.



Back in Echo Park, things can get a little frosty in the mornings.



And a blanket is requisite when sitting on the couch.



Well, option number one for combatting this sad state of affairs was to back some Christmas cookies. Gingerbread, in case you were wondering.


But, further steps were needed. So, it was decided that we should make a fire.



And while having fun of that kind, why not make some friends? We thought she looked a bit like Amy Winehouse, but thankfully she has been much better behaved.



We initially thought this character was old friend Jeffrey, but then we realized he's more like friend Giorgos.



Nothing like warming the place up and celebrating the holidays by gathering a few friends around the fireplace!



And before you know, even a feline friend shows up. Que bueno!

Book Review-ish: Nicolas Wey Gomez, The Tropics of Empire

Confession time: this can't really count as a book review, as what Old Ken read of Nicolas Wey Gomez's The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies (MIT Press, 2008) was on airplanes. Thus, it was not with the most assiduous attention possible. Nonetheless, this a provocative book and I thought y'all might want to hear some yappin' about it, no matter how threadbare my account might be.

Basically, what Nicolas Wey Gomez sets out to do in The Tropics of Empire is to call attention to the mostly forgotten fact that Columbus did not simply sail west to reach his Indies. Instead, he was trying to sail south! However wrong this sense of direction may be according to our maps, so our author observes, understanding what Columbus was trying to do is a powerful means of unveiling his cosmology, his world-picture. And in the late medieval geographical tradition upon which Columbus drew, Wey Gomez claims, latitude was far more conceptually significant than longitude.

"How can that be right?" we might ask. Longitude, as several popular books and movies have emphasized, was an elusive, technological riddle that, when it went unanswered, left sailors floundering aimlessly at sea or dead on the rocks. While latitude could be calculated by a few simple celestial observations, the determination of longitude drove the creation of sophisticated observatories, star charts and precision time keeping instruments - - not to mention the king's ransom offered for a successful means of resolving its mysteries.



The answer, Wey Gomez (see above) claims, is in the cosmological realm. "While longitude may have initially represented for Columbus the nightmare of crossing an unknown ocean," he claims, "it was latitude that would tell Columbus again and again - - when he admired the gold ornaments on indigenous bodies and when he gazed overhead at parrot flocks so dense they obscured the sun - - that he had indeed arrived in the Indies, or at least a place that shared the same nature with the old Ethiopia and India." (p. 49) That is, following Ptolemaic principles, latitude determined the nature of all the plants and animals in a region or zone, thus insuring that all life on a given parallel of latitude would be the same regardless of its east or west location.

Indeed, in this cosmology that Columbus inherited from antique and medieval learning, there were three zones of the world all determined by latitude: temperate, torrid, and frigid. Bounded by the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, the tropical latitudes were believed to be an infernal wasteland, while the frigid zones were equally inhospitable to life. Because this cosmological view was always also a political view, only those from the temperate zone were believed capable of possessing the mental faculties necessary for governing. Therefore, the author argues, it became necessary for critics of the Spanish colonial project in the American New World such as Bartolomeo Las Casas' to show that " 'the Indies' were more universally temperate than even the most temperate places in the Old World." (p. 96) Las Casas, in other words, was trying to beat Columbus at his own game, utilizing his own knowledge of the Americas to contest the legitimacy of Spanish dominion there.

But, how did Columbus reconcile himself to the fact that the Central American lands and people he saw were not the same as those of Africa or India? He had seen African people on the same latitudes as those he traveled in the Caribbean, and he knew the two to be different. How did this perception of difference not undermine his cosmology? According to Wey Gomez, if Columbus did not actually see the peoples in the Caribbean with the dark skin he associated with "Ethiopians" (i.e. any peoples from tropical latitudes), he came to see cannibalism and facial deformation as a kind of substitute for the tropical inferiority he believed his West Indians to suffer. (p. 220)

What is fascinating about this study is how it takes an episode that is so familiar to peoples of the American hemisphere and show how it was conceived and carried out according to logics that seem extremely far from us. However, so the author concludes in a perhaps slightly "j'accuse" conclusion, the belief that the Northern hemisphere is particularly entitled and able to intervene in the governance of tropical regions is perhaps the longue duree legacy of these largely-forgotten conceptions. Compelling stuff!

Haven't learned anything from 1973 recently? HAH!

The work of French philosopher Georges Bataille has always baffled me, if I am to be totally honest. He is supposed to have had immense influence upon the leading figures of French thought in the post-war era—luminaries like Jacques Lacan, Michel de Certeau and others. As interpreted by friends like the eminent Jeremy Biles (see above), I have found his ideas stimulating. However, Bataille's writings themselves mix economic thought, eroticism, aesthetics and anthropological observations in ways that I always find inscrutable, at best. So, when I happened across Denis Hollier's book Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille, which promises to bring Bataille's writings to bear upon the problem of architecture, I was duly interested.



One important caveat: Hollier's book was written in the early 1970s, and the text is an unmistakable product of that era of high-flying poststructuralist fireworks. However, when read nearly forty years later—and in translation—Hollier's endless indulgences of wordplay, his appeals to the slipperiness of language against meaning and against itself ... well, they feel both turgid and completely unsurprising. So, if you're not in the mood to relive, say, 1974 in Comp Lit at Yale (and I was not), what follows is more or less an account of what the book has to say about architecture and specifically Bataille's antagonism to it.



Hollier begins by noting the anti-architectural trend in French post-war thought, most familiar to us now in the work of Michel Foucault, but also present in that of Bataille. But, where Foucault's privileged instance of panoptic, penal architecture is hidden in the coercive action it inflicts, Bataille's architecture is extroverted—publicly visible as a monument of the ruling order's violent power. Interestingly, Hollier notes that architecture, specifically the thirteenth century Cathedral of Rheims, was the subject of Bataille's earliest publication. Written in the wake of the first world war when the cathedral in this, Bataille's native city, was bombed, the piece is an idealistic vision of how the destroyed building could be recuperated in a kind of spiritual communion.

The main thrust of the book is how Bataille's subsequent thought effectively negates the basic moves of this earliest piece. First, against the idealization proposed in this early essay, Bataille's thinking resonates with his now-famous notion of "informe" (or formless), whereby entities are released from their high-minded trappings and brought back down to earth like a spider crushed on the ground. Secondly, architecture as understood in his Rheims essay was a crystallization of the very orders of stability and systematicity that much of Bataille's work would subsequently combat against. Presumably echoing Bataille, Hollier claims that architectural metaphors in language are hallmarks of ideological programs in societies: "There is [...] no way to describe a system without resorting to the vocabulary of architecture." So Bataille would himself observe, the appearance of architectural forms or motifs in other branches of culture is a sure sign of a prevailing taste for authority.



Yet, what Bataille seems to propose is not an architecture that repudiates this linkage to violence sovereignty. Rather, his opposition (at least as I understood it) was to the concealment of this violence behind architecture. Thus, Bataille contrasts the architecture of the bureaucratic Inca empire wherein sacrifices would be performed secreted away in the bowels of stultifying, deadening buildings with that of the Aztecs. On the tops of specially-constructed pyramids, Bataille claims, subjects would be sacrificed to the sovereign rulers—released from profane, worldliness and liberated into a communal spectacle of sacred violence. Aztec pyramids thus refuse the paralysis of death—the literal stabilization and endless reproduction of social order—performed normally by architecture in its malevolent, bureaucratic forms.

The book then concludes with an extremely long chapter of nearly one hundred pages, entitled "The Caesarean" who major themes are eroticism and the rupturing, spasmodic experiences that Bataille privileges, theorizes and supposedly achieves in his writings. Although architecture is almost entirely absent from this discussion, science very definitely moves into the foreground as the equivalent "bad object." Like architecture, science here is a tool of patriarchal order and what would be called "the rationalization of the world picture." Drawing from Alexandre Koyré, Hollier's account of science is one that negated the grounds of religion and yet put nothing its place. The concluding set of claims returns to the title, making the primal scene of the first "caesarean" as a typological moment where the birth of the ruling order comes at the price of the death of the mother. Because science is the attendant of this imperial power, it is always the instigator of this merciless rationalization.

However, so Hollier argues through a wide-ranging series of discussions, Bataille's work also suggests a second kind of caesarean—one that would decapitate the father, lop off the king's head in a spectacle of solar radiance evoking the shards of light claimed to be represented by pyramids. This kind of blinding solar vision is that which Bataille variously associates with eating feces, staring into anuses, vulvas and so on. Indeed, in a long digression, Hollier takes us through a range of longue duree fantasies of the pineal gland, what Bataille would call the "pineal eye," and the solar anus as a kind of "third eye" that doesn't look at the orders of the world but only at sacred profanity—staring upward through a ruptured skull at the sun. In a word: win!

Consumption History Fun

In civilizations of the ancient Mediterranean, sumptuary legislation prohibited possession of certain prized objects. Silk and, most famously, Tyrian purple (seen here) were forbidden to all but the most socially elite. Not only did these objects become indicators of social class, but in the various forms of apology for sumptuary legislation these luxurious objects were often cast as actually dangerous to societies should they get out of the hands of their trusted, elite guardians. Strands of argument like this are certainly with us today in those who would blame the global economic crises on American "subprime" mortgage-holders living beyond their means - - acquiring luxurious McMansions to the detriment of their personal and our national credit.

Now, as social historians of the last three decades have argued, these hoary arguments begin to change in tone some time ca. 1600-1750. Rather than just endlessly condemning the desire of the poor to acquire coffee, lumps of sugar, cotton buskins, and other early modern "bling," philosophically-inclined observers like David Hume began to see this desire for material goods as an important engine of industriousness. Instead of being satiated into indulgence by the taste of expensive cognac or by a whiff of sweet, sweet ambergris (which we will call early modern Europe's Chanel No. 5 equivalent), a scullery maid would work harder so that she could afford to buy such items for herself. More radically, in the then-scandalous assessment Bernard Mandeville, a life of vice was actually much more socially-beneficial than abstemious self-restraint. It created jobs in pubs, restaurants, cake-shops, etc. to fulfill sensuous desires and jobs in repairing their damages (so a physician like Mandeville knew only too well).



As Berkeley professor of history and economics Jan de Vries (above) argued for us yesterday in an informal and thoroughly enjoyable session with his colleague John Styles, these elite commendations of consumption are importantly instructive of what was actually happening in northwestern Europe from ca. 1650 onward. That is, inventories reveal that the numbers of material goods in early modern households begin to expand dramatically from then. De Vries' argument is that people were working harder to acquire ever-more "comfortable" goods from the market and were making items for their own households less. Store-bought bread and commercial ale replaced oatmeal gruel and homebrew, as the European populace lived in environments increasingly filled with "breakable" (that is, more fashionable, intentionally less permanent) items.



Now, at its most ambitious, the aim of this historiography has been to re-interpret familiar stories about the Industrial Revolution. In these arguments, the Industrial Revolution is not the cause, but the effect, of this earlier "consumer revolution." As scholars like John Styles argue in his new book, the wide-spread desire for printed cotton dresses or pins—not simply the technological ability to produce them—drove the cotton gin, Arkwright's mills, and other icons of the Industrial Revolution.

Styles' book and his discussion yesterday focused specifically on cloth and clothing, explaining how the desire and actual acquisition of fashionable dress went far down the social ladder in Britain in the years prior to the classic Industrial Revolution. One of the most interesting arguments he set out a refutation of the frequently-cited claim that British textile manufacturers were really set into motion to produce cotton goods because of the increasing threat of cotton imports from India. By studying criminal records of thefts of commodities and probate inventories, Styles claims, there is simply no evidence that these Indian imports were actually making any important inroads into British markets. What is much more important about Indian cottons, he claims, is that they could readily mimic the visual appearance of the woven silk fabrics that were highly prized in early eighteenth century Britain. So, although a scullery maid could never afford a Spitafields silk dress worn by a duchess, she could afford one made of cotton that looked somewhat similar, cost twenty times less, and—crucially—was washable.

One of the most interesting aspects of Styles' talk was how his work and the broader consumption historiography had been received by British Marxist historiography. As is not terribly surprising, powerful British historians like E.P. Thompson (author of "The Making of the English Working Class") saw the desire for fashionable commodities as so many instruments by which capitalist interests alienated the working classes and colonized their imaginations for hegemonic purpose. Interestingly, Styles argued that the kinds of public festivals like May Day that Thompson had celebrated as moments for working-class solidarity were also occasions for display of consumer finery; working class heroes would show up for their big days out dressed in their highly fashionable garb. In other words, rather than being an occasion to repudiate enslavement of capitalist classes, industrially-produced commodities were part of the event.

It should certainly be acknowledged that much of this consumption historiography was begun in Thatcher-era Britain and Reagan's America, and has been seen as a capitulation of good old left-leaning social history to the market. As signaled by Styles' fascinating comments on India, though, one of its undoubtedly positive features has been its understanding of seemingly-North Atlantic phenomena like the Industrial Revolution in complex global perspective. Studies of Wedgwood china cannot now ignore the Indian tea that went into into the cups, the Jamaican sugar that sweetened it, or the Chinese designs that inspired and gave name to it.