Interdisciplinary Encounters: Hidden and Visible Explorations of the Work of Adrian Rifkin 9780755603596, 9781780767024

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Figures

Chapter 1 1.1

One board from the exhibition at Portsmouth City Museum and Art Gallery (c.1980).

1a

Vanalyne Green, stills from A Spy in the House that Ruth Built (videotape, 1989).

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Chapter 2 2.1

‘Rifkin and Miller’, Wynberg, Cape Town (1992).

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2.2

Adrian and Frances Rifkin with their grandfather, Victor, Muizenberg (1946).

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2.3

Adrian and Frances Rifkin with their mother, Iris, Muizenberg (1946).

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2.4

Tamar and Allen Garb with their grandmother, Anne Bloch, Muizenberg (1958).

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2.5

Adrian Rifkin, 38 rue Samson, Paris (After Atget, For Molly Nesbit) (1982).

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2.6 Berni Searle, stills from ‘Alibama’. Michael Stevenson Gallery.

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2.7 Berni Searle, stills from ‘Alibama’. Michael Stevenson Gallery.

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2.8

Aernout Smit, Table Bay (1683). William Fehr Collection, Cape Town.

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2.9

Charles Davidson Bell, The Landing of Jan van Riebeek at the Cape.

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2.10 Edouard Manet, The Battle of the Kearsage and the Alabama (1864). Philadelphia Museum of Art, The John G. Johnson Collection (1917) (cat. 1027).

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2.11 Thomas Bowler, The Alabama and the Mailship Lady Jocelyn. Parliament Library, Cape Town. Source, Ref. (650.7/15).

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2.12 Supposed site of the last barricade in the Paris commune (c.1982). Photograph: Adrian Rifkin.

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Elizabeth Price, Screen from ‘THE TENT’ (2012). A video 52–53 that features ‘SYSTEMS’, the catalogue for the Systems Art exhibition. Whitechapel Gallery (1973).

Chapter 3 3.1 Le Travail, c’est la liberté (mid–late May 1871).

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3a Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar. Two frames from the film essay Otolith ll (2007). Courtesy of The Otolith Group.

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Chapter 4 4.1 From John Tallis’s London Street Views (1838). Together with the Revised and Enlarged Views of 1847.

78–79

4.2

The Quadrant, Regent Street, London. Postcard (c.1900). 79

4.3

August Hervieu, Unknown Man, formerly known as Thomas Adolphus Trollope (1832). Watercolour. National Portrait Gallery: 3906a.

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FIGURES

4.4

The Staircase Ceiling at Cliveden, Buckinghamshire, painted by A. L. Hervieu, who included portraits of the Duchess of Sutherland’s children as the seasons. Reference: 102257; Copyright NTPL/John Hammond.

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4.5

Backboard of Carte de Visite, from the studio of W. Baker, 110 Moseley Road, Birmingham.

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4.6

Backboard of Carte de Visite, from the studio of J. W. Gorsuch, 48 Junction Road, Upper Holloway.

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4a

David Haines, Self Portrait with Adidas Veil (2011). Pencil on paper, 107 x 117cm.

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Chapter 5 5.1

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Deux études pour le personnage qui relève Acron. Graphite on cream wove paper, 22.4 x 36.3cm. Bayonne, Musée Bonnat, inv. NI 968.

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5.2

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Sept hommes nus debout, étude pour Romulus vainqueur d’Acron. Graphite on wove paper, 22.5 x 35cm. Paris, Musée du Louvre, inv. RF 1100.

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5.3

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Studies for the Cadaver of Acron. Graphite on wove paper, 19.7 x 36.4cm. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. 19.125.2.

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5.4

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Le corps étendu d’Acron. Graphite on wove paper, 15.6 x 30.8cm. Bayonne, Musée Bonnat, inv. NI 967.

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5.5

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Acron (plusiers études pour ses jambes et une main). Graphite on paper, 13.7 x 27cm. Montauban, Musée Ingres, inv. 867.2137; C.V. 1231.

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5.6

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Lapidateur de dos (vers la 122 droite, avec plusieurs bras droits, le bras gauche étant sous la tête). Black chalk on laid paper, 41 x 51.6cm. Montauban, Musée Ingres, inv. 867.1928; C.V. 554.

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5.7

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Studies for ‘The Martyrdom 123 of St. Symphorien’ (Lictors, Stone-Thrower, and Spectator) (1833). Oil paint over graphite, squared in graphite, on canvas, 61.8 x 50.1cm. Harvard University Museum, Fogg Art Museum, inv. 1943.246.

5.8

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Feuille d’études de la tête, 125 des bras et des pieds d’un homme étendu, la tête vers la droite, études pour Antiochus. Black chalk and black Chinese ink wash on laid paper, 38 x 37.7cm. Montauban, Musée Ingres, inv. 867.2217; C.V. 48.

5a

Mark Fairnington, Harpy Eagle (The Duke) (2010). Oil on canvas, 171 x 110cm.

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Chapter 6 6.1

Frederic Edwin Church, Mount Ktaadn (1853). Yale University Art Gallery.

6a

work-seth/tallentire, Manifesto 3: (… instead of partial object) (2004/2010). Installation; 4 monitors, 4 DVD players, trestle table, various materials including clamps, found discarded furniture (domestic, office, including worker’s glove, etc.); number of monitors, materials and dimensions variable. Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, in the exhibition Anne Tallentire: This, and other things 1999–2010. Manifesto 3 was first exhibited in 2004 at ENSBA, Paris, and Fri Art, Freiburg. Photograph: Hilary Knox.

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Chapter 7 7a Eyal Sivan and Audrey Maurion. Two frames from Pour l’Amour du Peuple (2004). Courtesy of Momento Films.

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FIGURES

Chapter 8 8.1

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, The Head of Medusa 199 (1598). Oil on panel. Galleria degli Ufizzi, Florence. © 2012. Photograph: Scala, Florence. Courtesy of the Ministero Beni e Att. Culturali.

8.2 Bracha L. Ettinger, Eurydice no. 17 (1994–6). Oil, xerography, with pigment, photocopic dust and ashes on paper mounted on canvas, 26 x 52cm. Private collection.

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8.3 Helene Schjerfbeck, Self Portrait with Red Spot (1944). Oil on canvas, 45 x 37cm. Ahtela 1953 no. 950. Ateneum Art Museum Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki, Stenman Collection.

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8a Roxy Walsh, Daphne (2011). Wall drawing, dimensions variable. Fancy Duck (2011). Watercolour on gesso panel, 25 x 20cm.

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Chapter 9 9.1

Gustave Courbet, L’Origine du monde (1866). Oil on canvas, 222 46 x 55cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Photograph: Gianni Dagli Orti/The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY.

9.2

Eugène Delacroix, Louis d’Orléans Showing His Mistress (1825–6). Oil on canvas, 26.8 x 35.2cm. Museo ThyssenBornemisza, Madrid. Photograph: © Lefevre Fine Art Ltd, London/The Bridgeman Art Library.

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9.3

Edouard Manet, Olympia (1863). Oil on canvas, 130.5 x 190cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Photograph: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY.

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9.4

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Amor Vincit Omnia (1601–2). Oil on canvas, 156 x 113cm. Staatliche Museen, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin. Photograph: Jörg P. Anders/Art Resource, NY.

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9.5 Titian, Triumph of Love (c.1544–6). Picture cover for a portrait. Oil on canvas, 88.3cm diameter. Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. Photograph: Ashmolean Museum.

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9.6 Titian, Venus of Urbino (1538). Oil on canvas, 119 x 165cm. Galleria degli Uffizzi, Florence. Photograph: Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali/Art Resource, NY.

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9.7 Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, John the Baptist 237 (c.1602–3). Oil on canvas, 129 x 95cm. Musei Capitolini, Pinacoteca, Rome. Photograph: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY. 9.8

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Narcissus (c.1599–1600). 239 Oil on canvas, 112 x 92cm. Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Palazzo Barberini, Rome. Photograph: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

9.9 Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Madonna of Loreto (c.1603–6). Oil on canvas, 260 x 150cm. Church of Sant’ Agostino, Rome. Photograph: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

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9.10

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Edouard Manet, Jésus Insulté par les Soldats (1865). Oil on canvas. 191 x 148cm. Chicago: Art Institute, Gift of James Deering, 1925.703. Photograph: The Art Institute of Chicago.

Contributors

Dana Arnold, ‘The Soundtrack to History’ Dana Arnold is Professor of Architectural History and Theory at Middlesex University, London, UK. She was joint editor with Adrian Rifkin of the international journal Art History 1997–2002. Her monographs include The Spaces of the Hospital: Spatiality and Urban Change in London (2013); Rural Urbanism: London landscapes in the early nineteenth century (2006); Reading Architectural History (2002); Re-presenting the Metropolis: Architecture, Urban Experience and Social Life in London 1800–1840 (2000). She is also the author of the bestselling Art History: A Very Short Introduction (2004) which has been translated into many languages. Her recent edited and co-edited volumes include Art History: Contemporary Perspectives on Method (2010), Biographies and Space (2008) and Rethinking Architectural Historiography (2006). Her latest book Art: An Introduction was published by TATE in 2014. I am interested in how the disciplinary interaction between history and art history impacts on our perception and understanding of the images of the past. One of the fundamental questions underpinning my line of enquiry is how we try to make the past visible. We are used to using words to narrate, describe or explain the past and there is an increasing belief in the testimony or truth of images. The use of images in the formulation and telling of history can be seen as a means of helping us to move away from the logocentric nature of the discipline. The ways in which historians employ images can become a scientific technique of observation which is part of a concern for system and method associated with a preoccupation with evidence. As an art historian, this also raises questions in my mind about the status of the art object: how it operates as a historical form of production; and how we understand and interpret it. My enquiry focuses on a political print from French political print Le Travail, c’est la liberté which dates from the period of the Paris Commune (probably mid–late May 1871). This print formed the link between two of Adrian Rifkin’s early writings on popular images that appeared in the mid-1980s: ‘No Particular Thing to

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Mean’, Block, No. 8 (1983), and ‘Well Formed Phrases: Some Limits of Meaning in Political Print at the End of the Second Empire’, Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 8, No. 1 (1985). Here I use it as a means of exploring how Rifkin’s work on popular prints, their relationship to social history and how they operated as language has informed my own thinking.

Paul Bowman, ‘Autodidactics of Bits: Adrian Rifkin’s [Rancièrean] Cultural Studies and the Partition of the Pedagogical’ Paul Bowman teaches cultural studies at Cardiff University. He is the author of eight books including, most recently, Reading Rey Chow: Visuality, Postcoloniality, Ethnicity, Sexuality  (2013) and Beyond Bruce Lee: Chasing the Dragon through Film, Philosophy, and Popular Culture (2013). He was a student of Adrian Rifkin’s at Leeds University between 1994 and 1997, but can only remember being given one piece of advice from him, which was that he ‘should read Rancière’. This chapter explores a minor work of Adrian Rifkin’s, a work which focuses primarily on his research method of parataxis, but which this chapter reads for what it offers to a reconsideration of pedagogy, or ‘teaching and learning’. The chapter argues that Adrian Rifkin has long been a ‘Rancièrean’ within UK cultural studies, and that this history has yet to be fully assessed. The importance of Rifkin’s Rancièrean pedagogical and research methods is laid out by discussing his interventions in the context of the growing (strangle)hold of prescriptive and reductive quasimanagerialist ‘teaching and learning’ protocols within academia. The chapter aspires to draw attention to this significant but underacknowledged Rancièrean force within British cultural studies (avant la lettre), but not just for the sake of it: it does so in order to offer counter-arguments and counter-positions for anyone seeking to contest or resist the stultifying tendencies within educational practices.

David Peters Corbett, ‘American Water: Memory and Projection in MidNineteenth-Century American Painting’ David Peters Corbett is Professor of Art History and American Studies at the University of East Anglia. He is currently working on American city painting and the landscape tradition between 1850 and the 1920s. He received a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship and a Terra Senior

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Fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC to pursue this project. This chapter looks at the ways in which water figured imaginatively for Americans in the mid-nineteenth century as both an image of, and medium for, development and the industrial transformation of nature. Taking Frederic Edwin Church’s 1853 painting Mount Ktaadn as my starting point, I describe the ways in which water stood for these elements of American mid-century culture and, at the same time, allowed a sceptical view of the aspirational aspects of industrialisation. In doing so, I draw on Adrian Rifkin’s methodologically important 1993 book, Street Noises: Parisian Pleasure, 1900–1940. Rifkin’s interdisciplinary examination of the narratives that sustain the images of a city has been critical for my formulation of certain possibilities in working on a different historical subject. However, as I go on to discuss, the deepest appeal Rifkin’s work makes to me is a more personal call to reflect on the interactions of memory, environment, and representation, all of which have both an emotional resonance and a primary intellectual role in my work on American landscape and city painting.

Steve Edwards, ‘Décor and Decorum at the “Temple of Photography”’ Steve Edwards is Head of Department of Art History at the Open University. He studied for his PhD with Adrian Rifkin at Portsmouth Polytechnic and Leeds University. His books include: The Making of English Photography, Allegories (2006);  Photography: A Very Short Introduction (2006) and Martha Rosler, The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems (2012). He is an editor of the Oxford Art Journal and of Historical Materialism. Currently, he is working on studies of photographic patents, biography and property in nineteenth-century England and a book on photography and the New Life at the end of the nineteenth century. He has just completed editing a collection of writings by Adrian Rifkin: Communards and Other Cultural Histories. In 1851 the photographer Antoine Claudet opened the studio at 107 Regent Street, which was to become known as the ‘Temple of Photography’. Claudet employed the architects Barry and Banks to remodel the Nash building in the Renaissance style and the artist (Auguste) Hervieu to paint extensive decorative schemes depicting the progress of photography. Only months after Claudet’s death in 1867 a fire destroyed his ‘temple’ and no visual records of the space or the décor have come to light. Paying particular attention to written accounts in English and French of these decorations,

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this chapter reconstructs Claudet’s ideological presentation of photography. The first section of the chapter entails a detailed reconstruction of the space, paying due attention to anomalies and contradictions. The second part provides a reading of the blind spots of mid-century liberalism. Drawing on Adrian Rifkin’s important essay on French taste and the reform of English artisan culture (‘Success Disavowed: the Schools of Design in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Britain (An Allegory)’, Journal of Design History, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1988, pp. 89–102) my chapter examines the way in which a photographer negotiated the relations and contradictions between art and industry and French and English taste.

Jas´ Elsner, ‘Green Curtains and Picture Covers: Towards an Archaeology of the Pictorial Closet’ Jas´ Elsner is Humfry Payne Senior Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and Visiting Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago. He works on Classical and early Christian art, on the reception of ancient art in later periods, on pilgrimage and collecting, and on travel and the literary descriptions of art. He has turned in the last decade – deeply under the influence of a vibrant and regular conversation with Adrian Rifkin – to the study of the historiography of the field. This chapter worries about the outing of pictures, bared for constant display in the placid light and viewing space of ‘ideal’ museum conditions in modern museological practice. The museum has removed our art from the closet of curtains, cabinets and covers (often themselves painted) and deprived it of the slow temporal process of unveiling and showing – that may lead to epiphanic revelation (e.g., in icons and statues only displayed on feast days or altarpieces rarely opened and then to tremendous fanfare). We have lost all sense of the special or periodic unveiling that marks the sacred, the salacious or the unusual. A number of canonical images once in the closet, though now laid bare in the museum – Caravaggio’s boys, Titian’s Venus of Urbino, Courbet’s Origine du Monde – themselves figure the processes and desires of disrobing. Manet’s Olympia placed the theme outrageously on uncurtained exhibited display in the 1865 Salon. Yet this picture was itself paired (as we usually forget) with Christ Mocked – a piece of nude, epiphanic, outed humiliation removed from church to art show. I seek to disclose the complexities of these pictures as meditations on, responses to, gestures within the great tradition – in which questions of concealment and revelation, closure and penetration have remained central since the Middle Ages.

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Tamar Garb, ‘Centres and Peripheries: Rethinking Cape Town and Paris for AR’ Tamar Garb is Durning Lawrence Professor in the History of Art, University College London. Her research interests have focused on questions of gender and sexuality, the woman artist and the body in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French art, and she has published extensively in this field. Her publications include Sisters of the Brush: Women’s Artistic Culture in Late Nineteenth Century Paris (1994); Bodies of Modernity: Figure and Flesh in Fin de Siecle France (1998), The Painted Face, Portraits of Women in France 1814–1914 (2007) and The Body in Time: Figures of Femininity in Late Nineteenth-Century France (2008). More recently she has worked on South African art and photography and curated the show ‘Figures and Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography’, at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2011, with a catalogue published by Steidl. My chapter will juxtapose two artworks, one a video by South African artist Berni Searle, Alibama, the other a painting of the Kearsage and the Alabama by Edouard Manet. The Alibama/Alabama is a multivalent historical signifier which links distinct geopolitical locations and temporalities in important (and potentially radical) ways. The juxtaposition of a contemporary and a nineteenth-century artwork allows for a redrawing of conventional narratives. It opens up to question our received understanding of past/present, centre/ periphery, significant/marginal, by demonstrating the interconnectedness of historical events and geographically separated places. If Cape Town decentres Paris, and the post-colonial strains of the twenty-first century dislodge the temporally distant certainties of the modern, then a new history and spatiality can be imagined. The video alerts us to the global network of connections on which Paris’s centrality was once based and gives voice, literally and metaphorically, to the peripheral lives and locations which made that centrality possible. By tracing the passage of Manet’s Alabama, before it was blown up off the coast at Cherbourg, to the Cape, where it was painted in Table Bay by Thomas Bowler in 1863, I hope to rethink the legacy of modernity and the prehistory of the global contemporary.

Griselda Pollock, ‘Queer and Feminist Voices Writing/Facing Death: Subjectivity, Mothers and Embodiment Beyond the Public Domain’ Griselda Pollock is Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art and Director of the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History at the University of Leeds. Committed to developing an international, post-

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colonial feminist analysis of the visual arts and cultures, she is currently researching issues of trauma and the aesthetic, Aby Warburg’s legacies, and concentrationary memory. Her most recent publications include After-affects I After-images: Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation (2013); Bracha Ettinger: Art as Compassion (with Catherine de Zegher, 2011); Concentrationary Memories (with Max Silverman, 2013). Her forthcoming books include The Nameless Artist: Charlotte Salomon’s Life? or Theatre? as Theatre of Memory and From Trauma to Cultural: Representation and ‘the Holocaust’ (2014). Picking up the thread of my long-standing reflection on the question of maternal bereavement and my transgressive move into performance and a personal narrative with the question: ‘Who is the subject of death?’ (mirroring Kristeva’s ‘Who is the subject of pregnancy?’), I examine Roland Barthes’s Journal de Deuil /Journal of Mourning, a daily act of writing through grief after the death of his life-long companion, his mother. In homage to a relationship between a queer man and a woman whose intelligence is her essence, a figure who without representation in culture, this profound and personal text sets off a series of meditations on death and its differential representation in painting from French painter Poussin to Finnish painter Helene Schjerfbeck that take as their oblique point of departure Adrian Rifkin’s work Street Noises and his homage to women of his mother’s and grandmother’s generations in his own cultural formation and the creation of a distinctive process of art writing.

Susan L. Siegfried, ‘Fragment and Repetition in Ingres: The Never-ending Work of Art’ Susan L. Siegfried is Denise Riley Collegiate Professor of the History of Art and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She joined the faculty of the University of Leeds (1996–2002) while Adrian Rifkin was head of its School of Fine Art, History of Art, and Cultural Studies. Her books include Ingres: Painting Reimagined (2009), Staging Empire: Napoleon, Ingres, and David (with T. Porterfield, 2006), Fingering Ingres (co-edited with A. Rifkin, 2001), and The Art of Louis Léopold Boilly: Modern Life in Napoleonic France (1995). She is currently working on a study of fashion and costume in the visual culture of nineteenth-century Europe. This chapter examines Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s drawings as evidence of an open-ended approach to art-making, in which his work on a

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subject was never finished and only rarely resolved. The work of art became a new kind of totality, a never-ending process of repetition and variation that embraced everything from the crude preliminary sketch to the final iteration, including engraved and photographic reproductions. Provisionality and the fragmentation of arrangements and forms that accompanied it are characteristics that we associate with modernism, and it is especially unsettling to encounter them in Ingres’s work because they occur there within the supposed integration of classical form, against which modernist artists reacted. Adrian Rifkin prepared us for this unconventional view of the canonical figure in Ingres Then, and Now (2000), which addressed a lifelong fascination. Rifkin proposed the problematic of repetition and of the fragment as a means of seeing and understanding the artist’s work, which he regarded as figuring the elusiveness of meaning in general. This chapter presents Ingres’s drawings as a visual analogue of Rifkin’s focus on writings by and about Ingres.

Artists

Vanalyne Green Vanalyne Green is an American artist who also teaches and writes about culture. She is currently Chair of the Undergraduate Fine Art Department at Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA. Green makes experimental documentaries about political issues that map onto domestic or personal experiences. Publications by and about, and interviews with, Green can be found in Performance Artists Talking in the Eighties by Linda M. Montano, Women of Vision by Alexandra Juhasz, and M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, Theory, and Criticism. Green’s videotape A Spy in the House that Ruth Built was listed as one of the 1,000 best films ever made by film critic and author Jonathan Rosenbaum.

Elizabeth Price Elizabeth Price teaches at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. She makes narrative videos for gallery installation. They incorporate digital photography, motion graphics, animation and sound, and emerge through formal, technical and intellectual exploration of digital visual media. In particular they exploit the heterogeneity of contemporary digital images – the possibility of combining graphic, photographic and cinematic languages – to permit a migration through varied formal genres and institutional contexts, in the course of a single narrative. She was awarded the Turner Prize in 2012 for a new work called THE WOOLWORTHS CHOIR OF 1979.

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The Otolith Group The Otolith Group was founded by the artists and writers Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun in 2002 to produce moving image works, essay films and installations. For over a decade, through the essay film form, The Group have explored events and histories, research being at the core of their practice. In 2010 The Otolith Group were nominated for the Turner Prize. www.otolith.org

David Haines David Haines was born in Nottingham, United Kingdom. He studied at Camberwell School of Art, London and the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam, where he lives and works. His solo exhibitions include: 2009 The Myth is Everything, Upstream Gallery, Amsterdam, and 2008, The Cyber Mythologies, Luisa Strina Gallery, São Paulo. He was awarded the Jeanne Oosting Prize, 2012. www.davidhaines.org

Mark Fairnington Mark Fairnington teaches at Wimbledon College of Art. He and Adrian Rifkin produced an artists book, Flora, for the 2011 eponymous exhibition in Dublin. www.markfairnington.com His solo exhibitions include: 2012 Unnatural History, Mannheimer Kunstverein, Galerie Peter Zimmermann, Mannheim, Germany. 2011 Flora, Oliver Sears Gallery, Dublin. 2010 Bull Market, Bury St Edmunds Art Gallery, Suffolk. 2009 Private Collection, Galerie Peter Zimmermann, Mannheim, Germany. 2008 Galerie Peter Zimmermann, Mannheim, Germany. 2007 Dynasty, Art Agents, Hamburg.

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work-seth/tallentire work-seth/tallentire is the collaborative practice which Anne Tallentire and John Seth formed in 1993. Both Seth and Tallentire currently teach at Central Saint Martins. The Manifesto series, which began in 2001, sets out to forge a process of art-making that maintains the contingency of decisions and actions in relation to structure and the incomplete. Within such a framework, the work explores the relationship between live action and the mediated image; the juxtaposition of action, object, image, and the ‘temporary coincidences’ that occur in various spatial/temporal designations during the working process. Other works include: 1998 Trailer, Project Arts Centre, Dublin. 2001 Dispersal, Orchard Gallery, Derry. 2002 Yes, let’s go (Manifesto 2), a ten-hour performance, South London Gallery.

Eyal Sivan After working as a professional photographer in Tel Aviv, Eyal Sivan left Israel in 1985 and settled in Paris. Since then he has been sharing his time between Europe and Israel. Known for his controversial films, Sivan has directed more than 10 worldwide awarded political documentaries and produced many others. His cinematographic body of work was shown and awarded various prizes in prestigious festivals. Besides worldwide theatrical releases and TV broadcasts, Sivan’s films are regularly exhibited in major art shows around the world. He publishes and lectures on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, documentary film-making and ethics, political crimes and representation, political use of memory, genocide and representation. www.eyal.sivan.info Recent work includes: 2012 Common State, potential conversation [1] 124 minutes, colour, Video. 2009 Jaffa, the orange’s clockwork 88 minutes, colour, Video. 2004 I Love You All/Aus Liebe Zum Volk (co-directed with Audrey Maurion) 98 minutes, b/w & colour, 35mm. 2003 Route 181, Fragments of a Journey in Palestine-Israel (co-directed with Michel Khleifi) Documentary, 272 minutes, colour, Video.

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Roxy Walsh Roxy teaches in the Department of Art at Goldsmiths, London. She initiated the internet-based project, exhibition and book INFALLIBLE, In Search of the Real George Eliot (sole editor/curator) published by Article Press 2005. www.Roxywalsh.com Her solo exhibitions include: 2013 Dependent Rational Animals, with Sally Underwood: Towner, Eastbourne. 2013 Body Language Galerie Peter Zimmerman, Mannheim. 2012 The Lady Watercolourist The MAC, Belfast. 2011 Second Sex Galerie Peter Zimmerman, Mannheim.

Interdisciplinary Encounters Hidden and Visible Explorations of the Work of Adrian Rifkin Introduction by Dana Arnold

M

uch has been made of the usefulness of interdisciplinarity in the humanities. But what effect does this have on the way in which we now think about and interrogate the archive? I am particularly interested here in the extent to which interdisciplinary approaches have influenced our methodologies in examining the practice of visual analysis. This is so much so that the polyvalence of interdisciplinarity itself can become a certainty that rivals the finality of traditional approaches to art history. Renaming does not solve this problem: transdisciplinary, multidisciplinary describe a similar fixity in the processes of a cultural analysis of the visual. Here I want to unpick the notion of interdisciplinarity and move more towards the concepts we now use to understand objects. This is not to say that these concepts remain static and fixed. Rather that they operate in a dynamic way that enables us to make close readings of our object of study. Our work will always, then, be provisional as we explore the implications of concepts whilst at the same time gaining insight into what they might mean and how they operate as methodologies. The importance for our understanding of the impact of interdisciplinarity lies in the different meanings these concepts have to different scholars working across different fields. This emphasises not only the inter-subjectivity of knowledge, but also the complexities of the visual. The chapters in this volume offer close readings of discrete aspects of the visual that operate on a range of levels. The authors’ interaction

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with their object of study and the evolution of his or her own thinking lies at the heart of each chapter. The connective tissue between these subjective reflections is the writings of Adrian Rifkin, who has made a substantial contribution to our concept of interdisciplinary studies of cultural/visual objects. Rifkin’s work covers a broad territory that includes specific historical topics such as the Paris Commune and Parisian urban formation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, together with more abstract conceptual and theoretical issues including the object of art history, the subject as a breathless or a waiting subject, and queer studies. The common thread in all of these lines of enquiry is the interweaving of these approaches so that, in Rifkin’s own words, a concept can be refigured or critically deployed within different fields of cultural materials or a historical thematic can become a theoretical question of disciplinary formation. In the last few years I have shifted to the more conceptual end of the spectrum as a means of reconstituting an archive of specific  knowledges and aesthetic problematics.1 Rifkin’s idea of concepts is a touchstone for all the writers in this volume. And this connects with the Jewish émigré Warburgian tradition of art history in which Rifkin and his own mentor Edgar Wind were trained. The concepts of art history were articulated by Panofksy in a series of books and articles that greatly influenced the diaspora of Jewish intellectuals interested in the visual.2 There is a continuity here as Rifkin both absorbs and distils the concepts of kulturgeschichte whilst engaging with distinctly different postmodern agendas. For us, Rifkin’s work opens the door to engage at once with canonical and non-canonical aspects of the visual. This volume comprises a series of interventions written by a group of internationally renowned scholars working across a range of disciplines all of whom share an interest in conceptually and critically engaging the visual as a field of genuine intellectual enquiry and complexity. Prompted by an opening statement by Rifkin each of the authors reflects on how his or her own methodologies have interacted with his conceptual framings of related topics. The chapters themselves act as provocations to make us think about the problematic of interdisciplinarity as the authors re-engage with the work of Rifkin and engage in dialogues with each other. The resonance between these individual experiences highlights the subjectivity of art history as it moves from a single discipline based on certainty and truths to one that exists in the flux and flow between intersubjective encounters.

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The structure of this volume employs a number of rhetorical devices across the writings and art works that comprise the objects and subjects of this study. My aim is to encourage re-engagements with Rifkin and new configurations of the discourses between the verbal and visual. This volume deliberately avoids the fixity of binary dialogues so Rifkin’s voice remains a fluctuating constant throughout. He speaks at the beginning and the end. He appears as a prompt, muse or inspiration in each of the chapters. These encounters are punctuated with images by artists who have also worked with Rifkin. The quasi biographical/chronological framework has been designed to offer an illusion of progress from ‘Beginnings’ to ‘Art History’ to ‘Cultural Studies’ to ‘Appreciation’ or conclusion. But this is more than an editorial sleight of hand: The dialogues and interventions that comprise the subjects and objects of this book play with our concept of normative art histories. In re-engaging with Rifkin the intersubjectivity of these encounters fold together to offer responses to the ‘theoretical question of disciplinary formation’. Indeed, the interdisciplinarity of the book is only the starting point for ‘reconstituting an archive of specific knowledges and aesthetic problematics’. With thanks to Jas´ and Adrian

Note 1 http://www.gai-savoir.net/ (accessed 4 August 2010). 2 See for instance Erwin Panofksy, Idea: A Concept in Art Theory (1924) and the article Erwin Panofsky, ‘Der Bergriff des Kunstwollens’, 1920, translated by Kenneth J. Northcott and Joel Synder ‘The Concept of Artistic Volition’, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Autumn, 1981), pp. 17–33.

1 Après (Tout) Coup? Adrian Rifkin

If there is no production in general, then there is also no general production. Production is always a particular branch of production.1 I wish, I wish, I wish in vain …2

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t must have been in 1967; let us say May for the sake of a fictional veracity, though it might have been later, in October that I first went to work in the library of the Warburg Institute. If I am certain of this it is because I do recall Helen Rosenau telling me than that I should read the ‘Lecture on Serpent Ritual’, and a host of relic-reader’s cards go back to 1967, BL, BN, Mazarine. I also wanted to be in the London art world as much as possible; the hippy pleasures of the Arts Lab in Drury Lane, the Bond Street Galleries, the Tate, as well as clubbing and night life. And note well that conjunction of Caro’s showing Prairie at Kasmin with Michael Fried’s newly published ‘Art and Objecthood’ (Artforum, Summer 1967) was in itself an engrossing moment, haunted by strangely out of place notions such as that of ‘grace’, compelling in its emergence in the commercial gallery. I guess the congregating of young Jewish scholars around such essentially Catholic notions is a long-lasting figure of the history of art. Then the Institute was the right place to read Warburg’s essay, rather than a provincial library, for it was to slip into a space of thought opened up by Rosenau and Edgar Wind, the grace of an art history that recognised no disciplinary boundaries to its remit.3 That was, then, a way to begin at a beginning, or at least very near to one; in volume 2 of the famous Journal of the Warburg Institute, and, as ‘Serpent

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Ritual’ appeared alongside Wittkower’s ‘Eagle and Serpent’, it was also to have an image saturated introduction to a possible practice of art history. This may sound superfluous, a pleonasm, but it is worth noting today as, with the development of fields of visual culture, political and social geographies, cultural studies and now the vast, electronic diffusion of virtual imagery and its accompaniment of theoretical reflection, it looks like a premonition of and a preparation for something of which we then had no idea. The assemblage of visual forms in works by Wittkower and Saxl or, above all, Warburg’s own Bilderatlas Mnemosyne implicate the procedure of parataxis as a figure for making work – perhaps an interface for the relation of works of art and the work of scholarship, as well as for a mutation of art history into art writing. And, for that matter dj’ing as the model of cultural practice that it was to become in the 1980s and 1990s; and already intimated in the work of a Gustav Mahler at the turn of the nineteenth century.4 In the shorter run, only a decade after that, in my very militant, and still unfinished, work on the Paris Commune, I guess that it was because of this encounter that it was possible to be aware of the symbolic as well as the allegorical values of the menagerie of animals that formed the sèmes of political caricature that accompanied French revolutions. It was possible, if not consistently, to stand off from resorting to easy if apparently exhaustive solutions in their interpretation, or from referring the whole matter to generalised discussions of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, which often masked out the most difficult approaches to the life of the image with an over-easy dialectic.5 Anyway the echoing of gestures in the multiple lives of the image began to suggest an aural attention, which might have been to do with sounds or just to the enigma of relation; but that at least led to the notion of thinking the city with shut eyes. Yet the temptation to invoke the bliss of the outcome of a satisfactory interpretation was certainly authorised by Wind, and, in his seminars, their complex and scholarly clinching was of the great affects of his vocal style; as he put it in his essay ‘The Eloquence of Symbols’, ‘a great symbol is exactly the reverse of a sphinx; it lives more fully when its riddle is answered’, even though, ‘In the centre of any good symbol there is an opaque core which will not yield to rational analysis, although around this core translucent images may be grouped which draw from it their strength and denseness.’6 Nonetheless it was not evident how to extend into one another the fascination with a Windian or Warburgian process of drawing to a conclusion – often more modest but also more radical in the latter’s case – with a realisation of the immense importance of Julia Kristeva’s concepts of the chora and the thetic cut as she elaborated them in the vast social, literary and historical archive of her La Révolution du langage poétique;

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not to mention the sublime synthesis of all these art historical potentials that was her La joie de Giotto. In effect the opacity of which Wind wrote here shifts enigma to the centre, the possibility of meaning in the frame of an overdetermined relation between the singularities of making individual works of art and their being seen or heard or read. And, at the same time Kristeva fluidly integrates the more classic Marxism of Frederick Antal’s Florentine studies.7 And we, I, were left holding this increasingly misshapen topology of future thought, and we are still somewhere very close to a beginning, to which, time and time again, we will get more or less close. If this first reading was, then, 44 years after Warburg had pronounced the lecture, and 28 since Gertrude Bing had put her version in the Journal, another 44 years has now elapsed; and this a time of immense delay, delay in a rather Duchampian sense of settling dust and opaque transparency, of palimpsest. And the notion of delay is something like the heart of the matter, for a wholly negative aspect of a first visit to the library of the WI is the slogan in the form of a Latin inscription posted over the entrance to the ground floor reading room – Otiosis locus hic non est: discede morator. I don’t think that I ever mentioned my horror at this to anyone, but just now, Google searching for its origins, I find that I am far from being alone and in a few days, as I ask around, many friends tell me how they share my revulsion. A very recent essay by Rebecca Bligh echoes exactly my own first feelings – ‘but what about my naps?’8 And so for years I only worked up in the stacks, out of view of the librarian and the ‘real’ scholars of the reading room. Maybe I felt like the wrong kind of Jew?9 Of course, after the catalogue itself, the stacks really are the best view of the inside of Warburg’s mind – just as secretly checking out Rosenau’s reading on her private shelf in the North Room of the BL was a way of monitoring an aspect of its afterlife. And being so uncomfortable, isolated up there with the rickety tables, was probably the better place to learn that the only future is not to be in Warburg’s mind, but in one’s own, a move that the oddity of his supports; and that this is the space to be constructed through the work that one will, in the end, have done. Oddity, the oddness of nachträglichkeit (Freud), of différance (Derrida), of knowing one can never have (Lacan (the past, the revolution, jouissance, the ideal self) Kristeva), however it unfolds. Discede morator is precisely (sic) an inappropriate injunction because putting off is rather the heart of the matter, waiting, surprise and revision, daydreaming, recall in the absence or loss of evidence (in all its senses). No Warburg without delay (between the field research in Santa Fe and

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the lecture at Kreuzlingen), and none either without the otiosus (no dative here): for in any reasonable philology of the word Warburg was a great and innovative thinker on condition that he was a ‘riche oisif’, a not-banker otiosus. His was never the scrabbling for position, career and prestige that was the life of Ernst Kantarowicz, for example – which is not to diminish Kantarowicz but to indicate the importance of a tone and an involuntary politics.10 Today I find out from the Warburg archivist Claudia Wedepohl that the inscription was chosen by Otto Kurz; yet knowing this it remains too protestant, inhospitable, guilt-laden, too prescriptive for thinking of the immense and timeless delay of nachleben, which itself, importantly for me, is the substance of this volume. The inhospitableness is also odd when in essays such as Wind’s ‘Eloquence of Symbols’ he opens in dispute with E. M. Forster and looking at paintings in the National Gallery, while Rudolph Wittkower’s ‘Serpent and Eagle’ concludes its dense and complex trajectory with a more or less epiphanic tribute to Shelley’s ‘most exalted artistic intuition’ – the poet’s line ‘The Snake and the Eagle meet – the world’s foundation tremble!’ drawing the article to its close. Nothing could be more delicate and theoretically pointed than this acceptance of hospitality through the hosting of what was, for such writers, another culture, in the substance or structure of their texts. At the same time it reminds us that what became the post colonial (or the more general and radical realisation of otherness) was not a matter of will or a decision on the part of crucial writers such as Edward Said, nor even the huge movements against colonial violence, but it also for us has much to do with accepting the processes of exile, movement and the adoption of new mother tongues as vectors in the formation of a subject who becomes capable of writing in difference, in multiple differences (‘race’ and class and gender and queer, origins we have discounted or even forgotten); and that these processes are long, polymorphous and beside ourselves as well as of our individual pain, delight or anger – a lived out parataxis of possible inscriptions. If only because none of this is predictable Nobis morandum est would be the better inscription, even though it has no authority in a classical corpus. Do we not need to hold back, to be held? And never more than now, in these police decades of interdisciplinary formation and the instrumentalised knowledge of the research grants and outputs? We might, as and if it is offered to us, choose to imitate the oisif; but without forgetting we do ‘care for our raiment’, though that in itself is not to be regretted. That said I want to blow a bit on the Duchampian gathering of dusts, for settling itself is the ineluctable force of disciplinary formation and of the

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entropy of success.11 At face value it is quite abusive to look at what has happened over the decades as dust, a series of huge dust storms might be more appropriate. But it does settle and is settling, ever more densely with the passage of time; so if this deposit can be regarded as having a charm, the fixed beauty of historiographical accomplishment, it’s up to us to disturb it, to stir it up and to catch fresh shapes that might emerge from what it was we saw – after all were we not deprived of not-seeing L’Origine du Monde? As I write this the secret of stirring up seems to draw me back to the matter of parataxis. Is it just Ingres lying in a muddle with words from the language of industry, like the chaos-poetics of dolls and clumsy special effects in Hans Jurgen Syberberg’s (1982) film Parsifal? As it is a rhetorical figure, I may as well associate it with a number of other such figures that have interested me in recent years, thinking about the transitions between art history and art writing. Already I want to spoil the outcome of this speculation by guessing now that, if we set Jacques Rancière’s understanding of parataxis as the characteristic of what he calls ‘the aesthetic regime of art’ – his abyssal dejection of the words modern/ity/ism – in his discussions of Mme Bovary, as in his book Le destin des images, then in the end truly modern art history of the last century would seem, in its pursuit of parataxis, to have been the aesthetic regime of a ‘discipline’ that evolved, as ‘representation’, out of the descriptions of Pausanias and Vasari’s teleologies.12 Indeed it might even be worth the risk of saying that the drive behind all forms of identitarian or social critical art histories, which we made, and took to be the most radical, is to remain, in some way, in the representational regime of writing; and that, in this, they were always and already fated to be one step aside from the making of art and literature. That is, they were fated to risk confounding their politics with a formalism that was not the one that their politics of writing art history critically fought. This is one reason why non-representational texts such as those of a Jean Louis Schefer have lasted so well. It’s here, then, that we can expand the tropology of art (historical) writing simply to include address on the one hand and memory, or sounding, on the other; parataxis with and against prosopopoeia, apostrophe and anaphora. Parataxis inevitably fades in and out of repetition and echo, assonance, overlapping rhythmic structures or lapses, and looks like the ally of anaphora in thought and thinking afterlife (Mahler again, the dj as creator through citation, Derrida in Glas). An example of mine that shows how the time of nachleben may be very short, or nearly instantaneous, comes from a film that I saw at the time of

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the ‘first reading’ under the auspice of discedit. It is made up of a couple of fragments from Jacques Demy’s Les Demoiselles de Rochefort of 1967. The ecstatic, staggeringly delightful and ironic imitatio the American musical is in full swing, in an uncanny, camp and self-regarding resumé of French tropes of sentimental culture that is Demy’s genius, and then the ‘real’ Gene Kelly suddenly appears: as Danny, the étranger. Once he bumps into the demoiselle Solange in the street, strewing her shopping and the score of her symphony over the pavement; he is wearing a violet jacket. And now for a second time, dressed in a white suit, and playing her score at a piano (we hear the full orchestration) he meets her in the music shop to which she had directed him; as she comes into the shop he stands to dance with her and, at this moment, he becomes the embodied nymph. There is a flash of memory between the film and the contemporary culture in which Kelly is still active as if this were now an involuntary rather than a self-conscious imitation, inside and outside the screen; and another within the film as the return of affect imperilled with loss between the two appearances, the sentimental cliché turned into an abstraction of pure affect. The conventions of the musical’s ballet sequence, here a pas de deux, now become the bearer of a singularity, become a visual and aural anaphora of the desire for cinema. The time scaling is at once of the infinitesimal and the epochal, or the epic, but also of the coexistence and succession of the regimes of representation and the aesthetic.13 Let’s now leave this figure of Gene Kelly as an affect of cinema become Ovidian nymph. But let us leave it alongside the long and contorted development of arguments concerning the figuring of the immaterial and the infinite, the before and after the beginning or the Creation, from Augustine to Maimonides and after. This is something wonderfully covered by Wind in one of his Sistine essays, ‘In the Beginning’, though I came to these questions neither via Wind nor Gene Kelly but rather through the strange transliteration of the contemporary virtual (electronic chat) into the material (video art) that is David Haines’ Three Months. It was reflecting on this that led me back to Maimonides and then to Wind. But then too Wind’s own discussions of the ‘God’s positions’, his face or his back, of the passive tense of ‘The Spirit upon the Face of the Waters’ or of Michelangelo’s way of assigning the sun and the moon to a proper order of visibility, all, now echo some questions of the distribution of the sensible and the securing or breaking of one or another police order.14 Of course it is an abuse to set Kelly, Wind, Michelangelo and Rancière side by side like this, so many gestures from a dictionary like that of Marianne Wex in her Let’s Take Back Our Space: on “Female” and “Male” Body Language,15 but one no worse than Walter Benjamin’s parataxes that make up the Passagenwerk.

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The aporetics of parataxis also invite us to let things drop in our pursuit of them. I think the first time that I paid serious attention to the word was not in reading Adorno on Hölderlin or even in the odd construction of his Minima Moralia or Marianne Wex’s own version of a Bilderatlas, but in a talk given to the art and cultural studies students, in the later 1970s, at Portsmouth by Charles Parker. This marxist-folklorlist, broadcaster, producer of the BBC Radio Ballads in the 1950s and 1960s and founder of the Banner Theatre of Actuality in Birmingham in 1973/4 was as good a thinker as he was a singer and this was a singing-thinking lecture. Amongst many topics Charles addressed, and somewhere I have a transcript of this talk, foremost was an account of the structure of folk song as one of narrative founded in parataxes and juxtapositions of lived experience, accumulated and made symbolic in such a way as to generate an adequate narrative account of being alive, something sufficiently coherent to sustain a collective life in the frame of class conflict and exploitation. It was a quite general theory of many specific songs and aimed at a shift in the distribution of the sensible, the sounding of unheard voices. In a sense parataxis was a method from below, which the voice from below could make us hear as a form for life; and then, in another juxtaposition of materials, Charles also suggested how this was also an important aspect of Karl Marx’s own processes for accumulating the materials in setting out the analysis of Capital. In this, as was fairly typical of this period of surviving intellectual Maoism, as well as the still powerful influence of E. P. Thompson, Charles was opening up a means of thinking away the differences or rather the hierarchies between the ‘intellectual’ and the ‘non-intellectual’ as itself a discovery of Marxism as a practice. I heard this, ironically enough, at a point that I was exiting street politics and rethinking the proper mode of action for the aspiring leftist intellectual. I guess that one thing hearing it did was to make me entranced by hearing in a way that Wind’s voice had once enchanted me, or Astrid Varnay in 1958 on the radio from Bayreuth, or Mrs Noach’s voice on the interphone of hers and Arnold Noach’s house, or Kristeva’s chora, that I have never understood other than when it happens; but also of hearing myself as having a narrative to make. So my short contribution to this volume, which was to have been about being possessed and enchanted, has ended by presenting the page with which I might have begun it.

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Notes 1 Karl Marx, Introduction to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, being Chapter One of The Grundrisse, written in 1857, consulted at: http://www.marxists.org/ archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/appx1.htm#production (accessed 12 October 2011) – this comes from a couple of paragraphs through which it is possible to construct whole syllabuses of cultural methodology. 2 Phrase from a folk song, used by Bob Dylan in ‘Bob Dylan’s Dream’, I wish, I wish, I wish in vain That we could sit simply in that room again Ten thousand dollars at the drop of a hat I’d give it all gladly if our lives could be like that. (© Warner Brothers, 1963, 1964), but derived from Tommy Makem and others, ‘The Butcher Boy’, I wish, I wish, I wish in vain I wish I was a maid again A maid again I ne’er will be ’Till cherries grow on an apple tree. Of many variants either of these versions suit my purpose. The perfect pendentif to the Dylan would be the third song of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, ‘Von der Jugend’. 3 For this part of my text see: Aby Warburg, ‘A Lecture on Serpent Ritual’, Journal of the Warburg Institute, Vol. 2, No. 4 (April 1939), pp. 277–92 and Rudolf Wittkower, ‘Eagle and Serpent: A Study in the Migration of Symbols’, ibid., pp. 293–325. Helen Rosenau, who had pioneered writing on women in art and the social analysis of J.-L. David was preparing her book Social Purpose in Architecture. Paris and London Compared, 1760–1800 (London: Studio Vista, 1970). One of the fascinations of the North Reading Room at the then British Library was the rank of private shelves facing its outer perimeter on which regular, senior scholars could leave their books continuously. Snooping around these was easy as one was not necessarily visible to the reader his or her self, and as in this they were an important bibliographical resource. 4 It’s worth noting that at this point, before the reconstruction of Warburg’s Atlas and the rise of scholarly interest in him after the publication E. H. Gombrich’s book Aby Warburg, an Intellectual Biography (London: The Warburg Institute, 1970), that it was more of a rumour than an active presence in art historical thinking. There circulated more mythic memories of Warburg sitting silently before it than knowledge of what it looked like. Since then, of course, the Atlas has become a key to the possible futures of art history. Warburg himself has, as an object of study, generated a whole branch of the discipline, and a largely wonderful one at that in which it truly reaches out to and receives from cultural studies, Critical Theory and Benjamin studies, film, trauma studies, the post-colonial and so forth. I made an exhibition of political prints of the Paris Commune for the Portsmouth City Galleries in 1978, I think, which toured to a couple of other destinations, and which was made of more or less ordered assemblages of quite rough photographic prints on roughly 50 A3 boards, and in which gesture and event were, in their combination supposed to carry the day over caption and explication in an exposition of political memory and conjunctural reactions.

Figure 1.1: One board from the exhibition at Portsmouth City Museum and Art Gallery (c.1980).

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Aby Warburg, Der Bilderatlas MNEMOSYNE, herausgegeben von Martin Warnke unter Mitarbeit von Claudia Brink (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2008). The best work on the long genealogy of dj’ing, from the seventeenth century, through Liszt’s transcriptions to the present day is in Peter Szendi, Écoute, une histoire de nos oreilles (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2001) and Musica Practica, Arrangements et phonographies de Monteverdi à James Brown (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997). 5 See the ensemble of these essays in a collection from my work: Communards and Other Cultural Histories, edited and with an introduction by Steve Edwards (Brill, 2014). 6 Edgar Wind, ‘The Eloquence of Symbols’ in The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 92, No. 573 (Dec. 1950), pp. 349–50. 7 Julia Kristeva, La Révolution du langage poétique: L’avant-garde à la fin du Xixe siècle, Lautréamont Et Mallarmé (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1974). The Giotto essay in Polylogue (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1977), pp. 383–408, and originally in Peinture, 2/3 (January 1972), pp. 35–51. It’s important not to overlook the powerful impact of intellectual Maoism in Polylogue from which, in its quiet radicalism, this article should not be excepted. 8 See Rebecca Bligh, one of her four essays on libraries, posted at www.8fold.org/online %20content/Rebecca_Bligh_The_Warburg.pdf (accessed 10 October 2011). 9 Again, at this point such an observation was more of a half thought than a disciplinary issue of the first order, and the current range of books available on Jewishness and art history is quite big! I am not sure that this engages me as more than a half thought, if only because Jewish thought as such is not one of my preoccupations, though it bubbles up here and there. Charlotte Schoell-Glass’s trajectory through the Warburg archives and the question of Warburg and Jewishness is exemplary, but here I note just the article which she gave to Art History under my editorship: ‘An Episode of Cultural Politics during the Weimar Republic: Aby Warburg and Thomas Mann Exchange a Letter Each’, Art History, Vol. 21, No. 1 (March 1998), pp. 107–28. Here the complicated folding, in a Deleuzian complexity, of the Jew between Warburg’s origins and Mann’s Joseph und seine Bruder novels is astonishing. See also an important but as yet unpublished essay by Griselda Pollock, ‘Aby Warburg and “Thinking Jewish” in Modernity’, communicated to me in September 2011. 10 See Alain Boureau, ‘Visite au Monument E. K. – histoires d’un historien, Kanotorwicz’, postface to Kantorowicz, Oeuvres (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), pp. 1205–339. Kantarowicz published in the JWCI in 1939. He had one of the oddest of Jewish exiles, going from being a pretty fervent German nationalist to a trenchant critic of the worship of state power, from the author of the very myth of Imperial Germany in his great book on Frederick ll, to undermining the contemporary legitimacy of sacrifice in his essay ‘Pro Patria Mori in Medieval Political Thought’ in The American Historical Review, Vol. 56, No. 3 (April, 1951), pp. 472–92. 11 Carolyn Steedman, Dust (Manchester: MUP, 2001), is a marvellous working through of dust as a concept. But in my use of the word I echo my own editorial introduction to About Michael Baxandall (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 1–4, which began ‘When the dust settles we are left with text’. Obviously the converse can obtain, when the text settles, we are left with dust. This is Steedman’s starting point as I read it. 12 See Jacques Rancière, Le destin des images (Paris: La Fabrique, 2003) see especially p. 54 ff.: Politique de la littérature (Paris: Galilée, 2007). Obviously the classic exposition of his regimes of art is in Le Partage du sensible (Paris: La Fabrique, 2000). 13 Le Demoiselles de Rochefort – un film de Jacques Demy (1967), DVD Les Films de ma Vie (undated), print of 1996. This notion about the length of a very short time has also become important to me as a resistance both to the epochal thinking that is demanded by a certain left politics as to the time-discipline of research assessments. It resulted, alas without publication, with a syllabus that Rob Stone and I devised to try to teach in the time of musical portamento; the differences in thinking time between the

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elongated downward slope of the word ‘rispondi’ in old recordings of Che faro … from Gluck’s Orfeo with the almost elided portamento of contemporary practice. The idea that Kelly is, so as to speak, an instant nachleben, comes from here and other work on Orfeo that I did for a conference of Centre CATH at the University of Leeds 23–25 November, 2007. The related possibility that the length of nachleben might be that of a breath enables it to be located alongside Charles Parker’s singing lecture, see below, as well as in the body. 14 Edgar Wind, The Religious Symbolism of Michelangelo: The Sistine Chapel, edited by Elizabeth Sears (Oxford: OUP, 2000), especially ch. vii, ‘In the Beginning’, pp. 64–89. For my remark on Haines’ video see my essay ‘Look, No Wires! Some Notes Around the Idea of a Sign (1, 2, Nothing)’ in Antony Bryant and Griselda Pollock, editors, Digital and Other Realities – Renegotiating the Image (London: I.B.Tauris, 2010). 15 Marianne Wex, Let’s Take Back Our Space: Female and Male Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures (Hamburg: Frauenliteratur Verlag, 1984 (1979)), and also Mike Sperlinger and Andrew Hunt, editors, Let’s Take Back Our Space, with an introduction by Mike Sperlinger, essays by Adrian Rifkin and Marina Vishmidt and an afterword by Andrew Hunt (Southend: Focal Point Gallery, 2010).

Figure 1a: Vanalyne Green, stills from A Spy in the House that Ruth Built (videotape, 1989).

2 Centres and Peripheries Rethinking Cape Town and Paris for AR Tamar Garb

Prelude (August 2011)

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ape Town and Paris seem to be worlds apart. But in my life both have been central. I was raised in the first and came of age intellectually in the second. It was in Paris, as a young graduate student, that I embraced the joy of the archive and learned the act of imaginative projection that the writing of history entails. Growing up in Cape Town in the 1960s and early ’70s, I was acutely aware of the lure of Europe in general and the charm of French culture in particular. In that, I was not alone. Paris had served as the focus of dreams and desires for local artists, writers and intellectuals from the late nineteenth century onwards and the South African landscape was regularly seen, during the twentieth century, through the filters of ‘Fauve’ colour, ‘Cubist’ simplification or ‘modernist’ decorative design.1 For many of my generation, such colonial constructions seemed to betray both the specificity of the land that we inhabited and the authenticity of Parisderived formalisms. We grew up painfully aware of our own provincialism: not only did we feel we inhabited a cultural backwater, inevitably belated and bathetic, but the pariah status of South Africa as an oppressive and undemocratic state, compounded our shame and unease. This was a place from which to escape. Survival depended on it. It was through French culture that I found my ‘voice’, and it took nearly 30 years (and the transformation of the political landscape) for me to begin to write as a South African.

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In 2007, I was approached by Haunch of Venison Gallery in London to curate an exhibition on contemporary South African art and I chose to look at landscape as a site of historical inscription.2 It was in this context that I came across the video Alibama (2006) by Berni Searle, a work that presented me with the possibility of bringing together Cape Town and Paris and integrating these two apparently disparate places into a historical narrative that was not confined to the autobiographical. While researching this piece and writing about it both for a catalogue of Searle’s work and for the London show, I was invited to participate in a conference to be held at the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, in October 2009 entitled ‘Is Paris Still the Capital of the Nineteenth Century?’.3 I offered my paper as a polemical intervention into this event. I had been discussing the issue of capitals and centres for some time with Adrian Rifkin whose own paper unsettling the very premise of such a question was delivered at a similar conference held in Norway in spring, 2009. (See postscript.) While Rifkin addressed the competing claims of the once-great modern metropolises of London and Paris to such an accolade, and asked if what they have become sheds light on what they were imagined to have been, I sought to juxtapose the historic centre with its putative periphery, puncturing its self-importance by turning things upside down. Rifkin had seen Searle’s video at my London show and its soundtrack featuring the well-known South African song ‘Daar Kom die Alibama’ (There comes the Alibama) had struck a chord with him – his engagement went beyond the theoretical or purely academic to a deepseated almost visceral recognition. It took him back. Although he grew up in England, was educated at Oxford and has suffered neither the embarrassment nor inhibitions of a colonial childhood, Adrian is the son of first generation Jewish immigrants to the UK: his flat-vowelled, Ashkenazi father from South Africa whose accent he vividly recalls, his Francophone Sephardic mother from Egypt who was also fluent in Arabic.4 It was through his mother that Rifkin’s engagement with Paris was fostered and for him Paris remains the space of maternal identification and affect. But two trips to South Africa in childhood, and a steady stream of visiting paternal relatives to the family home in Manchester, kept his South African connection alive. Photographs of the family general store in Wynberg, Cape Town, display the sign ‘Rifkin and Miller’, named after Adrian’s grandfather, a late nineteenth-century Lithuanian immigrant called Victor Rifkin who started the shop in c.19195 (Fig. 2.1). Success in business meant that he could send his sons to be educated in the UK, and his eldest son, Frank, qualified as a doctor in Edinburgh and opened a practice in Salford. It was there and in Manchester that Adrian and his sister Frances were raised. I had driven past the sign for ‘Rifkin and Miller’ before I had even met Adrian. And once we had become friends – we met at the legendary Association of

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Art Historians Conference in London in 1983 when Adrian spoke on Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida in ‘the new art history session’ and his student, the late Nicholas Green, mounted a virulent attack on Ernst Gombrich at a plenary causing the room to erupt – I made a point of driving past it on the way to Muizenberg, the ‘Jewish’ beach on which we had both played (and been photographed) as children, he in the 1940s, I in the 1950s (Figs 2.2, 2.3, 2.4). All this is by way of saying that when we met, I did not need to explain much to Adrian for him to understand where I came from – intellectually, politically, culturally. It took me much longer to decipher him. For his connection to South Africa was much more occluded and covert than mine, which was worn in my voice, my mannerisms and my all-too-obvious anxiety. I did not recognise it at first. In Adrian I saw Paris: the Commune, post-Structuralism, the glamour and street-cred of Europe. During the 1980s, we hung out in the old Bibliothèque Nationale in the rue Richelieu and the Butte aux Cailles, where coincidentally Adrian had photographed the doorway of our neighbour’s house on the rue Samson, home to a decade of research summers (Fig. 2.5). Only with time did the strength of Adrian’s South African memory become clear to me as I heard his stories of papa Rifkin and his sister, Auntie Shynie (who worked in Rifkin and Miller), the childhood Union castle trip to Cape Town with the family and English nanny Edie, the relationship to anti-Apartheid activist cousins such as Sylvester Stein and his wife Jenny, who was a Hutt from the high echelons of the British Communist Party, Harold Wolpe, once a legal colleague of Nelson Mandela, and Anne Marie – alongside whom he experienced the elating but also disturbing moment of return in the 1990s.6 And his recollections of a formative teenage road trip through the hinterland of the Cape and the Eastern Transvaal, a youngster as fascinated by the wildlife and the flora as he was viscerally disturbed by his encounter with state racism. In 1991, when the ‘Immorality Act’ was repealed, and I was able to return to my parental home with my ‘non-white’ husband and child, we drove together past Rifkin and Miller on Main Road, Wynberg, which was also en route to the Cape flats, the impoverished residential district to which my husband’s family had been forcibly removed under the ‘Group Areas Act’ and from which he, under a special dispensation, had cycled daily to the ‘whites only’ art school where we had met in the 1970s. Rifkin in Wynberg! A curious unlikely origin for our ever-so-English friend. But when, at Haunch of Venison Gallery in 2008, he recognised the song ‘Daar Kom die Alibama’, that serves as the soundtrack of Searle’s film and was able to hum along, I finally understood that he came from elsewhere and that the interwoven trajectories of his immigrant family meant that he too could never settle for a ‘centre’ or a ‘capital’ without that degree

Figure 2.1: ‘Rifkin and Miller’, Wynberg, Cape Town (1992).

Figure 2.2: Adrian and Frances Rifkin with their grandfather, Victor, Muizenberg (1946).

Figure 2.3: Adrian and Frances Rifkin with their mother, Iris, Muizenberg (1946).

Figure 2.4: Tamar and Allen Garb with their grandmother, Anne Bloch, Muizenberg (1958).

Figure 2.5: Adrian Rifkin, 38 rue Samson, Paris (After Atget, For Molly Nesbit) (1982).

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of unease which makes for a politics of place. I offer this piece for him therefore, in the knowledge that though we may sound different, we sing the same song – a song that comes over the sea and binds us in sometimes unrecognisable ways.

The ‘Body’ of the Text (November 2009)7 The centrality of Paris in the history of modernism has been a given in the formation of my generation of artists and art historians. So, as a young art history student in Cape Town in the 1970s, educated during the Apartheid era, it was to Paris that I and my classmates turned for our understanding of the origins of modern art, for test cases of significance, value and influence. We had no doubt that Paris was not only the ‘capital of the nineteenth century’, but still at the center of the world. Largely ignorant of the cultural production that surrounded us – the oldest rock paintings in the world were only a few miles away – we, products of a colonial education system, looked to Europe in general and Paris in particular for models of formal and cultural value. Of course, the admiration was belated – Paris appeared already to have been supplanted by New York and was still reeling in the aftermath of war – but the events of ’68 reaffirmed it as the place of critical thought and political action. So, even on arrival in London in 1979, I saw that it was across the Channel that we, the generation remade after ’68, turned for our intellectual and aesthetic succour. The map of modernity was securely in place and those of us who worked on French culture were assured of being at its heart. This is no longer the case. And one doubts now that it ever should have been. For Paris’s avowed centrality was born of a powerful discursive construction – even a state of delusion – that we inherited from the Baudelarian, Benjaminian, Clarkian, critical trajectory, and which we in turn perpetuated. That the advent of the arcades, dioramas, technologies, materials and urban spaces of nineteenth-century Paris have come to stand for a dominant conception of the modern, is indisputable. Baudelaire was the first to make poetry out of these conjunctions, Benjamin elevated them to the tragic markers of the modern and the social history of art has made them the material foundation of modernist practice. As such they have been enormously facilitating and productive. But they have also locked us within a circular narrative which adjudicates practices and events in relation to their engagement with these phenomena. True, revisionist accounts and expanded local histories have, since the 1980s, sought to develop our understanding of cultural production beyond the canonical –

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so that lesser masters, women, minor genres and mediums, institutions and markets have all had their day, but the geopolitical construction of Paris’s global centrality (at least in the nineteenth century) has remained intact and the naturalised adherence to historical hierarchies of center and periphery have been little challenged. This has meant that we are still locked, in French nineteenth-century art historical studies at least, into a kind of parochialism, not to mention Eurocentrism, and a refusal to situate the cultural production of Paris in a much larger global map – one which can take proper account of the traffic in peoples and goods and the emergent multiple and fractured modernities that nineteenth-century migrations and movements precipitated. I want to think about the question of centrality – for what is a capital city if not at the center? – from a different vantage point, that is from what is now described as the global South in general and from the slopes of Table Mountain in particular.8 I want to demonstrate the interconnectedness of apparently disparate histories – ones described as marginal and peripheral, as well as those deemed central – through the floating signifiers that link them. This, in order to open up the possibility of “decapitating” the capital and inverting, or at least playing with, conventional genealogies and hierarchies. I start therefore in Cape Town, rather than in Paris, with a discussion of a contemporary video work. Entitled Alibama, the work is shot from the slopes of the mountain which have long been emblematic of the city and begins with a frame of the artist Berni Searle and a young boy, the new citizens of a democratic South Africa. They are shown, dreamily contemplating the ocean, from a place which is strongly identified with Cape Muslim history and the Creole or ‘Coloured’ communities of the Cape from which they themselves hail (Fig. 2.6). It is they that establish the vantage point from which the first half of the video is shot. Over their bronzed bodies, black ribbons waft gently in the breeze. In the second frame, only the hand that holds them is visible and from then on the ribbons appear periodically over the landscape and finally dissolve in a watery expanse that connects the private reveries of the pair to the overdetermined seascape they survey (Fig. 2.7). The first half of the video comprises a panning shot that encompasses the ocean, Robben Island (the famous prison that housed the dissidents of Apartheid) and reaches round to the other flank of the mountain known as Devil’s Peak. In the bay, the lights of boats flicker and the oneiric expanse of the sea seems to stretch out beyond the horizon and into the distance. Accompanying this exquisite view – one of the most famous views in the world – you hear the strains of an old South African folk song, sung in vernacular Afrikaans in

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a dialect unique to this place, and made up from a fusion of a number of language groups, predominantly European, but also inflected by African and Asian vocabularies. The song itself registers the complex history of the people who inhabit this place. Its repeated refrain, translated as ‘There comes the Alibama, the Alibama comes over the sea,’ invoking the name of a ship, which in turn provides the title of the video work.9 As the camera approaches the end of its panoramic sweep and the strains of the chorus reach their climax, the landscape erupts, replaced by the fleeting still of the barrel of a gun and the resounding bang of cannon-fire, which brutally ends the pleasurable scene and its choral accompaniment. This is the startling sound of the noonday gun, the oldest functioning cannon in the world, which still booms daily over Cape Town, and alerts us to the violence which is at the heart of this landscape. It works here as an intrusive reminder of past battles and brutalities, of naval conflicts and colonial settlements, inserting violence into the picturesque and doubt into the poetics of nostalgia. For, the site from which Searle shot her video (and where the gun is now located) is itself contested and complex. Signal Hill is the historic home of the Cape Muslim community, called the ‘Malay Quarter’ in the early years of the twentieth century and under the Apartheid Government (which enforced separate residential areas for particular ‘racial’ groups), but it also forms one of the flanks of Table Mountain.10 Known as the face of Cape Town, Table Mountain was encrypted into the European imagination, its unique geological formation providing the subject matter of prints and pictures from the time of the first settlers in the seventeenth century, and often featuring in the imagery of printmakers and painters who had never even traveled to the South. One such view is that provided by the Dutch marine painter Aernout Smit (1641/2–1710) in 1683, in which the bay is shown to be full of sailing boats and national symbols, the mountain forming a backdrop to a narrative of Dutch naval supremacy (Fig. 2.8). It was on ships such as those depicted by Smit, that the French Huguenots, expelled from France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1658, would have landed in 1688 and ’89. Sent by the Dutch East India Company to develop the farms and the wine-lands of the Cape, their first sighting of their new ‘home’ would have been the impressive silhouette of the mountain.11 Its characteristic peaks flanking a flattened ‘table-top’ feature in countless images produced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from William Hodges’ (1744–1797) stormy renditions to variations of a topographical, romantic and naturalist variety produced throughout the period and into the nineteenth century. We see it, too, as the setting for ethnographic depictions and scenes of colonial mastery. It was here that the indigenous people of

Figure 2.6: Berni Searle, stills from ‘Alibama’.

Figure 2.7: Berni Searle, stills from ‘Alibama’.

Figure 2.8: Aernout Smit, Table Bay (1683).

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the Cape first encountered the early settlers and were subject to the force and classificatory filters of the European imagination. It forms the backdrop of historical landscapes, like that by the Scotsman, Charles Davidson Bell (1813–1882), whose The Landing of Jan van Riebeeck at the Cape, painted in 1854 (by which time the Cape Colony had been incorporated into the British Empire) situated settler and indigenous peoples on its slopes and re-imagined the landing of the Dutch explorer in 1652 as an encounter between civilisation and the primitive (Fig. 2.9). The British had conquered the Cape in 1795 as part of their campaign to gain control over the world’s seas and to establish their supremacy over their enemies the French. They were to lose it again to the Dutch in 1803 but were to regain it three years later. The Cape was a valuable asset, increasingly commercialised over the nineteenth century, of vital strategic and economic import to the Empire and gradually consolidated with capital investment and assisted British settlers who arrived in 1820.12 These joined the descendents of the Dutch and French in the colony as well as the local population, by now largely coerced into serving the European settlers. Charles Davidson Bell, in addition to picturing Table Mountain as the setting for the earliest encounter between the Dutch and the local population was also the author of a series of typical nineteenth-century ethnographic drawings and prints of the indigenous population and subsequent inhabitants of these mountain slopes, the so called ‘Hottentots’ and ‘Cape Malays’ (as he labeled them) whose offspring are still known as the ‘Cape Coloureds’ and who were classified as a separate racial group in the nomenclature and legislative system of Apartheid. Searle’s appropriation of this vantage point is carefully chosen therefore. In the same way that Tracey Rose (born 1974), another South African contemporary artist, chose to inhabit the pose of Saartjie Baartman in her revisiting of the topos of the Hottentot Venus, who left from this very port when she was shipped, under false pretences to Europe, finally to end up in pieces, and on display in the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, Searle asserts her own image over a landscape from which her agency was historically excluded.13 And she overwrites this place with the sounds of a folk song, associated both with this seascape and port and with the inhabitants of this place, those descendents from the Khoikhoi and the San, as well as the indentured laborers brought from the East, the settlers and the slaves, who make up the Creole communities of the Cape. It is to the poetic imaginings of its first inhabitants, imported labourers, and mixed progeny, that Searle’s careful pacing and placing of the song over the picturepostcard panning of the bay addresses itself. Traditionally sung by minstrels and choirs and regularly performed at the annual Cape Town minstrel carnival – still controversially called the Coon

Figure 2.9: Charles Davidson Bell, The Landing of Jan van Riebeek at the Cape.

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Carnival – when it is often accompanied by a banjo-like instrument, the song is traditionally linked to jollity, celebration and the carnivalesque. It is often associated with the stereotypical image of the ‘Cape Coloured’ perceived as a drunken buffoon whose primitive instruments and simple lyrics testify to a debased culture born of miscegenation and abuse. But Searle prizes the song away from this context, assigning it to a lone male chorister and chorus and slowing it down so that we attend to its enigmatic meanings as never before. In the second half of the film, Searle and her young ward adopt it as a lilting lullaby, internalising its strains and allowing it to melt over the dissolving images of water, boat and streamers that have been the components of the film from the start. Finally, out of the amniotic reverie of the mother/son dyad, the familiar landscape re-emerges, washed over by their half-asleep voices (Fig. 2.7). The origins of the folksong are contested. The words, known and sung by all Capetonians, center on a ship, the eponymous ‘Alibama,’ once viewed from these slopes and purportedly memorialised in the refrain: ‘Daar Kom die Alibama, Die Alibama hy kom oor die see’ (There comes the Alibama, the Alibama comes over the sea).14 Although preceded by a recitation of the months of the year and followed by a mysterious second verse, it is these repeated lines which give the name to the song, provide its chorus, and by which it is recognised and rehearsed. And it is the invocation of the ‘Alibama’ that sticks. Sounding and looking much like the more familiar ‘Alabama’ the name may, to European and North American eyes and ears, seem to be misspelled, mispronounced and misplaced. It suggests knowledge that we possess, and yet it sounds unfamiliar, strange, and oddly distorted. The replacing of the ‘a’ by the ‘i’ leaves much of the word in place, but, from the vantage point of English speaking northerners, it undermines and distorts its intelligibility. History, it appears, is being refracted differently. Nor is the history of the song simple. Like all oral traditions, it is openended and disputed, but it is likely that it refers to a celebratory moment in the past of this port, which connects it to much wider historical narratives encompassing the American Civil War, the history of British Shipbuilding, International Mercantile Law and the Slave Trade, not to mention nineteenthcentury French modernist painting. For the eponymous ‘Alibama’ appears, according to local accounts, to refer to none other than the CSS Alabama, made famous to art historians by its appearance in Edouard Manet’s painting of 1864 when it was destroyed off the coast of Normandy by the USS Kearsage, a federal sloop of war, in one of the most famous sea-battles of the American Civil War (Fig. 2.10).15

Figure 2.10: Edouard Manet, The Battle of the Kearsage and the Alabama (1864).

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For historians of nineteenth-century French painting, Manet’s work is interesting for a variety of reasons. We may wonder where Manet’s sympathies lay in the battle between Unionists and Confederates, in his attitude to the slave trade, his views on Napoléon III’s support for the Confederates or his negotiation of the genre of marine painting.16 We may puzzle at his mobilisation of newspaper reports as source material or speculate as to whether he ever left Paris and actually saw the battle (there is no evidence to suggest that he did),17 or whether it was the fact that it was an imaginative reconstruction that gave him the freedom to create his extraordinary high horizon line, vast and painterly expanse of sea without a clear, single focus as well as the turbulent conjunction of smoke and clouds. We may situate it in relation to the other seascapes he produced and compare it to contemporary watercolors and oils of jetties, harbors and ports and to the precedents of French painters from Delacroix to Courbet. We may proclaim that the work reads as a truly modernist marine, free from the obligation to describe and delineate in detail or compare it to the conventional topographical representations of the day, such as the one that appeared on the front page of L’Universel in June 1864, or to the traditional composition used by Henri Durand-Brager in his well-known prints and paintings of the incident.18 We can subsume it into the discourses of Parisian spectacle by following the line of caricaturists who viewed the battle in the Channel as yet another form of entertainment for urban day-trippers, recycled as humor for metropolitan newspaper readers. Subsumed into our histories of Paris, modernism, Manet and the painting of modern life, The Battle of the “Kearsage” and the “Alabama” has a secure and central place. All this is fascinating and important. It is the stuff of which European art history is made. But it tells a partial and particular story, one in which the circuits of production and display are firmly located in Paris and the battles over slavery, secession and trade are fought in Northern ports and centers of commerce. A little known fact of the CSS Alabama’s precious cargo, recovered when it went down in the English Channel, links it to an altogether different geographical location and an alternative historical narrative. For amongst the casualties of the day that it was sunk off the coast of Normandy was a cask of the famous Groot Constantia table wine given as a gift to the captain and his crew on their recent visit to the winelands of the Cape.19 Like the mountain silhouette, it was the local wine that was already at this time emblematic of the region and was associated with its fertile produce. Although grapes had been introduced to the Cape by the Dutch, it was the French viticulturalists amongst the Huguenots who had developed and perfected its wines.20 According to contemporary news reports, this particular wine was sampled by most visitors to the port and

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was known by the name ‘Constantia.’21 Already identified by its landscape and its liquor, global perceptions of the region that have been persistent (and exploited for exports and tourism) were in place by the 1860s. But the ship’s captain Raphael Semmes and his crew never got to drink the wine they had received. Nor of course could they have known that the two brief stopovers that the ship made at the Cape of Good Hope in 1863 and 1864 would become subsumed into the folklore of the city.22 The fact that the CSS Alabama docked twice at the Cape is not surprising given the importance of this port for shipping in the modern world. It was, in the words of Semmes, the ‘Cape which had so long divided the Eastern from the Western world.’23 Describing his activities there he wrote of the ‘perpetual stream of commerce, that comes setting around the Cape of Good Hope from the East Indies.’ ‘From daylight until dark, ships are constantly in sight from the lighthouse on the Cape…,’ he added, and a cursory glance at the newspapers of the time show how important this traffic was to the culture and economy of the colony.24 The arrival of ships was big news and the activity of the harbor, was tracked and recorded relentlessly. Fashionable folk were regularly invited aboard to meet the captain and senior officers, ladies hosted salons in their honor, and locals celebrated the business that sailors and visitors brought. The Cape of Good Hope was valuable to colonial powers precisely because of its position between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, providing a half-way house for travelers, commerce and goods that was unparalleled by any other location.25 You only have to examine the CSS Alabama’s travel route which went from Liverpool in England where it was built, via the Americas, the southern tip of Africa and on to the far East, from which it returned, once again docking at the Cape en route to Europe and Cherbourg, to see its strategic importance, and to understand why this confederate raider on its marauding voyages would have stopped here for repairs, restocking and trade. In Semmes’s words, the Cape was the ‘relay house’ of the sea.26 But the docking of the Alabama, if the reports in the daily newspapers are anything to go by, exceeded the normal excitement of a new boat in the port.27 Famous for its successes in chasing and destroying Union mercantile ships, the reputation of the Alabama predated its arrival at the Cape where sympathy for the Southerners was widespread. In addition to their identification with a slave owning society and a perceived underdog, residents of the Cape, embroiled in their own quarrels with the colonial administration in London, were pleased to embrace the ‘gallant’ Semmes and his crew.28 ‘Alabama fever’ lasted in Cape Town for almost a year. The local newspapers covered its passage in detail and swarms of fashionable Capetonians crowded onto the ship for organised visits or climbed the slopes

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of Signal Hill to view it, especially on its initial arrival when news spread that it was engaged in a battle with the Union ship Sea Bride in full view of the coast.29 The Cape Argus covered all its exploits, reeling them off one by one, and advertised photographs for sale by a local photographer Arthur Green (1832–1873), who was quick to see its commercial potential.30 Featuring Captain Semmes and his crew on deck, stereoscopic and singular views went on display at Green’s ‘photographic saloon’ in Cape Town a few days after the ship sailed from the bay and engravings after the photographs appeared a few months later in the Illustrated London News.31 A contemporary photograph captured Green and his assistant on Signal Hill, the spot from which the ship could best be seen and where people rushed in their crowds to view it. This was also the spot from which Searle was later to shoot her film and offers, as we have seen, some of the most photogenic panoramic views of the bay. The CSS Alabama’s stay in Table Bay was immortalised in a number of visual images. Most famous and ambitious amongst the paintings which captured its sojourn and departure were the watercolors of the British painter Thomas Bowler (1812–1869) who was also famous for his views of Table Mountain.32 In 1863, Bowler produced a number of pictures capturing the scene of the CSS Alabama in the bay. While one depicted the boat from the vantage point of the west coast beach of Blouberg Strand, showing the full range of the mountain behind it and including local wildlife such as penguins and seagulls for context, another focused in on the boat itself creating a composition which is strikingly similar to Manet’s sea-battle picture of the following year (Fig. 2.11). Despite the difference in medium, mood and setting, both center the principal vessel and place an ancillary boat at the left to lead the eye into the area of interest.33 In the background are other vessels, the Lady Jocelyn in the case of the Bowler, the Kearsage in the case of the Manet. But here the similarities end. While Manet’s sea-battle rages against a choppy but indeterminate ocean that fills up three quarters of the canvas and seems to envelop the floundering vessel, Bowler’s gentle watercolor shows the ship peacefully docked in Table Bay, encircled by the famous mountain range. It is its situatedness in the Cape that is captured here and which provides the recognisable setting for its impressive, sea-worthy grandeur. So Cape Town and Paris come together in the 1860s over the floating signifier of the Alabama, triumphantly docked in Table Bay, flag flying high, and floundering pathetically, like a wounded hero off the coast of France a year later. Providing a literal link between an expatriate watercolorist and a modernist history painter, an Englishman and a Frenchman, the Normandy coast and Table Bay, the northern and southern hemispheres, the passage of

Figure 2.11: Thomas Bowler, The Alabama and the Mailship Lady Jocelyn.

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the CSS Alabama seems to bind the far-flung and the near-by into a web of intertwined narratives. Internationally famous, the ship’s adventures, battles and eventual demise were recorded from the Cape Argus to the New York Herald, a veritable topos of the interconnectedness of disparate modern geographies and histories in the landscape of Imperialism and Colonialism.34 In this cartography, Cape Town, in its position at the tip of Africa, is crucial. Without its existence as a staging post, a dockyard and a trading port for goods and people, the history of the modern world would have been different. The line which traces its journey on the map also expresses the links which tie places and populations together in the modern world. That the infamous or heroic exploits of the Alabama became internalised as a metaphor of longing and loss for a disenfranchised local community at the tip of Africa, transformed in local patois into the ‘Alibama’ of oral history and folktale is telling. It speaks of the shared repository of narrative from which history is made, and calls into question the conventional demarcations of center and periphery. Indeed the ribbons that waft over the protagonists’ bodies in the first frame, wave over the scenery in the subsequent panning shot, and dissolve into an inky pool from which the landscape re-emerges in the domestic relocation of the song in the second half of Searle’s film, serve as a linking motif between the here and the there, the epic and the intimate, public discourse and personal experience. Invoking the colored ribbons thrown habitually to ocean liners from the quay in order to mark their departure from the shore, but here reduced to black, they have melancholic, even elegiac associations linked to separation and loss. Held in the hand and shown from the vantage point of the previously silenced servants and slaves of modernity, the ribbons, like the film itself, overwrite the bay with an over-determined motif as well as a song that, though definitively local, is also capable of suggesting dreams of ships that come over the sea. As large cities all over the world have become inhabited by diverse populations of immigrants, temporary workers, asylum seekers, refugees and exiles, they have become hybrid places of cultural encounter, leading to a new awareness of the spatial and temporal interconnectedness of people. And as ‘subaltern’ subjects in the far flung reaches of the world gain agency, so the received histories of place and peoples are overturned. It is Searle’s film which has alerted us to the ‘Alibama/Alabama’ as a topos for the connective tissue of history, demonstrating the mutual imbrications of stories and experiences. In the second half of the film, after the canon has exploded and the sea has transformed into the watery space of the bath tub, the grand narratives of military, art and political history evaporate and the boat is transformed into a toy, ephemeral, dissolving and uncertain (Fig. 2.7). As the domestic replaces the spectacular and the mother/child

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dyad appropriates and mediates the language of myth and memory, history dissolves and becomes blurred. So too do its conventionalised categories. If post-modernity and post-coloniality – vexed as they are – have even the slightest claims to repositioning the point from which we view the past, then the centre can no longer hold. It is this that the floating signifier of the ‘Alibama’ – at once sloop of war and child’s paper play-thing – so beautifully and tenderly encapsulates.

Postscript: Adrian Rifkin, ‘Pour ne pas Conclure’ from ‘Paris et Londres, capitales du 19ème siècle’35 What is there that should not be said about the title of this conference – especially as a response to its rich and complex offerings? Indeed on account of this it’s best to set off somewhere else. And, as a starting point suggest this: that the very notion of capitals of the nineteenth century begs too many questions of time and space concerning that century itself; and that the further we slide away from it, in the confusion of being seen by some angelic figure of history’s unfolding, or of ourselves taking the position of this angel, ever more questions fall into the begging ... so to speak. What should we ask of London and Paris today, in our time, that will enable us to form an image, for these days, of a now long-gone century? How can the proposition that Paris and London might have been capitals of the nineteenth century be activated through the future that now awaits them, rather than that which was their prospect when Walter Benjamin gave a working title to his unfinished work, Paris, capital of the nineteenth century? Put another way; are Paris and London up to it? What are they up for? Régine Robin, in her recent book Mégalopolis. Les derniers pas du flâneur, remarks of contemporary London that ‘Aucun Dickens pourrait émerger de ce chaos.’ Instead she sees it as a city that calls for a novelist by the quadrants of the compass, or even a locality as reduced as Clerkenwell, such is London’s fragmentation; though strangely enough she makes no reference to Patrick Keiller’s famous film London – that comforting epitaph to what we might think of as the flâneur désemparé, worn out after the lost decades of straying in a post-Baudelairean modernity. Indeed in her travels to the end of each underground line in London, visiting shopping centres, going to a movie, noting social differences, Robin clings to the idea of flânerie as if an individual might still embody it, with a book contract in her files and paid time on her hands. Her implicit critique of this weary ideal is perhaps nothing more than that Paris is excluded from a volume that

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includes Los Angeles and Tokyo, and in this at least she begins to exorcise the hold of exhausted histories and their stereotypes. Yet it is surely better to accept that as an idea the flâneur was generated in a limited time and space, as no more, and indeed no less than a hermeneutic device regarding the capital in the nineteenth century, and it was endowed in Benjamin’s thinking with an after life that has become one that we live when we think about the city. At the same time I am happy to think that there may never have been a man or a woman who really was such a creature, though Jules Romains in the 1930s clearly believed that it might well have been a dog. Indeed it is hardly contentious to argue that if Walter Benjamin was able to disclose the flâneur as a key figure in Paris’s being the capital of an epoch, then it is not on account of that alone being a sociological fact, nor the less important for not being one. Benjamin stepped out of the old Bibliothèque Nationale into the Passages that Louis Aragon had given him to see as the survival of an affect, a figure, a dialectical image of the unconsciously formed structures of his present. Today a reader stepping out of the Bibliothèque de France forays into a commercial wasteland that may not as yet even qualify to be a non-lieu, while the Passages, decrepit until the 1970s, have been brought back to commercial life. In a strange twist of fate, just as young scholars are removed from the bodily affect of the historical fabric as the framing of their attention to the archive, the Passages are probably closer to their atmospheres and frequentations of the 1830s than they have been at any time since the beginnings of the Third Republic. That said it’s important to go further afield than Vivienne, Véro-Dodat or Caïre to the Passage Brady or the Passage du Prado to see that Paris is able to host the climate of post-colonial migrations in all their complexity, with the uncannily Anglophone restaurants and food shops from the Indian subcontinent. Once home to the sheet music sellers of Mistinguett or Chevalier, these new emporia are decorated with the stars of Indian soap operas and heroes and heroines of Bollywood; ‘popular’ taste persists. But this should warn us that, like the flâneur, the menu peuple of old Paris is or was the name for an imagined relation and not an object – or rather a relation of objectifications where a certain condensation of social forms takes place. And that new condensations must be the symptoms of how the interior of such words has changed, drained of the comforting provincialism of a worn-thin conception of national space, a deterritorialising of the refrain, to borrow the insight of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their Milles Plateaux.

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It’s this nexus of differences inside the commercial and cultural circulations of the city now that alerted me to the possibility that we were walking away from an abyss. And yet to advance our comparisons of the two cities we needed rather to approach it, to cede the very notion of a particular territory in favour of inhabiting its loss. As I say this I admit that it irritates me. For at a rather literal level I am not sure that I want to put up with the way in which things are taken away, drained off into Euro Disneyland or the Millennium Dome, nor live with them when they are gone. Take the corner of the Rue Julien-Lacroix and the Rue Ramponeau, for example, this dreamy shot of the intersection across which was built – perhaps, there are other candidates – the last barricade to fall at the end of the Paris Commune, in the closing moments of the Semaine Sanglante. From prints of the mid-nineteenth century it looked like this, until it became a part of the concrete annexes to the Parc de Belleville in the 1990s. There was never a plaque here to indicate that this had been a site of the bloody endgame, one of the great urban massacres of any Western city in the last two centuries – that is reserved for the more dramatic mise-en-scène of the Mur des Fédérés in Père Lachaise. It’s a lost site, altogether, though it might have warned us of Rwanda. And if there has been, since 2001, a plaque on the Pont St Michel to commemorate the massacre of Algerians on the demonstration of 17 October of 1961 at the command of the Parisian Prefet, Maurice Papon, sometime collaborator and delivery boy of Jews to the German concentration camps, it is shy of giving numbers. If this implied but intentionally un-explored comparison has a value then it is to underline what I have been trying to bring into view. On the one hand we can say that the question of what future a present might dream can be thought of as the model of a nightmare of forgetfulness and that this is a characteristic of being-a-capital – to become able to forget and to repeat with new materials. On the other hand, this is nothing to do with numbers or with the precise reality of an event, its sociological weight, its transmigration into literary trope. Rather it’s to do with the capacity to generate a relation between a figure and an event that is unstable, potentially explosive and which it should be our task to trigger, or to seek to stumble upon the secret of its triggering. This is living in lost territory. And, at the same time, the recent transformations of space in Paris, their mixtures of scale and usage, together with the addition of genuinely public parks and areas to a cluttered and redundant city fabric, seem to follow a promise that was never made in the cheapskate commercialism and Royal privilege that hem in London’s planning, the naked profiteering that William Blake had long ago turned over into a critical poetic figure. If we were to

Figure 2.12: Supposed site of the last barricade in the Paris commune (c.1982).

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trace the promise of Chartism and the English cooperative movement to the point of its demise in the stock-market floating of the mutual societies and the sub-prime crisis of our day, London would be the capital of a different form of deceit, neither better nor worse than Paris. It is this that can give sense to the ongoing comparison of these two capitals, to modalities of their place in the deceit of capital itself in its contemporary reordering of the world. This is not a question of judgement, of one city as being better than the other. Rather it is a question of how Paris and London can stage our times, and how this shows that what they were in the nineteenth century is ever waiting for disclosure. Curiously in our proceedings all the papers spoke only of the nineteenth century, albeit a fairly long one. Ironically then, as we engaged in our discussions it was an old refrain, a ritournelle, that came floating back to me, from not so long ago. It was an unease, that something was missing, something from twenty or thirty years ago, six flowing syllables that resonate like this ‘race and class and gender’. Of course this absence was the sign of something new as well, the reviewing of what we conceive of as the experience of a city plan at its broadest as well as its most intricate topographies; how we think through the fundamental modes of comparison between two cities, shifting the axes between Dickens and Balzac, for example, or sifting and reorganising the tropes that articulate our speech on the loop of London/Paris/London. So it’s not enough to say that this refrain came back, the more so as its sounding is not just a reminder, a call to arms, but rather the marking of a shift in borders between the forms of knowledge that we develop in our changing conceptions of what, after all, history was, or might have been. Yes, it is difficult to rethink the Paris Commune from the Passage Brady of today, or from the Goutte d’Or, just as it is a strange ellipse to think the docklands of East London from Brick Lane or Cable Street and Whitechapel to the sound of Muezzin. But it is just this re-thinking or un-thinking that can disclose in what ways Paris and London might still be adequate to their roles as having been capitals of the nineteenth century. For if the transformations that have swept over them are still shockwaves of that period, ones that did not register in Benjamin’s present as they do now for us, then what we may still learn from him is a way of seeing what has befallen us today – and not how we can attribute a status to either of these cities. And here one difference that strikes me immediately is that it is far easier to build a decent, new mosque in London or to convert an old cinema into one than it is in Paris, or anywhere else in France and that in this way their capacity to bear or to acknowledge the symptoms of change is very

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different. Now the careless dilapidation of London’s fabric, compared with the almost achieved modernity of Paris, looks more like a shelter for the shocks of contemporary global movements and transformations. In London you can build a mosque or wear a veil without offending the homogenising force that has become the French Republic, but in this city capitalism’s care for whom it exploits is all the more abandoned. In the world now these are little cities, with nothing more to show than a heritage of imperial power in gradual and even catastrophic collapse. Were they ever capitals of anything at all? Or were they nothing more than figures for the congealing of power, desire, whatever, at the moment they had to be thought as such.

Notes 1 For a discussion of the ‘influence’ of Parisian culture on South African art, see Lucy Alexander, Emma Bedford, Evelyn Cohen, Parys en Suid-Afrikaanse Kunstenaars 1850– 1965 (Cape Town: Suid-Afrikaanse Nasionale Kunsmuseum, 1988). 2 See Home Lands – Land Marks: Contemporary Art from South Africa (London: Haunch of Venison, 2008), reprinted in Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 26 (Spring 2010), pp. 6–29. 3 See ‘Alibama: The Poetry of Place’, Berni Searle, Recent Work, 2007/8 (Cape Town: Michael Stevenson, 2008), pp. 26–34. See also Tamar Garb, ‘A Land of Signs’ in Home Lands, pp. 8–27. 4 Rifkin talked to me of his father’s pronounced South African accent and his mother as a conduit to ‘Frenchness’ in an interview held in London, 16 August 2011. 5 The Rifkin family’s presence in Wynberg is chronicled in Helen Robinson, Wynberg: A Special Place (Wynberg: Houghton House, 2001), pp. 6, 13, 126, 157. Robinson describes the 1930s and 1940s as the heyday of ‘Jewish participation in the Wynberg commercial sphere’ and the ‘upward mobility of these early Jewish immigrants and their descendants’, p. 13. 6 The Stein family, from 1959, lived at 62 Regents Park Road in what was then a cheap and dilapidated pile and as their fortunes flourished it became something of a centre for a literary and artistic and politically radical avant garde with figures as diverse as Doris Lessing, Arnold Wesker and Joe Slovo passing through the house – a political and cultural education in itself. 7 ‘The body of the text’ is a version of the paper delivered at the Clark symposium and published in the volume Hollis Clayson and André Dombrowski, Is Paris Still the Capital of the Nineteenth Century? Essays on Art and Modernity (Pittsburgh: Gutenberg Periscope Publishing, Winter 2013/2014). I am grateful to Hollis Clayson and André Dombrowski for their invitation to participate in this event, which provided me with a public forum to think through these ideas. I also delivered versions of this paper at the ‘Writing Art History’ seminar at the Courtauld Institute in 2009 and at the postgraduate art history seminar at Oxford University in the same year. I am grateful to all my interlocutors for their questions and comments. 8 For a discussion of the implications of ‘thinking from the global South’ see the roundtable discussion ‘Thinking from the South: Reflections on Image and Place’ with Achille

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Mbembe, Sarah Nuttal, Riason Naidoo and Colin Richards, in Figures and Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography, ed. Tamar Garb (London: Steidl and the V&A Museum, 2011), pp. 300–7. 9 The words in Afrikaans are: ‘Daar kom die Alibama, die Alibama Hy kom oor die see.’ These form part of a longer song, but it is this refrain that is relevant here. 10 For a history of this location and its communities, see Vivian Bickford Smith, Elizabeth van Heyningen and Nigel Worden, Cape Town in the Twentieth Century (Cape Town: David Philip, 1999), pp. 81–3. 11 For a detailed study of the French Huguenots and the early French presence in the Cape see Annette Keaney, The French Huguenots of South Africa (Annette Keaney: Cape Town, 2010). 12 For a useful overview of the colonial conquest of the Cape, see Robert Ross, A Concise History of South Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 21–53. 13 For an account of the life of Saartjie Baartman, see Rachel Holmes, The Hottentot Venus (Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball, 2007). For an important collection of essays on the life and legacy of Baartman, see Deborah Willis (ed.) Black Venus 2010, They Called her “Hottentot” (Philadephia: Temple University Press, 2010). 14 The words of the song vary, as do many folk songs that are passed down from generation to generation. The version used by Searle is: ‘Daar kom die Alibama, Die Alibama hy kom oor die see/Daar kom die Alibama, Die Alibama hy kom oor die see./ Nooi, nooi, die riet-kooi nooi, die riet-kooi is gemaak,/ Die riet-kooi is vir jou gemaak, om daarop te slap.’ My translation: ‘There comes the Alibama, the Alibama comes over the sea/ There comes the Alibama, the Alibama comes over the sea./ Girl, girl, the reed-bed girl, the reed-bed is made-up for you to sleep on.’ 15 This claim is made by a number of local commentators, most notably the historians Edna and Frank Bradlow in their comprehensive study of the ship and its travails, Here Comes the Alabama “Daar Kom die Alabama” (1st edn 1958) (Cape Town: Westby Nunn, 2007). For corroborating and other accounts, see H. C. Willis, ‘One Hundred Years Ago ... The “Alabama” Visits Simon’s Town’, Simon’s Town Historical Society Bulletin, 2, no. 2 (July 1963), pp. 42–77; Miss Pattie Price, ‘Daar Kom dei Alibama’, Simon’s Town Historical Society Bulletin, 6, no. 1 (January 1970), pp. 5–8; J. A. S. Abecesais-Philips, ‘The Alabama, Tuscaloosa and the Saxon’, Simon’s Town Historical Society Bulletin, 9, no. 1 (Jan., 1996), pp. 23–5. An alternative version of its origins is provided by Lawrence G. Green, ‘On Wings of Fire’ (RSA: Howard Timmins, 1967), pp. 213–14. Green traces the folk song to a small craft on the Berg River that came to Table Bay loaded with thatching reed. This explains the song’s second verse which invokes the reed-beds made for Malay brides. 16 For an excellent and comprehensive historical and contextual account of Manet’s painting and related works, see Juliet Wilson-Bareau and David C. Degener, Manet and the American Civil War: The Battle of the U.S.S. Kearsage and the C.S.S. Alabama (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003). 17 Wilson-Bareau and Degener, Manet and the American Civil War, pp. 41–2. 18 Ibid., pp. 43–4. 19 Bradlow, Here Comes the Alabama, p. 79. 20 Annette Keaney, The French Huguenots, p. 2. 21 An article in the Cape Argus put it thus: ‘To be sure, Cape Town has been pretty intimately known to most English folks of decent education; for who does not but recollect a prettylooking vignette in a geography book depicting a ship in full sail entering an inlet of the sea, with two mountain peaks flanking some buildings ashore? – or who has not had a brother or a cousin going to or returning from India who touched at the Cape, and reported having tasted a delightful “stuff” called in those parts Constantia?’, The Cape Argus, 12 September 1863. 22 For an account of the ship’s sojourn at the Cape, see Bradlow, Here Comes the Alabama, pp. 77–84. See also J. P. van Niekerk, ‘The Story of the CSS (“Daar kom die...”)

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Alabama: Some Legal Aspects of her Visit to the Cape of Good Hope, and her Influence on the Historical Development of the Law of War and Neutrality, International Arbitration, Salvage, and Maritime Prize’ Fundamina, 13, no. 2 (2007), pp. 180–250. 23 Adm. R. Semmes, Memoirs of Service Afloat During the War Between the States (London: Richard Bentley, 1869), p. 673. 24 The Cape Argus covered the comings and goings of international shipping extensively in the period. At the same time the American Civil War is covered in detail in its pages. See for example Cape Argus, 10 March 1863, which declared how the American Civil War was followed avidly throughout the empire, and even discusses Napoléon III’s engagement with the conflict. 25 This point is well made in relation to the history of globalisation by Okwui Enwezor, ‘Introduction, Travel Notes: Living, Working, and Travelling in a Restless World’, in Trade Routes, History and Geography (Johannesburg: Greater Johannesburg Metropolitan Council, 1997), pp. 7–12. 26 See Semmes, Memoirs of Service, p. 671. 27 See, for example, ‘The Alabama’, Cape Argus, 8 August 1863. 28 Reasons for this are complex. See Bradlow, Here Comes the Alabama, pp. 67–9. Cape Argus reported it as follows: ‘Having completed on Saturday the repairs intended to be effected here, at an early hour on Sunday morning Captain Semmes weighed anchor, and at six o’clock the Alabama took her first departure from Table Bay, accompanied by the good wishes of the great majority of the inhabitants of the capital of the colony for the success of the cause in which she is embarked, and for the welfare of her gallant crew – neutrality notwithstanding. There is something in human nature which compels sympathy for anything fighting against odds, and it is impossible that the spectacle of two or three vessels such as the Alabama, ranging the seas at will and preying upon Federal merchantmen in spite of all the boasted power of the vaunted Northern navy, should appeal in vain to the hearts of brave men with liberal views and generous aspirations.’ ‘Further Exploits of the “Alabama” and the “Tuscaloosa”,’ Cape Argus, 11 August 1863. 29 For a description of the appreciative crowds admiring its appearance in the bay, see Stephen Fox, Wolf of the Deep, Raphael Semmes and the Notorious Confederate Raider CSS Alabama (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), pp. 159–60. 30 For an account of Green’s career see Marjorie Bull and Joseph Denfield, Secure the Shadow: The Story of Cape Photography from its beginnings to the end of 1870 (Cape Town: Terence McNally, 1970), pp. 193–5. 31 See Illustrated London News, 10 October 1863. 32 See Frank Bradlow, Thomas Bowler, His Life and Work (Cape Town and Amsterdam: A. A. Balkema, 1967), pp. 55, 120, 225, 248. 33 I have dated Bowler’s image to 1863 because the Alabama appears, according to Bradlow, Here Comes the Alabama, p. 86, in the port with the Lady Jocelyn. Contemporary newspaper reports date the docking of the Lady Jocelyn in the bay to August 1863 and report how it passed the Alabama in the bay. See ‘The Alabama’, Cape Argus, 8 August 1863. 34 See for example the front page of the New York Herald, 9 July 1864. 35 This postscript stems from a paper delivered at a conference in Norway in 2009 by Adrian Rifkin and adapted after for publication. A version of it was published in Synergies, Royaume Uni et Irlande, no. 3, 2010, edited by Dana Arnold, Tore Rem, Helle Waahlberg for the special issue Paris et Londres, capitales du 19ème siècle, Paris and London, capitals of the nineteenth century, pp. 223–7. I am grateful to Mike Kelly and the editors for the permission to include it here.

Figure 2a: Elizabeth Price, Screen from ‘THE TENT’ (2012). A video that features ‘SYSTEMS’, the catalogue for the Systems Art exhibition. Whitechapel Gallery (1973).

3 The Soundtrack to History Dana Arnold

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sometimes wonder what would happen if we lost the soundtrack to history. Here I take soundtrack to mean the words, which in a multimedia age I am trying to free from the confines of the printed page. Perhaps I can explain what I have in mind through the example of the vivid images of the enormous bonfires across Britain that appeared in newspapers, magazines and on our television screens over a period of about 15 years from the late 1980s. We were witnessing the consecutive outbreaks of foot and mouth disease, swine flu and BSE each of which led to the mass slaughter of livestock and the incineration of their corpses, which took place in the fields where the animals once grazed. But what would a historian looking back with only the visual evidence of these acts make of the powerful images of huge pyres of burning farm animals? Are we witnessing ritual sacrifice, a public health regime, some belated reference to the arrival of the Spanish Armada, or a practice run for Guy Fawkes’ night? A competent historian might be able to make a convincing case for one or all of these interpretations. Now let’s turn the question on its head and lose the images of history; we have sound but no sight. To do this we can think about (with our eyes closed) the French political print Le Travail, c’est la liberté (Fig. 3.1) which dates from the period of the Paris Commune (probably mid–late May 1871). It is an engaging image that problematises the relationship between liberty and labour and narrates this using a series of visual tropes that add to the complexities of the print’s meaning. The soundtrack in French might well speak as loudly as the image itself. But, if we were listening in German we would hear ‘Arbeit macht frei’ and I doubt many of us would think we were entering the world of the Paris Commune.

Figure 3.1: Le Travail, c’est la liberté.

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This prompted me to think about the role of images in the construction of histories and equally the way in which histories of images are written. In other words how the disciplinary interaction between history and art history impacts on our perception and understanding of the images of the past. One of the fundamental questions underpinning my line of enquiry is how we try to make the past visible. We are used to using words to narrate, describe or explain the past and there is an increasing belief in the testimony or truth of images. The use of images in the formulation and telling of history can be seen as a means of helping us to move away from the logocentric nature of the discipline. The ways in which historians employ images can become a scientific technique of observation which is part of a concern for system and method associated with a preoccupation with evidence. As an art historian this also raises questions in my mind about the status of the art object: how it operates as an historical form of production; and how we understand and interpret it. I would like to believe that the physical remains of the past can make history visible – they allow us to see the past with our own eyes. Of course this concept is not new; autopsia in other words eyewitnessing the past was a term used by the Byzantine humanist Manuel Chrysoloras.1 Moreover, the rediscovery of the past by antiquarians from the Renaissance onwards complemented known histories as well as revealing stories that had not been told in textual sources. Material objects can then act as an archive and tell a story. In this way coins, medals, sculptures, prints and even architecture seem to have an immutable truth – but is this really the case? In recent decades a distinctive practice of using images has developed amongst a range of historians. Of note here is the work of writers such as Peter Burke, Michael Camille, Francis Haskell, W. T. Mitchell and Robert Scribner. Camille’s use of critical theory to unravel the meaning of images is apparent in such articles as ‘The Très Riches Heures: An illuminated manuscript in the age of mechanical reproduction’, where he is making clear reference to Walter Benjamin.2 A point to which I will return. A few years later in his book Mirror in Parchment: The Luttrell Psalter and the Making of Medieval England, Camille examines the Luttrell Psalter through close reference to its illustrations and he shows how it worked to shape the identity of its owner Lord Geoffrey Luttrell.3 Camille uses the images to explore the political and social history of England in the Middle Ages and how through his donor portrait Luttrell became the standard image of chivalry – the archetypal medieval knight on horseback. W. T. J. Mitchell presents a different way of thinking about the relationship between images and history. For instance in his recent book What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images, Mitchell questions the long held opinion that images

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are merely signs that only require interpretation, analysis or commentary.4 Instead, he contests that images operate independently and can demand responses from the viewer. In this way according to Mitchell we should put the image first rather than adhering to established methodologies. Here he is referring for example to psychoanalytic or materialist approaches that present and interpret images as symptoms or ideological manifestation of these schools of thought. In some contrast to Camille and Mitchell, both of whom explore the overlaps between art historical and historical analysis and use of images, Burke, Haskell and Scribner present what we might term a more traditional historian’s use of images in the telling of history. Scribner’s work on the study of the German reformation through popular culture certainly had its precedents not least in the work of W. A. Coupe.5 Coupe had published a two volume study of the German illustrated broadsheet in the seventeenth century that had, in Scribner’s view at least, pioneered this important field of historical research. My concern, however, is not so much with the amply discussed and easily accessible writings of these historians, although they provide my starting point for this essay. It is more that as an art historian trained in the formulation of histories of the visual world I find some tension between the ‘truthful’ status bestowed upon figurative art by historians, what these images might actually be doing, and how this affects their historiography. In other words the images, just like historians, act as interlocutors between the viewer/reader and the event. The choices made in the depiction of history are as subjective as those made by the historian when he or she formulates his or her narrative. Here we have to differentiate between the kinds of images used by historians – the visual art from the period under discussion and depictions of historical events produced at a later date. In addition the subjugation of images by some historians to illustrative ephemera on the margins of their ‘true’ history denies the fact art has its own history with its own dynamics and is not just in the service of other narratives.6 Francis Haskell in his wide-ranging book History and its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past provides a survey of historians’ use of visual sources, principally the figurative arts, in their attempts to see the past.7 The chronological and typological arrangement of the book presents a comprehensive overview of the activity of writing history using images. Haskell outlines the many ways that historians have used images and how they became available or were discovered through excavation, the creation of private collections and public museums, as well as the increased popularity and ease of travel. He begins with a consideration of early

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types of visual evidence including coins and portrait busts from antiquity. He then moves on to the ways in which historians have used these by discussing patterns and trends in historical scholarship principally from the Renaissance onwards. Haskell explains that, in the eighteenth century, historians gradually began to acknowledge the significance of such visual sources and to draw on them in order to validate their narratives including a new field of study: the history of culture. Following on from this, writers were influenced by the example of Michelet in seeing in the visual arts an indication of the whole mentality of an age. History and its Images culminates in the work of the twentieth-century Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, especially his well-known book The Waning of the Middle Ages.8 Here Huizinga challenged the distinction between the Renaissance and the Middle Ages that had been so clearly drawn by Jacob Burckhardt in his The Civilization of Renaissance Italy over a half a century earlier.9 Instead, it is argued that the culture and tradition evident in medieval society endured until the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. It is only at this moment that any significant shift in culture is identifiable. The point here for us is not the rights or wrongs of Burckhardt’s and Huizinga’s theses. Rather, it is that both historians used art – or perhaps here more precisely visual culture – as a major part of their evidence to support of their arguments, and they interpreted these ‘signs’ in different ways. Of the many historians who have used images it is perhaps the work of Peter Burke that relates most closely to the concerns of this essay. In his book entitled Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence Peter Burke argues for images as having the same historical value as texts and oral testimony as they record ‘acts of eyewitnessing’.10 His attention is focused on images, especially prints, photographs and so forth, which are contemporary to the events they describe. The popularity and accessibility of these mass produced images may reduce their status as art works, but does not detract from their value as historical evidence. Indeed, Burke invokes Walter Benjamin’s discussion of the aura of the work of art being reduced from ‘cult value’ to ‘exhibition value’ through its mechanical reproduction, whether by printed or photographic means. At the same time Burke suggests that, in agreement with Michael Camille, the mass reproduction of images may well actually enhance their aura. And we can certainly see this as being the case, for instance, with the use of posters and other visual imagery in the service of political ends. This all seemed very straightforward to me. Images offer us a route through social history where the authentic voices of subjects excluded from grand master narratives can be found and listened to. I want to stay with the use and interpretation of mechanically produced images. Here I am concerned

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with what happens to the status of these art objects when they are used as evidence. To my mind this addresses the important question of the relationship between authorship and meaning when prints are used in this way. In a piece written for Block in the early 1980s Adrian Rifkin examines the way in which the political print or satire is taken up and used in both historical and art historical writing.11 These processes can seem at first to be parallel tracks. Rifkin is concerned with the then newish practice of New Art History and the methods employed to historicise the art work. His focus is the political prints and satires of the Paris Commune which he runs alongside the historiography of the Paris art world of that time. Indeed, Le Travail, c’est la liberté is one of his examples. What becomes clear very quickly is that great artists and the grand gallery remain paramount. Prints and other forms of popular culture provide only a backup narrative or infilling of social detail. He points out that for art historians these images remain locked in the hierarchies attributed to different kinds of artistic production. These hierarchies follow the academic system of art practice and reinforce the supremacy of high art: the uniqueness of the painted canvas eclipses the ubiquity of the mass produced image. Le Travail, c’est la liberté has no place in the Salon and, albeit paradoxically, it remains a footnote in social histories of art. Historians’ use of prints appears at first to be a contrasting practice. Prints (and pictures) are merely useful illustrations to the verbalised truths of the written account. But art historians and historians are unanimous in their privileging of a master narrative to which these art works come second. What might be expected is a cry for the revising or dismantling of these hierarchies of production – prints should be seen as ‘as good as’ or ‘unjustly neglected’. At best images remain documents of social history and operate as ‘facts’ like any other artefact or example of visual culture. In this way we can put the role of images in the formation of social history in the same category as museums designed to represent everyday life or preserved or reconstructed architectural sites that provide historians with information. What is lost in this process of what has been called ‘the history of the inarticulate’ is the intrinsic history and analysis of the images themselves. Instead they are taken at face value to provide what we would like to believe are eyewitness accounts of the past. The same can be said, and perhaps with a note of irony, about social histories of art. Reading Rifkin encouraged me to consider some problems in the analysis of what these art objects actually do. I was particularly struck by what he refers to as ‘the cannibalistic approach of certain trends in the social history of art that eat up little signs in order to give more importance to bigger ones’.12 Moreover, Rifkin points to an overlap between authorship and meaning in the way historians and art historians use political prints as evidence. This overlap

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‘confuses and inhibits materialist social analysis of the ways in which they [political prints] can produce meaning’. This led me to think about my own preoccupation with the problems of the ‘great man’ theory of history and, as Roland Barthes would say, the ‘author god’ status of the historian. A consideration of the uses of images in history can help single out various trends in social (art) historical narrative whilst at the same time revealing a rather restricted logocentric purview. For instance, the growing interest from the 1960s onwards in social history necessitated different kinds of historical evidence as the ‘great man’ narrative found in such abundance in traditional archives such as parliamentary papers and legal documents rendered silent the voices of others – including women, children and the lower classes. Prints, paintings of everyday life and photography afforded a rich archive for the study of ‘history from below’. But this material remained a prompt for a verbal discussion of history. In other words the logocentrism of history endured. It was only in the 1980s that illustrated articles began to appear in cutting edge journals such as Past and Present and History Workshop Journal. These journals were part of a forceful movement, encouraged by (neo)Marxist theory, to try to expand the boundaries of history, including the evidence base that could be drawn upon. The special issue of the Journal of Interdisciplinary History that appeared in 1985 is of particular note. Here a group of American historians discussed the problem of the ‘evidence of art’ and this led the way to historians treating a range of visual material as evidence including in more recent years television and web based sources. Rifkin published ‘Well Formed Phrases: Some Limits of Meaning in Political Print at the End of the Second Empire’ in the same year.13 This is a pendant piece to his 1983 article in Block which had begun to address the problematic of the shift in the interests of historians and art historians, and the widening of the archival base used by each.14 Le Travail, c’est la liberté was the image used by Rifkin to link these two essays. There is no doubt that these publications were part of a wave of new and important studies that appeared in 1980s where images were used in a more subtle and creative way in the forging of historical argument. These works included Robert Scribner’s For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation15 where he made woodcuts an integral part of his portrayal of the faith of ‘simple folk’ – in other words the largely undocumented mass of the population during the Reformation about whom there is no other archive. Scribner provides the first detailed analysis of the forms of propaganda – such as illustrated broadsheets, picture books, title pages, and book illustrations – which were aimed at the illiterate and semi-literate during the Reformation

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in Germany. He argues that visual propaganda exploited popular belief and the coarser aspects of popular culture, while at the same time being a product of them. This, he suggests, explains why the Reformation appealed to the broad masses, even though the propaganda was unable to educate them in the more complex theological aspects of the Reformation. Scribner makes an important contribution to the understanding of early modern popular culture and to the nature of propaganda in the age before mass media and the kind of Benjaminian mechanical reproduction discussed by Burke. The interdisciplinary analysis of woodcuts combines the methods of iconography, semiology, sociology, and folklore but the focus remains on the social history of this aspect of the Reformation in Germany. Scribner explains some of the influences on his approach to images in this book but he perhaps addresses this more fully in an article ‘The Printed Image as Historical Evidence’. Here he discusses the work of a range of art historians including Michael Baxandall, David Freedberg and Joseph Koerner to consider how the viewer and the printed image interact and arouse emotions such as sensuality, authority or devotion. Scribner refers to the latter as the ‘magical power of images’ to engender the pleasure of looking to which he attached great importance for his own study.16 In ‘Well Formed Phrases’ Rifkin examines the political print during the Paris Commune, albeit with the luxury of far more verbal sources than those available to Scribner. He displaces the ‘magical’ power of the image and removes it from being at the centre of political and social discourses. Instead Rifkin suggests that both the print and its publics share a status of being afloat in the discourses that surround them. In this way the political print is set loose from the fixity of meaning inscribed in it by historians and art historians. For me, this helped me to dissolve the boundaries between text and image which remains a central concern in my own work. Rifkin presents Bakhtin’s, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1973) as a way of interrogating the social significance of and circulation of signs. The multiplicity of meanings this method reveals is an historical question in itself as the sign (print) itself becomes a site of social and class conflicts. Moreover, the verbal and visual representations of social relationships have much in common; both seek to reinforce the established social order and exhort the individual to stay in their assigned place. There is something else at play here both in Rifkin’s analysis and more generally in the historical reading of images. For historians such as Caroline Bynum depictions become the only evidence and proof of her line of reasoning. Her study of female saints, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women uses iconography portraying holy women and Christ figures to link physicality and medieval

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religiosity.17 Here Bynum uses images as icons in the classical sense of the word iconography – as she mostly treats images as simple texts. In this way she is representative of the way medieval historians, and here I would include the work of Michael Camille, use a range of evidence, including visual and material culture as the written archive is less abundant than for later periods.18 Bynum is concerned with the role that food played in female medieval spirituality and argues that food was central to women’s spiritual life, because it was the aspect of life over which they had control. The evidence presented includes extracts from hagiographies, testimonies of the saints themselves, and a vast array of imagery showing food and female religious motifs. These images both support and illustrate Bynum’s argument and helps explain some of the more complex theological aspects of Christianity discussed in her book. The examples of Scribner and Bynum show us how the use of images by social historians can obscure the value of images for our understanding of kulturgechichte. This approach is evident in the subtle, nuanced readings of visual culture by art historians such as Ernst Gombrich and Aby Warburg. Although the Warburgian tradition remains a strong force in the field of art history, its reception by historians has been more mixed. I doubt there is a simple explanation for this. But in the context of the concerns of this essay I think it is fair to say that initial interest, at least, in the use of images by historians was predicated by a political agenda to tell the history of those who the conventional archive had forgotten. There is no doubt that the kulturgechichte of Warburg, which was proselytised widely in the English speaking world by Gombrich and others, enables us to unlock the complex meanings of visual culture whether it be popularist or not. For those of us who studied at the Warburg Institute (some 20 years after Adrian and I too entered the reading room under that terrifying sign Otiosis locus hic non est: discede morator) iconology is an established method of the historical analysis of the visual. But, it does not necessarily work to reinforce a particular political standpoint and the image remains the focus of attention rather than its social context. I agree with Adrian that this is not such a bad thing. Concern about what historians actually do and what their duties are does in fact predate the debates I have outlined above. The adoption of ‘scientific’ techniques of narration from the early nineteenth century onwards where the historian disassociated himself (historians were usually men) from literature in favour of science reinforces the primacy of factual accuracy and empirical information and the myth of truthful reality. And visual images were very much a part of this process.

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Wilhelm von Humboldt’s essay entitled The Historian’s Task written in 1821 leaves us in no doubt as to the prevalent view. The historian’s task is to present what actually happened. The more purely and completely he [note ‘he’] achieves this, the more perfectly has he solved this problem. A simple presentation is at the same time the primary indispensable condition of his work and the highest achievement he will be able to attain. Regarded in this way, he seems to be merely receptive and productive, not active and creative. To this end the authority of the historian as an objective writer of the truth about the past is reinforced. The use of images in the production of this kind of objective truth in narrating the past was also inscribed in institutional practices in Britain. Here again the dynamic between hierarchies, politics and artistic production so ably articulated by Rifkin is at play. For instance the Royal Academy of Art, founded in 1768, promoted the notion of there being a hierarchy of the different genres of painting. History painting – which included the depiction of scenes from classical history or indeed current political events was seen as the highest art form and practised only by the most competent artists.19 This way of narrating the past became more ‘real’ when in 1770 the American painter who settled in Britain, Benjamin West, who was twice president of the Royal Academy 1792–1805 and then re-elected in 1806 until his death in 1820, painted the ‘Death of General Wolfe’.20 He broke with the tradition of representing contemporary characters in classical dress, instead showing the General and his entourage in their military uniforms. That said, West still conformed to the academic tradition of grand manner painting and showed Wolfe in a pose based on a classical sculpture.21 In terms of the concerns of this essay West’s picture tells us that images are not just ‘truthful’ depictions of historical events. The narrative choices made by the artists are as plentiful and significant for the final result as those made by the historian when writing history. Moreover, we can also see that art has its own history rather than just being an adjunct to history itself. This is a significant moment in the history of art and the choices made by West in terms of pose, composition and drapery and so forth are part of this. It is important to note that this way of visualising the past and telling its story runs parallel to the evolution of written history, rather than being subsumed in to it. As history grew as a field of academic enquiry so did the interest in the identity of the historians and the ‘great men’ who were their prime concern. History books written in the nineteenth century frequently contained a

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portrait of the historian in the opening pages to enhance the authenticity and authority of the author. But it is perhaps the National Portrait Gallery in London which enshrines this preoccupation with ‘scientific’ evidence and institutionalises the use of images as historical data. The idea behind the gallery typifies the mid-nineteenth-century preoccupation with the ‘great man’ theory of history and commensurate with this the building up of the idea of national greatness. In 1856, in a speech to the House of Lords, Philip Henry Stanhope, 5th Earl Stanhope argued for the founding of what became the British Historical Portrait Gallery ‘of original portraits, such portraits to consist as far as possible of those persons who are most honourably commemorated in British history as warriors or as statesmen, or in arts, in literature or in science’. Interestingly for us, the historians Thomas Babington Macaulay and Thomas Carlyle were two of Stanhope’s strongest supporters. The gallery was opened in premises at 29 Great George Street in London in 1859 with the criteria that it was to be about history, not about art, and about the status of the sitter, rather than the quality or character of a particular image considered as a work of art. The status of the artist who painted the portrait was also of little concern. The importance of the collection for the telling of national history was emphasised in the decision, not only not to acquire any portraits of people who were still living, but also that subject had to have been dead for more than ten years. The only exception to this rule, which was only revoked in 1969, was the current monarch and his or her consort. The success of the gallery is evident not only in the growth of its collection in the first 10 years of its existence from 57 to 288 items, but also in the number of visitors which increased from 5,300 in 1859 to 34,500 in 1869. The National Portrait Gallery provides a distinctive example of how images can narrate history. The portraits of great men give a visual identity and presence to these historical figures. They also operate as facts which appear to be the substance of this ‘objective’ historical narrative. But what is the relationship of the historian to the facts? Is it the duty of the historian, as Ranke amongst others suggests, to let the facts speak for themselves? But the facts history purports to describe are in the past – no longer accessible to direct inspection or empirical observation – they are untestable and have no yardstick of known reality to which they can be compared. Similarly, we may have no idea if the portraits in the National Portrait Gallery are accurate representations of their sitters, but we accept them as likenesses. The relationship between the historian and his or her facts was the subject of debate in the 1960s. W. H. Walsh added to these debates in his Introduction to the Philosophy of History where he considered the question

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of truth and fact in history, which he saw as relating to the more general theory of knowledge. We are apt to suppose that the facts in any branch of meaning must be in some way open to direct inspection, and that the statements of experts in each branch can be tested by their conformity with them. [...] The most striking thing about history is that the facts it purports to describe are past facts; and past facts are no longer accessible to direct inspection. We cannot, in a word, test the accuracy of historical statements by simply seeing whether they correspond to a reality which is independently known. How then can we test them? [...] we do so by referring to historical evidence. Although the past is not accessible to direct inspection it has left ample traces of itself in the present, in the shape of documents, buildings, coins, institutions, procedures and so forth.22 Every assertion must be based therefore on some kind of evidence. If there is no evidence history, according to Walsh, becomes an inspired guess or a fiction. But the original sources need scrutiny and the historian has to decide whether to believe them as they are not the ‘ultimate datum to which we can refer to test historical judgements’. Walsh places historical thinking firmly in the present so that the historical truth arrived at by the historian is a product of the present and not the past. I think this applies equally to verbal and visual histories. The preoccupation with the nature of history and historical truth is scrutinised by Adrian Rifkin in terms of its linguistic and textual possibilities, and his work has informed my own thinking. There is no doubt that in many instances images are subsumed into a logocentric view of the past providing only visual proof of the historian’s or the art historian’s narrative. Perhaps it is important here to pause to think about what we mean by history and what we think historians actually do and to consider the role images can play in this process. History is about the past. Yet it exists only in the present – the moment of its creation as history provides us with a narrative constructed after the events with which it is concerned. The narrative must then relate to the moment of its creation as much as its historical subject. History presents an historian with the task of producing a dialogue between the past and the present. But as these temporal co-ordinates cannot be fixed, history becomes a continuous interaction between the historian and the past. As such history can be seen as a

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process of evaluation where the past is always coloured by the intellectual fashions and philosophical concerns of the present whether they be social history, empirical narratives and so forth. And as we have seen the use of images forms part of this ongoing dialogue. This shifting perspective on the past is matched by the fluid status of the past itself. Rifkin shows us how printed images of the Paris Commune operate at once as histories of a political revolution whilst at the same time they work to reinforce the social status quo. Historical reality or truth is then a ‘referential illusion’ where we try to understand the past (the referent of language) which we believe lies beyond the barrier of the linguistic construction of its narratives. Seeing the past is then a way of witnessing what we want to believe actually happened at a given historical moment. In this way history becomes a myth or an ideology as it purports to be reality. This enables me to think differently about how texts and images operate and it helps me to make sense of the anecdotal reductio ad absurdum with which I began this essay and to which I shall return. Historians interpret evidence just as they interpret signs – and this helps to bring together the central concerns of this essay: the logocentric practice of writing history and the role of images in the construction of these narratives. Indeed storytelling is often seen as one of the most important functions of writing histories and making them appear to be real. A story requires a beginning, middle, and end, based on a series of events that take place over a period of time. This coherence or linearity is a selective process that requires the exclusion of material and the imposition of a unity on a disparate set of historical events or circumstances. This consequence of the desire for narrative relates to the empirical tradition; it is one way of ordering facts – ‘letting them speak for themselves’ – and has a built-in notion of progress and images can reinforce this. We have a tendency to believe what we can see. The choice of narrative is an important way of making the facts speak. But this was not recognised by many nineteenthcentury historians who were oblivious to the nature and consequences of the narrative choices available to them. They believed, instead, that at some point all facts would be known to provide an archival truth. As we have seen the setting up of the National Portrait Gallery stemmed from the belief that an empirical reiteration of the facts, in this case pictures of great men, presents reality. The past does leave traces of itself in the present in the form of archives, whether they be documents, institutions, images or indeed buildings. This archive of knowledge about the past, no matter how incomplete, allows the historian to present an argument or reconstruction based on this body

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of ‘evidence’ or facts. If we accept visual culture as a part of this body of evidence then we must also see its histories as a text open to a variety of readings. The process of locating ‘the text’ within its appropriate contexts is not merely to provide a historiography; it is to begin the process of interpretation. Recently, Adrian gave a series of talks, From an obstructed viewpoint, artwriting-image.23 I was particularly drawn to his discussion of the relationship and the dissonance between sound and image. In a series of provocative visual and aural juxtapositions he explored the continuous state of flux of the archive. The performative quality of these talks added to their intensity and to my mind they enriched the practice of ‘art writing’ with the processes of what seemed to me to be ‘art sounding’. Indeed, Adrian confided in me that his model for the production and delivery of this kind of discourse is that of the screwball comedy and its rhetorical risks. I would like to end with one of these pairings as they bring us back to where I began this essay. Imagine two screens: one is showing the comic song and dance sequence ‘Let’s be Common’ from Ernst Lubitsch, The Love Parade, 1929; the original soundtrack to this is music by Victor Schertzinger. On the other screen we see the sequence where the Israelites dance before the golden calf from Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Moses und Aron, 1973; the music is by Arnold Schoenberg. Adrian showed these two sequences simultaneously for about five minutes during which time the music slowly exchanges from all Schertzinger to all Schoenberg by the end. As the soundtrack changes, so does our response to the film clips. The volatility of meaning and interpretation evident here recall the bonfires and the ambiguities of the soundtrack to history.

Notes 1 See Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators (Oxford: OUP, 1971), pp. 80–1 esp. 2 Michael Camille, ‘The Très Riches Heures: An illuminated manuscript in the age of mechanical reproduction’, Critical Inquiry, XVII (1990–1), pp. 72–107. 3 Michael Camille, Mirror in Parchment: The Luttrell Psalter and the Making of Medieval England (London: Reaktion, 1998). 4 W. T. J. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); see also Mitchell’s Iconology: Image. Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986) and Landscape and Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 5 W. A. Coupe, The German Illustrated Broadsheet in the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols (Baden-Baden, 1966–7). Coupe continued to contribute to the study of images as historical documents in his books Through the Looking Glass: A Cartoon Chronicle of

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the Federal Republic (Leamington Spa, 1986), and at greater length in German Political Satires from the Reformation to the Second World War, 3 Parts (White Plains, NY: 1985–93). 6 I have discussed this issue at length in my book Art History: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: OUP, 2004). 7 Francis Haskell, History and its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 3rd printing with corr., 1995). 8 Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (1st edn 1924) trans. F. Hopman (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955). 9 Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of Renaissance Italy (1st edn 1860) trans. S. G. C. Middlemore (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1990). 10 Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence (London: Reaktion, 2001). 11 Adrian Rifkin, ‘No Particular Thing to Mean’, Block, No. 8 (1983). 12 Adrian Rifkin ‘Well Formed Phrases: Some Limits of Meaning in Political Print at the End of the Second Empire’ Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 8, No. 1 (1985), pp. 20–8; 20. 13 Ibid. 14 Le Travail, c’est la liberté is the link or connective tissue between the two articles. 15 Robert Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation (Oxford: OUP, 1981). 16 Robert Scribner, ‘The Printed Image as Historical Evidence’ in German Life and Letters, 48 (3 July 1995), pp. 324–37. 17 Caroline Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (University of California Press, 1987). 18 On this point see T. F. Tout, ‘The Present State of Mediaeval Studies in Great Britain’ in: Proceedings of the British Academy, Vol. 6, 1913–14 (London, 1914), pp. 151–66, who wrote in 1913 that the expert in medieval history should have knowledge in the ‘relevant languages, thought, literature, and art’. 19 See for instance John Bonehill, ‘British Art History and the Royal Academy’, Oxford Art Journal 31 (2008) pp. 292–4. 20 See Ann Uhry Abrams, The Valiant Hero: Benjamin West and Grand-Style History Painting (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985). 21 This picture is in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottowa. 22 W. H. Walsh An Introduction to the Philosophy of History (London: Hutchinson, 1967), pp. 19–20 esp. 23 These were first given at iniva in October 2012; subsequent versions were heard at Camden Arts Centre and ICA.

Figure 3a: Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar. Two frames from the film essay Otolith ll (2007).

4 Décor and Decorum at the ‘Temple of Photography’1 Steve Edwards

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his essay attempts to reconstruct a series of decorative schemes depicting the rise and progress of photography, which Antoine Claudet commissioned in the early 1850s for his Regent Street Daguerreotype studio. My text moves from a detailed description of these paintings to a consideration of the condensed Liberal fantasy that shaped their production. It will turn out that the shockwave of 1848 is close to the heart of the matter. Of course, Claudet’s decorative scheme does not bear the aesthetic weight of Courbet’s contemporaneous work and the reports written about this photographic studio lack the bathos attached to a spy’s description of the murals adorning a café run by émigré exCommunards.2 But that is their value. The testimonies that form the basis for this essay offer commonplace descriptions of working images and attention to them opens familiar enough questions. Adrian Rifkin’s essay ‘“Success Disavowed”: the Schools of Design in Mid-NineteenthCentury Britain (An Allegory)’ provides a key point of reference for my reading.3 I will return to his essay in more detail in the second part of my contribution, but I am not specifically going to discuss Rifkin’s intervention into the disciplines or his seemingly endless generation of concepts, ways of thinking and the creation of stories for guiding research. I just want to put some of his themes to work. (Long ago, he taught me that discussing a thinker’s work was much less useful than inhabiting it as a programme for research and for the way it might suggest what there is to be found in the archives). While reference to Rifkin is explicitly confined to this one essay, I conceived this study as an engagement with some themes running through his work; principally, the poetics and practices of culture as histories of labour (or labour histories of culture) put into

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constellation with a series of Communard murals. It strikes me as timely to return to the 1980s Rifkin: to his engagement with workers’ archives and commodities; to artisans and art; to ideology critique and practices of reading – to the moment that crossed the Gramsci of History Workshop with Les Révoltes logique.4 At the core of Rifkin’s work during this period was a desire to incorporate aesthetics (though he might have scorned the term) into the multiple histories of labour and thereby to reconfigure dirempt narratives of art and work. A return to this cluster of problems is timely, not only because of the current interest in the early work of Jacques Rancière, which Rifkin helped make available in English, but also because there can be no way of now evading the linkage of capitalism, work and art at this moment of systemic crisis.5 (In the process, an allegory from the 1980s will have to undergo a sequel or remake for this time. It would be nice to think that someday we could finally leave behind the tall tale that suggests gearing education in art or culture to the needs of production will reanimate a failing economy and give rise to generalised abundance.) Rifkin’s essays from this period also offer one way out of the dreary common sense that is increasingly descending over art history and cultural studies, as ‘social history’ and postmodern cultural history begin to converge, from their seemingly distinct perspectives, on a born-again empiricism that, all-too-often, takes the form of the little monograph. What Rifkin describes as his ‘hippy part’ might not welcome this turning back, but he can’t have it all his own way; these essays belong to me as much as they do to him. No visual records of Claudet’s studio interior have come to light and so we have to rely on the handful of accounts or short notices published by contemporary witnesses.6 My description simply follows some tracks through the available records and my aim is to read this small group of sources as the archaeology of an absence, which in its deficiency testifies to a social imaginary. It frequently happens that, once we step off the beaten track of the canon, the history of photography has to be written in the absence of pictures. What I propose here is a kind of ekphrasis for a series of missing images; just a snapshot of a lost object. Evidently, there is no possibility of reconstructing this studio and its schemes in their originary fullness, nevertheless the point at which the descriptions clash or agree opens on to an imaginary resolution for some disfigured daydreams (or nightmares).7 While working on this piece I have come upon several reports of the studio that were previously unknown to historians of photography; on each occasion they have forced me to revise the account I had set out. There is no reason to imagine that further evidence will not turn up or that we can ever iron out the anomalies between the variant sources. In

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fact, I simultaneously dread and delight at the idea that photographic documents recording the appearance of the studio interior might emerge: I would be intrigued to see them, but my descriptions would surely turn out to be inaccurate and rendered effectively null. Extensive research could then be replaced by a simple presentation of some images, even if the task of description would need to begin again on the basis of different material traces. What follows is a provisional account; a staging of some themes from a research project. In this case, I will be joining close attention to the consistency and iteration of the sources with symptomatic reading, a process we might think of as a social or realist fantasmatics of the sort that underpins ‘Success Disavowed’. In this sense, I am going to proceed by considering what the statements have to say on the decorative schemes.8 The first part of my essay asks what we do not know, and what we might glimpse; the second considers the ideological field that we might envisage emerging on the basis of these patterns and themes.

I In 1851 the photographer Antoine Claudet opened a studio at 107 Regent Street. This was the most prestigious site for the nascent daguerreotype business and, according to Ernest Lacan, in 1855 there were more than 20 photographers on Regent Street.9 Claudet occupied this studio until his death at the end of 1867. It was a grand building ranging over several floors plus basements. He conceived a plan for a lavishly appointed reception/showroom/studio that would celebrate the invention and achievements of photography; as he put it: ‘I will try to organise it, in every detail, based on the lessons of my long experience.’10 He must have been very successful in his trade because the available reports suggest that a small fortune was spent on the building, fittings and décor. Claudet hired an architect to adapt the existing John Nash building and kitted out the premises with expensive furnishings and an extensive painted scheme depicting the progress of photography; these images may have extended over two floors. Initially he advertised the ‘Daguerreotype Portrait Gallery’ and it was still referred to as the Daguerreotype Gallery at the time of his death, but at some point the studio was designated the ‘Temple of Photography’.11 Claudet’s gallery was to be a key site for the photographic trade and for the new consumer culture of the capital. A detailed account of this ‘Temple’ would add a great deal to our knowledge of how photography was imagined at the top of the business and its insertion into the rounds of metropolitan pleasures, but only a month after Claudet’s death his premises went up

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in flames. In the process, many of his photographs were destroyed along with his papers and the decorative schemes. From the 1847 Supplement to Tallis’s London Street Views, we know what the façade looked like (Fig. 4.1). In fact, it depicts two adjacent buildings numbered 107, but while the smaller structure was occupied by a billiard hall and a picture gallery, the larger one was in use by the hosier Mr Faulkner and it was this that Claudet took over. (Faulkner is mentioned in the accounts of the fire.) In a measure intended to prevent ‘vice’, the iron colonnades on the Quadrant were removed in 1848. A postcard from around 1900 shows the façade of 107 had not been changed during Claudet’s renovations (Fig. 4.2). Between 1902 and 1927 the Nash terraces of Regent Street were demolished to create larger retail units. Nothing remains of the No. 107 as it was known and occupied by Claudet and the site is now incorporated into the flagship store of Austin Reed.12 The fire took hold at ten o’clock on Thursday 23 January 1868, devastating the premises (along with the ground-floor hosiery shop of Mr A. Faulkner). The adjoining premises of watchmaker José R. De Losada were also destroyed. According to the report of the fire published in The Times the areas damaged were: show and store rooms on the ground floor, 50 by 20 feet, and contents nearly burnt out; chymical rooms and offices on the first floor; sitting and artists’ rooms and studio on second floor, and contents severely damaged by fire and water; basement and contents by water; rest of house and contents by smoke.13 Initially, the fire was put down to the overheating of a hot-air stove, but Claudet’s son Henri subsequently disputed this suggestion (possibly for insurance purposes).14 Henri Claudet is listed in the London Post Office Directories as operating as a photographer from 107 Regent Street between 1869 and 1884; we can assume that he renovated the studio after the fire.15 We know Faulkner had been paying £350 per annum for this building and it seems that Claudet took over most of the space and probably most of the rent, but from the reports of the fire, it is apparent that Faulkner retained some premises on the ground floor, probably subletting rear sections. According to Marion Kamlish, Claudet found the building rather large and may have proposed renting some space to the photographic society that was being formed at the time.16 The space itself is indeterminate. I want to begin from the anomalies contained in descriptions of the space and its décor. In 1851 there was a specimen room on the ground floor and

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portraits were produced on the floor above.17 A report in the Athenaeum in 1851 described the first-floor studio as a ‘large, improved, and wellventilated Crystal Building’, which was decorated with (three) paintings glorifying the production of photography on paper, on glass and on metal.18 Thus, in 1851 the paintings are cited as on the first floor. The batch of reports from 1854 suggests a different placement. One detailed description was published anonymously in the French photography journal La Lumière in July 1854.19 It is possible that it was penned by Claudet himself as a puff. Producing a foreign reputation didn’t add up to many sales, but it was important in the award of exhibition medals and other honours and these could be cashed out. The writer suggested: Claudet […] decorated his salon with a series of allegorical paintings, the idea of which is as noble as the execution is admirable. The idea is to represent the various phases by which the science had to pass before arriving at the magnificent results obtained by photography, and thus to recall the lofty origin of this art and the respect it deserves.20 We are told that the walls of the rectangular ground floor showroom were painted by Hervieu;21 a frieze running around the upper walls featured ‘arabesques and medallions containing portraits of learned people and artists to whom photography and stereoscopy owe their birth or their eventual improvement’. Here we are dealing with the salon or reception room on the ground floor. This essay from La Lumière not only gives us some details about the decoration, but it also allows for an approximate placement of the various components of the scheme. The space was ‘a long rectangle’. On the upper section of the wall facing the entrance were medallion portraits: ‘Porta who in 1590 invented the camera’, Daguerre, Talbot and Wheatstone. On the right-hand wall were ‘Herschel, Newton, Brewster; above the entrance, Davy, Leonardo da Vinci, Niépce and Wedgwood; the frieze on the left shows portraits of Fizeau, of Arago and of Niépce de Saint-Victor.’22 Set between ‘four arcades’, which divide the long wall were ‘five panels’ representing ‘sculpture, painting, the invention of photography, the making of photographic portraits by means of a camera, and the application of the stereoscope to photography’. The four great centres of civilisation – Athens, Rome, Paris and London – appeared in ‘interposed medallions’. The left-hand wall was dedicated to England and carried ‘a view of the Thames and of Somerset House, headquarters of the Royal Society, to which Talbot first communicated his invention of photography on paper’.

Figure 4.1 (above): From John Tallis’s London Street Views (1838). Together with the Revised and Enlarged Views of 1847.

Figure 4.2: The Quadrant, Regent Street, London. Postcard (c.1900).

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The right-hand wall carried a depiction of ‘the Chamber of Deputies, which, under the reign of Louis-Philippe, whose portrait is found just below, passed the law giving a pension to Daguerre and Niépce, in recompense for their admirable discovery’. Also on the right there was an additional panel bearing a picture of the Great Exhibition, which had been ‘the occasion of the first meeting of photographers’. We have no idea how the two panels were positioned or their respective sizes. Above the painting of the exhibition were pendant portraits of Albert and Victoria.23 The writer also tells us ‘on the staircase side, three gracious compositions symbolise photography on paper, on glass, and on metal’. The problem is, we do not know where the staircase was located. We are also informed that Claudet’s specimens, including coloured-stereoscopic pictures, were on show in this room. Importantly, the writer indicates the ‘style’ or mode of the scheme by way of a denial: We would not know how to describe the delicacy of drawing, the richness of colour, and the sweetness of expression, with which are treated these various subjects, of which we have just given such a dry account. All these murals, the most remarkable perhaps of those done in England by contemporaneous artists, are the painterly accomplishment of Hervieu.24 All of this suggested to this author that ‘photography is a venerable art, exercising a calling and a special aptitude’ and Claudet ‘the most worthy and the most distinguished’ of its practitioners. We will leave this account there for the time being. In another significant description, which was published in Art Journal in the same year, we are informed: M. Claudet’s Daguerreotype Gallery in Regent Street has been recently reconstructed by Messrs. Banks & Barry, and decorated with a series of paintings by M. Hervieu. The architecture is in the Italian style very light and elegant; the decorative paintings have been designed to illustrate the history of photography and stereoscopy in a series of allegorical groups very gracefully conceived.25 The writer thought it a good idea to make ‘the reception room the exponent of the history of the art which attracts its visitors’ and that Claudet should be honoured for ‘having turned ornamental walls to so useful a purpose’. The room was said to be lit by a skylight and again there are said to be 14 medallion busts beginning with Porta, ‘who, about 1590, invented the camera’ (the wording is remarkably close to the equivalent passage in La

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Lumière, as is often the case with mid-nineteenth-century journalism, it may entail some recycling) and ending with Wheatstone, ‘who invented, in 1838 the stereoscope’. Despite the repetition, the Art Journal description adds some detail to the account of the painted scheme in La Lumière: the writer states: The allegorical pictures of Cupidons, shadow forth in a graceful manner the progress of representative Art from its first creation in statuary, to the sister art of painting, ending with the invention of photography. The commemoration of its discoveries in France and England is effected by graceful tableaux; and the series is completed by other allegorical allusions to the paper, glass and metal used in the photographic process. The names and achievements of such philosophers as have aided the art from its infancy to its present maturity are exhibited in two ‘honorary’ panels, completing the general review of the art comprised upon the walls.26 Claudet’s specimens were said to be displayed in an ‘ante-room’, but this may be a synonym for the reception room. This description adds some significant additional information. First, we are informed the architects are Banks and Barry and it is worth correcting a little myth in the history of photography: it has been assumed that Claudet’s architect was the Barry of the Houses of Parliament. However, it was Charles Barry Jr (1823–1900), and not his father Sir Charles Barry (1795–1860), who was the partner of Robert Richardson Banks.27 Secondly, the description of the decorative work in this literary sketch substantially echoes that in La Lumière, but there are significant anomalies and further particulars. The medallion portraits are said to constitute a kind of narrative of photographic invention beginning in the sixteenth century and ending in 1838/9. The writer mentions three allegorical paintings that appear to match those on the long wall, but not the other two; the tableaux depicting ‘discoveries in France and England’ again seem to fit with what we have learned from La Lumière. Paintings that allude to photography on paper, glass and metal are once more cited; we also read of ‘“honorary” panels’ that list the names and achievements of inventors (where were they positioned?) Significantly, we are told the allegorical representations contained ‘Cupidons’. There were at least two more reports on Claudet’s Daguerreotype Gallery in 1854 (one of which was duplicated in a further newspaper). We are informed by a writer in the Morning Herald that, on the morning of 6 June, Claudet gave a private view of ‘certain decorations which he has bestowed upon his establishment in Regent-street’.28 This report appeared the following day

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and on 8 June the Daily News also carried an account.29 The appearance of the piece in La Lumière on the 22 July is congruent with this. The Morning Herald suggested Claudet’s reception room was ‘now probably the most beautiful chamber of its kind in the metropolis’. The word now, like ‘recently reconstructed’ that figures in the Art Journal, combined with the private view and clustering of reports suggests something had changed and it seems historians have been inattentive. The Daguerreotype Gallery in 1851 was probably not the same space as its 1854 incarnation. It seems likely that the scheme was reconfigured, developed or extended at this later point. This may account for the apparent contradiction in the earliest description that locates the three paintings dealing with photography on metal, glass and paper in the first-floor studio. The reports in the Daily News and the Morning Herald substantiate much of what we know from La Lumière and Art Journal. The Morning Herald author confirms the 14 savants who appear in ‘medalioned portraits’ mentioned in La Lumière; it also mentions ‘allegorical paintings’ on the west wall and images that are ‘emblematic of the periods of Louis-Philippe and Queen Victoria’ on the south and north walls. This text adds some additional particulars. The room is said to be 30 feet by 18 feet. Importantly, it suggests there was a balcony that ran the length of the room and was ‘supported by a series of delicate arches and columns of bronze’. The five paintings on the long wall fitted into the bays formed by these arches and columns. We also learn that the paintings were ‘divided into paneled compartments’ and that here were mirrors interspersed around the walls. The account in the Daily News covers some of the same territory. The whole is said to be an ‘allegorical poem in colour’; again da Vinci, Wheastone, Newton and Brewster are mentioned; and ‘The equal claims of France and England to the honour of the discovery are expressed by the introduction of emblems of the two nations at the opposite ends of the gallery.’ But here we are told that ovals and scrolls ran around the top of the room depicting painting and sculpture; the aid rendered by chemistry and metallurgy; and ‘impersonations of the materials employed’. The medallion portraits representing ‘men of science and art’ are said to be positioned below these ovals and scrolls. These accounts confirm much of what we know, but add a balcony, bronze columns and the topological distinction between allegorical emblems and medallion portraits. We can correlate the space described in the Daily Herald with the account in La Lumière, but only if the west wall, the long wall and the wall facing the door are all the same. However, this is a problem because the building is approximately 20 feet wide and it is difficult to see how this could be the ‘long wall’; in addition, it must have contained a door to the rooms behind the show room or salon. If as seems likely there was an interior balcony, then the reception room was double height. This would account for the three paintings of photography on glass, paper and metal being positioned on the entrance wall, which otherwise would seem to have

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been a plate-glass window and door. We don’t know where the staircase was so it is possible these three images were located on the left-hand wall, which otherwise had only the representation of Somerset House. Two further short notices appeared in the middle of the decade. In 1855 Ernest Lacan, editor of La Lumière, visited Claudet’s studio and called it a: ‘Pantheon of photography; it is also a beautiful book written in stone: the history of that great discovery, which has already produced so many marvels and will produce many more.’ The whole chronology was there on the walls and, Lacan felt, the only name missing was that of Claudet himself.30 Claudet was last in a series, present in his absence. This short description will turn out to be an important clue to the schemes. In 1856 a brief notice on stereoscopic portraits at ‘Claudet’s Gallery’ that appeared in the Athenaeum praised his work, comparing his portraits with the lens to those made by Lawrence.31 This small piece mentions for the first time two elaborately carved stereoscopic viewers by Rogers sited in the reception space. Each is said to be ‘a real work of Art’.32 They may have been introduced after 1854. Then we hear nothing further for more than 12 years. Two or three days after the fire in 1868 George Wharton Simpson, the editor of the Photographic News, visited this ‘distressing spectacle’. He noted that the darkroom and laboratory escaped the fire and the studio and apparatus ‘although injured, were not destroyed’. However, ‘the reception room, business office, Mr Claudet’s private room, the waiting and dressing rooms, and the corridors’ were all completely ruined. More than 20,000 negatives were lost in the blaze. He continued: The reception room was one of the most elegantly decorated and appointed rooms in London, and cost the elder Mr. Claudet years of thought and effort, besides a very large amount of expense. The paintings in the panels, of allegorical and emblematical subjects in keeping with the place, designed and painted under Mr. Claudet’s instructions, by a clever French artist, cost upwards of four hundred pounds, and the decorative fittings of the place nearly three hundred more. These are now simply blackened and blistered canvas and ashes. A couple of magnificent table stereo stands, magnificently carved by Harry Rogers, which cost two hundred and fifty pounds apiece, are now simply a few pieces of charred wood; and scattered near, a number of Daguerreotype plates on the surfaces of which, here and there, a portion of a ghostly face is seen amid the half melted metal, the sole remains of some exceedingly choice and carefully coloured stereoscopic portraits of beautiful women. The walls and stands and glass cases were crowded with very elaborately finished

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specimens in water colours and oil, many of the latter enlargements: the whole of these are utterly destroyed.33 ‘Saddest of all’, according to this writer, was the destruction of ‘every existing portrait of the late Mr. Claudet’. These portraits from different ‘periods of his life’ had been gathered together in the specimen room with a view to dividing them among the family. Along with the reception room, these were now ‘one scattered heap of ashes’.34 Simpson believed that a ‘still more melancholy loss’ had occurred in Claudet’s private room, which contained the ‘experimental results of Mr. Claudet’s scientific life’. Claudet had, he said, ‘been an earnest, active, and successful experimentalist’ and had preserved the results of his experimental work in this room: In this private room were collected the examples of the various experiments in the Daguerreotype process, from the earliest portrait of himself – stretched on his back, because the plate required upwards of a quarter of an hour’s exposure – down to the most recent illustrations of the value of accelerators. Here were Daguerreotype etchings; examples of the work of curious lenses; a large series of illustrations of the peculiarities of binocular vision, and the apparatus belonging thereto; illustrations of the various optical theories and mathematical contrivances which absorbed Mr. Claudet’s attention. All of these are utterly and irretrievably destroyed.35 Henri Claudet had been collecting ‘documents, notes and memoranda of experiments, historical data, etc’ for a memoir of ‘Claudet and his scientific labours, especially in relation to the early history of photography’. These were collated in a desk and were ‘all burnt; some of the documents exist in duplicate, but others are beyond replacing’.36 While Claudet’s premises were insured, the pictures, documents and decorations were not. There are two notable themes in this report. The first is a melancholy account of life: aesthetic objects are all reduced to ‘blackened and blistered canvas and ashes’; beautiful female visages are transformed into ‘half melted metal’. It is difficult not to find in this an image of Inferno – figured through the destruction of faces, particularly that of Claudet himself. The Christian imagination haunts this account in which earthly splendour turns to ashes: all is vanity. Science is the second important theme. Claudet is described as an ‘experimentalist’ and his ‘labours’ are scientific. There is no mention of art and the decorative schemes are broached only to stress their expense and the fact that they were not insured. In fact, the carved stereoscopes

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figure more prominently than the ‘allegorical and emblematical subjects’; they also cost more than the paintings. While Claudet’s elaborate studio was destroyed, taking with it pictures and papers; what remains is his contribution to the march of the intellect – even if he is in hell. A few months later in the middle of 1868 J. Ellis published a memoir of Claudet in The Scientific Review.37 Ellis cast himself as a ‘disciple’ of Claudet and his essay sought to position his master as a man of science: ‘it was not merely to the fame of photographer that his genius aspired. It was not that for which he “scorned delights, and lived laborious days”. If, in any degree, he sacrificed to Plutus, his heart-homage was to the shrine of Minerva.’ Here commerce is subordinated to learning. Claudet’s name, Ellis said, was ‘inscribed on the melancholy death-roll’ of the martyrs to science.38 We are told that Claudet was a chemist, a mathematician, ‘an ingenious mechanic’ and an ‘artist of consummate taste’ who ‘took up photography as a philosophic pursuit’: There he would be, day after day, among the fumes of mercury and iodine – careless of life or health – experimenting, producing, expounding, never tiring, never exhausting the fecundity of his expedients, never desponding in his aspirations. And, happily, he was found equal to what he undertook.39 Ellis conducts the reader through a tour of Claudet’s research, which included work on paper photography, the Daguerreotype and the ‘Archertype’. The ‘fecundity’ of his imagination is conjured through a list of questions: ‘“What is the action of light on the sensitive coating?” “How does the mercurial vapour produce the Daguerréotype image?” “Which are the particular rays of light that impart to the chemical surface the affinity for mercury?”’ Questions of this sort go on for half a page. Ellis briefly touched on Claudet’s ‘ability as an artist, and his great services to the art of photography’ through his ‘studies and inventions’ and his championing of the medium in the International Exhibition of 1862.40 We then rapidly return to Brewster and the Topaz lens. Immediately prior to the final paean to Claudet and science, Ellis gives a description of the Regent Street studio, which is worth citing at length: In 1851, Claudet set up a Temple of Photography after his own heart. Here, in the Hall of Audience, could he be consulted from the adytum sanctum. Here, surrounded by symbols and examples, the neophyte was impressed with the dignity and beauty of photography: perhaps first learned that photography is the outcome of the labours of

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philosophers through the ages of civilisation. For he saw, on glancing at the medallion portraits around the cove, names of men now thought of as ancients – Roger Bacon, Porta, Da Vinci, Newton – and was reminded of the honour due to many nearer to his own time, Davy, Wedgwood, Niepce, Daguerre, Talbot, Wheatstone, Brewster, Arago. He saw described by allegorical paintings the progress of the arts by which natural objects and the human form have been replicated from the earliest time – statuary, painting, application of the camera obscura to photography and of photography to the stereoscope, emblems of the discovery of photography and of the means of producing photographic pictures, mural scrolls, chronological records of the inventions and discoveries whereunto photography is indebted. Or, looking again, he read inscriptions of the classical testimony of Virgil or Martial: “Nulla recordanti lux ingrata,” “Solem quis dicere falsum audeat?” “Lux est Mundi lumen”.41 There is a great deal to be said about this recollection from someone who knew ‘the Temple’ at such close proximity, but there are important aspects of misrecognition in this account. Firstly, Ellis added a portrait medallion of Roger Bacon and dropped Herschel, Fizeau and Niépce de Saint-Victor. There is one rogue medallion portrait in his description and we do not know which of these four it is. This may have been the effect of a faulty memory or the scheme may have been changed during the life of the gallery. I suspect that it was Ellis who introduced the term ‘The Temple of Photography’; he picked up on a theme running through the decorative scheme – Athens, Rome, Cupidons, Martial, Virgil, ancient sculpture – and stretched the classicising tone, adding Plutus and Minerva and the adytum sanctum. This was ‘modern bourgeois society, in Roman costumes and with Roman slogans’.42 Greek ones too. The reference to The Temple of Photography was probably transported into modern scholarship by Helmut Gernsheim, who is rarely exact with his sources, and subsequent historians have not registered the classicising moment of production in Ellis’s text. Ellis’s memoir is embedded in a discourse on science and dispassionate knowledge inherited from the Ancients: ‘photography is the outcome of the labours of philosophers’; even Claudet’s contribution to art is said to stem from his ‘studies and inventions’ and ‘natural objects’ are ‘replicated’. This description presents us with a lavish space, but it is one that places learning, rather than luxury or commerce, at its centre. The Temple of Photography is a place of Latin inscriptions and portraits of ancient and contemporary men of science. Overall, this description plays down the role of art and sets photography in the narrative of discovery and technical progress.

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These various descriptions repeat and overlap, but they emphasise different aspects of the interior and of the decorative scheme for the ‘Temple of Photography’. Immediate problems of interpretation present themselves from these diverse accounts. The Athenaeum account of 21 June 1851 has paintings (seemingly three) of photography and its relation to paper, glass and metal in the portrait studio; other accounts locate them on a wall in the reception room, possibly the entrance wall, possibly the lefthand wall. Was there an error or, as seems more likely, did Claudet move them to the reception room in his reconfiguration of the décor in 1854. The various reporters employ different terms for what may have been the same space. Are the ‘specimen room’, the ‘reception room’, the ‘Hall of Audience’ and the ‘ante chamber’ the same area? Probably, but we cannot be sure; nor is there any certainty about the percentage of the ‘20 by 50 feet’ given over to the reception room and the store room; in contrast the Morning Herald of 1854 suggests the room was ‘upwards of 30 feet in length and 18 in width’. How can the long wall be 18 feet? The report of the fire in the Times mentions ‘show and store rooms on the ground floor’; ‘chymical rooms and offices on the first floor’; ‘sitting and artists’ rooms and studio on second floor’, and a ‘basement’. This not only indicates rooms otherwise not discussed, but the floors do not match up with those in other witness statements: the studio is placed on the second and not the first floor as it is more usually. Presumably, the dressing room and waiting room referred to by Simpson were on the first floor, but we can’t be clear. Was the studio relocated from the first to the second floor? Some of theses anomalies can be accounted for by assuming that the building was reconstructed in 1854, but no means all of them are explained away. There are also differences in the accounts of the medallion portraits and some descriptions of the allegorical panels seem condensed. One account suggests an additional tier of images running around the cove. The report in La Lumière mentions five themed paintings on the long wall representing the development of the imitative arts: sculpture, painting, photography’s invention, portrait photography and stereo photography. However, the passage in Ellis that would seem to match up with this wall gives only four: ‘statuary, painting, application of the camera obscura to photography and of photography to the stereoscope’. Three, and probably a fourth, overlap. Gernsheim suggests different subjects for these murals: representations of painting, sculpture, engraving and lithography, the application of the camera obscura to photography and photography to the stereoscope.43 Neither lithography nor engraving is mentioned in any other account and he omits the representation of photographic portraiture mentioned in La Lumière; he further leaves out

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the representations of the French Chamber of Deputies and the Great Exhibition and Somerset House. He also omits sources for his account. What is more, Ellis, who lists the characters in the medallions, refers to the ‘names of men now thought of as ancients’. These were likely to have been painted portraits, but it is not impossible that they were simply inscriptions of proper names. We are told that there were also ‘mural scrolls’ around the coving frieze: did these contain the Latin mottos? Were they the same as the ‘arabesques’ mentioned by La Lumière? Ellis also mentions ‘emblems of the discovery of photography and of the means of producing photographic pictures’, as well as ‘mural scrolls, chronological records of the inventions and discoveries’: none of which can be clearly identified. Even where we are given some indicative content for the murals or panels, there is no detailed description. Only the 1854 description in La Lumière brings up the portraits of Louis-Philippe, and Victoria and Albert, though the Morning Herald mentions pictures emblematic of their ‘periods’. The biggest short-coming is that we don’t know what any of this looked like. How did Hervieu imagine and render these subjects? We know little of Hervieu. There are some work-a-day portraits in the National Portrait Gallery and others sometimes turn up in the auction houses44 (Fig. 4.3). Probably the best clue is the contemporaneous ceiling painting he executed at Cliveden for the Duchess of Sutherland, depicting her children as the four seasons (Fig. 4.4). The redesign of Cliveden was carried out by Sir Charles Barry and completed in 1851–2 and Hervieu’s ceiling was part of this work. (Interestingly, this suggests that Hervieu had a connection with the Barrys and it may have been Barry Jr who selected the painter rather than Claudet.) This ceiling painting was the only element retained from Barry’s interior by Lord Astor and now occupies the spot over the entrance stairwell. The accounts of Claudet’s studio give no more than hints about Hervieu’s work, but they all fit with The Four Seasons: ‘allegorical poem in colours’ and ‘Cupidons’ seem right; the writer in La Lumière mentions ‘delicacy of drawing, the richness of colour, and the sweetness of expression’. The Four Seasons is certainly a sweet and delicate painting; a point at which the classical iconography has definitively tipped over into decoration and ethereal kitsch. This gives us some indication of Hervieu’s paintings in Claudet’s salon. The paint work was probably quite thin and the drawing basic. I envisage something with figures and cameras situated among wafting clouds; the whole rendered in pale hues. It seems that even a debased Rococo vision could serve allegorical purposes. This description resembles nothing so much as the allegorical trade backs to carte de visite photographs from the later part of the century (Figs 4.5 and 4.6).

Figure 4.3: August Hervieu, Unknown Man, formerly known as Thomas Adolphus Trollope (1832).

Figure 4.4: The Staircase Ceiling at Cliveden, Buckinghamshire, painted by A. L. Hervieu.

Figure 4.5: Backboard of Carte de Visite, from the studio of W. Baker.

Figure 4.6: Backboard of Carte de Visite, from the studio of J. W. Gorsuch.

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Finally, it is also worth remembering that this was probably quite a cluttered space, containing chairs or benches for the smart clientele, though, none are mentioned. The stands for the two stereo viewers, carved by Rogers, were certainly in this room. It also probably contained photographic specimens: ‘The walls and stands and glass cases were crowed with very elaborately finished specimens in water colours and oil, many of the latter enlargements.’45 Specimens may have been displayed both in cases and hung on the wall. It is worth remembering that this report dates from 1868, but if they were sited in this room, we do not know if those on the wall were hung in separate areas of the room or directly over the paintings; their presence may suggest that the allegorical work was smaller than we might otherwise believe. The sightlines of the paintings were undoubtedly broken up by this paraphernalia of photographic show. There are far too many qualifications in my description for comfort; too many uses of ‘perhaps’, ‘possibly’ and ‘might have’. Cross-referencing the various reports does not rectify the anomalies, but in some respects there is a remarkable congruity across these texts, even in their differences. While the various reports are not exactly coextensive, they emerge from the tensions in an ideological field. They hinge on art (or depiction), technology and the nation state. These ideologemes appear throughout the published descriptions, but they shade in different directions. The French texts place more emphasis on the decorative schemes than the English reporters, who tend to invest Claudet’s figurative space in the context of scientific experimentation or knowledge. For the French commentators, Claudet is a man of taste who was involved in perfecting photography; for the English, he was a photographic experimentalist who showed good taste. It might be tempting to put this difference down to the differing positions of the French and British economic situation, but we need to attend to the social imaginary.

II In one of the most important contributions to the discussion of the culture of capital in nineteenth-century Britain, Adrian Rifkin argued that the British obsession with the superior taste of the French artisan entailed a process of profound misrecognition or projection. Rifkin suggests that while the ‘discourse on luxury and the values of consumption and production goes back to the middle of the eighteenth century and beyond’ there is a constant risk that ‘mythemes’ and ‘ideological unities’ will paper over the discontinuities. According to him, eighteenth-

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century wars in India and North America were significant in defining the ‘relations between luxury production and the articulation of the nation’. However, he suggests, it was the quarter of the nineteenth century after 1826, when tariffs were removed and French goods were allowed to reenter British markets, that ‘the myth of Parisian luxury production and artisan taste entered powerfully into both the kinds of choices made by consumers and the ways in which British Manufacturers began to take cognisance of a new stage of competition’.46 In economic journalism just as much as the rhetoric and practice of design reform, ideologues bothered themselves (and others) with the idea that British economic supremacy would be eclipsed by French production underpinned by good taste. Rifkin suggests that this was to get the matter upside down (the camera obscura of ideology) since the dominance of British industry was predicated on industrial production of cheap commodities, while French design education was dated and even dilapidated by this time. The French, for their part, feared they would lose their dominance in the luxury trade and Delaborde and others were pressing the state to reinvigorate art education.47 The construction of a ‘moral profile’ for the worker in this push-and-pull was not without its particular anxieties: the fear that artisans might abandon labour for the higher calling of art; the different requirements of the trades pitched into differing markets, with some preferring ‘training’ and others opting for a general improvement of ‘taste’.48 A number of historians have shown how impervious workers actually were to this moral intervention and that the fears were misplaced; this didn’t stop the proponents of improving artisan taste from fretting.49 Nevertheless, in this ideological patterning the French luxury trades came to operate as lures shaping commodity production in general, but also an impetus for the reform and remodelling of the English artisan. Rifkin’s argument puts processes of ideology, myth, fantasy and misrecognition at the centre of social history. At the same time, he takes taste to be a generative form and keeps his distance from accounts that would suggest this history can be put down to the politics of snobbery or, or to give this its pseudo-theoretical cast, ‘distinction’.50 These concerns are not merely coincidental for understanding Claudet’s ‘Temple’ and its schemes of self-presentation. Claudet was not a significant player in this ideological policing of taste, and he may have had no more than a flickering understanding of the larger social relations at stake, but he seized the opportunity that the elevation of French taste offered to claim the high ground for his enterprise. It is indicative that he was not the only French photographer to do so. When the Nadar visited Camille Silvy’s London studio in 1863 he claimed that the ‘choice arrangement of the objects’ offered the ‘astounded English a

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glimpse of Latin genius’.51 Taste and luxury figure here as a claim on the exclusive clientele that visited these French photographers in London.52 By locating his space and his wares within the debate on the luxury trades Claudet was accruing French lustre, but he was also doing something else. The essential note is struck by Ernest Lacan who described Claudet’s studio as a ‘Pantheon of photography’. This point of recognition allows us to further pursue Rifkin’s argument. The pantheon was a live issue in Britain at the time as Whigs tried to contest the Tory vision of the nation predicated on conservative values and military prowess; the Whig cult of great minds that followed the Glorious Revolution was counter-posed to the celebration of military men. Locke, Newton, Boyle, Milton, Pope and Shakespeare appeared in encyclopaedia articles and popular biographies; busts and statues, medallions and engravings.53 Christine MacLeod has shown that this involved the Whig and Radical commemoration of engineers, inventors and men of science as an alternative to the military and aristocratic leaders beloved by Tories: in particular, she argues that the figure of James Watt was pitted against the Iron Duke. This entailed a contest over the representation of the nation: principally, whether the values of Enlightenment sociability, progress through enterprise, ingenuity and commercial trade would trump insular nationalism and protectionism. By the middle of the nineteenth century Whig ideologues had fused the narrative of constitutional liberties with progress and prosperity figured by free trade, manufacture, machines and ingenuity to generate a powerful account of what would later be known as ‘the Industrial Revolution’.54 Importantly, this dispute involved contesting the national pantheon in Westminster Abbey (according to MacLeod the positioning of Chantrey’s statute of Watt in the Abbey was the cultural equivalent of the 1832 Reform Act),55 but this process also entailed the struggle for the national signs in the printed press and in the politics of public sculpture. It was around mid-century that this push reached its high-point and the creation of the National Portrait Gallery and the Patent Museum should be seen in this context. However, the pantheon also began to appear in minor forms. In order to celebrate their display of blotting books at the Great Exhibition, the bookbinders J. & J. Leighton issued a commemorative shield with 21 artists and men of science surrounding commerce, raw materials and manufactures: Watt rubs shoulders with Raphael and Davy with Durer.56 Pantheons came in all forms: the electroplating company Elkington, Mason & Co. (also manufacturers of daguerreotype plates) displayed a vase at the Great Exhibition with elaborately modelled figures of Newton, Bacon, Shakespeare and Watt.57 In the mid-1850s the Royal Panopticon of Art and Science on Leicester Square was decorated with a ‘series of Minton tiles’, which ‘portrayed the arms of Purcell, Davy, Newton, Goldsmith, Herschel, Shakespeare, Barry, Watt, and Bacon, as well as the Panopticon’s own armourial bearings, which

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incorporated Newton’s apple, Columbus’s egg, and Galileo’s lamp’.58 Ellis’s memoir of Claudet internalises these ideologemes and carves a pantheon for his master from his master’s pantheon. While Claudet’s pantheon takes its place in the wider disputes, his explicit model was closer to hand, at Daguerre’s Diorama. There can be little doubt that Claudet knew the Diorama; it was sited a mere stone’s throw from his studio in the Colosseum, and was the creation of one of the central figures in his own pantheon. At the time commentators were enthralled by the spectacular effects on stage and the subsequent accounts remain entranced, but Claudet shifted the angle of his gaze and looked up: The ceiling of the arena, or salon, is of a transparent fabric, divided into compartments, and painted in colours, in imitation of the rich foliages by Raphael, at the Vatican, and embellished by Cameos, containing the portraits of the following celebrated painters:- Sir Joshua Reynolds, West, N. Poussin, Ruisdael, Rembrandt, Vernet, C. Lorrain, Berghem, L. de Leonardo, Teniers, Rubens, Raphael and Gainsborough.59 The principle behind Daguerre’s pantheon and Claudet’s version is similar: a combination of old and new figures are deployed to ‘consecrate’ modern art, but Claudet’s adaptation is both a continuation and inversion of this model. Only Leonardo appears in both series. Claudet takes the idea of an array of portraits that represent the high points of European culture converging on the present, but he shifts from art to invention and from Diorama to photography. His is a technical pantheon in which Daguerre appears as a single moment rather than point of culmination. Whether as portraits or simply inscribed names the pioneers of photography feature prominently in Claudet’s pantheon: Davy and Wedgwood for their early experiments in ‘photography’, Niépce, Daguerre, Talbot are all included, and so is Wheatstone for his stereoscope. Sir David Brewster is there too, represented perhaps for his optical work and essays on photography, or more likely, his work on the stereoscope; Arago features for his role in announcing photography to the world and securing its open access (except in Britain). The absence of Archer is almost certainly a consequence of the schemes conception in the early 1850s. As late as 1855 Claudet believed that the Collodion process was an infringement of Talbot’s Calotype patent, if an improvement on it.60 (Though the allusion to a painting commemorating photography on glass may be seen as entailing a reference to Archer in some indeterminate form.) These figures are metonymically conjoined to earlier luminaries: Roger Bacon

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was a thirteenth-century philosopher and Franciscan friar with a command of classical and Arab optical treatises – he may not have been among those depicted, but it is significant that Ellis should insert as the earliest figure in this series a man who moved between the academic centres of Oxford and Paris. Porta, in the absence of Alhazen and the philosophers of the Muslim world, is credited with the invention of the camera obscura; Leonardo is an odd hybrid of painter and natural philosopher; Newton is included, probably just for being Newton: he is the very figure of English genius. Herschel, Brewster, Talbot, Daguerre… This is not an arbitrary list. It is a Whig or Whig-Liberal pantheon, which casts photography as the outcome of a long process of heroic invention and discovery by men of genius and facilitated by the institutions of the bourgeois-democratic state. Photography is positioned as the direct inheritor of the intellectual brilliance of the Renaissance and in the absence of any intervening figures it may stand on a par with the works of those exulted figures. This list has little to do with Fine Art; rather it is concerned with progress, invention and technical knowledge. Like the earlier phase of this development represented by Bacon and Porta, Newton and Leonardo, the modern renaissance is a bi-national formation. Johann Heinrich Schulze and Carl Wilhelm Scheele are notable absentees. This is not an inclusive series: France replaces Italy as the intellectual equal and counterpart for Britain and together they inherit the legacy of Greece and Rome. As the writer in La Lumière put it: ‘Thus, in Claudet’s salon, are shown face to face the two inventors, French and English, who, in the same year, in 1839, found the secret of the photographic process, the one on paper, the other on silver plates.’ Claudet’s pantheon negotiates the position of a French photographer in Britain in a way that accrued for him prestige, authority and taste. (It is notable that the depiction of the Great Exhibition appears on the French wall with the image of the Chamber of Deputies and not on the left wall with Somerset House.) As far as we can tell, the ‘allegorical and emblematical’ paintings picked up these themes. As I have indicated, one account suggests that the righthand wall contained both depictions of the French Chamber of Deputies; and the Great Exhibition of 1851; while the left-hand wall carried the image of Somerset House. Again, it is not clear whether these were external views of the buildings or representations of the events. On balance I think the former, but plausibly a scene of the French Deputies voting state pensions to Daguerre and Niépce faced one presenting the announcement of Talbot’s photogenic drawing process at the Royal Society. If so, both would have contained arrays of politicians, savants and other gentlemen. It may be a metonym, but possibly not. The other wall is equally indeterminate, but equally suggestive. Accounts mention five panels representing the imitative

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arts: sculpture painting, the invention of photography, portrait photography, and stereo photography. There were also images celebrating photography on glass, metal and paper. Photography emerges here as the continuation of the traditions of the visual arts, but simultaneously those craft traditions are repositioned as part of an industrial sequence; forerunners to the image culture of modern capitalism. Invention is foregrounded and it is located in the context of democratic ideals and institutions. The Orleanist Chamber honours photography and so does the Royal Society. It is worth remembering that Claudet’s specimens were probably in this space, adding an additional photographic referent as another coating to the hyperbolic pill. In a different configuration, the same issue is picked up in the medallion representations of the four sites of civilisation where the classical world of Greece and Rome gives way to Paris and London. The modern Athens and the modern Rome sit either side of the Channel as the sites for a new civilisation with photography at its heart. In this elaborate design bourgeois democracy is seen as heir of civilisation, classical or renaissance, and photography is its highest expression, joining together art and invention under the sign of progress and peace: the presence of the International Exhibition of 1851 is central to cementing this pattern of figuration. It doesn’t much matter if the narrative of photography in Claudet’s ‘Temple’ encompassed Fine Art, though I don’t think that in any well defined sense this idea was available to photographers at the point when he conceived this scheme and Hervieu executed it.61 The transformed conjuncture of photography after the International Exhibition of 1862 may have meant that the decorative schemes at the Temple of Photography took on new valances during this later period. It makes more sense, certainly, in the 1850s, to think about the schemes as an attempt to mediate economic and national tensions and to locate intellectual work in forms of capitalist competition. Claudet stands at the crossing point of these various ideologemes: French taste and luxury as economic model for the reinvigoration of artisan production; heroic invention as the key to international prosperity; progress through the meeting of art and industry; the advancement and diffusion of knowledge; peace and co-operation through free trade. He figures as a point of condensation for photography’s encounter with Liberal political economy. The photographic dreamwork revolves around a Whig-Liberal pattern. Myths certainly, but here a form of self-presentation is shaped by a force field of social relations. This crossing point of misrecognition with powerful forces is one definition of the social imaginary. At this point a double displacement emerges into vision. Claudet’s scheme requires a twofold absence in order to constitute this narrative of Liberalphotographic triumph. The abolition of the Corn Laws, Chartism and the

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revolution(s) of 1848 are absent forces that structure Claudet’s decorative cycle, all fall within five years of its conception. Specifically, the first blind spot is signalled by the three royal portraits: Victoria and Albert preside over the Great Exhibition, while the Orleanist peer Louis-Philippe is coupled with the Chamber of Deputies. Both are ‘bourgeois monarchies’ whose presence signifies Liberal and enlightened principles as the condition of progress; in this vision Voltaire and John Locke, Jean-Baptiste Say and Adam Smith, François Guizot and Sir Robert Peel preside over photography. As if to make the point clear Claudet produced photographic portraits of both LouisPhilippe and Guizot.62 However, Claudet’s paintings were created after the farce of Louis Bonaparte’s coup d’état. France exists in these images in a suspended form of Liberal time, a moment fixed forever before the coup that swept away the July monarchy and its tail comprised of the ‘financial aristocracy’ and the big industrial bourgeoisie.63 Like M. Guizot’s book on the English revolution, Claudet’s salon envisages a ‘gentle tranquillity and an idyllic peace’ at the point ‘history comes to an end with the consolidation of the constitutional monarchy’.64 It is a moment of infinite beneficence and perhaps Arago’s gesture calls to mind all those pensions, place men and chains of patronage: ‘a joint stock company for the exploitation of France’s national wealth’.65 The award made to Daguerre is a central trope in this phantasmagoria. The second instance of dislocation pertains to the fresco cycle for the Houses of Parliament conceived and produced between 1841 and 1864. At this time there was an intense debate on the future of history painting in Britain. The Daily News article on Claudet’s studio makes the connection, noting that ‘the only chance of high decorative art in Britain is its adoption in public buildings’. However, it suggested that the nobility and wealthy private individuals could do much to promote taste for high art. The example given is the ceiling by ‘Hervien’ (sic) for the Duchess of Sutherland at Cliveden.66 These disjointed reflections are simply appended to the description of Claudet’s salon, but this writer perceived a connection even if its delineations eluded him. Claudet’s decorative scheme is metonymically attached to the propertied franchise. The frescoes in Parliament negotiate the relation of elected representatives and monarch and there is a suggestion that Albert played a leading role in envisaging these works, which would ‘affirm the role of the monarchy in the British Constitution’.67 As Clare A. P. Willsdon shows, the parliamentary murals were projected under Albert and Peel to represent the presence of the ‘royal dimension’ in the constitution, beginning with Alfred giving laws and ending with The Passing of the Reform Bill, and taking in along the way the battles of Trafalgar and Waterloo. With the accession of the Whig government in 1846 this plan was reformed to focus on the Parliamentary struggle against Stuart absolutism as the

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foundation of the Constitution. There is no scope here to explore these frescos and their representations of English history as mythic triumph of democratic constitutionalism; the multiple revisions the narrative underwent as they took shape through the Select Committees on Fine Art from 1841 onwards; or their emergence on the walls, but as Willsdon demonstrates the paintings that materialised were caught in the tensions and conflicts between these perspectives. Claudet’s decorative cycle is a displaced and minor version of this constitutional drama in which Albert and Victoria preside over the International Exhibition and the circulation of peoples and things. The version of the constitutional murals that took shape at the Temple of Photography presents visitors with a dream world of permanent and perpetual progress; a vision of abundance under the sign of peace; a conjoining of middle-class freedoms and technological progress; bourgeois monarchies as a presence in parliaments. His cycle returns to the vision of Albert and Peel. Read as the traces of an ideological field the Cupidons and the savants propagate the hallucinatory delirium of a democracy of and for gentlemen: ‘which holds its victims spellbound in an imaginary world and robs them of all sense, all memory, and all understanding of the rough external world’.68 Claudet’s scheme is a double cancellation (at once French and British) of the nightmares unleashed in 1848. In a section of The Camera Obscura of Ideology titled ‘The Photographer’s Antechamber’, Sarah Kofman takes the ‘dark antechamber’ as a crossing point for a metaphorics of ideology in Marx and Freud.69 The splicing of the camera obscura’s inversions with the reception hall and watchman of consciousness seems like an appropriate way of thinking about what Claudet was doing in this scheme, which might be characterised as a lightfilled antechamber of ideology. He was negotiating the trauma of the patent restriction in England, while advocating free trade and balancing French and English interests. The necessary qualification involves recognising that this space of social fantasy is neither simply contingent nor a purely textual pattern, but a conjuncture held in place by property relations and the economic and geopolitical rivalries of nation states; in this gravitational field the sign of ‘taste’ could generate subjectivisation on both sides of a social division. In the process, the schemes in the Regent Street studio played their part in positioning Claudet as a leading figure in the modern pantheon of photography; they contributed more than is thought to making a reputation. The daguerreotype portraits that issued from this studio generated another small pantheon of bourgeois faces.

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Postscript I could not have known how provisional this snapshot of a series of missing images was going to be. After completing this essay, I unearthed the architect’s plans for Claudet’s studio. The new sources that have come to light confirm some aspects of my narrative, refute other parts, and throw up perhaps more questions than they settle. It is pretty clear that the descriptions from 1851 and those of 1854 do not refer to the same space; I was right about this. But who could have imagined that Claudet rented such a particular suite of rooms and at the rear of the building? It turns out that my description of the façade of No. 107 was beside the point, and with it my precious postcard (so thrillingly sourced from archive eBay). Our perspective needs to shift from front to back. It is the strange outcrop of the back of the building that we need to know about. The space of the reception room will have to be reconceived and my placement of individual elements in the scheme needs to be refined. There are some important clues in these documents. However, we need to know if the spaces depicted on paper were ever built in this form? Deeds will have to be read and other plans consulted. What is more, the architect who signed these plans is neither Banks nor Barry, but C. W. Eppy. Who was he? A little myth? Why do the accounts of the studio from 1854 still name the former pair? Why do the plans also name Claudet’s business partner in the glass merchant firm of Claudet and Houghton? Without more research, the work of ekphrasis presented here can not be worked over and rethought. Even as it acknowledges narrative uncertainty and unsettles some established stories, my essay was always going to be more engaged with realism in the archive than anything Rifkin would now see as tenable. Somehow, then, it seems fitting that the multiple traces of history require of this art historian a second look and a beginning over. None of this work will allow Claudet’s scheme to be recovered or reconstructed in its original plenitude – not even should the pictorial records turn up – but other questions come into focus and they suggest other paths through little archives. An auto-critique is required.

Notes 1 Work on this essay was made possible by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in 2008/9. I would like to thank John X. Berger for his translations from La Lumière and his comments on the text. Gail Day also read a draft and Dana Arnold made many helpful editorial comments. 2 See Adrian Rifkin, ‘Keeping Silent, speaking out: returning to the Paris Commune of 1871 when once again we need its lesson in democracy’: http://adrian-gaisavoir.

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blogspot.com, in which he finally revealed the murals from the Geneva cafe run by Galliard Pere et fils. Adrian Rifkin, ‘Success Disavowed: the Schools of Design in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Britain (An Allegory)’, Journal of Design History, Vol. 1, No. 2 (1988), p. 91. An earlier version was published as ‘Les ecoles anglaises du dessin: un succès contradictoire’, in Les Révoltes logiques (January 1985). I have in mind the essays and broadcasts prior to the publication of Street Noises: Parisian Pleasure, 1900–1940 (Manchester University Press, 1994). In addition to ‘Success Disavowed’, these are principally: ‘Cultural Movement and the Paris Commune, Art History (1979); ‘Ingres and the Academic Dictionary: An Essay on Ideology and Stupefaction in the Social Formation of an “Artist”’, Art History, Vol. 6, No. 2 (1983), pp.153–70; ‘No Particular Thing to Mean’, Block, No. 8 (1983), pp. 36–45; ‘Well Formed Phrases: Some Limits of Meaning in Political Print at the End of the Second Empire’, Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 8, No. 1 (1985), pp. 20–8; ‘Musical Moments’, Yale French Studies, No. 73 (1987), pp. 121–55; ‘Carmenology’, New Formations, No. 5 (1988), pp. 91–107; and ‘The Words of Art, the Artist’s Status: Technique and Affectivity in France 1789–98’, Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 14, No. 2 (1991), pp. 73–82. I see Street Noises as a transitional text situated between the earlier concerns and the method of his more recent work, which might be characterised, only partly ironically, as ‘lethargic projection’. Typically, nothing is neatly synchronic here and I would locate the 1994 essay on art criticism with the earlier sequence, see: ‘History, Time and Morphology of Critical Language, or Publicola’s Choice’, Michael R. Orwicz ed., Art Criticism and Its Institutions in Nineteenth-Century France (Manchester University Press, 1994), pp. 29–42. See: Adrian Rifkin and Roger Thomas, eds, Voices of the People: The Politics and Life of ‘La Sociale’ at the End of the Second Empire (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1988). Some of these essays have now been reissued as Jacques Rancière, Staging the People: The Proletarian and his Double (Verso, 2011). Twenty-three years on they are becoming readable for an English speaking audience. Perhaps Rifkin’s own essays will too. ‘Notice’, The Times, 5 July 1851, p. 1; ‘Notice – Mr Claudet’, Athenaeum, 21 June 1851, p. 649; F. A. de la Riviere, ‘Heliographie sur Plates Metalliques; une Visite a M. Claudet’, La Lumière, 24 August 1851, pp. 113–14; ‘M. Claudet’s Daguerreotype Gallery’, Art Journal, Vol. 6 (new series), 1854, p. 219; (Claudet?), ‘Galerie Photographique de M. Claudet’, La Lumière, 22 July 1854, ‘Mr. Claudet’s Daguerreotype Gallery’, The Morning Herald, 7 June 1854, p. 2; an identical report appears in The Standard, 7 June 1854, p. 2; ‘Claudet’s Daguerreotype Gallery’, Daily News, 8 June 1854, p. 2; Ernest Lacan, ‘La Photographie en Angleterre’, La Lumière, 23 June 1855, pp. 97–8; ‘FineArt Gossip’, Athenaeum, 30 August 1856, p. 1089; ‘Obituary’, Athenaeum, 4 January 1868 p. 20; ‘Fire in Regent Street’, The Times, 27 January 1868, p. 9; ‘Serious Fire at Mr Claudet’s Studio in Regent Street’, Photographic News, 17 January 1868, pp. 51–2; J. Ellis, ‘Claudet: A Memoir’, The Scientific Review, Vol. III (1 August 1868), pp. 151– 4. Recent accounts of this important studio run these various descriptions of the Regent Street Gallery/Temple of Photography together to produce a synthetic description. However, we need to take care with these reports, which were drafted and published at different times, for distinct purposes – they are not self-evidently all descriptions of the same space. Janet E. Buerger, French Daguerreotypes (University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 123–4; Stephen Monteiro, ‘Veiling the Mechanical Eye: Antoine Claudet and the Spectacle of Photography in Victorian London’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, No. 7, 2008: http://www.19.bbk.ac.uk/index.php/19/article/ viewFile/485/345. This approach entails a perverse procedure that puts to work ideas from both Rifkin and Fred Orton, but that may just be a way of calling to mind Pierre Macherey.

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8 Stephen Montiero, ‘Veiling the Mechanical Eye’, offers the best account, but he reads the reports and testimonies as direct evidence. 9 Ernest Lacan, ‘La Photographie en Angleterre’, La Lumière, 23 June 1855, p. 97. 10 Antoine Claudet, ‘Les Dangers resultant de l’emploi de mercure’, La Lumière, 18 May 1851, p. 59, trans. Stephen Monteiro, ‘Veiling the Mechanical Eye’, p. 13. 11 ‘Notice – Mr Claudet’, Athenaeum, 21 June 1851, p. 649; ‘Fire in Regent Street’, The Times, 27 January 1868, p. 9. As we will see, I suspect this dates from 1868 when J. Ellis published his memories of Claudet. 12 The Austin Reed store incorporates Nos 103–113 Regent Street and was redeveloped in the Deco style in the 1920s.This was probably the redevelopment and the Nash building may have stood until then. 13 ‘Fire in Regent Street’, p. 9. Claudet is incorrectly cited as Antonio (sic) J. F. Claudet – ‘photographic artist’. 14 Ibid.; ‘Serious Fire at Mr Claudet’s Studio in Regent Street’, Photographic News, January 17, 1868, pp. 51–2. 15 Michael Pritchard, A Directory of London Photographers (Watford: PhotoResearch, 1994). 16 Marion Kemlish, ‘Claudet, Fenton and the Photographic Society’, History of Photography, Vol. 26, No. 4 (Winter 2002), fn 6 p. 301. 17 ‘Notice’, The Times, 5 July 1851, p. 1; ‘Notice – Mr Claudet’, p. 649. 18 ‘Notice – Mr Claudet’, p.649. 19 (Claudet?), ‘Galerie Photographique de M. Claudet’, La Lumière, 22 July 1854, pp. 114–15. It is taken from an unnamed ‘French journal in London’. 20 ‘Galerie Photographique de M. Claudet’, p. 114. 21 Auguste Hervieu, 1819–58. 22 ‘Galerie Photographique de M. Claudet’, p. 114. 23 Ibid., pp. 114–15. 24 Ibid., p. 115. 25 ‘M. Claudet’s Daguerreotype Gallery’, Art Journal, Vol. 6 (new series), 1854, p. 219. 26 Ibid. 27 The latter had been the principal assistant in the office of the older Barry. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/1550/57400?docPos=2 (accessed 22 March 2011). Among others, Kemlish makes this erroneous identification. 28 ‘Mr. Claudet’s Daguerreotype Gallery’, Morning Herald, 7 June 1854, p. 2. 29 ‘Claudet’s Daguerreotype Gallery’, Daily News, 8 June 1854, p. 2. 30 Lacan, ‘La Photographie’, p. 97. 31 ‘Fine-Art Gossip’, Athenaeum, 30 August 1856, p. 1089. 32 Ibid. 33 ‘Serious Fire at Mr Claudet’s Studio’, p. 51. 34 This was not entirely accurate and we now know that there were other portraits of Claudet. 35 ‘Serious Fire at Mr Claudet’s Studio’, p. 51. 36 Ibid., p. 52. 37 J. Ellis, ‘Claudet: A Memoir’, The Scientific Review, Vol. III (1 August 1868), pp. 151–4. 38 Ibid., p. 151. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid., p. 153. 41 Ibid., p. 154. 42 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte in Surveys From Exile (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 147. 43 Helmut Gernsheim, The Origins of Photography (Thames and Hudson, 1982), p. 139. 44 He was the illustrator for many works by Frances Trollope and tutor for her family including Anthony Trollope.

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45 ‘Serious Fire at Mr Claudet’s Studio’, p. 51. 46 Adrian Rifkin, ‘Success Disavowed’, p. 91. For recent extensions of this argument see: Whitney Walton, France at the Crystal Palace: Bourgeois Taste & Artisan Manufacture in the Nineteenth Century (University of California Press, 1992); Lara Kriegal, ‘Narrating the subcontinent in 1851: India at the Crystal Palace’, Louise Purbrick ed., The Great Exhibition of 1851: New Interdisciplinary Essays (Manchester University Press, 2001), pp. 144–78; idem, Grand Designs: Labor, Empire, and the Museum in Victorian Culture (Duke University Press, 2007). 47 Whitney Walton, France at the Crystal Palace: Bourgeois Taste & Artisan Manufacture in the Nineteenth Century (University of California Press, 1992), pp. 171–3. 48 Adrian Rifkin, ‘Success Disavowed’, pp. 89–102. 49 See for example: John Seed, ‘Political Economy and the Antimonies of Liberal Culture in Manchester, 1830–1850’, Social History, Vol. 7, No. 1 (1982), pp. 1–25; Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘Working-Class Culture and Working-Class Politics in London, 1870–1900: Notes on the Remaking of the Working Class’, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History 1832–1982 (Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 179–238. 50 For this argument see: Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social critique of the Judgement of Taste (Routledge, 1986); Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (Stanford University Press, 1991). Kristin Ross’s introduction to the latter book makes the connection clear. 51 Nadar, cited in Mark Haworth-Booth, Camille Silvy River Scene, France (Getty Museum Studies on Art, 1992), p. 79. From the other end of this ideological spectrum we find lessons in taste given to (imaginary) English artisans in William Lake Prices’ text ‘On Composition and Chiar-oscuro’, Photographic News, 17 February 1860, p. 281. 52 One hundred and twenty years later this pattern of figuration is still being recounted, compare: Janet E. Buerger, French Daguerreotypes, which informs us that Claudet’s ‘pictures, though tinged with Victorian style, betray a French soul’, p. 122. 53 Christine MacLeod, Heroes of Invention: Technology, Liberalism and British Identity 1750–1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 17. 54 Ibid., pp. 136–44. 55 Ibid., p. 1. 56 Ibid., p. 182. 57 Ibid., pp. 218–19. 58 Richard D. Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA & London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 491. 59 A. W. Pugin and John Britton, Illustrations of the Public Buildings of London, 2nd edition, Vol. 1 (William Henry Leeds, 1838), p. 365. For an extensive account of the Diorama and its relation to De Loutherbourg’s Eidophusikon see: ‘Fine Arts: The Diorama’, European Magazine (October 1823), pp. 337–43; A particularly spellbound narrative is provided in Helmut and Alison Gernsheim, L.J.M. Daguerre: The History of the Diorama and the Daguerreotype (Secker & Warburg, 1956). 60 Antoine François Jean Claudet, Affidavit sworn on 22 November 1855, Talbot v. Henderson, C31/1126, Public Record Office, London. 61 See: Steve Edwards, The Making of English Photography, Allegories (Pennsylvania University Press, 2006). 62 It is referred to in the Daily News (4 June 1851) and other newspapers at the time. 63 Karl Marx, The Class Struggles in France: 1848–1850, in Surveys From Exile (Penguin, 1973), p. 36. But this account underpins the argument in both The Class Struggles in France and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. For a good defence of Marx’s reading of the July monarchy against assorted revisionists see: Roger Macgraw, France 1815–1914: The Bourgeois Century (Fontana, 1987). 64 Karl Marx, ‘Review of Guizot’s Book on the English Revolution’, Surveys From Exile (Penguin, 1973), p. 254.

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65 Karl Marx, The Class Struggles in France, p. 38. 66 ‘Claudet’s Daguerreotype Gallery’, Daily News, 8 June 1854, p. 2. 67 Clare A. P. Willsdon, Mural Painting in England, 1840–1940 (Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 29. 68 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, p. 211. 69 Sarah Kofman, The Camera Obscura of Ideology (Athlone, 1998).

Figure 4a: David Haines, Self Portrait with Adidas Veil (2011).

5 Fragment and Repetition in Ingres The Never-ending Work of Art Susan L. Siegfried

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ne of the often-repeated episodes in the literature on Jean-AugusteDominique Ingres (1780–1867) concerns him arguing with his patrons over the choice of subject for a major altarpiece: they wanted a painting of the vow of Louis XIII, and he wanted to paint the Assumption of the Virgin. He eventually agreed to paint the vow of Louis XIII and in explaining his change of mind, he said that ‘uncertainty’ was characteristic of ‘the imagination of a true artist’ and portrayed himself as mulling the subject over before reaching an understanding of it and of how to compose it.1 In the course of a confusing exchange of letters between the artist in Rome and his patrons in Montauban, each party explained why the subjects of the vow and the assumption were or were not related, and each party conceded to the wishes of the other, although their last letters crossed in transit. In the end the artist prevailed, and at the same time did what his patrons wanted. The reasons usually given for his change of heart are political, that he would curry favour with the Bourbon monarchy if he painted the historical and political subject of Louis XIII’s vow, and the subsequent history of the painting, which re-launched his career in Paris, would seem to bear this out.2 But I would like to go back to the reason that Ingres himself gave in 1821 for reversing course and consider it seriously. He argued that it was the artist’s prerogative to change his mind, an idea familiar to us from notions of the romantic artist as a creative genius. More interesting is Ingres’s use of the word ‘uncertainty’ (l’incertitude). The idea of ‘uncertainty’ as a trait of the artist’s imagination, one that he was proud to claim, points

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to a tension between art-making as a process that is ongoing and the work of art as a finished product. I propose to examine here the relationship between process and outcome in Ingres’s work, particularly as it played out in his drawing practice and its relation to his paintings.3 Charles Baudelaire characterised the modernity of Eugène Delacroix’s art in terms of its sense of process,4 and the high finish and frozen look of Ingres’s paintings have precluded them from inclusion in this idea of a process-oriented modern art. Yet if we consider the material evidence of Ingres’s practice in all of its manifestations, from crude preliminary sketch through late repetition, there are ample grounds for arguing that neo-classical artists like him embraced an idea of incompletion in their art-making that, as Adrian Rifkin argued, was deeply embedded in nineteenth-century culture. What is at stake here is a conception of the totality of the work of art, which shifted during the course of the nineteenth century. For Ingres, the totality of an artwork consisted of all the physical evidence of his thinking about a particular subject, from scraps of paper to monumental paintings, reduced replicas, and engraved and photographic reproductions. While those distinctions in media and format remained crucially important for him, they also tended to dissolve into a continuous flow or as often into fits and starts of thought and work on a given subject. My thinking about these matters is much indebted to Adrian Rifkin’s fascinating study Ingres Then, and Now (2000), which challenged us to think about the artist, his work, and art historical interpretations of him in new ways. Rifkin noticed, for instance, that ‘Ingres is forever fiddling with the way things are to look’ and constituted the fiddling as significant. He saw it as symptomatic of ‘the unconscious or an archive of the everyday’, which increasingly pressed the need to multiply choices and to make them. More surprisingly, he proposed that this was homologous with its apparent opposite, ‘the Phidian ideal of the perfect choice [...] the atemporality of a deliberated, Academic discourse on art’s making’.5 If we are to understand the conditions that gave rise to Ingres, Rifkin maintained, then we must accept the ‘coexistence as well as the contrariety’ of such positions and our ‘conceptualizing of the modern [needs] to be left quite open ended’.6 The idea that the composition of a subject was variable and contingent became an important element of Ingres’s art.7 The elements of a painting, from individual figures to an ensemble arrangement, which are too often regarded as definitive in the work of a classical artist, in his case were not so permanent. Instead of fusing figures into an integrated composition, he continually re-arranged variable elements in a scene around a set of fixed motifs. This dynamic between fixity and variation was very important to his

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work. The pattern of variation that runs through it was not purely formal, since it was tied into his conception of the drama, nor was it a classical artist’s impossible search for an ideal solution. Rather, Ingres’s drawing practice reveals his idea of a composition, including a painting, as something provisional, as merely one staging of a subject to which he kept returning. He subjected the subjects of his work to continual transformation in a neverending process of interpretation; for him, the work of art was never finished.

Romulus, Victor over Acron Ingres built an idea of provisionality into his composition for Romulus, Victor over Acron from the very start. He completed this monumental painting in 1812 for the Quirinale Palace in Rome, which was being readied as Napoleon’s residence.8 His preparations for the picture included a stunning series of drawings of male nudes, and contingent poses were incorporated into his earliest studies of the live model. In his drawing of a man who leans over to pick up the slain body of Acron (Fig. 5.1), the model assumed a very unsteady pose, bending far over and lifting a large book with both hands, his back leg extended, so that his entire weight rests on one leg.9 The pose was unsustainable. In a secondary sketch in the centre of the same sheet, the model’s fisted arm comes down for steadying, an unintentional gesture of lost balance that the artist, whose speed of drawing was legendary, managed to capture.10 This unsteady, natural pose can be contrasted with the inert, static poses that studio models commonly adopted at the time, leaning against props and supported by ropes.11 The drawings for Romulus reveal a systematic effort on Ingres’s part to unfix his study of the figure. He destabilised both terms of reference, himself as a viewing subject and the model as the object viewed. Many drawings show a manic proliferation of body parts: legs, hands and arms multiply and fill up the sheets, each rehearsal of a gesture distinguished from its neighbours by the minutest variations (Fig. 5.2).12 The drawings record slightly shifting viewpoints, as the artist or the model shifted a little from side to side, edged forward or back, adjusted a line of sight, altered a pose. These subtle alterations of viewpoint and pose characterise the entire series of male nudes the artist drew for Romulus, Victor over Acron. There were practical reasons for this: variations in a pose drawn on one sheet were used for three different figures in the painting.13 But more generally, these life drawings reveal a dynamic pattern, a rapid undoing of fixity through the dispersal of limbs and body parts. It is instructive to compare Ingres’s drawing with a similar study of male nudes by François

Figure 5.1: Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Deux études pour le personnage qui relève Acron.

Figure 5.2: Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Sept hommes nus debout, étude pour Romulus vainqueur d’Acron.

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Gérard, who was only one generation older than him. Gérard rationalised his conception of the relationship between figure and ground: his nude men are solid, three-dimensional forms, their feet planted firmly on the ground, and they move through space as a social collectivity, clasping each other.14 In Ingres’s sheet, by contrast, bodies drift across a blank field of paper; the forms are only momentarily grounded in the act of drawing itself as the artist multiplied fragments, shifted scale, and considered alternative poses.15 The spray of body parts across the sheets suggests that he was looking for an affect, an overall visual impression. The drawings generate a formal rhythm or an aesthetic for the whole painting: their oblong format, for instance, is in sympathy with the painting’s horizontal frieze. In this case, the governing idea was interplay between the brokenup staccato rhythm of the drawings and a few figural motifs that anchor the composition. The figure of Romulus forms the central accent in the painting. I would, however, like to focus on the scene’s anti-hero, the dead general Acron, whose defeat assured the triumph of Rome. Romulus has ritualistically stripped Acron of his armour, the spolia opima, which he carries in triumph to show the people and dedicate to the gods. Acron’s nudity is thus motivated by the narrative, unlike the gratuitous nudity of the slain warrior in David’s Intervention of the Sabine Women (1799, Paris, Musée du Louvre), which Ingres recalled in posing his figure. His drawings for Acron reveal his attempts to maximise the pathos of this character. He drew only one complete sketch of the model, a full figure that is stretched across the centre of one sheet (Fig. 5.3).16 He then fragmented his studies for this figure, dispersing partial views of it into other areas of this sheet and spilling over onto additional sheets as well (Figs 5.4 and 5.5).17 The energy driving this proliferation was very powerful and appears to have been motivated by a search for expression in the gesture-less body. One inset sketch of the face records aching pain (Fig. 5.3): this was a gratuitous study of expression, for what need did a cadaver have for a facial expression? Ingres’s study of pain advanced to less conventional parts of the body such as the abdomen as he pulled the legs forward and tilted the hips up, exposing the vulnerable stomach cavity and severely twisting one leg around until it collapsed into the other knee. The body broken, with its arms limp, stomach exposed and legs contorted: this was a totally artificial construction designed to express pathos. The nude in the painting is a composite figure, made from an amalgam of views drawn on three separate sheets: the tilted-up hips and midriff from the topmost sketch in a drawing in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Fig. 5.3); the crossed over, stretched up arms from a drawing in the Musée Bonnat, Bayonne (Fig. 5.4); and the extended and bent legs from the middle sketch of a drawing in the Musée Ingres, Montauban (Fig. 5.5).

Figure 5.3: Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Studies for the Cadaver of Acron.

Figure 5.4: Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Le corps étendu d’Acron.

Figure 5.5: Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Acron (plusiers études pour ses jambes et une main).

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The figure of Acron that Ingres painted does not exist as an integrated whole anywhere in the drawings. The artist’s referent here was no longer nature but art, in the form of the literal, material reality of his own drawings. Ingres continued to modify Acron’s pose throughout the extended history of his work on the subject. He reiterated the 1812 painting in a small watercolour that he executed before 1825, in which he altered Acron’s pose by pulling the knees up.18 He took this even further 15 years later in another variant drawing, which he executed in view of an illustrated catalogue of his work.19 By this time, in the 1840s, Ingres had bought the painting back and shipped it to Paris, where he encountered it again as a physical object. He subverted a traditional assumption of the fidelity of reproductive engravings to the paintings they reproduced, however, by altering the composition of the drawing he made to serve as a model for the print.20 Most notably, he retrieved poses for Acron that he had initially considered but rejected – one with both arms extended overhead, another with both knees bent up (see Fig. 5.3) – and created a new composite figure by combining poses from these earlier sketches.21 When Ingres drew variants of Romulus, Victor over Acron in the 1820s and again in the 1840s, he evidently referred back to his early figure studies. This method of revision suggests that the pose he had originally adopted for Acron had always been a temporary solution and that the alternative poses he had explored for this figure remained open and viable possibilities in his mind. As Pierre Boulez has remarked à propos of the sketch in modern musical composition, these first attempts, witness and record of the route taken, which float in a space [that is] still undetermined before they come to be used, can regain their independence; observation isolates them from their context and gives them a sort of autonomy, an existence of their own between the unfinished and the finished.22 We can interpret Ingres’s revision of Acron’s pose as an example of ‘uncertainty’ at work in his art, an indication that he continued to mull over the expression of this particular figure, which acquired a ‘sort of autonomy’ under the isolating observation of his gaze and entered into a suspended state ‘between the unfinished and the finished’. He made new drawings for the later variant composition, inserting a figure that bends over Acron’s head and lifts him up by the corners of a sheet that now cradles the body.23 This motif recalled the deposition of Christ, as George Vigne has pointed out, and Ingres’s introduction of it intensified the pathos of the slain king.24 By this time, in the 1840s, this prone figure embodied the residue of the classical tradition of the beautiful male body made heroic in death, which stretched back from Niobe’s dying son (Roman copy, second century bce,

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Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi) through Jean-Germain Drouais’s The Dying Warrior (1785, Paris, Musée du Louvre). Ingres not only altered the poses of particular figures but regarded the entire composition as provisional. He considered rearranging its order. He divided the composition of Romulus into thirds, making a tracing of each section,25 and then shuffled them around, placing Romulus on the far left and pulling the ephebe carrying Romulus’s shield into the centre. He executed an ensemble tracing of the new arrangement to see how it would look and even worked up a more finished drawing of the central section, with the alternatively-disposed Acron group.26 Although he took the idea of re-arrangement quite far, he never rendered the new composition in colour. His re-ordering of the composition nevertheless suggests that he regarded its internal structure as somewhat open and arbitrary. This seems sustainable by a composition that was a decorative frieze and not quite a conventional easel painting. Indeed, the absence of a dramatic conflict in this triumphalist subject helps account for Ingres’s dispersion of visual energy across it, which is so evident in his drawings, and for his later modifications of the pose and disposition of the main characters. One might say that the decorative function and unfocused drama of Romulus, Victor over Acron exposed Ingres’s open-ended approach to composition in a particularly vivid way: contingency was a factor in his study of this subject from beginning to end and carried him through the subsequent stages of his work on it.

The Martyrdom of Saint Symphorien A creative dynamic between fixed and variable elements in a composition plays a particularly complex and suggestive role in another large-scale, ambitious history painting by Ingres, the Martyrdom of Saint-Symphorien (1834, Autun, Saint-Lazare Cathedral) produced some two decades later.27 Here he took a more standard approach to a conventional type of history painting and organised his painting around a powerful dramatic conflict, in this case one between paganism and Christianity. In a series of early croquis, Ingres worked through different moments in the narrative history of the saint – his judgement, his torture, his mother’s intervention – before settling on a somewhat unusual moment before the martyrdom, the saint’s mother heroically exhorting him to remain strong in his faith.28 This process of reviewing a narrative through drawings reminds us of Ingres’s teacher Jacques-Louis David, who considered different moments in the stories of the Horatii and Brutus before settling on the subject he painted.

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The process of narrative review is important in Ingres’s case because he left traces of it in the painting. That is, his approach to narrative is unusual because once he had settled on a climactic moment, he retained motifs in the painting that referred to what had gone before or would follow in the text. This temporal compression or juxtaposition gives his scene a peculiar tension between the climax and an ongoing story, in which the temporal duration of the story found a kind of analogue in the material process of drawing. Ingres’s drawings for the saint and his mother register the contingency of his ideas for the composition, for their bodies are fixed while their arms are drawn in a variety of different positions, as if the arms were paper cut-outs hinged at the shoulders.29 It was critical that Ingres got these gestures right because they hold the composition together. The open ‘Vs’ of the mother’s and son’s arms soar across the canvas toward each other, over the heads of the crowd. They trace a slender arc of Christian faith that bends backward in space and opposes the forward march, the military might and numerical strength of the pagan disbelievers. The mother’s call to faith provided the dramatic pretext of this scene: it caused her son to stop, improbably bringing the surging crowd to a halt, as he looks back toward her. Ingres himself stepped into the mother’s seminal pose, setting the angle of her arms in a drawing a student made of him modelling the position.30 The soaring X of Symphorien’s body performs a knife-edge drama, holding back the Roman army and the pagan disbelievers through his spiritual exaltation. Ingres’s preliminary conception of the saint as a kneeling victim and a Saint Sebastian-type, arms tied behind his back, could not have conveyed the drama of his halt in the same way, anymore than his initial conception of the mother as a striding foreground figure could have. The outstretched arms of Symphorien and his mother are effective dramatically precisely because they are juxtaposed against the dark, seething mass of Romans behind and beneath them. Ingres’s drawing process was instrumental in achieving this contrast between the telling gestures of the main characters and the great swarm of the crowd. He made hundreds of drawings of figures in the crowd over the course of the eight years that he worked on the commission, their number ever expanding.31 His proliferation and compacting of figures seems almost completely arbitrary but it is not. It has been customary to say of Martyrdom of Saint-Symphorien (as of so many other history paintings by Ingres) that the drawings are marvellous but the painting is a failure or a disappointment, at least. I would argue instead that the process of proliferation, which was carried out through the drawings and their related oil sketches, was dramatically motivated and that the bewildering array of figures was an

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essential foil to the clarity and power of the protagonists’ gestures. During this great surge of creative activity, Ingres worked in different media, on different supports, combining and re-combining figures, adjusting poses, and studying fragments of bodies to create a sense of surging density and compacted mass. In a sense, the crowd became a character in its own right, which absorbed subsidiary dramas into itself. Dense, dark, and big, the crowd was greater than the sum of its parts and it was this whole that generated the expansive gestures of Symphorien, his mother, and the centurion. Their telling gestures needed the packed confusion as a dramatic and a visual foil. The stone-thrower in the Martyrdom of Saint-Symphorien is a case in point. Ingres initially conceived this figure in terms of the physical effort of throwing a stone (Fig. 5.6). The artist moved around the model or perhaps had him rotate in space, drawing him from all angles – front, side, and back.32 His emphasis on this character conformed to the iconographic conventions for scenes of martyrdom, such as Abel de Pujol’s Martyrdom of St Etienne (1817, Paris, St Thomas Aquinas), which feature a few burly men throwing stones as personifications of pagan animosity. If Ingres had retained the spare scaffolding of his initial design for this painting, envisioned in an early oil sketch (c.1827, New York, Private Collection), he might have been able to integrate the stretchedout figure of the stone-thrower into it. But in the crowded composition he developed, this lunging figure would have been too distracting. Ingres shifted the stone-thrower’s expression of resentment from his body to his face, which eventually, in the painting, glares up at the mother from a body curled into a corner. His animosity is restrained by her blast of faith and by the Roman soldier towering above him, who brooks no disturbance. The dramatic change in the morphology of the stone-thrower, from an extended brute to a cowed, crouching figure, represented Ingres’s transformation of a major motif into a minor one, which he nevertheless wanted to retain. A drawing gridded for transfer that corresponds to one of his oil sketches (Fig. 5.7) shows him calculating the figure’s compression, wedging him into a thicket of limbs.33 Did the artist simply ‘waste’ too much time and energy on a peripheral figure? His reduction of the important role traditionally accorded to the stone-thrower turned him into a counterpoint to the Christian protagonists. The stone-thrower joined the main diagonal axis of faith and punctuated it with his scowling face and squeezed body. He assumes an importance disproportionate to his actual size, which engages the viewer’s curiosity and prompts one to think about why he is there.

Figure 5.6: Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Lapidateur de dos (vers la droite, avec plusieurs bras droits, le bras gauche étant sous la tête).

Figure 5.7: Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Studies for ‘The Martyrdom of Saint Symphorien’ (Lictors, Stone-Thrower, and Spectator) (1833).

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Antiochus and Stratonice The Martyrdom of Saint Symphorien has never been one of Ingres’s most popular paintings and although I think its reputation as a failure is undeserved, it was reinforced by the umbrage the artist took to its critical reception in 1834. His ‘comeback’ painting, Antiochus and Stratonice (1840, Chantilly, Musée Condé), proved to be enormously influential at the time and has fascinated critics and scholars ever since, Rifkin among them.34 It is a striking example of the never-ending artwork in Ingres’s oeuvre for he worked on the subject for over 60 years, representing it many times and revising it each time. At least three versions preceded the commissioned painting of 1840 – two drawings and a large, lost canvas – though scholars are inclined to regard the Chantilly painting as the ‘definitive’ version because it is the one he first delivered to a patron (the duc d’Orléans) and because he crystallised his interpretation of the story in it.35 The story of Antiochus and Stratonice has a long, thick history of representation as one of the oldest continuously told in Western literature, art and music.36 To devise a new interpretation of the story was thus something of an accomplishment. Ingres did that in pictorial terms by emphasising the moment of discovery, when the doctor discovers the source of the dying prince’s illness, rather than the moment of resolution, when the father-king hands his wife over to his son, which was the scene traditionally represented in Western art, for example by Pietro da Cortona (1641–2, Florence, Palazzo Pitti). Pulling Stratonice apart from the society of the men, and opposing her to them, constituted Ingres’s break with previous interpretations of the subject. This opposition established Stratonice as a mysterious source of feminine power, which was capable of re-ordering the family and the kingdom in the way that the classical literary sources tell us that she did. Ingres’s drawings show that he found her pose fairly quickly, pulling her up tall and turning her in on herself, and covering her body with the cascading folds of a robe.37 On canvas, he painted her an unearthly pale colour that makes her stand out against her dark surroundings. She remained like this throughout all his variants of the painting, an introverted, upright, hovering apparition who dominates the entire scene. Ingres’s drawings of the men tell another story.38 Anxiety pervades his depiction of their relatively powerless, emasculated states (Fig. 5.8). He kept altering their poses and gestures even after he had designed the brilliant pinwheel configuration of the men’s arms converging on the prince’s heart. That uncertainty left its mark in the almost awkwardly provisional concatenation of gestures. Here was a configuration of masculinity so fragile that it required the sanctuary of a temple-bed.

Figure 5.8: Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Feuille d’études de la tête, des bras et des pieds d’un homme étendu, la tête vers la droite, études pour Antiochus.

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The Chantilly painting’s status as the ‘definitive’ version of Antiochus and Stratonice is undermined by the artist’s ongoing process of work on the subject. Three other versions of the painting are known, one of which was probably executed simultaneously with the Chantilly canvas while the two others were executed subsequent to it.39 The constant element in all of these versions is the spatial and gendered structure of the dramatic interaction: Stratonice is isolated on one side of the composition while the three men cluster together on the other side. Everything else – background setting, foreground details, format, and choice of media – was variable. The opposition between the female and male poles of the drama was such a fixed idea in Ingres’s interpretation of the story that he found he could preserve it while inverting the entire composition: in his 1866 variant (Montpellier, Musée Fabre), Stratonice is on the right and the men, on the left. It is especially intriguing that Ingres availed himself of the latest technologies to effect this reversal. As Florence Viguier has shown, Ingres hired several photographers – Gustave Le Gray, Pierre-Ambroise Richebourg, and some whose names are not known – to reproduce the painting.40 He cut up and spliced Richebourg’s paper prints and coated them with wax, experimenting with the positive and negative photographic images to study the effects of reversal.41 Ingres evidently regarded photography as a form of drawing, much as he did engraving, that is, as a paper medium that he could mark on and change, rather than as a reproductive medium that was supposed to record a fixed appearance for posterity. An anonymous French photographer made a daguerreotype of the detail of Stratonice from the Chantilly painting, and of her alone.42 The daguerreotype is interesting to compare with Ingres’s drawings and paintings since his conception of the character remained constant through his treatment of her in these different media. Stratonice hovers like a ghost in the emulsion of the daguerreotype, beneath the surface of its smudges and smears, much as she haunts many of Ingres’s drawings for the paintings and the paintings themselves. In one study of the richly coloured architectural décor, probably executed with the assistance of Victor Baltard, her presence is marked out as a white blank; and in Ingres’s drawing of the young servants, he slipped the silhouette of Stratonice into the interstice between these figures, playfully charging the space between them with the memory of her presence.43 Ingres’s 1866 variant of Antiochus and Stratonice was executed in watercolour on tracing paper, which has been affixed to canvas and varnished. It is a technically hybrid work, half painting, half drawing. His work in and across media played an important role in generating new understandings of his subject for the interpretation shifted every time he changed media and format. The whole palette and tonality of the watercolour variant is different from those of the oil paintings. This reminds us that Ingres regarded colour

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as yet another variable element in a composition. Amaury-Duval, his student, reported an incident in which the master came to approve his copy of the famous portrait of Louis-François Bertin, and shocked him by asking, ‘Why didn’t you try another background […] a greenish background?’44 AmauryDuval did not dare to make such a major formal alteration but the master felt free to experiment. He changed the narrative inflection of Antiochus and Stratonice when he rendered it in watercolour since the clarity of the medium reveals what is hidden in the shadows of the Chantilly painting and thus highlights the central section of the men on the bed. Ingres still used colour to differentiate Stratonice from the men and make her stand out from the luminous colour patchwork of this setting; she remains an apparition, the most powerful accent in the painting. Ingres’s work across and between media began to dissolve the old hierarchies between drawing and painting, and between painting and reproductive engraving and photography, and anticipated the inter-media work of artists such as Horace Vernet, Degas, Munch and Picasso. The importance that drawing assumed as a generative process in Ingres’s work gave it a certain autonomy as a field of experimentation, a test-ground for everything from compositional rhythms to individual motifs, which intersected with the paintings. The affect of the series of drawings and variants is to introduce a dynamic element, a sense of narrative and ongoing process and incompletion that was so central to a nineteenth-century sensibility. ‘This is a book about rewriting,’ Adrian Rifkin declared in Ingres Then, and Now, ‘as if it were a desirable achievement.’45 He was interested generally in the problem of repetition and rewriting, both as a form of historical discourse and as it played out in Ingres’s work. The artist was a perfect candidate for his demonstration of the ‘non-positivity of historical discourse, of the unsettled machinery of identification and projection in its writing,’ because, as he concluded after analysing the historiography of interpretations of the artist, of ‘the myth he represents as the never-to-be finished work of cultural renewal’.46 In his book, and quite outrageously in the eyes of most period specialists, Rifkin used Ingres as a basis to perform his ideas about how artists are and might be staged and viewed, in which he played with the projections and identifications generating his own writing while steadfastly refusing to collapse them into an authorial I.47 It could also be said that Rifkin arrived at this formulation of writing (art) history partly as a result of thinking through Ingres.48 He was intrigued by the repetitions and alternatives that pervade the artist’s corpus and wrote insightfully about them: ‘[T]hough [Ingres] himself insists that it is good to repeat a fine work [...] each repetition tends to shift his relationship to

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the theme, unfolding the endless proposition that is “and if [...] and if”.’49 Rifkin illustrated his observations on Ingres’s art – on the drift of figures from one picture to another and on the artist’s disproportionate interest in peripheral details – by sprinkling small photographic reproductions of details of paintings and drawings throughout the text of his book, often without referring them to a complete image of the whole artwork and rarely bothering to cross-reference them in the text, as if to acknowledge that images cannot illustrate ideas and to clarify that they were not his primary objects of study. For it would be fair to say that Rifkin was even more deeply fascinated by words and the semiotics of language than he was by works of art: he wrote wonderfully about Ingres’s notebooks, about the look of words on their pages and the relation of those words to the textual sources they copied and referenced. More broadly, he related the microcosm of flux and equivalency represented by the words and reading notes in Ingres’s cahiers to the sea of words written about the artist and his work, including collections of his ‘bons mots’, and to the semiotic theories of writers such as Julia Kristeva and Jacques Lacan. Coming from a more traditionally art historical background, I have attended in this essay to the visual objects, the drawings for three paintings that offer a specific, material demonstration of the problematic of repetition and fluctuating alternatives that is a central concern of Ingres Then, and Now. My examination of the painter’s drawings elucidates one of Rifkin’s arguments, namely, that instability is productive.50 The relation of Ingres’s drawings to each other and to his paintings, as I have tried to show, reveals a process of repetition that fabricates slippages, and this makes meaning. I have presented the drawings as a kind of visual analogue of Rifkin’s analysis of the fragmentary suspension between denoting and classifying that characterises the artist’s writing in his notebooks.51 While Rifkin believes in the arbitrariness of the choices that Ingres made more than I do and accentuated the chaos of indecision permeating his art, we would agree that the vast, fragmentary morass of Ingres’s preparatory drawings, which tried to grasp something but never did, exemplifies a principle of fluidity or of the unfixity of conception that lay at the heart of his visual language.

Notes 1 Letter from Ingres to Jean-François Gilibert, dated Florence, 15 June 1821, quoted in Lettres d’Ingres à Gilibert, edited by Daniel and Marie-Jeanne Ternois (Paris: Honoré

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Champion, 2005), p. 181, no. 8: ‘incertitude’; ‘l’imagination d’un véritable artiste’. The letter is also cited in Marie-Jeanne Ternois, ‘Ingres et “le Voeu de Louis XIII”’, Bulletin de la Société archeologique de Tarne-et-Garonne 84 (1958), p. 29. 2 The classic interpretation of the painting’s ‘throne and altar’ ideology is by Carol Duncan, ‘Ingres’s Vow of Louis XIII and the Politics of the Restoration’, in her The Aesthetics of Power: Essays in Critical Art History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 57–78, originally published in Art and Architecture in the Service of Politics, edited by Linda Nochlin and Henry Millon (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978), pp. 80–91. 3 This essay grew out of some of the research I did for Ingres, Ingres: Painting Reimagined (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2009). The study of Ingres’s drawings has been enormously facilitated by Georges Vigne’s publication of an illustrated catalogue raisonné of the holdings of the Musée Ingres, Montauban, Dessins d’Ingres: Catalogue raisonné des dessins du musée de Montauban (Paris: Gallimard/Réunion des musées nationaux, 1995). Drawings reproduced in this volume are referenced hereafter as ‘C.V.’  followed by the catalogue number. Aspects of Ingres’s drawing practice have recently been addressed in exhibitions organised by Régis Michel, Le Beau Idéal, ou l’art du concept, exh. cat. (Paris: Musée du Louvre; Réunion des musées nationaux, 1989); Georges Vigne, Le Retour à Rome de Monsieur Ingres: Dessins et peintures (Rome: Accademia de Francia; Paris: Espace Electra, 1993–4); Adrien Goetz, Ingres collages: dessins d’Ingres du musée de Montauban (Paris: Passage, Montauban: Musée Ingres, 2005); and Pascale Picard-Cajan, editor, Ingres et l’antique: L’Illusion grecque (Arles: Actes Sud, 2006). 4 Charles Baudelaire, ‘L’œuvre et la vie d’Eugène Delacroix [1863]’, in Oeuvres complètes, Bibliothèque de la Pléide, edited by Y.-G. de Dantec and Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), pp. 1114–41; ‘The Life and Work of Eugène Delacroix’, translated by P. E. Charvet in Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Literature (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), pp. 358–89. 5 Adrian Rifkin, Ingres Then, and Now (London and New York: Routledge Books, 2000), pp. 43 and 44. 6 Ibid., p. 15. 7 Ingres’s iterations of the compositions of different subjects were systematically examined in Patricia Condon with Marjorie B. Cohn and Agnes Mongin, In Pursuit of Perfection: The Art of J.-A.-D. Ingres, edited by Debra Edelstein (Louisville, KY: The J.B. Speed Art Museum, in association with Indiana University Press, 1983). 8 The basic study of the painting’s patronage remains Daniel Termnois, ‘Napoléon et la décoration du palais impérial de Monte-Cavallo en 1811–1813’, Revue de l’art 7 (1970), pp. 68–89; see also Victor Pomarède, ‘Commandes napoléoniennes’, in Vincent Pomarède, Stéphane Guégan, Louis-Antoine Prat, and Éric Bertin, eds. Ingres, 1780–1867, exh. cat. (Paris: Gallimard/Musée du Louvre Éditions, 2006), pp. 166–9. For a consideration of Romulus as a costume piece, see my Ingres: Painting Reimagined, pp. 248–54. 9 Deux études pour le personnage qui relève Acron (Bayonne, Musée Bonnat, inv. NI 968). 10 The speed of Ingres’s drawing and his ability to capture movement were attested anecdotally by Amaury-Duval and Horace Vernet, in Amaury-Duval [Eugène-EmmanuelAmaury Pineau-Duval], L’Atelier d’Ingres: Souvenirs (Paris: G. Charpentier, 1878), pp. 46–7; re-edition edited by Daniel Ternois (Paris: Arthena, 1993), pp. 113–14. 11 For illustrated examples see James Henry Rubin with David Levine, Eighteenth-Century French Life-Drawing. Selections from the Collection of Mathias Polakovits (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977). 12 Examples include Feuille d’études d’un homme nu, avançant vers la gauche (Paris, Musée du Louvre, RF 1100, recto); Sonneurs de trompe (Bayonne, Musée Bonnat, inv. NI 969), Étude d’hommes nus et de bras (Bayonne, Musée Bonnat, inv. NI 971), and

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Études pour Romulus vainqueur d’Acron (têtes, bras, jambes) (Bayonne, Musée Bonnat, inv. NI 965). 13 Variant poses of a model with raised arms and unevenly weighted legs, studied in Étude d’hommes nus et de bras, were used for the painted figures of the man raising his spear and shield, facing front above the bending man; the man rallying troops to the right of him; and the man holding the horse. Ingres referred to the same sheet years later for his modifications of the Dream of Ossian (Montauban, Musée Ingres). 14 François Gérard, Étude d’hommes (Paris, Musée du Louvre, inv. RF 35653). 15 Étude d’hommes nus et de bras. 16 Studies for the Cadaver of Acron (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. 19.125.2). 17 Le corps étendu d’Acron (Bayonne, Musée Bonnat, inv. NI 967) and Acron (plusiers études pour ses jambes et une main) (Montauban, Musée Ingres, inv. 867.2137; C.V. 1231). 18 Romulus, Vainqueur d’Acron (Paris, Musée du Louvre, inv. RF 1441). On the dating of the Louvre drawings RF 1441 and RF 4623, which were inaccurately dated by Ingres in retrospective inscriptions, see Marjorie B. Cohn and Susan Locke Siegfried, Works by J.-A.-D. Ingres in the Collection of the Fogg Art Museum (Cambridge: Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, 1980), p. 160. 19 Romulus, Vainqueur d’Acron (Paris, Musée du Louvre, inv. RF 4623). Condon (In Pursuit of Perfection, p. 44) connected this late wash drawing to Ingres’s preparations for his œuvre catalogue, Oeuvres de J. A. Ingres, membre de l’Institut, gravées au trait sur acier par Ale Réveil, 1800–1851, edited by [Albert] Magimel (Paris: Didot frères, 1851). 20 See Stephen Bann, ‘Ingres in Reproduction,’ in Fingering Ingres, edited by Susan L. Siegfried and Adrian Rifkin (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 56–75; reprint of Art History 23 (2000), pp. 706–25. 21 Ingres combined the central and bottom sketches on the sheet Studies for the Cadaver of Acron. 22 Pierre Boulez, ‘Fragment: entre l’inachevé et le fini’,  in Pierre Boulez and Marcella Lista, Œuvre: fragment. Dessins, partitions et textes choisis (Paris: Gallimard, Musée du Louvre Editions, 2008),  p. 11: ‘Mais ces essais, témoin et mémoire du chemin parcouru, qui flottent dans un espace encore indéterminé avant d’être utilisés, les voilà qui peuvent reprendre leur indépendance, l’observation les isolant de leur contexte, leur rendent une sorte d’autonomie, d’existence propre entre l’inachevé et le fini.’ 23 Soldat retenant un cheval cabré (et deux autres ramassant le corps d’Acron) (Montauban, Musée Ingres, inv. 867.2139; C.V. 1244). 24 Georges Vigne, Ingres, Prix de Rome. Papiers d’Ingres: Collections graphiques du museé Ingres 4, exh. cat. (Montauban, Musée Ingres, 1991), 12, cat. no. 55, called Acron dans le linceul (Montauban, Musée Ingres, inv. 867.2139; C.V. 1244). 25 Partie gauche de la composition (Montauban, Musée Ingres, inv. 867.2126; C.V. 1247); Romulus (Montauban, Musée Ingres, inv. 867.2127; C.V. 1248); and Partie droite de la composition (Montauban, Musée Ingres, inv. 867.2128; C.V. 1249). 26 Respectively, Ensemble de la composition (Montauban, Musée Ingres, 867.2130; C.V. 1246); and Romulus et les porteurs de trophées (Montauban, Musée Ingres, inv. 867.2129; C.V. 1241). The dating of the latter drawing is discussed in Condon, In Pursuit of Perfection, pp. 42–4 and 158, cat. no. 7; and Vigne, Ingres, Prix de Rome, pp. 11–12, cat. no. 52. 27 Long ignored by scholars, the painting has recently been re-examined by Andrew Carrington Shelton, Ingres and His Critics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 15–53; Sébastien Allard and Marie-Claude Chaudonneret, Ingres: La réforme des principes, 1806–1834 (Lyon: Fage editions, 2006), pp. 137–46; and Siegfried, Ingres: Painting Reimagined, pp. 338–71.

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28 Ingres’s Croquis d’ensemble for The Martyrdom of Saint Symphorien are in the Musée Ingres, Montauban, inv. 867.1801, 867.1802, 867.1798, 867.1799, and 867.1800; C.V. 500, 501, 502, 503 and 504. 29 Saint Symphorien (nu, avec double pose de bras) (Montauban, Musée Ingres, inv. 867.1807; C.V. 520) and La Mère (nu, avec quatre poses de bras) (Montauban, Musée Ingres, inv. 867.1887; C.V. 507). 30 La Mère (et un autre personnage derrière) (Montauban, Musée Ingres, inv. 867.1893; C.V. 509). 31 Many of these are reproduced in Vigne, Dessins, cat. nos. 500–679. 32 Front views: Lapidateur (de face, accroupi, vers la droite) (Montauban, Musée Ingres, inv. 867.1926; C.V. 513) and Study for ‘the Martyrdom of St. Symphorien’: The StoneThrower, 1827 (Cambridge, MA, Harvard Art Museum, Fogg Art Museum, inv. 1965.296); end view: Lapidateur (accroupi, de dos, vers la droite) (Montauban, Musée Ingres, inv. 867.1925, recto; C.V. 512); side view: Lapidatuer de face (vers la gauche, avec deux bras droits, et reprise de l’oeil) (Montauban, Musée Ingres, inv. 867.1929, recto; C.V. 550); and a suite of back views (Montauban, Musée Ingres, inv. 867.1918, 867.1931, 867.1928, 867.1927, and 867.1924; C.V.552, 553, 554, 555, and 556). Front and back views of the bending figure, his leg extended, were combined on the reverse of one sheet, Lapidateur de dos (tourner vers la droite), Lapidateur de face (vers la droite) (Montauban, Musée Ingres, inv. 867.1929, verso; C.V. 550). 33 The drawing Groupe de droite (Montauban, Musée Ingres, inv. 867.1803; C.V. 519) corresponds to the oil sketch Studies for ‘The Martyrdom of St. Symphorien’ (Lictors, Stone-Thrower, and Spectator), 1833 (Cambridge, MA, Harvard Art Museum, Fogg Museum of Art, inv. 1943.246). 34 For a fuller discussion of the painting’s subject and references to the extensive literature on it, see Siegfried, Ingres: Painting Reimagined, pp. 214–35. Rifkin returned often to Antiochus and Stratonice in Ingres Then, and Now, pp. 43–4, 48, 56, 63, 68, 71 and 142. 35 The three earlier versions of the composition are a wash drawing from around 1801 (Boulogne-sur-Mer, Musée des beaux-arts); a graphite drawing from around 1806 (Paris, Musée du Louvre, inv. RF 1440); and a six-foot-long canvas with half-life-size figures that Ingres began in the early 1820s and never finished. The latter was sold in the 1867 sale of his studio and has since disappeared. Sources documenting these works are given in Siegfried, Ingres: Painting Reimagined, p. 431 n. 69. 36 Wolfgang Stechow, ‘“The Love of Antiochus with Faire Stratonica” in Art’, The Art Bulletin 27 (Dec. 1945), pp. 221–37. 37 Examples include for the figure nude Étude nue debout de trios quarts à gauche, la tête inclinée, avec reprises de sa tête et de sa main droite, étude pour Stratonice (Rotterdam, Museum Boimans Van Beuningen, inv. F. II 36), and draped, Study for the Figure of Stratonice (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. 63.66). 38 An extensive series of them is reproduced in Vigne, Dessins, cat. nos. 43–50, 52, 58–63 and 74–99. 39 The three later versions were done around 1834 (Cleveland, Cleveland Museum of Art), 1860 (Philadelphia, Collection of R. de Schauensee), and 1866 (Montpellier, Musée Fabre, inv. 844.1.1). 40 Florence Viguier-Dutheil, ‘Stratonice à l’épreuve de la photographie’, in Picard-Cajan, Ingres et l’antique, pp. 199–208. See also Anne de Mondenard, ‘Du bon usage de la photographie’, in Pomarède et. al., Ingres, 1780–1867, pp. 44–53. 41 Pierre-Ambroise Richebourg, Stratonice ou La Maladie d’Antiochus (Montauban, Musée Ingres, inv. MIC 45 11 and MIC 45 8); reproduced in Picard-Cajan, Ingres et l’antique, 357, cat. nos. 264a and 264. 42 Anonymous French, Stratonice, c.1840, daguerreotype (Musée Ingres, Montauban, no inventory number, formerly in the Collection Ingres); reproduced in Picard-Cajan, Ingres et l’antique, 353, cat. no. 260.

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43 Ingres and Victor Baltard?, Étude préparatoire au décor de ‘Stratonice’ ou ‘La Maladie d’Antiochus’ (Montauban, Musée Ingres, inv. MIC 6 70); reproduced in Picard-Cajan, Ingres et l’antique, 342, cat. no. 241; and Ingres, Study for Antiochus and Stratonice: The Slaves (and Silhouette of Stratonice between the Two), c.1838–40 (Montauban, Musée Ingres, inv. 867.2271; C.V. 109). 44 Amaury-Duval, L’Atelier d’Ingres, p. 243; re-edition edited by Ternois, p. 340: ‘“Pourquoi n’avez vous pas essayé un autre fond… un fond verdâtre?”’ 45 Rifkin, Ingres Then, and Now, p. 3. 46 Ibid., pp. 5 and 75. 47 Ibid., pp. 132–51. 48 Ibid., p. ix: ‘For over thirty years thinking about Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres has been a focus of my intellectual life.’ 49 Rifkin, Ingres Then, and Now, p. 43. 50 On this theme see also Adrian Rifkin, ‘Dancing Years, or Writing as a Way Out’, Art History, 32 (2009), pp. 806–20. 51 Rifkin, Ingres Then, and Now, p. 31.

Figure 5a: Mark Fairnington, Harpy Eagle (The Duke) (2010).

6 American Water Memory and Projection in Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Painting David Peters Corbett

D

uring the summer of 1852 the painter Frederic Edwin Church travelled to Mount Katahdin in the Maine wilderness and made a successful ascent up ‘the eastern side of the mountain’.1 Church’s 1853 painting Mount Ktaadn (Fig. 6.1), shows the characteristic profile of the mountain rising above the surrounding foothills in atmospheric perspective. The evening light and salmoncoloured clouds soften its bulk and are reflected in the lower half of the canvas where they tint the waters of a lake. Signs of human settlement are clearly marked as the viewer’s eye follows the road into the landscape, across a bridge, and towards a substantial sawmill, dam and waterwheel. A carriage moves along the road to the right, following its curve into the surrounding forest and towards the foothills of the mountain range below Katahdin. At the near shore of the lake a group of cattle drink, and against a tree in the left foreground leans a farm boy who gazes out over the scene. Church’s picture has received a significant amount of attention, the main thrust of which has been to point out the aspirational character of the account it gives of Katahdin and its surroundings. The whole ensemble of Mount Ktaadn was in 1852 an effect of the imagination, ‘an optimistic vision of the promise of the future’, and the musing boy is the author of a fantasy of settlement.2 The boy imagines Maine, not as it was in the 1850s, but as he hopes it will be through his own efforts and those of others like him when the potential of the land and the ambition

Figure 6.1: Frederic Edwin Church, Mount Ktaadn (1853).

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of its settlers are fully realised. The elaborate dwelling, with its cupola and its several wings, the sawmill, the taming of the waters through dam and waterwheel, the road, the carriage, the cattle and the bridge, are all imaginative projections; they are ghostly, hopeful possibilities written over the landscape of reality. Katahdin, towering over this idyllic scene in Church’s picture, represents that as yet unconquered world and, placed calmly amongst the clouds, suggests its eventual domestication. Church’s theme is an important one: the dialogue between American nature and the settlement of the landscape is central to the influential school of landscape painting that dominated in the mid-nineteenth century. The ‘Hudson River School’ promulgated a view of American nature as the primary expression of the national self-image. In Church’s paintings the glorious future beckons the Republic, often imaged in dramatic sunsets leading the way through the wilderness, and even in direct statements of equivalence between the nation and the evocative world of American nature (Our Banner in the Sky, 1863, private collection). Hudson River paintings often feature bodies of water as central compositional devices in the mid-ground. In many of these landscapes, there is also an observing subject whose contemplation, like that of the farm boy, is evoked or focused by the reflective medium of the water: Thomas Cole’s The Oxbow, 1836 (Metropolitan Museum of Art), is an early and famous example. Water also explicitly features as a medium of transformation and a metaphor for life and experience, as in Cole’s Voyage of Life series in the National Gallery in Washington, DC (1839–42). Meditating on these liquid surfaces in the prospect, the observers in such paintings tend to glide over them and into reverie on the present or future. The effect is often to position these images in a poised relationship between settlement ‘and the untouched world beyond’, and many commentators have rightly seen Church’s painting as ‘profoundly meditative and evocative’ in this way.3 The watching boy in Mount Ktaadn is lost in what Herman Melville called in his dark contemporaneous fiction, Mardi, ‘the world of mind’; and it is significant that Melville associates this dreamy state with the conquest of American space, ‘wherein the wanderer may gaze around’, he writes, ‘with more of wonder than Balboa’s band roving through the golden Aztec glades’.4 Not infrequently these meditative or dreaming figures are youthful, boys even as here, or young men, as if the innocence suggested by their immaturity or unfinished state could also be a property of the land itself and could imply an authentic or naïvely truthful gaze. Like the Spanish conquistador, Vasco Núñez de Balboa (1474–1519), in Melville’s reading of the conquest of America their prime emotion in the face of the new world is ‘wonder’, a sort of innocent response that is the juvenile equivalent of the

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‘bewilderment’ and ‘disorientation’ said by commentators to be the reaction provoked by the uninhabited wilderness.5 Leo Marx long ago noted that the ‘pastoral ideal has been used to define the meaning of America ever since the age of discovery’.6 Interpretations of American culture have been deeply engaged with the need to understand how American landscapes were imagined from the materials of this American wilderness.7 The constant sense, inherited from the first moments of European contact, of the American landmass as unnervingly alien, vast, and unfathomable, provokes a dialogue between its twinned meanings of promise and possibility that never entirely overcomes the disturbing impression of radical otherness. Indeed, the troping of America as other is a regular counterpoint to the emergence of patriotic pride. Such thinking is evident in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s uneasy description of nature in America as ‘sleeping, overgrowing, almost conscious, too much by half for man in the picture, and so giving a certain tristesse, like the rank vegetation of swamps and forests seen at night’. Emerson goes on to elaborate on this image of ‘rankness’, evoking a disreputable and feckless expanse of terrain that is not quite perceptible as settled land, not at least in comparison to the ordered tidiness of European norms: ‘There, in that great sloven continent’, he writes, ‘in high Alleghany pastures, in the sea-wide, wideskirted prairie, still sleeps and murmurs and hides the great mother, long since driven away from the trim hedge-rows and over-cultivated garden of England’.8 This is an expression of the otherness, even monstrosity, that American nature has sometimes assumed in the imaginations of its inhabitants. Emerson’s ‘great mother’ is both chthonic, the image of the land, the cause even of a perverse sort of pride, and also repellent, turning away in her tainted sleep from any human contact. Nature’s ‘almost consciousness’ gives rise to a perception of nothing but its indifference. It is this unresponsive, careless, image of nature in the imaginary of American culture that signifies in such ambivalent images. It is America as bad mother. The dreaming figures of American paintings in the mid-nineteenth century are engaged in oblique ways with this image of American nature. Looking out over the bodies of water before them they contemplate her exploitation and revenge. In this essay, I look at these two aspects of water – the exploitation of nature through settlement, and its use as a vehicle for a different sort of relationship to the natural world, one that is contemplative and reflective, but also sensitive to problematic meanings in the cultural use of its object. In doing so, my view of the possibilities is indebted to aspects of Adrian Rifkin’s discussion

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of cultural meaning in his 1993 book, Street Noises: Parisian Pleasure, 1900–1940. In the midst of a meditation on the fugitive quality of memory and its recreation through passage along once-familiar city streets, Rifkin quotes Baudelaire’s lines about Paris: ‘la forme d’une ville/ change plus vite, hélas, que le coeur d’un mortel’, as well as Julien Gracq’s late-twentiethcentury reformulation of them.9 What interests me here is memory and the ghostly figuring of itself it casts over changed and reformulated scenes. For art historians memory is a central element of the evidence we handle and the stuff from which we make our accounts. For the most part these memories are not our own; but there is a sense in which the presence of our own memories is a vital component of the thinking and understanding we do. In Street Noises Rifkin offers a subtle enquiry into the shifting and ‘inexhaustible power of representation’10 as it appears in the tropes raised up by and through the city of Paris during the early decades of the twentieth century. It is the city with ‘images [...] so complexly made in overlapping histories, some not its own’11 that is evoked rather than a catalogue of physical change. Throughout Rifkin’s ability to move fruitfully through bureaucratic records, literature, popular magazines, films, photography and song, and to weave all into a tight narrative is on show. This capacity is a truly interdisciplinary achievement: it allows Rifkin to bring under scrutiny objects which did not previously exist with any clarity – soundscapes in the city, for example, or certain aspects of his tracing of sexuality and erotic feeling across Paris. Yet it is the evocation of memory and the investment of understanding by narrative and mediation in the very first pages of the book (Rifkin receives Paris through the words of his grandmother and the experience of Salford and Manchester) that continues to be meaningful for me. The start of Street Noises conjures memory and ‘the split between memory and my experience of its materials’, making of our encounter with ‘the urban poetic’ something shifting, oblique, and lived out ‘at a slight angle’ to experience.12 My essay is part of a longer project that aims to trace the filaments of relationship between the mid-nineteenth-century landscape tradition in the United States and the painting of the new urban centres which began to appear as part of the explosion of city culture in America during the final decades of that century and the early years of the twentieth. I am interested in the ways in which the memory of nature continues to resonate in urban visions, appearing often as ghostly or otherworldly elements within city streets and scenes. The dreaming figures of the landscape tradition, casting their nets of imagination over the raw material of their contemplation, stand or sit at one of the points of origin of this trope. Their own ghostliness before nature, and their own experience of a fluid and shifting natural world, provide the impetus for later hauntings and spectral presences. Rifkin’s cultivation of the evanescence of experience in the city, the ‘slight

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angle’ created by the relationship between memory and those transforming and shifting streets, feeds into my investigation of this situation. Building on his proposition about the interchange between memory and experience, I end the discussion by suggesting that mid-nineteenth-century Americans were aware of the psychic costs of commitment to future development, and that such a reading – promoted by Henry David Thoreau and others – might alter our view of Church’s dreaming farm boy. I also venture something more about the more personal meanings of these themes in the context of the importance to me of elements in Rifkin’s book.

I Herman Melville describes in the first pages of Moby Dick the Sunday ‘crowds of water-gazers’ congregating at the Battery in New York City as a respite from their commercial labours: Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days […] tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks […] Inlanders all, they come from lanes and alleys, streets and avenues […] Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses of all those ships attract them hither?13 Such a sight can be glimpsed in contemporary engravings. Melville’s assembled landsmen, aching with desire for something other than the commercial round and the dull cityscape of dark ‘lanes and alleys, streets and avenues’ from which they emerge to gaze towards an extended watery world – imagining their own extension in space all the way to China – stand for the moment of transformation in which the yearning eyes of these observers switch from city into a space that disregards ‘the green fields’ of the settled landscape and fixes upon the ever-changing wilderness of water that beckons beyond. The industrialisation of this powerful and abundant natural resource, and its connection to the development of other elements of the landscape, helped to define the progress of American society during these years. In the first decades of the nineteenth century the great majority of Americans lived near the coasts or within easy reach of navigable rivers. The cities

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were predominantly coastal and the majority seaports, and the exceptions – such as St Louis, Missouri, depended on the trade routes of these major rivers, along which commerce and other goods requiring passage, such as human beings, could move significantly faster than across land.14 The United States was dependent on water for its economy and survival. Until the 1840s the US had had ‘a frontier of rivers’ based on the ‘OhioMississippi-Missouri network with their tributaries, which had carried settlers to their new homes and provided their initial links with the rest of the world’.15 Water remained its main source of industrial power until well into the second half of the nineteenth century, and the 1825 opening of the Erie Canal, connecting two New York State cities, Albany on the Hudson and Buffalo on the shores of Lake Erie, forged a 363-mile link between New York City and the Northwest by water and started a boom in canal construction which produced a further 3,700 miles of canals by 1850. By opening up the Great Lakes and the Midwest to direct commerce the canal transformed the economic potential of the United States and helped to make New York a leading international port.16 This ‘transportation revolution’, as it has been called, had a profound effect on the speed and cost of the transit of goods, powering the phenomenal growth of the US in the early nineteenth century and its transformation into a thriving industrial economy.17 To a significant extent, it was water that allowed the United States to emerge as a world power later in the century.18 This watery history plays directly to Leo Marx’s foundational analysis of ‘the machine in the garden’: the dialectic between the pastoral ideal in America and the processes of modernisation expressed most powerfully for the nineteenth century by the growth and development of machine technology. Like other distinctive natural forms – America’s mountains, plains and forests – water had early on begun to provide a keynote for the delineation of characteristically American experience. As Marx says of American culture as a whole in the early nineteenth century, there was ‘always a place for the machine in the myth of the garden’, so that water too was conceived as a resource that could be industrialised without losing its meaning as nature.19 Commentators have extensively discussed the role that the Falls at Niagara played in the national imaginary during the nineteenth century, describing their status as icon and primary locus of the sublimity associated with American landscape, and tracing the elaborate and highly ritualised emotional and topographical itinerary visitors were expected to follow.20 Charles Dickens’ dramatic evocation of the Falls in his account of his American trip of 1842, emphasising its ‘might and majesty’ and ‘vague immensity’, is only one of the best known of repeated attempts to summon up the sublime in accounting for Niagara.21 Its ‘cultural prominence’ was based ‘to a large degree on the thousands of images

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made of it’, from cheap prints and photographs to Church’s phenomenally successful rendering in the great 1857 Niagara in the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC.22 Despite Niagara’s status as an icon of the natural, the banks above the Falls rapidly became industrialised. In 1831 Alexis de Toqueville saw the future. ‘Already the forest round about is being cleared […] I don’t give the Americans ten years to establish a saw or flour mill at the base of the cataract’, he wrote.23 The industrialisation of water power, its transformation, in the industrial buildings that spread out around Niagara Falls, into an instrument of human will, does much to define the attitude early nineteenth-century Americans took to the natural landscape. John Seelye gives a cogent account of the period’s attitudes. Rivers, however beautiful, ‘were most attractive when they yielded most to humanity’s needs whether as mechanisms of transportation or as sites for nascent towns’, and were thus fundamentally no more than ‘beautiful machines’ for the nation to exploit.24 However famous Niagara became, the most powerful example of the transformation of nature by American water during these years was the Erie Canal. Opened in 1825 after less than eight years, it was a breakneck, extraordinarily innovating, feat of civil engineering, and stood as a testament to the capacities of American industrial development. To travellers along the system the canal seemed to embody a great deal about the attitudes of Americans to the landscape and its exploitation. Here is a Canadian, William L. Mackenzie, reporting on his trip along ‘the liquid highway’ in 1825: I […] surveyed the scene around me – the canal – the locks – stone and frame houses – log-buildings – handsome farms – warehouses – grist-mills – waterfalls – bustle and activity – waggons – hotels – thousands of tree stumps, and the people burning and destroying them – carding machines – tanneries – cloth works – tinplate factories – taverns – churches. What a change in four short years from a state of wilderness!25 Mackenzie’s breathless enumeration does a good job of conjuring up the intense economic activity which struck other travellers too. The landscape painter Thomas Cole, passing through Upper New York State in 1829, thought ‘I should consider Rochester one of the wonders of the world’. Like Mackenzie he was struck by the speed with which the city, which had been effectively created by the canal, had come into being: ‘there is a large and handsome town that has risen in the midst of a wilderness almost with the rapidity of thought’, he wrote, and concluded

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that ‘future ages shall tell the tale of the enterprise and industry of the present generation’.26 An English traveller in 1820, John Howison, found Rochester, then less than a decade old, already filled with 3,000 people, and distinguished by ‘spacious streets […] well-furnished shops, and the bustle which continually pervades them’. The same traveller noted the effects of the boom on the town and its natural setting. The Genesee Falls which provide Rochester with ‘fine water power […] are unfortunately surrounded with machinery; for the rattling of mills, and the smoke of iron founderies [sic] […] neither harmonize well with the wildness of uncultivated nature, nor give any additional interest to a scene where they are so manifestly out of place’.27 Howison’s scepticism about the virtues of industrial development reflects a general uncertainty on the part of British travellers who were startled by Americans’ overt preference for industry over the picturesque. ‘They seem to look upon a tree as a natural enemy,’ wrote the Englishwoman Margaret Hall reporting a journey in 1827–8, ‘and chop down right and left and all around without the smallest mercy, and often where the tree instead of doing mischief might be spared and be a very great ornament and use.’28 In accounts such as these the country is often presented as ravaged by the determination of its inhabitants to civilise it. Europeans, accustomed to established landscapes, felt they could look down on the American preoccupation with the mechanics of colonisation. Often the motif of the stump – associated for Americans with development and progress, as in Mount Ktaadn – is evoked to communicate the horror the narrator feels. ‘It is impossible to describe the appearance of the outskirts of this town,’ Margaret Hall commented on Rochester, ‘to me it looks as if a box of houses had been sent from New York, the lid opened, and the houses tumbled down in the midst of the blackened stumps.’29 Frances Trollope, another Englishwoman, and not a sympathetic one, nevertheless caught the American side of the story. In her account of travelling on the canal she reports a conversation with ‘one of our Yankees’ as together they contemplated ‘the scenery, which is of the wildest description’. The man, pointing out ‘the wild state of the country and apologizing for it’, explained it had been owned by an Englishman. And you’ll excuse me, ma’am, but when the English gets a spot of wild ground like this here, they have no notions about it like us; but the Englishman have sold it, and if you was to see it five years hence, you would not know it again; I’ll engage there will be by that, half a score elegant factories – ’tis a true shame to let such a privilege of water lie idle.30

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When she arrived at Rochester Trollope found her view of the American landscape confirmed. ‘In short,’ she concluded, ‘“the great water privilege” has been so ingeniously taken advantage of, that no point can be found where its voice and its movement are not mixed and confounded’ with industrial development. Such opinions were replicated many times over.31 When the official account of the celebrations which attended the opening of the Erie Canal were published in 1825, this contrast was clearly drawn in favour of American development. Under the British ‘the vast and fertile regions of the west’ were said to have been ‘doomed to be a perpetual wilderness’, but, now that ‘we have opened communication by our Canals’, the prospect that appears is of ‘the now beautiful, populous, and cultivated country through which the western canal runs’.32 Such new landscapes stood for the triumph of settlement over wilderness, and human values over the inhuman world of the raw nature out of which landscape is constructed. The building of the Erie Canal gave rise to an extraordinary visual culture of its own, the most striking realisation of which appeared in the extensive celebrations for the opening of the canal. The politicians who had driven through the project, left Buffalo on Lake Erie on 26 October 1825 on the canal boat The Seneca Chief, and made a stately and magnificent progress down the canal to Albany and then via the Hudson River to New York. Along the way, the group was treated to an endless succession of banquets and celebrations – for 600 people in Albany for example – and a collection of inventive visual celebrations of the canal. At ‘the Ladies’ supper-room’ of the Lafayette Amphitheatre in Laurens Street, New York, the dignitaries and guests were regaled by a brilliant concoction: ‘upon the supper table was placed, floating in its proper element (the waters of Erie), a miniature canal-boat, made entirely of maple sugar’.33 The Seneca Chief itself ‘was superbly fitted up for the occasion’, and boasted a number of paintings, one representing the boat’s own journey, and another ‘a classic emblematical production of the pencil’. This image, by George Catlin and now apparently lost, featured an assembly of telling elements, including a full-length figure of Gov. Clinton in Roman costume; he is supposed to have just flung open the lock gate, and with the right hand extended (the arm being bare), seems in the act of inviting Neptune, who appears upon the water, to pass through and take possession of the watery regions which the Canal has attached to his former dominions.34 All accounts of the celebrations agree on these commercial benefits of the canal. A wilderness has been made over into a productive landscape,

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connecting the interior with the markets of Europe, and providing ‘the advantages which agriculturists and manufacturers must derive from being furnished with these means of moving their mills and machinery’.35 It is a narrative of progress, ‘populating regions which only yesterday […] were uninhabited’.36 The landscape that came into being around the canal was an assertion of the remaking of nature as human landscape. The lithographs accompanying the text show scenes of industrial triumph. In 1835, the Surveyor’s report on the proposed route of the railroad that soon replaced the canal made it clear that the canal had demonstrated to the full, the possibilities of ‘the increase of population and wealth […] in the progress of agriculture and trade, the augmented value of lands, and the rapid and unexampled growth and creation of cities, towns and villages’ through the exploitation of ‘natural resources which the […] work could not fail to develop’.37 But that process was unstable and precarious, laying only the thinnest skin of development over the natural landscape. British visitors to the United States frequently saw this impermanent character in the landscapes and natural spaces they encountered. ‘Whilst we were standing in the midst of a forest so thick that had I gone a few yards further I am sure that I should have lost myself’ wrote Margaret Hall, ‘the men [engaged in felling trees on the site of Rochester] mentioned that all the lots of the ground were sold, and that we were then in the middle of a street!’ She goes on to reference a common impression, ‘were we to return here a twelve month after this, we should probably find a large tavern and innumerable stores where now there are only hickory and bass wood trees and only black squirrels for inhabitants’.38 Hall’s reminiscence calls up not only the presence of nature before human intervention – ‘a forest so thick […] I should have lost myself’ – but also the eerie quality of that investment, its instability, and almost phantasmic character. Two-dimensional images of settlement rise up and spread themselves in her text across the flat plane of the natural scene, a prospect in all senses, both forward-looking and imaginary.

II Nathaniel Hawthorne, who wrote a number of short sketches based around the Erie Canal in the mid-1830s, was clearly aware of these tensions. In a piece on ‘Rochester’, published in 1835, he noted of the Genesee Falls that ‘the Genesee has contributed so bountifully to the canals and mill-dams, that it approaches the precipice with diminished pomp’. Hawthorne goes on to comment on ‘the town’ that had ‘sprung up like a mushroom’ and to evoke the bustle and industry of the place.39 But this familiar observation

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becomes, in Hawthorne’s hands, the account of something fading and unnatural as he contrasts the wild country through which the canal boat passes with the effect of the new towns that have sprung up. From ‘a forest, dark, dense, and impervious’, he writes, ‘breaking away occasionally and receding from a lonely tract, covered with dismal black stumps’, the canal penetrates, via a lock and a small village, ‘into the unquiet heart of an inland city’, where travellers will encounter ‘piles of brick, crowded docks and quays, rich warehouses and a busy population’. But these two aspects of the journey turn out to be somehow the same. In the city: We feel the eager and hurrying spirit of the place, like a stream and eddy whirling us along with it. Through the thickest of the tumult goes the canal, flowing between lofty rows of buildings and arched bridges of hewed stone. Onward, also, go we, till the hum and bustle of struggling enterprise die away behind us, and we are threading an avenue of the ancient woods.40 The city is, in its eagerness and bustle, like a vigorous stream; the woods make an ‘avenue’ like the ‘lofty rows’ of the buildings and ‘hewed stone’. For Hawthorne, who has a markedly ironic view of development, country and city, landscape and settlement, are not opposites but parts of a single process. If the city is an ‘unquiet’ and even sinister place, then so is the landscape. Here is Hawthorne’s description of ‘the “long level”, a dead flat between Utica and Syracuse’: There can hardly be a more dismal tract of country. The forest which covers it, consisting chiefly of white cedar, black ash, and other trees that live in excessive moisture, is now decayed and death-struck, by the partial draining of the swamp into the great ditch of the canal. Sometimes, indeed, our lights were reflected from pools of stagnant water, which stretched far in among the trunks of the trees, beneath dense masses of dark foliage […] In spots, where the destruction had been riotous, the lanterns showed perhaps a hundred trunks, erect, half overthrown, extended along the ground, resting on their shattered limbs, or tossing them desperately into the darkness but all of one ashy-white, all naked together, in desolate confusion. This prospect, ‘based on obscurity, and overhung and bounded by it’, was ‘ghost-like – the very land of unsubstantial things, whither dreams might betake themselves, when they quit the slumberer’s brain’.41 The final vignette in Hawthorne’s piece extends this vision of nature as ghostly and dreamlike. The narrator, ‘during a momentary delay’ in his canal

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journey, sets out into the forest in search of the source of ‘the phosphoric light of an odd tree’, commenting that ‘it was not the first delusive radiance that I had followed’. The tree lay along the ground, and was wholly converted into a mass of diseased splendor, which threw ghastliness around. Being full of conceits that night, I called it a frigid fire; a funeral light, illuminating decay and death; an emblem of flame, that gleams around the dead man without warming him; or of genius, when it owes its brilliancy to moral rottenness. Just as he is giving way to these thoughts, imagining ‘ghost-like torches […] fit to light up this dead forest, or to blaze coldly in tombs’, he realises that the canal boat has left without him and, in a serio-comic ending, has to use a phosphorescent branch from the dead tree to guide him on the long walk to Syracuse where he hopes ‘to find a house or shed, wherein to pass the night’.42 Hawthorne’s piece was written as an entertainment; but even so his vision of a landscape made over into the grave has a convincing character to it. The shattered stumps and stagnant watery landscape form a dank tomb for the wilderness, rendering it sinister and oppressive. Like the primal circumstances which repeatedly recur in Edgar Allan Poe’s contemporary short stories, like a ‘thing that was enshrouded’, depicted unloosing ‘the ghastly cerements which had confined it’, such a landscape seems to conjure up ‘the hideous dropping off of the veil’.43 Like Poe’s moments of psychic intensity, perhaps, it is a fantasy world, but one in which the repressed or other world of nature returns as supernatural force, haunting the living, its alienness imaged as death. Certainly Dickens’ set piece on Niagara Falls in American Notes sees the natural wonder as harnessed intimately with death: ‘the first effect, and the enduring one […] of the tremendous spectacle, was Peace’, he writes, ‘calm Recollections of the Dead: Great Thoughts of Eternal Rest and Happiness: nothing of Gloom and Terror’. ‘Faces, faded from the earth, looked out upon me from its gleaming depths.’ At first, this association seems to be a quality of the Falls’ role as ‘Image of Beauty’, eternal and comforting for that reason. But in the final moments of Dickens’ account, the Falls in all their moods become dead and haunting spirits themselves. Still, when the sun is on them, do they shine and glow like molten gold. Still, when the day is gloomy, do they fall like snow, or seem to crumble away like the front of a great chalk cliff or roll down the rock

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like dense white smoke. But always does the mighty stream appear to die as it comes down, and always from its unfathomable grave arises that tremendous ghost of spray and mist which is never laid: which has haunted this place with the same dread solemnity since Darkness brooded on the deep.44 Dickens concludes with a final evocation of divinity, but the impression remains of something that attains extinction in the moment of its greatest realisation, something which, at exactly the moment when it is most vibrant, is, in reality, lifeless, so that everything genuine and real in it has been dismissed, hollowed out, and reduced to a spirit ‘haunting’ the scene of its triumph. Here, as in Hawthorne’s account, the wilderness is a solemn presence, something which can never be ‘laid’ to rest, but which is dead, vanished, finished even as it is recognised and returns to haunt the living.

III When Henry David Thoreau visited Mount Katahdin in 1846 he found it ‘grim’ and ‘untrodden’, a ‘tangled labyrinth of living, fallen and decaying trees only the deer and moose and bear and wolf, can easily penetrate’. Perhaps I most fully realized that this was primal, untamed, and forever untameable Nature […] It is difficult to conceive of a region uninhabited by man […] And yet we have not seen pure Nature unless we have seen her thus vast and drear and inhuman […] Nature here was something savage and awful, though beautiful […] It was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor waste-land. It was the fresh and natural surface of the planet earth. When he got to the top of Katahdin he thought the situation evoked the alien condition of the world even more forcefully, writing that here not even the surface had been scarred by man, but it is a specimen of what God saw fit to make this world. What is it to be admitted to a museum, to see a myriad of particular things, compared to being shown some star’s surface, some hard matter in its home.45 In his 1856 short story ‘Benito Cereno’, Melville depicts something very like this American sense of the alienness of nature in a conversation between the eponymous captain (a European), who is traumatised by his suffering

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and the revelation of the impersonal horrors of the world, and the bluff American, Amasa Delano, who attempts to encourage him to let go of the terror he has experienced: ‘Forget it. See, yon bright sun has forgotten it all, and the blue sea, and the blue sky; these have turned over new leaves.’ ‘Because they have no memory’, [Cereno] dejectedly replied; ‘because they are not human.’46 It is this inhuman quality in nature, resisting the generally unperceptive and naïve Delano’s understanding of a beneficent world, that is seen to press on the imaginary of progress. Unlike the farm boy, contemplating the future with his back to the tree in Mount Ktaadn, nature has no capacity for human time. It has no ‘memory’, as the disturbed vision of Benito Cereno sees, and it has no future. As a consequence, it was not adaptable without some residue to the fictions of settlement and civilisation American culture imposed upon it, and this residue becomes what is resistant and awkward in nature, what will not readily fit. Black stumps and eerie phosphorescent branches, ghostly presences and fictional landscape, these are the signs of that suppression of the inhuman character of nature and its replacement by these fantasies of achievement. But many of the figures in American painting which sit or stand facing away from the viewer and looking into the landscapes of the paintings also have a ghostly quality, as if their imaginary creation and reworking of the landscapes they look out on, reflect back onto these observers themselves and render them transparent or fragile, unstable identities whose presence is as wavering and uncertain, as unconvincing indeed as the imaginary settlements they project onto the canvas for our benefit. In Asher Brown Durand’s Early Morning at Cold Spring, N.Y., the figure gazing out onto the water seems in the process of dissolving into the glitter of the ambient light. In other images the figure is so distant as to be virtually a part of the landscape, dwindling to the size of a stump him- or herself, as in Jasper Cropsey’s American Harvesting (1851, Indiana University Art Museum, Bloomington IN). I want to return here to Adrian Rifkin’s reflections on ‘the split between memory’ and the ‘experience of its materials’, the ways in which it makes of our encounter with ‘the […] poetic’, whether urban or otherwise, something shifting, oblique, and lived out ‘at a slight angle’ to experience. Meditation on the landscape and its civilisation becomes more complex because of a split comparable to this, the painted figures who stand for a calm achievement of this process are, from this perspective, much less

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certain and assertive, more anxious and unpersuasive than the major interpretations would posit. Indeed, they take their meaning from a set of circumstances that renders them, as Rifkin says of his own, Parisian, actors, on ‘a trajectory in which the people are markers of change of which they are themselves not the subject’.47 Like the aspirational visions of settlement they so often mediate, they are ghostly, fading, transparent to the world beyond, unstable and fragile in their straining towards a fullness of achievement that is asserted but still fictional, unrealised and purely hopeful because more a feat of the imagination than a reality. Thoreau’s comments at the beginning of Walden, his account of his time in the Massachusetts woods, seem to speak to this. Thoreau has this to say about his countrymen’s obsession with the future: Always promising to pay, tomorrow, and dying today, insolvent; seeking to curry favor, to get custom […] lying, flattering, voting, contracting yourselves into a nutshell of civility, or dilating into an atmosphere of thin and vaporous generosity, that you may persuade your neighbor to let you make his shoes, or his hat, or his coat, or his carriage, or import his groceries for him; making yourself sick, that you may lay up something against a sick day, something to be tucked away in an old chest, or in a stocking behind the plastering, or, more safely, in the brick bank.48 This is a wonderful evocation of the ghostliness that comes upon those who strive for the future and neglect the present. It is a common experience to find that capacity for historical insight depends on personal experience. It is those things that speak most directly to the self, to its longings as well as its understanding, that allow aspects of other lives and other moments to speak most directly to us. The repertoire of themes to be investigated, larger or smaller in individual cases, is across a career related to this: we enquire best into those things which we feel most deeply. When Rifkin conjures, on the very first page of Street Noises, some ‘wet November evening’ in which ‘the centre of Manchester, in the little streets behind the Arndale Centre’ seems ‘more apt to evoke a certain form of the urban poetic than any quartier of modern Paris’,49 he raises not only a central issue of what that poetic might be, but also speaks directly to my experience. When Street Noises was published I was living in Manchester, and feeling bewitched and repulsed in equal measure by its dark glamour and pungent urbanity, so different from the character of central London or its leafy suburbs which had defined my most substantial urban experience until then. The echoing, desolate and deserted streets of that quartier of Manchester behind the Arndale Centre were indeed, before their recent economic renaissance, reminiscent of Atget’s photographs in their

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emptiness and sense of vanished energy. And, in keeping with reflections on the rapidity of transformation in the city, that part of Manchester has changed since Rifkin published his book, and has acquired a name – the Northern Quarter – and a place on tourist websites. The truth is that it was the appeal of understanding Manchester through the images of Paris and Alexandria that made Rifkin’s reflections on memory and its objects so meaningful for me. The very name, Paris, brought into conjunction with the grimy streets of my everyday had about it a magnetic compulsion which seemed to promise a future transformation of my experience into something culturally creditworthy. But of course, it was an appeal, as Rifkin makes relentlessly clear, that depends on a set of narratives, a reading of ‘Paris’ that relies on the allure of our fictive and, in my case, certainly very strongly literary, image of the actual city. How exhilarating to imagine for a moment that it could be ‘Manchester that […] equipped [one] with a certain sympathy for the city-vision of a Baudelaire’.50 This is about memory, then, but also the work that memory does in casting its web of meaning onto the present by reformulating it and proposing a different, imagined and proleptic, version of the now in which the meanings of the desired past are made plain. Rifkin’s in many ways pitiless investigation into Paris, his ability, too, to balance affection for the image with its subversion and with scepticism about it, provoked for me investigations in a different sphere that sought to trace a similar dynamic. The farm boy in Church’s Mount Ktaadn is doing exactly this, projecting forward the fruits of clearance and labour, imagining the faraway moment when everything has been achieved, won, and is now productive; and in the process of imagining this life becoming a ghost, being worn out, ‘dilating into an atmosphere of thin and vaporous generosity’, says Thoreau. These ghosts and hauntings express both the essential alienness of nature in the imaginations of Americans, even as it serves as one of the most central of ‘myth materials’, and the thinning of selves into vapour by the action of that imagination, projected constantly into the future towards development and the imposition of the human scale.51 Like American nature as perceived by Emerson, where across the ‘great sloven continent, in high Alleghany pastures, in the sea-wide, wide-skirted prairie, still sleeps and murmurs and hides the great mother’, this is indigenous nature as a disquieting spectre located in an inland sea. But it is also – and here is the appeal of Hawthorne’s version of the dream, darker and more negative, threatening nightmare rather than promise – a ghost of memory and the fascination of our projection of memory into the imaginary future.

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Notes 1 Theodore Winthrop, Life in the Open Air and Other Papers (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1863), p. 97. 2 Franklin Kelly, Frederic Edwin Church and the National Landscape (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988), p. 69. 3 Andrew Wilton and Tim Barringer, American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States, 1820–1880 (London: Tate, 2002), p. 126. 4 Herman Melville, Mardi, and a Voyage Thither [1849], ch. 169. 5 See Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 3rd edn (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982). 6 Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), p. 3. 7 See for example Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950); John R. Stilgoe, Common Landscape of America, 1580 to 1845 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982); Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800– 1890 (New York: Atheneum, 1985). 8 Cited in Marcus Cunliffe, ‘American Thought’, in Dennis Welland, ed., The United States: A Companion to American Studies (London: Methuen, 1974), p. 474. 9 The lines are from Charles Baudelaire, ‘La Cygne’, in Les Fleurs du Mal. 10 Adrian Rifkin, Street Noises: Parisian Pleasure, 1900–1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), p. 153. 11 Ibid., p. 4. 12 Ibid., pp. 1 and 4. 13 Herman Melville, Moby Dick, or the Whale (1851), ch. 1. 14 Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815– 1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 40. 15 Ibid. 16 See for example Peter L. Bernstein, The Wedding of the Waters: The Erie Canal and the Making of a Great Nation (New York: Norton, 2005); Evan Cornog, The Birth of Empire: De Witt Clinton and the American Experience, 1769–1828 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Carol Sheriff, The Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817–1862 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1996). 17 See George Rogers Taylor, The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860 (New York, 1951). 18 See Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought. Kevin J. Avery has explicitly connected the Erie Canal with the emergence of landscape painting and the reputation of Thomas Cole. See Kevin J. Avery, ‘Selling the Sublime and the Beautiful: New York Landscape Painting and Tourism’, in Catherine Hoover Voorsanger and John K. Howat, eds, Art and the Empire City: New York, 1825–1861, exhib. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 108–33, 109. See also Kenneth Maddox, ‘Thomas Cole and the Railroads: Gentle Maledictions’, Archives of American Art, 30, 1–4 (1990), pp. 146–54. 19 Marx, The Machine in the Garden, p. 182. 20 See for example Elizabeth McKinsey, Niagara Falls: Icon of the American Sublime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); John F. Sears, Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Jeremy Elwell Adamson, Niagara: Two Centuries of Changing Attitudes, 1697–1901 (Washington, DC: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1985). 21 Charles Dickens, American Notes (1842) (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 220. 22 Sears, Sacred Places, p. 72. 23 Cited in Adamson, Niagara, p. 117. 24 John Seelye, Beautiful Machine: Rivers and the Republican Plan, 1755–1825 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 9.

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25 William Lyon Mackenzie, Sketches of Canada and the United States (London: Effingham Wilson, 1833), pp. 144–5. 26 Cited in Patricia Anderson, The Course of Empire: The Erie Canal and the New York Landscape, 1825–1875 (New York: University of Rochester, 1984), p. 84. 27 John Howison, ‘A Tour from Rochester to Utica, 1820’, in Upstate Travel: British Views of Nineteenth-Century New York, ed. Roger Haydon (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1982), p. 37. 28 Margaret Hall, The Aristocratic Journey: Being the Outspoken Letters of Mrs Basil Hall Written During a Fourteen Months’ Sojourn in America, 1827–1828 (New York: G P Putnam’s Sons, 1931), p. 56. 29 Ibid., p. 56; pp. 53–4. 30 Fanny Trolllope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) (London: Penguin, 1997), p. 289. 31 Ibid., p. 292. 32 Cadwallader D. Colden, Memoir, Prepared at the Request of a Committee of the Common Council of the City of New York and Presented to the Mayor of the City at the Celebration of the Completion of the New York Canals (New York: Corporation of New York, 1825), p. 8; p. 7. 33 Ibid., p.329. 34 Ibid., p. 296. 35 Ibid., p. 90. 36 Ibid., p. 91. 37 Benjamin Wright, Report of the Survey of the Route of the New York and Erie Railroad … Together with the Report of a Special Committee of the Common Council of the City of New-York, in Relation Thereto (New York: Railroad Journal, 1835), p. 1. 38 Ibid., pp. 53–4. 39 See Nathaniel Hawthorne, ‘Rochester’, New-England Magazine (1835). Available at http://www.history.rochester.edu/canal/bib/hawthorne/roch.html (accessed 9 January 2009). 40 See Nathaniel Hawthorne, ‘The Canal Boat’, New-England Magazine (1835). Available at http://www.history.rochester.edu/canal/bib/hawthorne/roch.html (accessed 9 January 2009). 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid. 43 Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (1839). 44 Ibid., p. 221. 45 See Henry David Thoreau, ‘Ktaadn’, in The Maine Woods (1864). 46 Herman Melville, Benito Cereno (1855). 47 Rifkin, Street Noises, p. 52. 48 Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or, Life in the Woods (1854). 49 Rifkin, Street Noises, p. 1. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid., p. 28.

Figure 6a: work-seth/tallentire, Manifesto 3: (… instead of partial object) (2004/2010).

7 Autodidactics of Bits Adrian Rifkin’s [Rancièrean] Cultural Studies and the Partition of the Pedagogical Paul Bowman

Against Teaching and Learning

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his chapter seeks to intervene into current ways of constructing, perceiving, partitioning, policing and discoursing about pedagogy. Specifically, it seeks to flesh out one possible way to reorientate discourse about and practices of pedagogy away from the current simplistic and stultifying focus on ‘teaching and learning’. Such a reorientation would be an improvement because the dominant focus relies on a limited and limiting conception of pedagogy. Yet this limited and limiting conception and orientation has a strong and constraining hold on educational discourse at all levels. However, what deserves much more exploration is the extent to which the topics or problematics of pedagogy, of didactics, of learning, can be shown to far exceed the current myopic focus on teacher-student relations or indeed ‘learning resource’-student relations, or, worse, ‘student-centred-learning’. This is what this chapter seeks to do, albeit paradoxically, by exploring the almost anti-pedagogical model that can be discerned in much of the work of my former teacher, Adrian Rifkin – a teacher from whom I am not sure I ever learned anything. I certainly don’t recall him ever obviously trying to teach me or anyone else anything. Nevertheless, we learned. Even if we all learned very different things.

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What is first and last to be critiqued and recast is the surely familiar theme of the pedagogical scene itself. Perhaps what is to be learned is why we must definitively move away from prioritising a teacher-student conception of pedagogy, as encapsulated in the mythic Socratic (or Oedipal) scenario of the teacher teaching and the student learning, in a clear communicative transfer. There may well be elements of this relation in pedagogy, but by virtue of its anthropocentric focus (and what Derrida referred to as its metaphysical phonocentrism), the discourse of teaching and learning misses vast tracts, realms and regions of material pedagogic relations. However, a term like ‘material pedagogic relations’ could be misleading. So let me stress that here it should be taken to refer neither to ‘new technologies’, C&IT, VLEs, nor to any other such acronymic new clothes, nor to teaching and learning ‘methods’, ‘techniques’ or ‘strategies’. These are all versions of the same sort of view or partition of the perceptible which construes pedagogy in terms of the metaphysics of presence so critiqued by Derrida, or is based on an ideal of transparent, unimpeded, ideally face-to-face communicative transfers, boiling down to an idealisation of the teacher-student relation (or scenario) that Deleuze called arboreal, because organised by the Platonic vision of teacher teaching student in the quiet, tranquillity and shade of a tree. Nothing like this ever took place in my ongoing relationship with Adrian Rifkin, which has always hinged on tangential discussions around research and researchers, their styles and limitations. Accordingly, this discussion, even though animated by questions of pedagogy, will instead – and perhaps unexpectedly – focus on teaching and learning’s putative other: namely, research. Or, perhaps even more unexpectedly, on questions of ‘research methods’ – and, what is more, on the ultimate artifice, contingency, constructedness and widespread foreclosure (of its own impossibility) at the heart of ‘method’. The contention is that a reconceptualisation of teaching and learning’s supposed opposite is necessary insofar as it reveals ‘research’ and ‘research methods’ to be neither opposite nor other, but rather a supplement that could and should subvert (or invert) and displace the terms of the entire debate about ‘education’. Of course, no academic study, paper, theory, exposition, demonstration or argument can, in itself, change anything. But in constructing an argument which first clarifies not only the falsity but also the reductive consequences of the separation of ‘teaching and learning’ from ‘research’ (a separation which prevails in academic, educational, funding and policy discourses), and secondly which champions an approach to ‘research methods’ that is deliberately antidisciplinary1 – or, that is invested in a project of altering disciplinarity,2 for any number of theoretical, ethical and political reasons – then this paper will at least be making available a further critique, one

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that may prove useful, that could be used to help alter disciplinary projects in the arts, humanities and even perhaps social sciences. Such projects are vital because – put bluntly – given the sustained attacks not just on ‘theory’ but on ‘useless’ arts and humanities tout court, both at (macro) government policy levels and at (micro) disciplinary orientation levels, it is vital that arguments, rationalisations, explanations and accounts at least exist which make cases for how and why to proceed otherwise – in ways that are different to the dominant approaches to pedagogy, in research and in teaching and learning ‘methods’. Without strong counterarguments, representatives of practices deemed ‘useless’ by the dominant discourse – in this case, dominant educational discourses – will find themselves floundering in the face of political and ideological attacks, as was the case as much during the decimation of UK public university funding initiated by a Labour government and completed by a weak Conservative-led coalition government in 2010 as during the trailblazing Thatcherite onslaught on arts and humanities fields in the 1980s.3 What is perhaps most astonishing about this is the fact that, despite three decades of living under the axe, ‘critical’ academia developed shockingly few intellectual retorts, rejoinders, responses or, indeed, simple counterarguments to the neoliberal, instrumental, neo-utilitarian rationales that have dominated and ultimately devastated the ‘critical’ faculties of the university themselves. Instead of arguments, ‘critical’ academics seem to have been much better at delivering denunciations, demonisations and moralisations. Yet, as Jacques Rancière has argued many times, political protests and projects and positions that do not simply demonise the other but that engage the other in detailed dialogue and precisely focused reasoned argument largely fare considerably better than projects which simply denounce and decry the evil enemy. And yet the latter has been the preferred mode of response by embattled and embittered arts and humanities academics and students.

The Partition of the Pedagogical Questions of disciplinary orientation, approach and method may seem to be ‘entirely’ or ‘merely academic’ – a world away from politics proper. But even a quick appraisal of the historical relationships between governmental educational policies and the kinds of fields and approaches that are valued and those that are undervalued quickly reveals that one need not be Antonio Gramsci or Louis Althusser to see that education per se is always and

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everywhere eminently political. The risk always faced by ‘critical’ scholarship is that of being ‘cut’ – struck from the books, struck from the record. So reasons must be constructed and given, clarifications, demonstrations and cases must be made for the crucial importance, value and even usefulness of even some of the most avowedly ‘purely academic’ work. Rather than entering into this matter from the macropolitical perspective of government (or governmentality), this chapter will instead remain focused on the question of pedagogy. This is because of the role played by what Jacques Rancière regularly refers to as the partition of the perceptible. Today, ‘teaching and learning’ is conventionally distinguished from ‘research’; ‘teaching methods’ distinguished from ‘research methods’, and so on. All of these categories have been in a sense invented, abstracted, isolated and separated out as part of the so-called professionalisation (aka proletarianisation) of university education. In this process of differentiation, definition, clarification and demarcation (objectification or objectifying), what has become obscured is the irreducible interconnectedness and expansiveness of the pedagogic field. Insisting on this expansiveness should be among the most consistent and insistent challenges to the professionalist, managerialist discourse that – to use the word that Jacques Rancière has put on the pedagogical-political map – stultifies all manner of pedagogical scene.4 In order to set out some of the terms and stakes of this matter, this chapter will primarily explore one text by Adrian Rifkin (2003). It is a text that is immensely rich, expansive and enlightening on many subjects. Given this richness, it is regrettably a text that I will be able to discuss here only very selectively and all too fleetingly and, inevitably therefore, reductively.5 Nevertheless, despite having to overlook many dimensions of it, I will try to pull one key thread out of it in order to amplify one important impulse within it. Specifically, I will characterise it as a reflection on archival (and theoretical) research methods, and argue that this reflection gives good reasons to regard Rifkin’s manner of archival research method as providing a crucial insight into all ‘methods’ and all pedagogy. I will characterise this as an autodidactics of bits. Rifkin is primarily known for his contributions to the fields of art history and queer theory. But, as becomes clear through this very uncanonical text, he should also be connected to the development of cultural studies in the UK. Accordingly, perhaps, Rifkin should also therefore be regarded as involved in the development of cultural studies as such, cultural studies as an institutional entity and disciplinary field per se – even if, as he suggests, one should really regard the history of cultural studies in terms of various

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BA degrees ‘lurching into being’ at a particular time6 rather than emerging according to any kind of master plan or overarching programme. Even so, placing Rifkin into the foreground of any narrative of cultural studies emergence is not a proposition that is likely to be met with universal agreement. Certainly, canonical histories of cultural studies would be unlikely to locate Rifkin at any kind of centre. Nor would he claim to have been. Nevertheless, like untold others, he was certainly present and active, on the unstable margins, and the occasional dilations or bursting of the banks of these margins into the unstable centres, of the emergent and constantly contested fields of cultural studies. But of course, anyone who knows (or, rather, thinks) anything about the history of cultural studies should baulk at the idea of a canonical history anyway. Which is one reason why, given the sustained critiques of the impositions of monolithic or univocal and linear histories on what are irreducibly complex formations, critiques that have been carried out in multiple fields and registers for many decades now, readers might already begin to anticipate why placing Rifkin into a relation with the discipline’s formation and history might be productive, enlightening, informative, and educational, in its own right. This is particularly so given that to place Rifkin’s narrative of formation at the centre of a narrative of formation makes us foreground the complexity of any such narrativisation and of the range of interlocking struggles involved. ‘It’s very easy to forget’, Rifkin points out, ‘that the formation of cultural studies was in fact a very real fight for syllabuses’:7 And not just a very real fight for syllabuses within institutions, but a real fight to establish those syllabuses in the face of institutions which didn’t understand them at all. I don’t mean the institutions we were working in – the polytechnics – but I mean the universities, who largely had no idea of what cultural studies was or what was going on in Birmingham, but who at the same time were given power over the polytechnics, in terms of validating and examining our courses, to allow them to come into being. So at the same time as we were trying to formulate the syllabuses in cultural studies, or the syllabuses in new forms of social historical studies, we had to educate the people who were put in power above us to authorise us to do these things. The struggle for syllabuses and the production of the new kinds of student through that syllabus would then make that syllabus work, which is something that is coterminous with the production of the kinds of text which would then further make that set of investigations possible.8

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This chapter seeks to focus on these different forms of pulling out of shape, out of time, and out of place – processes which Rifkin so consistently perceives and engages. In this context, what is also noteworthy is the fact that Rifkin has long had a close intellectual relationship with Jacques Rancière. For, despite Rancière’s lengthy and prestigious writing career in philosophy, ethics, theory and history, he is only now definitively coming to the forefront of theoretical debates within Anglophone academia. Given the recent widespread explosion of interest in the significance of the work of Jacques Rancière for a very wide range of disciplines, the extent to which Rifkin has for a very long time been influenced and orientated by the work of Rancière (albeit tangentially, much more in the manner of inspiration and mutual affiliation than anything like discipleship) ought to be acknowledged and deserves to be engaged. For if Rancière is a figure whose significance in the context of educational philosophy, theory and practice is still now continuing to emerge, internationally and cross-disciplinarily, then consideration of this case of one of the longest sustained Rancièrean relationships in Anglophone academia clearly has a unique currency. Given the extent to which Anglophone scholarship of many persuasions is currently trying to establish what a Rancièrean history, a Rancièrean cultural studies, a Rancièrean art history, a Rancièrean political theory, etc. will or should look like, therefore a consideration of what Rifkin’s longstanding Rancièreanism, not just in art history but also in cultural studies, does look like, should also recast this problematic – moving it from the speculative and futural by demonstrating that it already has several long histories, of which Rifkin’s is but one. Specifically, here, I hope to illustrate the actual and potential alterdisciplinarity inscribed in the convergence of Rancièrean insights and Rifkin’s approach to research, to the archive, and to the autodidactics of that encounter and that relation.

Against Satisfying Method As Rifkin notes, at a certain point in his thinking about history, historical processes and methods, during the 1970s, his archival research led him to a conviction that, in history, culture and society, ‘it’s not a question of a dialectic of base and superstructure, but it’s a case of the two never meeting in a form in which you can talk about satisfactory forms of historical narrative or satisfactory forms of historical outcome’. He continues, immediately: ‘That was the point, in late 1978, when I met Jacques Rancière’.9 In other words, Rifkin met Rancière in the immediate context of coming to suspect the impossibility of the veracity of satisfactory narratives and outcomes, the impossibility of simplicity, resolution, completion, solution or of dissolution.

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The other face of such a position, it soon becomes clear, is the enhanced awareness of the extent to which all of these impossibilities are repressed or foreclosed in academic discourse. To say this is not to activate a repressive hypothesis about academic discourse. It is rather to notice the extent to which academic discourse often trades in the fabrication and circulation of satisfactory narratives and complete outcomes. Realising and rejecting the repression or denial of the at best asymptotic relation between archive and account is what underpins and fuels Rifkin’s theoretical and practical approaches to teaching through and learning from archival research into popular (and unpopular) culture. To prefer to dwell with complexity rather than to prefer to try to exorcise it and impose a coherent narrative or conceptual form on it perhaps bespeaks a history, an ethos and a paradigm of cultural studies that is arguably in jeopardy of being, if not forgotten, then certainly subordinated by both disciplinary practices and disciplinary memories and histories in cultural studies and other fields. Such subordination or amnesia would condemn more than one field to live in more than one type of repetition. Moreover, it could constitute a palpable loss, a denudation of disciplinary possibility – in much the same way that a widespread ignorance about even the most prominent works of cultural studies from the 1970s leads students and academics of ‘discourse theory’ to constantly recover the same sorts of ground and make the same sorts of arguments, but in a much more ‘disciplined’ – as in formalised, constricted, strictured, hidebound – manner. Of course, to say this is not to elevate cultural studies per se from the same sort of charge. Indeed, cultural studies as a field arguably has an increasingly schizophrenic relation to history itself. On the one hand, as is well known, key figures of the field often insist on explaining cultural studies in terms of constructing rather grand narratives about the struggles involved in its disciplinary formation. But on the other hand, ‘theoretical’ cultural studies itself apparently proceeds more and more by way of simple regular replacements of one preferred theorist with another – substitutions, without any attempt to engage with the reasons for the perspectival and paradigm shifts; without engaging the question of why we are all meant to be ‘doing’, say, Deleuze now instead of Derrida, and why we are all going to have to be ‘doing’ Badiou next instead of Deleuze, and so on.10 Outside of the violent jolts of fashion that grip the movements of cultural theory, more empirical styles of cultural studies proceed with scientific method as the ideal, and inevitably therefore these approaches strongly subordinate, discipline and ‘police’ questions of historical formation, conflict and complexity. Nevertheless, some awareness of disciplinary history, of the formative struggles and arguments around politics, ethics, methods, foci, syllabi,

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investments, priorities, and so on, in the emergence of the disciplinary present could prove transformative of current orientations in such contexts. At the very least, engaging with Rifkin’s insights into and arguments about the emergence of cultural studies, as well as his theoretical perspectives on the pedagogical relation to/of the archive, could transform many of the practices – both in ‘research’ and ‘teaching’ – that currently have a widespread hegemony. What is even more pertinent is the fact that Rifkin’s own accounts of the history of cultural studies do not merely add information that will complete a picture. Rather, his contributions supplement any such picture in a way that pulls the picture or object out of shape and reconfigures it as something rather different, and, indeed, render it constitutively uncompletable. This is not to suggest that Rifkin ought to be numbered among the many who proposed – as a key feature of their intervention – one or another argument about constitutive incompletion. The phrase ‘constitutive incompletion’ itself certainly had great currency during the 1980s and 1990s, arising through the encounters between various strands of poststructuralism and, in particular, Lacanian scholarship.11 And Rifkin can certainly be placed within or in a relation to this moment and movement. Nevertheless, his tangent and ‘take’ on it never went with the flow of reiterating the importance of ‘impossibility’ or ‘incompletion’. Rather, Rifkin is invested much more in the importance of reconstructing through the principled pulling out of shape; or a process that I have come to think of as this autodidactics of bits.

Aims, Objectives and Outcomes This autodidactics of bits is of direct importance for cultural studies. For, debates about pedagogy are not only dominant within the aim-, objective-, output- and outcome-oriented world of the ‘professionalised’ contemporary university, in which managerialist approaches to pedagogy have significantly restructured and reorientated university teaching and research activities in recent decades. They are also arguably at the heart of any and every possible cultural studies ‘project’. Many thinkers, influenced directly or indirectly by Gramsci, for instance, regard culture as pedagogy. Hence, debates about pedagogy are inextricable from questions of culture, politics and intervention. Gramscian and Bourdieuian paradigms in particular have been dominant touchstones in this regard. But Rifkin’s alibi, orientation and theoretical underpinning relates much more to Jacques Rancière’s work, and in particular, I would argue, to Rancière’s reading of the radical pedagogue, Joseph Jacotot: the educator whose

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fundamental lesson Rancière claims to have been that not only can one learn without being taught but also that one can teach what one does not know, and that the imposition or enforcement of method and discipline is a stultification of the universal capacity to creatively solve riddles that all people are imbued with and whose existence illustrates a much more essential truth than any disciplining or systematising institutionalisation can ever reveal.12 Rancière’s intervention is increasingly well known. But Rifkin’s own interpretation or performative elaboration of (ir)responsible Jacototism is less clear cut, and indeed adds some important dimensions to Rancièrean Jacototism. To elucidate this, I would like to position Rifkin within a context of educational debate, a world of different paradigms, many of them utterly different to any of the art, literary, cultural, political, queer, historical and philosophical paradigms that Rifkin himself ever discusses explicitly. Of course, given what I have already said about constitutive incompletion, I can hardly now move on to try to place Rifkin within a definitive history. Nevertheless, I can relate his work and words to some important bits of it. One big tumult in particular: postmodernity. Most relevant here is that the gathering storm that Lyotard announced in 1979 came to be characterised not simply by discrete, disconnected language games (paralogies) and the corresponding proliferation of mutual unintelligibility between groups and contexts, but rather, across many fields and sectors, by a new type of connectedness.13 This took the form of the rise to dominance of discourses asserting the importance of efficiency, profit, market mechanisms, choice and freedom, coupled with the corresponding intensification of techniques of control and restrictions of autonomy in increasingly professionalised sectors such as education. Indeed, it was in the universities and other public sector institutions such as health, education and social services, that entrance into the ‘postmodern’ era amounted to the growth of managerialism and the intensification of what some came to call ‘audit culture’.14 Of course, others, most prominently Foucault, had equally alerted us to the nearly invisible, microscopic, micrological emergence of panoptical power (and of course Deleuze subsequently picked up this baton and ran with it into the famous theorisation of societies of control). But Foucault captures perfectly the simple/subtle logic at work in panopticism in an insight that also applies to managerialism, as well as to disciplinarity, and to all of panopticism’s mongrel offspring besides: The exercise of discipline presupposes a mechanism that coerces by means of observation; an apparatus in which the techniques that make it possible to see induce effects of power, and in which,

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conversely, the means of coercion make those on whom they are applied clearly visible.15 The growth of the audit culture in education has seen the implementation of an ostensibly market-based logic that is actually a control-based logic. In universities it has increasingly taken the form of a requirement that disciplines justify themselves according to ultimately utilitarian criteria. Under such criteria, the prevailing questions to be answered are: What is the point of this? What is the use of this? What are the profits or returns of it, and for whom? On the ground, in the bookkeeping, in the administration, in the paperwork, the registration, the assessment, the documentation, management and delivery of university education, there has flourished all of the micrological apparatuses of surveillance and regulation that, to a greater or lesser extent, anyone involved in university education takes for granted today. ‘Education’ became end-orientated, outcome-orientated. Courses and modules now have to have explicit and detailed rationales. More and more clear expectations are set out for coursework, combined with more and more prescriptive stipulations of assessment criteria and guidelines. Terms like ‘learning aims’ and ‘learning outcomes’ have become so familiar that they are now entirely unremarkable phrases within everyday academic-bureaucratic language. Teaching has to have an aim. Learning has to have an outcome. Both must at least pretend to be knowable and known in advance. There are enormous problems with all of the premises and propositions underpinning this dominant neo-utilitarianism. Thomas Docherty sums them up concisely when he points out that the notion of ‘outcomes’ is ‘part of the triumph of the managerialist ideology damaging education at the present time’, because it demands that educators be obliged ‘to predict with total certainty […] what the student who follows the course will be able to do after she has followed it’.16 Yet, he complains: An education that is worthy of the name cannot predict outcomes: it is part of the point of education that we do not know what will eventuate in our processes of thinking and working and experimenting. In this sense, education should be of the nature of the event: the Docherty who is there after reading and thinking about Joyce or Proust or Rilke or Woolf is different from the Docherty who was there before that activity; but the earlier Docherty could never have predicted what the later one might think – that was the point of the exercise of reading in the first place: to think things that were previously undreamt of in my philosophy.17

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Docherty has a point. However, closer inspection suggests that in order to make it so powerfully he has had to bodge together some very different things along the way, things that do not necessarily run together in quite the dramatic all-or-nothing mode of his polemical formulation. Specifically, Docherty conflates two pedagogical scenes or positions: one of teaching or of the teacher; and one of learning or of being the learner. Yet, it is eminently possible to be or become both: for teacher and student to change positions unexpectedly; for the teacher to learn and the learner to teach, and so on and so forth. There are other problems with Docherty’s argument that I will return to in due course. But nevertheless, despite the limitations involved in constructing such a stark (hyperbolical) opposition between the predictable and the event, this all-or-nothing argument clearly flags up the terms of an entrenched and long-raging debate. Moreover, the terms of this debate do indeed boil down to two starkly different conceptions of education. One position sees (or values) education as training (education as predictable). Another sees (or values) education as, so to speak, revolutionary transformation, alteration, or interruption (education as event).

Training and Event Education conceived as training has been decisively in the ascendant in the dominant neo-utilitarian discourse, in the UK at least, since the Thatcherite onslaught on ‘useless’ arts and humanities in the 1980s.18 The ‘good’, the ‘useful’ education, became defined as training: for industry, for vocations, for money-making. The values inscribed within this position increasingly hold not only hegemony but actually now a stranglehold on educational policy, funding, and orientations in the UK (and elsewhere). This is most clearly testified to by the quick move to withdraw all government funding from the teaching and provision of undergraduate courses in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences in England, by the recently elected Conservative coalition government in the UK in 2010. As radical as the UK government’s actions against the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences have been since 2010, their position is not new. It is in fact programmatically predictable, according to a two centuries old discourse about university education in the UK; a discourse which, according to Robert J. C. Young,19 has been organised by an ongoing and entrenched polemic about whether university education should have any use. Set up within the utilitarian frames of this discourse, and amplified by the neoliberal marketisation of everything since the 1980s (and further confounded by the

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prevalence of a fuzzy ‘puritanical realist’ logic which, in its insistence on the superiority of ‘practical usefulness’, confuses ‘usefulness’ and ‘value’ and comes up with a naïve sense of ‘use value’ as the yardstick of all use and all value), UK government policy overwhelmingly prefers that which can present itself as unambiguously ‘useful’ in the most instrumental (and indeed metaphysical) sense. Hence the common sense: the only useful education is education that only has a useful use. The opposite or alternative position available today, in the current discursive configuration, prefers not so much ‘uselessness’ as such, but rather involves a critique and a principled rejection of all utilitarian ‘end and outcome’ orientated values in education. It does so for at least two reasons. The first is by dint of an argument which contends that to decide in advance what should be studied, taught and done amounts to a kind of closing down of possibility of discovery and new insight – a closing down of the possibility of encountering the new, the unexpected, the surprise, the event, the different, the other, or indeed even (as Derrida preferred) the future. The second reason is the rather less universal and rather more particular fact that ‘pragmatic’, ‘vocational’, ‘training’ or otherwise end-and-outcomeorientated values always threaten to close down the future employment of those in education who are not involved in education as training. Given Docherty’s rendition of this position, we can see that the rejection of a utilitarian approach to education (or a rejection of the ‘education as training’ paradigm) is easily associated with the arts and humanities. However, it is a perspective that is equally prevalent within the sciences. In the sciences, a version of the ‘useful v. useless’ debate has long raged between what Lyotard in the 1970s called ‘technoscience’ (i.e., science that operates ultimately in the service of profit-seeking corporations or the military), on the one hand, and ‘basic’ or ‘fundamental’ scientific research, on the other (i.e., the advocation of theory and experiment; sometimes but not necessarily for theory and experiment’s ‘own sake’, but also because of equivalent arguments about the unknowability, in advance, of what might come to be known; or, in other words, because there are more things – whether or not potentially ‘useful’ things – in heaven and earth than can be dreamt of from the position of the present). Even so, things are not so simple. All-or-nothing interpretations of events and orientations may themselves be rather more predictable than evental – missing subtlety, complexity, multiplicity. For instance, despite the undoubted reality of the intensification of bureaucratic surveillance infusing and permeating the delivery of university education today, surely (and actually according to the tenets of poststructuralist ontologies) there must

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always be gaps, hiatuses, aporias, spaces, play, scope for the unpredictable, the event, the future, etc. These will exist no matter how all-encompassing the statement and enforcement of rationale, aim, method, outcome. Surely, even the most programmatic programme cannot ward off or entirely control the possibility of an event. Moreover, to climb down from the hyperbolical: no matter how febrile, surely no administrator ever said that educators must ‘predict with total certainty’ everything that students might possibly learn during a course.20 And besides, surely providing a rationale for a course which consists of reading Joyce or Proust or Rilke or Woolf is not some kind of betrayal or reduction or simplification of the reading of these writers. Indeed, on the other hand, as anyone who has undertaken any kind of ‘mere training’ can testify – whether in martial arts or music or marketing, language learning, or management – there is no sense in which ‘mere training’, rationalised by predictable outcomes, precludes the possibility of a completely transformative event. I as educator can feel strongly and can give reason upon reason why I might want my students to read Marx, Althusser, Laclau, Hall, Chow or Rifkin – or, indeed, why I might want my other types of students to perform a martial art form three times per day (preferably first thing in the morning) – even if they cannot understand why they should do so, especially in advance of having done so, and even if I cannot predict precisely what they will (also) learn, or what will (also) happen to them, along with what I want them to learn and what I want to happen to them in doing so. Or what happens to me, both in doing the same myself and/or instructing others to do what I do or indeed what I have never ever done, and don’t know how to do – whether that be ‘read Rilke’ or meditate in the lotus position. Similarly, it needs to be remembered: the theorists, or artists, or humanists, or eventists, whether from philosophy or from physics, must not be assumed to be thwarted or tragic heroes: as if some noble, principled Banquo to the murderous managerialist Macbeth. There is absolutely no guarantee, for instance, that those involved in areas that neo(liberal)-utilitarianism deems ‘useless’ are not, in fact, terrible elitists; and there is absolutely no guarantee that their works, their subjects, their orientations, their knowledge, and all the rest of it are necessarily ‘good’. Reciprocally, it deserves to be said: nor is panopticism somehow simply ‘bad’. Nor is an audit necessarily negative. As Timothy Bahti once argued, in a deconstructive argument focusing on one of the most often and easily pilloried ‘useless’ subjects, history: to hold to account, to demand a rationale, a justification, a reasoned argument for existence and activity, is not necessarily to condemn ‘arts’ subjects to death or to utilitarianism. It can, on the contrary, be an occasion for

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retheorising, philosophising, and perhaps even politicising or ethicising an otherwise ‘merely academic’ field. He writes: For all the activity devoted to historical knowledge – by which I mean the courses, the examinations, the papers and dissertations and submitted manuscripts – there [should] be the repeated occasion, on each such occasion, for these small and simple questions: How? Why? So what? […] [E]ach bit of historical knowledge, each occasion for its articulation and transmission, should become the occasion for inquiry into its methodology and teleology. Even to acknowledge, and to insist upon the acknowledgement, that history has a history, and that the history ‘known’ is not a substantial object but a subjectively constructed cognition, can be critical in this context. Put more polemically: no history of literature, no history of art, no history of society, without a philosophy of history, a method of historiography, an internal and external accounting.21 So, from a broadly deconstructive position, this would be an example of ‘good’ accounting, with potentially ‘good’ transformative consequences. Yet is deconstruction therefore simply ‘good’? It was precisely deconstructive arguments such as Bahti’s which led Timothy Bewes to argue that, given deconstruction’s investment in, so to speak, restructuring (by other names), therefore, it could be said to be the case that: The revolution ratified by deconstruction, in fact, is the capitalist one, which effects the gradual anonymization and atomization of society. This revolution lacks any ‘end’ other than itself: it involves, as the Communist Manifesto puts it, the ‘constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation’.22 This is not the place to adjudicate the status of anything and everything that has emerged since, within, because of or in relation to something about ‘capitalism’. But Bewes’ challenge to the perceived radicality or unequivocal progressiveness of deconstructive scholarship is pertinent in terms of the problematisation of what Derrida himself called ‘clearconsciencism’: the belief in one’s rectitude, the conviction of one’s rightness, the belief that one’s position is sound, justified, clean and reliable, and that the outcomes of one’s interventions will be beneficial, etc. (Given this, of course, Bewes’ own challenge thereby becomes open to the accusation of being symptomatic of something to do with the capitalist revolution too.) The point here is that if what can be picked up is the extent to which, like many radical thinkers, what Bahti wanted and expressed

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the wish for in his 1992 essay was a deconstruction and reconstruction of humanities fields, including history, then arguably the response to that request was already well underway, well in the post, and being delivered and injected into arts and humanities departments the world over, through the various different machines of disciplinary deconstruction that travelled under such names as feminism, women’s studies, black and other ethnicity studies, poststructuralism, postmodernism, and, of course, cultural studies. Of course, the broadly contemporary lurching into being of so many movements, academic and disciplinary revolutions and transformations can be historicised and diversely diagnosed. But although Bewes connects ‘constant revolutionizing’ with ‘capitalism’, many other approaches could couch this in rather less starkly political, conflictual, or indeed potentially or implicitly moralistic terms. Although Marx did not have words like ‘modernity’ in his vocabulary, thinkers such as Heidegger or Benjamin, for instance, connected modernity (capitalist or otherwise) with shock. And this latter kind of vocabulary or worldview is arguably much better equipped and much less liable to collapse into moralism and judgementality. The effort to try to prevent thinking and theory about the contemporary world from collapsing into political moralism is what led Jameson to argue that disapproving of or denouncing the historical period of ‘postmodernity’ and its productions amounted to little more than a category mistake.

All That Was Solid This is another way of saying that the modern world is hyperconnected, hypercommunicated and paradoxically therefore disconnected, chaotic, cacophonic, isolating, fluid and antagonistic. This is why, in The Order of Things,23 Foucault proposes that knowledge per se must henceforth be understood as ‘a matter of tracking the broken lines, shapes, and patterns that may have become occluded, gone underground, or taken flight’.24 Similarly, Sam Weber reminds us of Bachelard’s reflections on the implications that contemporary science has for our understanding of knowledge: All the basic notions can in a certain manner be doubled; they can be bordered by complementary notions. Henceforth, every intuition will proceed from a choice; there will thus be a kind of essential ambiguity at the basis of scientific description and the immediacy of the Cartesian notion of evidence will be perturbed.25 Referring to Foucault’s genealogical work on the history of knowledge epistemes in The Order of Things, Rey Chow notes Foucault’s contention

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that ‘the premodern ways of knowledge production, with their key mechanism of cumulative (and inexhaustible) inclusion, came to an end in modern times’. The consequence of this has been that ‘the spatial logic of the grid’ has given way ‘to an archaeological network wherein the once assumed clear continuities (and unities) among differentiated knowledge items are displaced onto fissures, mutations, and subterranean genealogies, the totality of which can never again be mapped out in taxonomic certitude and coherence’.26 As such, any knowledge establishment, any construction, even any comparison, must henceforth become ‘an act that, because it is inseparable from history, would have to remain speculative rather than conclusive, and ready to subject itself periodically to revamped semiotic relations’. This is so because ‘the violent yoking together of disparate things has become inevitable in modern and postmodern times’. As such, even an act of ‘comparison would also be an unfinalizable event because its meanings have to be repeatedly negotiated’. This situation arises ‘not merely on the basis of the constantly increasing quantity of materials involved but more importantly on the basis of the partialities, anachronisms, and disappearances that have been inscribed over time on such materials’ seemingly positivistic existences’.27 And all of this bears directly not only on the history but also on the method of Adrian Rifkin, both in terms of its theoretical and empirical justification and its mode of enactment. Each is intimately involved in the other, calling it up and reflecting its validity and almost ineluctable appropriateness, even in its idiosyncratic impropriety. Inevitably, there must be many possible histories, and many possible disputations of the epochal event of the ends of the cumulative. But Adrian Rifkin’s account of the very first undergraduate work in cultural studies deserves some consideration at this time. As he recalls, ‘between 1970 and 1975 in Portsmouth […] the first cultural studies BA anywhere had come into existence’.28 It emerged ‘through the work of a group of staff who came from the kinds of background that were themselves part of the formative myth of cultural studies, as some kind of epistemic break with previous modes of disciplinary formation. But also a group of staff working very closely with Stuart Hall, who came down and helped design the courses and who was himself the first external examiner of the course’.29 Rifkin’s discussion of this emergence of cultural studies is itself far from being a simple recounting of a chronology. Rather, it is a reflection on emergence itself. As he notes, one of the things that was most striking about this first cultural studies undergraduate work was that ‘the kinds of words which students had used in their essays in the 1970s were words like “articulate” and “mediate”’. These undergraduate essays, he argues:

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orientated themselves around particular words; certain words which took a kind of distance from the materials they examined and suggested that these materials could be put together in a way which was not a question of sequence and not a question of historical temporality, but a question of the way in which ideas, the logic of ideas, and the material conditions of the society, could be mediated through each other via something which we might call ‘articulation’ or a series of articulations.30 There is an enormous amount that could be said about Rifkin’s recollection of the place of the notion of ‘articulation’ as organising of cultural studies discourse even in the early 1970s (long before, say, the first book of Ernesto Laclau,31 the one of which Stuart Hall so approved, and up to fifteen years before Laclau and Mouffe’s blockbuster Hegemony and Socialist Strategy,32 which put the idea of ‘articulation’ on the international academic map in a huge way, but a book of which Hall was extremely critical, and which marks a watershed dividing line between Birmingham-style cultural studies and an emergent Laclauian and proto-Žižekian ‘discourse analysis’ – or, rather, ‘discourse theory’). But what Rifkin singles out is the way it indicates the emergence of something very important going on: ‘something which was I suppose both “metacritical” (taking a step back from the cultural materials and historical materials with which they were engaged, and seeing them as part of a cultural process), on the one hand, and, on the other, part of a political project’:33 So there was a project, which was to move forward the relation between disciplinary methodologies and each other in terms of their mutual criticism on the one hand, and to move forward the role of university thinking, in terms of its hold on society, its critique of society, on the other. So if you like, if you started reading the use of the word ‘articulation’ as symptomatic of what was going on you could say that what those essays symptomatized was a desire – in their discourse, that is: in the particularity of their discourse – a desire for theory to be both productive and effective – to both produce new forms of knowledge and to articulate those forms of knowledge in such a way that they were genuinely critical.34 Rifkin repeatedly contrasts this ‘desire for theory to be both productive and effective’ – which he associates with frustrated, transformative impulses – with the rather different, but widespread, desire, to ‘construct satisfactory historical teleologies leading up to oneself and one’s own desires’. The latter involves ‘fantasising around categories’, taking such forms as believing in the ‘otherness of the working class and the bourgeoisie to each other as being

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a point of non-meeting and non-touching’. In Disagreement,35 Rancière characterises the object under critique here as being the geometrical conception of society, wherein each type of social identity is regarded as having – and having to be in – its own proper place. Rancière’s work has consistently problematised such a conception. In Rifkin’s words: Put very crudely, this is the burden of those early articles of Rancière: that, if what the worker desires is to be a poet, rather than to be on the barricade, in a sense that desire presupposes a dissolution of the whole social relations upon which the concept of the poet itself has become constructed – if you like it’s a kind of Kantian category. So this bringing of a kind of neo-Kantianism into the political field, which Rancière achieved I think, was one of an immense metacritical potential, and a potential to disrupt the ways in which studies can settle down into their own genre of becoming themselves, and becoming consolidated. I think that this has largely happened with cultural studies.36 In Rancièrean terms, Rifkin rejects the police dimensions of disciplinarity, the way disciplinary structures, categories, fantasies and discursive fetishes work to partition and to police and discipline the perceptible and the sayable. Rather than this, Rifkin deliberately privileges approaches which demand the ‘reconstruction of something in its difficulty’, the refusal of simplification, and in a sense of conclusion, if only to ‘disrupt the ways in which studies can settle down into their own genre of becoming themselves, and becoming consolidated’: Rancière’s work of that period enabled me to precipitate and consolidate the kind of ideas which I was beginning to develop myself. I was not thinking in terms of ‘the relative autonomy of the superstructure’, or in terms of the way in which forms of figuration then levered out, utopianly or dystopianly, or whatever; so that, for example, the political cartoons of the Paris Commune (which is what I was then working on) become a register not of a kind of treasury of socialist history and its tragedies and its ups and downs, but a site on which we can historically represent the impossibility of reading things in that ‘clean way’ – that way in which one can construct satisfactory historical teleologies leading up to oneself and one’s own desires. So it is a way of taking oneself out of condensation and displacement and daydreaming about one’s politics through cultural materials, and thinking of history not so much pessimistically, but in a way in which, if you like, the hyper-metacritical position has to win out over the archive in the end. You have to precipitate situations in which the

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metacritical wins out over the potential of the ‘satisfactory’ or ‘whole narrative’ coming out of the archive.37 The archive is thus never the repository of the proof of the theory, but rather the source of potentially interminable demonstration or verification of if not the undecidability of the demonstration or verification then certainly at least the impossibility of establishing ‘satisfactory whole narratives’ that are actually reliable or based upon attentive readings. ‘Satisfactory whole narratives’ are then not only imaginary or phantasy gratifications but also actually symptomatic of the enactment or embodiment of a police logic that takes place in the mode of a kind of self-blinding. Satisfactory whole narratives are not based on reading, but are rather produced from condensations, displacements, daydreams and desires. So, rather than this, rather than basing or orientating research on some fantasy of completion, completeness or completability, Rifkin instead follows what he calls a paratactical ‘method’: It’s a kind of, not a diagramaticising (that’s too simple) but a topological analysis of quite tiny elements of theory against quite tiny or sometimes quite extensive figures taken from other forms of culture, and (in the Kristevan terms) a listening to the dynamics in such a way as not to say ‘this one has authority over that’ or ‘this one is the subject of that one’ or ‘the material for that one’, but in such a way as to listen to the figural densities of the dynamics of the texts which I am setting alongside each other. So the method is one of parataxis. It essentially works with very tiny units of theory, such as a paragraph of Lacan, say, on the formation of the unconscious, a paragraph of Kristeva, on the double disabusal of the young girl with the phallus, in terms of which she talks about the feminine, therefore the concept of the feminine in Kristeva; and the allowing of the configurations of these materials to lie alongside materials so that one begins to make unexpected kinds of readings of or listenings to those materials. Now this means creating new kinds of objects of attention. In terms of the cultural-historical narrative, I call it anahistorical. This is a historical equivalent of anamorphic – it’s a kind of historical object pulled out of shape by its framings, which might be Lacan and Saint Augustine. But equally, those framings pulled out of shape by the object, and a reading of the suppositions which we bring to it.38 This method therefore involves acknowledging that any object must necessarily exist ‘in increasingly complex place’, made up of such coordinates

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as ‘the textual interpenetrations, the complex textual formations, the processes of listening to the text, listening to yourself listening to the text, and producing a text which is your own text out of that process’.39 Such a methodology has its historical and philosophical antecedents and precedents, of course. Rifkin’s anahistorical method certainly comes close to what Rey Chow discusses in terms of that ‘materialist though elusive fact about translation’ that Walter Benjamin proposed: namely, that ‘translation is primarily a process of putting together’. As Chow explains, for Benjamin, translation is a process which ‘demonstrates that the “original,” too, is something that has been put together’ – and she adds, following Benjamin: ‘in its violence’.40 Rifkin’s method, whether thought of as anahistorical, or as materialist cultural translation, or indeed as an autodidactics of bits, certainly has a relation to violence. One if its many virtues is the ways that its theoretical force does a violence to all scientistic approaches to historical or cultural study of any kind. This theoretical force derives from its facing up to all of the nigh-on impossible complexities implied in academic endeavours, rigorously conceived: the impossibility of omniscience, of encyclopaedic knowledge and mastery of a field, of the existence of a field that is one, of the ability to enclose, pin down, and establish facts or unequivocal connections; the impossibility of taking into consideration all of the things that would need to be taken into a consideration were anything like a compelling ‘objective’ or even ‘satisfactory’ account of anything to be possible – in other words, a facing up to the impossibility of objectivity, and the absolute textuality of texts, through deliberately staging encounters, and listening to the dynamics and the evental character of the encounters. Now, arguably all academic approaches involve such staging. But few openly acknowledge this. Rifkin, however, has the courage to face up to the inevitability and the contingency, the reality and the artifice, the facticity, fictionality, factionality, and the awareness that the full implications of such staging are ultimately unmasterable. The question is what would happen if others had the courage to follow suit.

Notes 1 John Mowitt, Text: The Genealogy of an Antidisciplinary Object (Durham and London: Duke, 1992). 2 Paul Bowman ‘Alterdisciplinarity’, Culture, Theory and Critique, Vol. 49, No. 1 (2008), pp. 93–110. This paper is online both at the journal website, of course, and (open access) at: http://cardiff.academia.edu/PaulBowman/Papers/9926/ Alterdisciplinarity.

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3 As Young explains: ‘The difficulty for literary theorists, when faced with a new “technologico-Thatcherite” assault on the humanities, was that the terms by which their subject was established historically, and the only effective terms with which it could still be defended, were those of cultural conservatism and humanist belief in literature and philosophy that “literary theory” has, broadly speaking, been attacking since the 1970s. When theorists found themselves wanting to defend their discipline against successive government cuts they discovered that the only view with which they could vindicate themselves was the very one which, in intellectual terms, they wanted to attack. One might say that the problem was that the oppositional literary or theoretical mode was not the oppositional institutional one – a situation that in itself illustrates the limitations of oppositional politics. In short, for theorists the problem has been that in attacking humanism they have found themselves actually in consort with government policy. This has meant, effectively, that it has often been left to those on the right to defend the study of the humanities as such: symbolized, perhaps, when the University of Oxford, traditionally, as we have seen, the main object of utilitarian hostility, refused to award Margaret Thatcher the customary honorary degree given to British prime ministers’ (Robert J. C. Young, ‘The Idea of a Chrestomathic University’, Logomachia: The Conflict of the Faculties (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska, 1992), p. 113). 4 Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987/1991). 5 Adrian Rifkin, ‘Inventing Recollection’, Interrogating Cultural Studies, ed. Paul Bowman (London: Pluto, 2003). The whole paper is online at the open access resource of academia.edu, at: http://goldsmiths.academia.edu/AdrianRifkin/Papers/323032/ Inventing_Recollection. 6 Ibid., p. 105. 7 Ibid., p. 104. 8 Ibid., pp. 104–5. 9 Ibid., p.112. 10 Simon During (‘Postdisciplinarity: A Talk Given at the Humanities Research Centre at the ANU. May 2011’. Unpublished paper, 2011) has recently proposed that the new phenomenon of the borderless free flow of academic fashions – in which people working in all manner of nominally different fields all over the university and all over the world will all of a sudden start taking seriously the work of this or that theorist – indicates the extent to which academic disciplines are in fact post-disciplinary. ‘Disciplinary’ knowledge is less and less bordered and bounded; scholars are less and less disciplinarily hidebound, less and less invested in their own putative fields. 11 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985). 12 Rancière, op. cit. 13 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1979/1984). 14 Peter Kilroy, Rowan Bailey and Nicholas Chare, eds, Parallax, ‘Auditing Culture’, Vol. 10, No. 2 (2004). 15 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London: Vintage, 1977/1995), pp. 170–1. 16 Thomas Docherty, ‘Responses: An Interview’, Interrogating Cultural Studies, ed. Paul Bowman (London: Pluto, 2003), p. 223. 17 Ibid., p. 224. 18 Robert J. C. Young, ‘The Idea of a Chrestomathic University’, Logomachia: The Conflict of the Faculties (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1992). 19 Young, op. cit. 20 Although, since drafting this sentence, an external examiner at an exam board for the BA in Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies on which I teach at Cardiff University raised a

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range of ‘criticisms’, among which was the fact that many modules did not demonstrably test or assess each and every one of the stated learning aims and outcomes on certain modules. And this was not the least of his criticisms and suggestions for ‘improvement’. All of them amounted to suggestions for increasing panopticism, standardisation, regularity, disciplining and policing within, across and between every module. Despite this, I have decided to let the sentence stand. The reader can decide whether my argument could or should perhaps have gone the other way instead. Timothy Bahti, ‘The Injured University’, Logomachia: The Conflict of the Faculties, ed. Richard Rand (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), pp. 72–3. Timothy Bewes, ‘Vulgar Marxism, The Spectre Haunting Spectres of Marx’, Parallax 20, ‘the new international’, ed. Martin McQuillan, Vol. 7, No. 3, July–September (2001), p. 92. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock, 1970). Rey Chow, The Age of the World Target (Durham and London: Duke, 2006), p. 81. Bachelard, cited in Sam Weber, Institution and Interpretation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. xii Chow, The Age of the World Target, p. 81. Ibid. Rifkin, ‘Inventing Recollection’, p. 101. Ibid. Ibid., p. 102. Ernesto Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (London: New Left Books, 1977). Laclau and Mouffe, op. cit. Rifkin, ‘Inventing Recollection’, p. 102. Ibid. Jacques Rancière, Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). Rifkin, ‘Inventing Recollection’, p. 114. Ibid., p. 113. Ibid., pp. 121–2. Ibid., p. 122. Rey Chow, Primitive Passions (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 185.

Figure 7a: Eyal Sivan and Audrey Maurion. Two frames from Pour l’Amour du Peuple (2004).

8 Queer and Feminist Voices Writing/Facing Death Subjectivity, Mothers and Embodiment Beyond the Public Domain Griselda Pollock

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rom 26 October 1977 until 15 September 1979, the French literary critic and cultural theorist Roland Barthes wrote, on a series of specially prepared slips of paper, created from quartering a standard sheet, brief notes that daily recorded the process of grieving following the death of his mother on 25 October 1977 beside whom he had lived his entire life. Barthes named this practice his Journal de deuil.1 It might also be considered a ‘last self-portrait’ and a final testament. It might also be a portrait of the subject of grief as much as it is testimony to the meaning of Henriette Barthes who functions publically only as the mother of a renowned writer. Her meaning, however, is only fully discovered for her son when he becomes the subject of her death and she the subject of his grief. Losing the mother is a universal affliction. His losing this person shifts us between the mythic structures of subjectivity grounded in kinship with all that implies sociologically, anthropologically and psychologically, and the singularity of our relationships in which our singularities overflow but are never free from such structurations. Where do the mythic and the contingent meet except in the moment, modes, and effects of writing? Following his death aged 64 on 25 March 1980 following a road accident on 25 February, these pages of the Journal de deuil were deposited in the French archives IMEC. They were finally edited and published under that

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title only in 2009. Other posthumous publications include a collection titled Incidents, edited by François Wahl, which include extracts from other diaries – of Barthes’s erotic life in Paris and Morocco as well of his memories of boyhood in the French countryside. The ‘journal of mourning’ is, it seems, the final punctuation point of the writer Barthes. He did not long outlive its prolongation of his own life by writing it. It is here that the musings on the death of his mother by a French, Protestant, queer man touches my own preoccupations as a feminist Warburgian. Lifelong grief, endless mourning and the significance of maternal-feminine have formed long-term areas of reflection in my own work since it took a turn that finds its confirmation in Adrian Rifkin’s innovative and unclassifiable use of family memory and archival research in Street Noises: Parisian Pleasure 1900–1940 published in 1993. In September 1992 I spoke at the symposium organised by the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London to launch Elisabeth Bronfen’s landmark study, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic.2 It was the invitation to think about death, framed in relation to how aestheticised femininity displaces masculine terror before mortality, that provided an opportunity to create a work that I had long wanted to write but which stepped outside the normal parameters of art historical writing within which I had sought authorisation as a scholar, despite troubling it with heavily theorised feminist interventions. Intensely and affectingly personal – a performative piece spoken within an academic forum and later made as a video installation and an actual performance – the paper was crafted in one swift writing session. Symbolically structured by the number seven, it was composed of two sets of three ‘deadly’ tales with a fourth as centre and hinge. All seven touched on bereavement and mourning, a feature of my own adult life that had never been included directly in any formal writing on art until that date. I had, however, for some years been working, somewhat unsuccessfully, on a photo-text artwork about miscarriage and maternal loss drawn from re-photographed image traces of my South African childhood and autobiographical narratives inspired by art feminist practices after the manner of Jo Spence’s Beyond the Family Album while also engaging in dialogue with Roland Barthes’s fascinating conclusion from his own review of photographs of his mother from her childhood, from the time before he existed about which Barthes famously stated: ‘With regard to many of these photographs, it was History which separated me from them. Is History not simply that time when we were not born?’3 Barthes it was who had taught us about the profound connection between photography and death in his own study of the photographic archive of his mother.4 My 1992 turn to this topic marked the first moment in

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28 years that I had been able to ‘look at’ photographs of my deceased mother and not find myself endlessly disappointed at their opacity and their failure to yield that which I longed to meet again in this mechanically registered index of a disappeared person: ‘this was here and that was once’. This moment of transgression and the interjection of a personal voice into concurrent analytical writings in 1992 would initiate a series of interventions I dared to perform over the 1990s into forms of writing, forms that nowadays have acquired their own naming: art writing. This term originates with David Carrier’s Art Writing published in 1987 where it has a largely philosophical colouring.5 Hyphenated, the term was taken up by Mieke Bal for her intervention in the reading of artworks by Louise Bourgeois that stood outside of the disciplinary structures of art history.6 Most recently, as a title for professorships and a graduate programme at Goldsmith’s College, it has touched on a novel interdisciplinary interface of theory, writing, and artistic practice where now Adrian Rifkin practices his own ‘craft’. During the 1990s, my lectures turned into performances. I made videos of images that accompanied lectures in order to go beyond the ‘illustrated slide lecture’ format in which the art historian normally operates. I provocatively blurred the boundaries between official and personal narratives by juxtaposing a family photograph on a beach in South Africa with a painting by Gauguin.7 I mixed public and private archives and shifted from formal culture to informal ephemera and back. All of these gestures were, of course, deeply rooted in and sustained by feminist culture that could perhaps be considered, by definition, interdisciplinary in a formidably transgressive way. They owed their daring to a long conversation with Adrian Rifkin’s practices of teaching and writing that cannot be contained by being simply a shift from the disciplinary to the interdisciplinary. They form a search for what Adrian Rifkin and Mieke Bal, from different positions, call a search for unreason with which to counter the reason of art history as we have inherited it. There is interdisciplinarity that functions now as an obligatory condition of meeting grant-giving bodies’ criteria to secure collaboration between scholars in different parts of sometimes-different universities. There is interdisciplinarity that requires input from different specialities to produce a single outcome such as when engineers and cardiologists design a heart valve. There is also an interdisciplinarity that has arisen from combinations in an individual’s education and training. I began as a historian at undergraduate level, and moved into art history, while also trespassing into film studies, feminist literary criticism, psychoanalysis and philosophy. There is interdisciplinarity that arises from the necessities of diverse

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analytical and archival resources already present in any historical study of the image. What then is the writing that results from such ‘unreasonable’ practices? As a conceptual operation, however, interdisciplinarity involves the individual scholar’s ability to think with, indeed to play with, a variety of intellectual resources each shaping a manner of thought and a field of analysis while maintaining a knowing difference between modes and objects of thought so as to set them in motion. As a founder of cultural studies at my own university, I teach a new interdisciplinary subject area: Cultural Studies, which like women’s studies, queer studies, postcolonial studies is not confined to one traditional university disciplinary field. As a cultural analyst and theorist, however, I have sought to create transdisciplinary encounters, allowing the challenge of ways of different thinking to animate and provoke each other without creating some new kind of hybridisation. Rifkin has presented himself as a-disciplinary, obeying no previously recognised system of thinking through a problem while freely drawing on and transforming many in pursuit of a way of engaging critically with cultural phenomena in ways that seek to defy the incessant recuperation and increasing abuse of intellectual activity under the audited and instrumentalised formalities of ‘research’ in current British academic management. The legacies of feminist and queer intellectual practices have perhaps as their most insistent site and effect an engagement with embodiment, with desire, with pleasure as the affirmative self-inscriptions of subjectivities abused by the hegemonic formations and either effaced or deformed in dominant regimes of representation. Such interdisciplinarity or transdisciplinarity or even adisciplinarity does not quite capture the politics of feminist/queer interventions which both expand the domains of knowledge by inclusions of embodied subjectivities and other desires and redefine or rather specify the voice articulated in writing. For the exclusion of that which is deemed ‘personal’ has in the past operated to allow an extremely personal, located, and particular set of knowledges and self-perceptions to function as unmarked, normative consolidations of empowered but unselfconscious positions. Since Adrienne Rich deconstructed the norms of the university, its social relations, disciplinary models and approved modes of speech, writing and reference, in her formative paper, ‘Towards a WomanCentered University’, the institutionalisation of the objective/subjective division has been rendered a political target.8 Yet critiques of and counterpractices to intellectual depersonalisation are still policed and possible forms of resistance and transformation are hotly contested even in the critical communities of intellectual radicalism.

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Yet I do not think that these speculations about current formations of academic knowledge quite meet the kind of ‘transgressions’ we explore in writing about death. Clearly death can be made into a proper academic topic. Bronfen’s remarkable book placed it firmly on the table traversing literature, visual arts, and music: opera above all. There is now a field of Death Studies and a journal titled Mortality indicating the expanding field across anthropology, sociology and psychology. The launch of Bronfen’s book in 1992 assembled speakers from several fields across art, literature and philosophy. What was improper and unreasonable in Deadly Tales was not merely my conforming to what Nancy Miller named the ‘personal turn’ that feminist scholarship had itself historically taken by the later 1980s, but my twisting and turning between registers of discourse and modes that invoked affectivity sited in the speaker and in reflections on people’s deaths, relations to death, and theories about who is the subject of mortality.9 This question relates to Julia Kristeva’s critical question: who is the subject of pregnancy?10 Deadly Tales starts with a mock/real art historical lecture about one painting from the sixteenth century that portrayed an Elizabethan gentleman, his deceased wife and missing infant, and his own surviving son and heir.11 Travelling around its spaces, tracking its components and the uncanny doubling of the dead woman and her ghostly but living self, I demonstrated the type of reading of an image that had become commonplace postsemiotics and ideology critique while also drawing on contemporary art historical research into late medieval ideas about two bodies: the mortal and the social. It was a knowing ‘performance’ of art historical practice and its modes. The second tale referred to, but did not mention by name, Adrian Rifkin, who had, at the same time as I was attending a conference earlier in the summer of 1992, commemorating the centenary of the birth of Walter Benjamin in 1892, visited his apparent resting place: Port Bou on the Spanish-French border. This second tale was a musing on the cultural significance of the premature death of a public figure, a writer cut off by circumstances that curtailed his intellectual project. I had already considered this effect in the case of several artists, the most notable of which was Vincent van Gogh whose entire oeuvre and career tends to be read backwards from his sudden death from untreated infection on 29 July 1890 aged 37. Yet a pilgrimage to Port Bou – an easy train ride from Barcelona where the Olympics were being held – held a significance beyond the symbolic function of an abbreviated and intellectually incomplete life of writing. To go to the very place of a historically significant dying touched the uncanny dimension of travelling, on a train journey Benjamin never lived to take, but in the

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opposite direction, towards the location of his apparent suicide and an unexpected, and untended resting place so dislocated from those spaces of Paris and Berlin which marked his own geo-autobiographical writings. His friend and fellow refugee, Hannah Arendt made the same journey over the mountains in secret escape as Benjamin from France in the autumn of 1940, seeking unsuccessfully the location of Walter Benjamin’s grave that had been leased for several years by Frau Gurlitz, one of Benjamin’s companion refugees on that fateful and tragic trip across the Pyrenees. What moves us to be ‘in the place’, to see it for ourselves, to place our bodies in their presentness in spaces already endowed with accumulated meanings by our virtual knowledges of the deceased as writer or artist regularly part of our own virtual libraries and museums? In the case of Walter Benjamin, this rocky coastline falling abruptly to the blue Mediterranean has been entered into a different relay between individual mortality and mass, racially targeted genocide. In the third tale, I juxtaposed the public mourning and remembrance of Walter Benjamin who endowed Port Bou with historic associations, and the many unknown Jewish refugees who escaped via this same frontier town and the millions who did not escape the genocide from which Benjamin tried to flee, and to the death of one Jewish survivor, doomed to a lifetime of impossible mourning for parents who were murdered in Auschwitz: my father-in-law who died in May 1992. A culturally marked and hence significant death was matched to an unmarked, private death. Yet both men were touched in deadly ways by mass murder: mass dying. A dimension of Jewish history cuts across the usual divisions of known and unknown, public and private individuals, creating a shared terrain that was itself ushered in by unprecedented slaughter of innocents that redefined the history of the twentieth century and altered concepts of life and death. As Sarah Kofman wrote, drawing on Theodor Adorno’s speculations on metaphysics ‘after Auschwitz’: Since Auschwitz all men, Jews (and) non-Jews, die differently: they do not really die, because what took place, death in Auschwitz, was worse than death: “Humanity as a whole had to die through the trial of some of its members (those who incarnate life itself, almost an entire people that has been promised an eternal presence). This death still endures. And from this comes the obligation never again to die only once, without however allowing repetition to injure us to the always essential ending.”12 If these three opening leaves of the seven that form the whole engaged with masculine encounters, the central section began a much more serious

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undoing of the order of things. I talked about the death of my mother when she was 52 and I was 14 and of the unborn children I had lost during several failed pregnancies, deaths or bereavements that only feminism acknowledged as such. The core of this section included a description of the emaciated body of an adult woman ravaged by fatal cancer and in the film version a piece of family archive moving footage in colour of that same woman’s wedding in 1941. Then came the closing three leaves: one on Roland Barthes’s grief for his mother as articulated in his photography book, Camera Obscura, and writing about his own mother as a child before he was born: namely History and as a woman nursed by him in her last months during which she became his daughter. Another on Freud and the father-son story of Abraham and Isaac as the symbolic tale hidden behind Freud’s awkward use of the Greek legend of Oedipus. In the former the father attempts to kill the son; in the latter the son kills the father. The Oedipus complex is technically about the son’s fear of destruction by the father, not his fantasies of destruction. The final leaf of the Deadly Tales was a reading of the sublimated grief and rage informing Tom Stoppard’s Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) which I had seen soon after my mother’s death and in which I found a representation of a critical truth about the subject’s experience of the death of another as opposed to culture’s theatrical or visual representations of death as dying. GUIL: No…no…not for us, not like that. Dying is not romantic, and death is not a game which will soon be over…Death is not anything… Death is not…It’s the absence of presence, nothing more…the endless time of never coming back…a gap you can’t see, and when the wind blows through it, it makes no sound. (3.343) Thus, when invited to write an engagement with the work of Adrian Rifkin’s thought and practice, I decided to return to this complex site that plaited many of the threads of 30 years of conversation around critical theory, writing about images, European Jewish history and differencing the canon. Roland Barthes’s Journal de deuil starts with a brief entry of two sentences. There is the Wedding Night, in French the first night: Première nuit de noces. But, he asks, is there such a thing as a first night of mourning: première nuit de deuil. Linking a coming together typically associated with heterosexual marital coupling with the shocking first dark night of loss (unspecified) but hence linked to the severance of a long intimate shared life-time, Barthes begins not only an extraordinary document testing out the Freudian hypothesis that mourning is work, a working through, an economy of overcoming, a labour not of love but of loss. He is also performing a work of autoethnography, devoting some moments, often several each

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day, to an act of writing loss that reveals not a failed mourning, as all mourning ultimately must be, but the nature of a life of suffering. Roland Barthes had lived almost all his life beside his mother in circumstances created by the premature widowing of Henriette Barthes during World War II and shaped by his own desires which did not lead to his moving into the heteronormative wedding night, yet left him with the undocumented, socially unacknowledged suffering of the gay man in his most profound relationship with another being outside of both the traditional familial scenarios as well as the heteronormative relations between the genders. In an undated fragment of this unique diary of mourning, a study in living beside one death, Barthes writes: ‘We never speak of the intelligence of a mother, as if this would diminish her affectivity, or distance her. Yet intelligence, this is: all that allows us to live sovereignly with a being.’13 Thus the journal becomes the site of inscription of painful research into the nature of living with being, a being whose otherness is not contained within a role but acquires its singularity through the attempt to portray it ­– in its absence. It was between April and June 1979 that Barthes wrote La Chambre Claire, translated as Camera Obscura. This book, second only to Susan Sontag’s On Photography, in the field of contemporary studies or theorisations of photography, centres ultimately on one photograph of Henriette Binger Barthes, born 1893 who became a mother aged 22 and a war widow aged 23 and lived to die aged 84, the mother of two sons. Barthes writes of his studying photographs in his grief. There I was alone in the apartment where she had died, looking at these pictures of my mother, one by one, under the lamp, gradually moving back in time with her, looking for the truth of the face I had loved. And I found it.14 (my emphasis) Barthes offers a touchingly personal narrative of his caring for his mother during her final illness in which he the child becomes parent to his now frail and dependent mother. ‘During her illness, I nursed her, held the bowl of tea she liked because it was easier to drink from than from a cup; she had become my little girl, uniting for me with that essential child she was in her first photograph.’15 This scenario prompts a more philosophical reflection and a more troubling statement: Ultimately I experienced her, as strong as she had been, my inner law, as my feminine child. Which was my way of resolving Death. If, as many philosophers have said, Death is the harsh victory of the race, if the particular dies for the satisfaction of the universal, if

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after having been reproduced as other than himself, the individual dies, having thereby denied and transcended himself, I who had not procreated, I had, in her very last illness, engendered my mother. Once she was dead I no longer had any reason to attune myself to the progress of the superior Life Force (the race, the species). My particularity could never again universalize itself (unless utopically by writing, whose project would henceforth become the unique goal of my life). From now on I could do no more than await my total, undialectical death.16 I have always been perplexed by this passage (and used it in Deadly Tales rather bad temperedly because I found it irritating to have the singular woman’s death caught up in distracting philosophical rhetoric). Death brings us face to face with both becoming nothing through yielding our place to another in a linked chain that clearly passes somehow through the progenitive body of a woman: the mother who begets the subject and the woman who begets his issue. For the man who does not beget in this way, there are two possibilities. The first is the experiencing of tender parenthood toward his own mother as age and infirmity reverses the relations of dependency between parent and child. The other is self-inscription through a different form of alienation of selfhood through the labour of writing. Yet this text suggests that there is a profound and inconsolable suffering in the severance of the bond that inheres in the mystery of parent/child as it has to be confronted as this moment of a finite end to a singular being who has functioned as a profound presence in a man’s life beyond childhood and has never been replaced fantasmatically because his own desires are invested in men and not women; it proposes writing as a poor alternative that merely keeps time until another death, his own, will occur which, itself, cannot promise such a reversal. The death will have no dialectical significance in this reversing chain. In a sense, it suggests a different subjectivity in relation to mortality, not lacking, but to be considered in its intense particularity as Barthes dared to do before Judith Butler began her work on livable and mournable queer lives. But if there seems to a lesson in the ‘Winter Garden Photograph’ of his mother as a child that might seem to mystify the Mother, in chapter 31, Barthes glosses his reflections by refusing to become entangled with twin institutions, the Family and the Mother. J.J. Goux explains that Judaism rejected the image [of the Mother] in order to protect itself from the risk of worshipping the Mother; and that Christianity, by making possible the representation of the maternal feminine, transcended the rigor of the Law for the sake

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of the Image-Repertoire. Although growing up in a religion without images (Protestantism) but doubtless formed culturally by Catholic art, when I confronted the Winter Garden photograph I gave myself up to the Image, to the Image-Repertoire. Thus could I understand my generality; but having understood it, invincibly I escaped from it. In the Other, there was a radiant irreducible core: my mother.17 Thus he pays tribute to the woman beside whom he spent his life in terms of her singularity: For what I have lost is not a Figure (the Mother), but a being; and not a being, but a quality (a soul): not the indispensable, but the irreplaceable. I could live without the Mother (as we all do sooner or later); but what life remained would be absolutely and entirely unqualifiable (without quality).18 The fascination which Barthes’s formalised practice of confiding in a diary and creating a new form of grief-writing exercises for me relates to deep feminist questions of the cultural possibilities for inscription of transgressive interruptions of the frontiers formally separating public and private loci of experience and meaning. The death of Roland Barthes’s mother – via the discussion of the photograph we never see by an author with established stature – like Benjamin’s death has entered into culture. How many of us read and cite Camera Obscura as the validating text for work on private archives, photo-albums, memory work? Is this because Barthes is a man, or because in his writing of his grief he testified to a dimension of subjectivity at its intersections with religion, culture, location and sexuality in ways that opened new pathways? Was my irritation with moments of pomposity ignorance on my part, a failure of reading for difference, or justified because there is no bridge between this, his difference and that which I desire to inscribe because of an utterly different psycho-sexual positioning in relation to the maternal-feminine which involves an otherness and a connection unavailable, hence mourned, for all men irrespective of their desires? In his last book, The Sight of Death (2008), former social historian of art, T. J. Clark documents an extraordinary experiment in art writing. For a period of several months he visited the room in a gallery at the Getty Museum where two paintings by the French seventeenth-century painter Poussin hung, reconnected after several centuries of separation, as they had once belonged to one collector in Paris from whom they were commissioned. One was a calm landscape and the other an agitated

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scene where a horrified man runs away from a livid corpse encircled by a huge serpent: Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake. Daily over months, Clark recorded both the light conditions under which he studied the paintings and his own observations, a journal of sorts, increasingly informed by supplementary art historical research, on just two works. Demonstrating his mixture of connoisseurial and materialist study of painting as a practice of thinking, saying and seeing, Clark circles around his chosen pictures, section by section, problem by problem, returning to recast earlier observations as this method thickens through the repeated daily gesture of visiting, watching, studying and noting. Beginning in January 2000, the dated entries culminate in November 2003. On 20 December 2001, hence almost two years after beginning but only three months after the events of 9/11, he finally contemplates the ‘corpse in the stream’ of Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake and puzzles over his failure to address the ‘nature of anguish in the running man’s face’ on the other side of the painting, arrested in movement with turned face and gaping mouth, painted as are the eyes as darkness excavating the painterly face to produce in itself a fleshed skull. He writes: ‘I think we hide, necessarily, from an understanding of what is most to be avoided in the sight of death.’ This leads to his wordy exploration of what we feel before a corpse and what Poussin has inscribed on the face of a man shown running, yet fixated in dread at the sight of a giant black snake still engulfing the pallid, limp body of a dead man in the shadowed stream of the foreground that we must peer at to discern despite the indicative gesture of the direction of his appalled gaze. What is the dread? Despite his fear of offending decency, Clark tells us he must blunder on to pose the question: I wonder if the ultimate horror surrounding the dead body, which is precisely what puts all these systems of inference onto overdrive, has to do with our sensing that all the identities and faces we are obliged to give the corpse – faces of fear and otherness, faces of haunting proximity, even the face of a terrible Force rising up from inside it and claiming it at last – are no more than reaction-formations. They try to shield us for the great fact, the ultimate uncanny: that Death, in the corpse, disappoints us – looks away from us and no longer has a face of any kind.19 For many years the issue of the face has been a topic of philosophical exploration from Levinas’ attempt to rebuild a post-Auschwitz ethic based on the face of the Other before me as a primordial call to responsibility for the Other to Deleuze’s formulation of faciality. The question of the face relates intimately to another critical issue: the gaze, namely the

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specular relations within which we look or are looked at through mediated representations such as painting, photography, and above all the cinema. Death appears to be that which catastrophically shatters the web of connectivity signified by the encounter with the face of the Other and the play of the gaze, gazing, which tips always onto desire and anxiety in the field of vision. From both Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, we learn that the field of vision is intensely eroticised from infancy onwards. We also learn that our pleasures in looking and being embraced by the gaze of another are fractured by the Oedipal process in which all human subjects’ fundamental lack is projected, under phallocentrism, away from the proto-masculine subject and onto the feminine as image. This projection in fact comes to define those two terms as plus and minus, as having and not having: the signifier being the phallus. Thus to the feminine accrues the notion of her lacking, being castrated, and threatening castration: itself the metaphor for mutilation and worse: nonbeing. The linking of the feminine with death leads perversely to the compulsive imaging of the feminine figure and face, which must itself not actively look back: that itself signals castrating power. It must offer itself passively to be looked at, on condition that the image of woman is manufactured to displace all threat, becoming impossibly and artificially beautiful and acquiescing masochistically in being bound, rendered passive, possessed. The close-up of faces such as Greta Garbo or Marilyn Monroe become as Roland Barthes wrote: a philtre in which one could lose oneself.20 The face is, of course, always ultimately the face of the Mother, the imagined source of life and nurture, who is dethroned and often split, during the Oedipalising trauma for the heterosexual man, into angelic ideal and abjected sexual object. The horror of death in the painting by Poussin opens up a void for T. J. Clark who bears witness to the way in which a certain returning of the gaze by an object of the gaze functions to deflect the encounter with what Freud taught us is unthinkable: our own death, our own not-being, or ceasing to be. Let me return to Clark’s text. It is at this point that a break occurs, as if the finely tuned text spun out over years circling and circling around two classical paintings splits to reveal a much deeper foundation for his writing about a painting with a dead body at its core. At this point personal associations take over. The face of Death for me – I suppose the reader may have already guessed as much – is my mother’s on the hospital mortuary slab, long ago.

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Some readers of Clark’s text have been tempted to allow this personal disclosure to become the explanation for the entire project as if all the writing was mere displacement for the resurfacing or ultimate confession of this dark core. Clark does confess that the visual memory of that scene, to which he says he has returned over decades, has weight. He uses the metaphor of carrying the body on his shoulders, warm and rigid, yet icy – or what ‘no adjective can touch’. The visual memory of a face in death now becomes a scenario. He tells us that he moved towards the body and kissed it. The agony to which he is bearing witness lies in an implacable refusal of any return of gaze, warmth or life. ‘This is what Death amounts to. It is the face, after so much pain, of a final disillusion. Perhaps death looks away from us in order to spare us this.’21 I do not understand the grammar of this textual passage. He moves towards the face of his mother. Death – it – is the face. Thus she has become it – death – the face of a final disillusion, which must be his, ours, the living witness, who, I concluded in Deadly Tales, is the subject of death, since the dead are no longer subjects. So Death, with its faceless face gives back to us the disillusion we must face. Death – his mother – the mother – looks away so that we do not have to confront the fundamental disillusion that we will one day be equally faceless: without our human face. As Poussin’s paint fabricated snake coils itself erotically around the deadly pale corpse it has created, there we confront animality, there we see a body, there we encounter the abjection of the pallor of the dead body as blood stops and pools, casting its marmorean pall over what was so recently warm and vibrant flesh. Thus Clark finally speaks of Poussin’s image showing the revolting combination of the erotic and dreadful. I do not believe that in this passage T. J. Clark is revealing the private key to his text on the sight of death, opening up a ‘proper’ if unconventional art historical project to a private moment. Instead he is lending to his work as an art historian the affective memory from lived experience that enables a recognition of something the painter Poussin qua painter in the seventeenth century of Descartes was trying to negotiate in painting. What Poussin was dealing with does not occur in the content of the image but in the painting’s structure and performative arrival as painting. This is not formalism; neither is it its opposite, iconography. What intervenes is a psychological comprehension of fundamental anxieties and dread that this painter creates as a scenario that we are lured to examine and replot through a certain kind of prolonged gazing in order to arrive at what we most fear to see: placed right there in the foreground, with an arrested, staring running figure there also to direct our gaze towards it. Both are planted in an elaborately constructed space and beautifully crafted painting. In

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Lacanian terms, what both Poussin’s painting and Clark’s personal memory affirm is ‘fascinum’ a deadly, castrating encounter with what we cannot withstand and so it virtually turns us to stone. Hovering in the wings, of course, is the classical legend of Medusa. In 1598, the Roman painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571– 1610) painted a convex wooden shield on which appears the decapitated head of the legendary Gorgon, Medusa. It is a curious painting for many, many reasons, but most of all because the features of the once beautiful Medusa are the painter’s own. Transgendering this ultimate image of the petrifying gaze of the woman, the horrifying and then fetishised sight of the castrated hence castrating woman, Caravaggio refuses the myth’s attempt to alienate us from ‘her’ and to heterosexualise the viewer. He makes her horrified gaze slide to her right, seeking the source of what has rendered her monstrous. Some suggest that Caravaggio’s painted leather shield Medusa’s Head (1600–1, Florence; Galeria Uffizi) was the younger man’s homage to a buckler that Vasari tells us Ser Piero da Vinci, father of Leonardo, sold to merchants in Milan. The monstrous image that Leonardo fashioned from his collection of sundry insects registers on a visual plane the psychic terror of difference that is driven to adorn the supposed lack of the feminine body with the sign of masculine narcissism – restoring the impossible maternal phallus – while also conquering a dread of its lack both by its imaging and by imagining the destruction of the fearful sign of feminine specificity: inverted as the aggressively toothed and gaping jaws that are lanced in the petrifying eye. Reading both Vasari’s tale and its lost image as allegorical, we can propose a strange intimacy between horror, art and sexual difference. We have thus been taught that the masculine psyche splits the archaic memory of the maternal into abjected monstrosity or sublime idealisation. These strategies, however, disseminated across Western art, occur only under what I shall name the ‘phallic’ prism where any crossing of these boundaries (life/death, being/nonbeing, inside/outside) is a transgression not a reverberating passage way, and where any encounter with such difference is uncanny and thus to be disarmed only by the maintenance of the barrier, the blinding shield of Perseus: the shield of art. Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero has offered a feminist reading of Medusa as a guide to understanding contemporary modes of violence to which she gives the name: horrorism.

Figure 8.1: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, The Head of Medusa (1598).

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In the ample repertoire of human violence, there is one particularly atrocious kind whose features I propose to subsume in the category of horrorism. This coinage, apart from the obvious assonance with the word ‘terrorism’ is meant to emphasize the particularly repugnant character of so many scenes of contemporary violence, which locates them in the realm of horror rather than that of terror. What is horrorism? A body that blows itself up in order to tear other bodies to bits. And sometimes now, a woman’s body and even a pregnant body performs this act. Unfortunately, the explosives used in these acts of mass slaughter of the vulnerable sheer the head from the body which itself is shattered into matter. These remains, from which all but the emergency workers are sheltered, produce modern Medusas with their disarming stares that horrify still. Cavarero writes, however, that: Medusa belongs to the female gender. We must gaze straight into her eyes, without yielding to the temptation to look away: according to mythology horror has the face of a woman […] As in every theatre of violence that we know of to date, men continue to be the unchallenged protagonists. But when a woman steps to the front of the stage of horror, the scene turns darker and, although more disconcerting, paradoxically more familiar. Repugnance is heightened, and the effect is augmented, as though horror, just as the myth already knew, required the feminine in order to reveal its authentic roots.22 The head is decapitated thus evoking a body itself dismembered. Yet what has been torn away from its body is the face, the site of a figural unity of a human being and the locus of the individual personality: the face is the uniqueness of a being. Paradoxically the dead woman, Medusa, never shown in profile, is a countenance: ‘the visage of the living, in the singularity of its features’ – (Cavarero is quoting Jean Pierre Vernant). The ontological crime is committed thus against the very order of being as a human whose essence is revealed to us by the face as vulnerability. Yet Medusa becomes a mask behind which that violence is veiled. The ontological crime that, concentrating on an offence to the human being as essentially vulnerable, makes of wounding a disfiguring and a dismembering repugnant to the singularity of every body.23

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Medusa must watch her own destruction: hers is not the image of horror or death as Freud would have it. Cavarero re-reads this ancient mythology in very contemporary, post-Arendtian terms. ‘Medusa alludes to a human essence that, deformed in its very being, contemplates the unprecedented act of its own dehumanization.’24 Cavarero makes a distinction between terror and horror. Terror derives from Latin roots that refer to shaking and trembling. What terrifies us causes the body to become agitated in preparation for flight. Horror has quite different roots. Horror leads to a state of paralysis. ‘Gripped by revulsion in the face of a form of violence that appears more inadmissible than death, the body reacts as if nailed to the spot, hairs standing on end.’25 Medusa is perhaps the most iconic signifier of horror for the West. What causes profoundest horror is disfigurement, since the ‘figure’ is the site of singularity, the uniqueness of the person, our constitutive vulnerability as a human before (face à) another. Horrorism is the ontological crime of killing a body reduced to the state of absolute helplessness. The helpless cannot reciprocally inflict violence. There is no symmetry. They are the victims of unilateral violence. We all are now at risk from this arbitrary destruction. For Cavarero, two legends signify horror and link it culturally to the feminine: Medusa and Medea. Medusa is brutally decapitated because it is said she is so horrifying that she turns those she looks upon to stone. Medea is the mother who kills her own children: the truly helpless and vulnerable. Cavarero plots out the genealogy of the ontological crime that shapes our present. She reaches back to the witness of Primo Levi and Jean Amery in the concentrationary universe and forwards towards the sometime female body of the suicide bomber, exploding itself as it dismembers those around it. The power of the face and the vulnerability of the body and the image of Medusa come together at the end of her book when Cavarero tells the story of two teenage girls looking very much alike in their olive-skinned beauty and long black hair. One Ayat al-Akhras is a Palestinian and she walks into a Jerusalem shopping mall on 29 March 2002 with an explosive belt strapped to her body, full of steel nails and screws to cause maximum destruction of human bodies. Stopped by a security guard, she detonates herself and kills herself and the security guard. Her body is destroyed, but as we know these explosive bombs cleanly sever the untouched head from the pulped flesh. Body parts are assembled with the head. It is only in watching television where the image of the head/face of Ayat is screened that the mother of another sixteen year old, Rachel Levy, an Israeli, realises that her daughter too was killed in this explosion and that her body parts have been mingled with those of Ayat who has been given her, very similar looking face. Cavarero notes

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the response of Ayat’s neighbours: the Israelis have killed children and innocent people and this is a fair response. Thus is born the ‘aberrant logic’: the slaughter of innocents becomes a criterion that justifies, indeed demands, the slaughter of more innocents. The disfiguring, dehumanising slaughter of innocents is the core of today’s horror that requires a profound analysis and feminist response. We are usually shielded by the media from seeing the full horror of the victims of suicide bombing. Innocent bystanders’ bodies are shredded and scattered. Gathering up their remains scar the psyches of the emergency workers themselves who are exposed to these atrocious sights. Images of these horroristic atrocities have not acquired the iconic status of images from Nazi concentration camps or scenes at Hiroshima, because they are too atrocious to circulate publically through the media. Cavarero is drawing on Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the true horror of the aftereffects of the concentration camps. Arendt argued as early as 1948 that the concentration camps – not the extermination camps – were a political laboratory in which the SS experimented with the destruction of humanity: firstly they destroyed the judicial basis for individual identity, then eroded the moral foundations for choice and action and finally by starvation, brutality and torture reduced each person to a predictable bundle of reactions in the constant struggle for the barest of life. In the concentration camp ‘everything was possible’ and total domination was practised by systematical violence that created a living creature who was no longer a human one: the Muselmann it was called in Auschwitz. This is the continuing site of our horror: whoever shares in the human condition also shares in disgust for the ontological crime that aims to strike it in order to dehumanise it. Cavarero links the eye and sight also to another key location of the human: the voice. Medusa’s mouth is also open – suggesting a primordial howl akin to the infant’s first cry. The depiction of Medusa with her mouth wide open is not a simple accident, or a secondary adjunct, of her fundamental belonging to the realm of the eye. In fact, eye and voice here encounter each other. The unwatchable, as dismembered body, outraged in its singularity, also occurs as a howl in which the baby’s wail, the singular voice of new life, expresses the same outrage. But since we are dealing with the visual image, this howl is soundless. There is no acoustic vibration, only a wide-open mouth. The extreme cry remains mute. And yet something in this inaudible, frozen, breathless cry is more disturbing to the viewer than are Medusa’s eyes. As though,

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through the characteristic game of mirrors, we, the ones doing the looking, were the ones emitting the soundless howl. Or as though the experience of horror had strangled the cry in (her, our) throat.26 In paintings such as Caravaggio’s that howl is silent, the image of it, like horror itself, strangled. Medusa reminds us that the ‘killing of uniqueness’ as Hannah Arendt would say, is an ontological crime that goes well beyond the inflicting of death. Medusa confirms that this crime is visited on a body not just vulnerable but reduced to the primary situation of absolute helplessness (l’inerme: desarmé). Cavarero has redefined one of the most ancient icons of phallic hatred of women: the beautiful woman, who was raped, and then punished by Athena, the woman born of the head of Zeus when he has swallowed his own pregnant wife and took over her wisdom, by being made to kill whenever she encountered another face to face. It is her decapitated head that Athena used on her shield. Freud would read Medusa as a sight and a site: female genitals that horrify the masculine subject, making him rigid with fear, namely erecting his penis in reassurance. Woman in Freudian theory is the opposite of face: she is the facelessness of mere sexual organs, and those that constitute the origin of life itself, birth. We have here a form of what Lacan names fascinum: a site that freezes and threatens death that must obliterate from thought the Mother as face, as intelligence, as singularity. Lacan defines the gaze as fascinum: ‘an unconscious element in the image that stops and freezes life’. ‘The evil eye is fascinum, it is that which has the effect of arresting movement and, literally, of killing life.’27 Countering this the painter and theorist Bracha Ettinger has created the concepts of a matrixial gaze and fascinance. Fascinance is an aesthetic effect that operates in the prolongation and delaying of the time of the encounter-event and it allows for the working through (perlaboration) of matrixial-differentiatingin-jointness and co-poeisis. Fascinance can only take place if borderlinking within a real, traumatic and phantasmatic encounterevent meets compassionate hospitality. Fascinance might turn into fascinum when castration, separation, weaning or splitting abruptly intervenes.28 Bracha Ettinger reads for fascinance in the novels and films of Marguerite Duras, notably Le Ravissement de Lol V Stein and Hiroshima Mon Amour.

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She also traces its work in Freud’s case study of ‘Dora’ where we learn that Dora spent two hours before Raphael’s Sistine Madonna. Ettinger writes: If Oedipal difference is the key to feminine sexual difference, the question what does a woman want? quickly turned into the question what does a woman want from a man? It is not sustained long enough at the level of what does a woman want from a woman? Dora’s case is one of Freud’s most glorious failures. Freud corrected himself a posteriori, claiming that ‘Dora was in love but with a woman – with Frau K.’ After such a courageous correction, it is not easy to proclaim that, again, Freud did not grasp what Dora wanted. Yet such is the case. Dora’s fascination with Frau K., like Dora’s admiration of the Madonna, were not expressions of homosexual desire. Dora did not desire Frau K. sexually. She desired to be caught in a move of fascination that belongs to femininity, a move composed of a girl toward a woman-figure, who is fascinated too by the daughter-girl and who allows her sufficient proximity to sustain the illusion of inclusion in her mature elusive sexuality – a femininity which is not directed at the girl but outside and away from her. Yet the girl desires to be included inside it for instants of eternity whereby she participates in advance, and by proxy, in a world not yet fit for her own immature sexuality.29 This is what Ettinger also theorises as a matrixial encounter. In a matrixial encounter, the private subjectivity of the individual is momentarily unbounded. The psyche momentarily melts, and its psychic threads are interwoven with threads emanating from objects, images, and other subjects. In a matrixial encounter with an image, a transformation occurs. To get a feeling of the arresting (fascinum) and transformational (fascinance) potentiality of an image, I [...] offer a reading of a novel.30 What is the origin of this fascinance and its foundation, the matrixial encounter? Ettinger, to whose work Adrian Rifkin introduced me, discovered it in her own notebooks that daily reflected on a painting practice. Both, I suggest, form an aesthetic counterpart to Roland Barthes’s highly personal and singularly focused Journal de deuil. Let me explain. If Freud proposed that mourning has an economy and is worked through in various phases, Barthes’s journal reveals that there is no such endpoint, no relief. This stymies and freezes him. Bereaved, we live beside the

Figure 8.2: Bracha L. Ettinger, Eurydice no. 17 (1994–6).

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endless nothing that may be at times more or less unbearable because of the singularity of the being who has been lost from our life. Easily precipitated into intense emotionality however long the time since the death, the shadow of the missing becomes part of the transsubjective reconfiguration of daily subjectivity and altered sensibilities. But is there another economy than working through our encrypted trauma? Ettinger’s theoretical intervention proposes aesthetics as site of transformation through becoming a transport station for traces of traumas that are at once personal and others’. Ettinger’s painting practice, moreover, hinges between the second and third leaves of Deadly Tales: between the historically accounted catastrophe of the Shoah in the twentieth century and the ethical call to respond to the death of any one. For Ettinger the painter engaged in the prolonged encounter through fascinance, the photograph that holds a defining punctum exceeding the studium of the archive that documents the Holocaust is one of a rare series of identified photographs taken of a massacre at Mizocz, Ukraine (then Poland), on 14 October 1942. The photograph belongs to an identified series, one of the very few, that documents the punishment massacre of the women and children of an entire town in Poland by German gendarmerie. This image appeared in Alain Resnais’ definitive documentary Nuit et Brouillard of 1955 to stand in for missing images of industrialised genocide and in doing so to perform exactly what Elisabeth Bronfen proposed: the use of the erotic or aestheticised female body to deflect the viewer from the confrontation with the petrifying horror of mortality. Resnais cropped the photograph to get closer to the women and thus to see more of their nakedness. Ettinger moves in even closer to find her way to the face and to transform the piercing gaze of petrifying Medusa into the ethical appeal that hovers in Caravaggio’s queered and affecting painting of she whom Greek culture rendered monstrous. Ettinger passes the photograph through a photocopier to summon apparition­– where something that is other occurs according to Lyotard – for the frieze of vulnerable bodies of women of all ages, some with children in their arms.31 But three are her constant companions over years and years of painting. One is a mother cradling the head of her child in a pathos formula of total maternal compassion for the vulnerable infant. Another is a tall woman with head averted so that we see only the nape of her neck and hairline. Ettinger names her no-face; ‘she looks away but what she sees is inhuman’. The third, however, is a blurred face, turned towards us now as we view/ review this translated and recuperated moment of the past – History before we were – in intense appeal. Eye and voice echoes Medusa while utterly deflecting us from that mythic domain.

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Historically, one woman was looking directly at the photographer on the other hillside of the ravine into which the women were being funnelled. The photograph now makes visible through her look the fact that there was a witness to this massacre who took the photographs of the killing. This event became an image by an act of photography, now holding this horror of a time before us, History, before us. It is, however, pierced by this woman who looks out at us from within this zone of death calling for the reciprocal, human gaze that will recognise in the face a human other, a vulnerable, unarmed, humiliated and terrified other about to be massacred in cold blood. This is one of the very few documents of Nazi mass murders and is a trace of the trauma of these women that circulates in our culture. How do we look back? Like Orpheus do we kill again? Or could painting emplot us to respond to her appeal, to the mother’s gesture, to the gaze at inhumanity through aesthetic wit(h)nessing? Bracha Ettinger’s painting performs a prolonged aesthetic wit(h)nessing. Through painting she remains with and beside such catastrophic fragments of the traumatic heritage that is her own. She could have been such a child, such a mother, such a girl­. As horrorism, this heritage is ours too because irrespective of who these women are in relation to our own religions, ethnicities, cultures, nationalities, they represent here in this moment and image the beginnings or the realisation of horrorism: the violence against l’inerme, the unarmed, the vulnerable, hence the human itself. Working with interrupted and partial photocopies of this photographic archive – and I cannot go into her interrupting relation to industrial technologies of vision, to power and death culture – Ettinger paints on papers bearing mere traces in dust of the spectres of trauma, horror and suffering. In this prolonged attention to traumatic traces, Ettinger came to theorise post-Lacanian psycho-aesthetic concepts: the matrixial gaze and the matrixial borderspace which indicate a non-phallic, non-fetishistic, non-voyeuristic mode of psycho-visual encounter with and a transsubjective sharing in the trauma and jouissance of the other even across frontiers of death. It is not because we can identify with these women that we feel with them, now. This is not an aesthetics of empathy. They are not in life and are radically unknown to us through time and history and unknowable to us except in that dimension that must be stirred when we, looking at their once indexical image-trace, become wit(h)nesses to their destruction as human beings. Humanity as such is made visible in such nakedness of appeal to an other only when it is about to be utterly destroyed. When someone has to exclaim: ‘But I am human, too’ we know that it is their fundamental, defenceless humanity in jeopardy.

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Ettinger’s art is a journey away from and back towards trauma. That trauma is the trauma of her Polish Jewish family almost destroyed amidst the annihilation of Jewish Europeans in the Shoah. Her trauma is the trauma growing up with parents without parents, without a past. Her trauma is the trauma of their building a new life in a co-inhabited land burdened with several peoples’ memories, histories and newly inflicted traumas. Her trauma is also the fact that these family and territorial histories into which she was born and which were transmitted to her are those indeed of the twentieth century and our societies that created, perpetrated, and suffered the invention of genocide as one form of ontological crime from Armenia onwards and of the concentrationary universe of the totalitarian will to power. For Ettinger, art after the twentieth century can become the site of fascinum, arrested and deadly, deflected by complex displacements, however, through aestheticisation of the phallically defined feminine body. It, or rather to be more precise, painting can, according to Ettinger, equally become a transport station of trauma: a site of transformation that is neither cure nor mourning but is predicated on a compassionate capability that is at once the gift of the maternal-feminine to all human subjects and that which can be stirred through specific forms of aesthetic encounter. But this can only occur under certain conditions: the matrixial encounter happens when the frontiers behind which the phallically constituted, boundaried subject is contained are loosened and what Ettinger calls self-fragilisation occurs alongside an ethical non-abandonment, allowing for compassionate hospitality to the trauma and jouissance of the other. In classic psychoanalysis, the subject negotiates the world as its object: be that a thing or a person, the other is an object necessary to gratify needs. Thus the mother or any other is an object for the subject through her milk, her presence etc. Later feminist theory advanced by thinkers such as Jessica Benjamin challenged these models and stressed the intersubjective nature of early human interactions and allowed that the mother is for the subject also a subjective presence. Ettinger goes beyond this move. She suggests that we can add to our theoretical resources the idea of trans-subjectivity. In classical thought the I is defined by separation from the not-I. Any breach of borderlines will lead to a collapse from subjectivity into fusion and symbiosis from which we have been cut out, like a figure from a field of cloth. Transsubjectivity is not such a confusion of beings. It concerns moments in which we may share an event with an other, an event that produces effects or affects on each side of the shared borderspace. It concerns therefore moments of borderlinking between and I and a non-I – that is not entirely separate and not entirely

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incorporated. Thus side by side with those psychic formations by which the I becomes a distinct and singular subject, an I, there are concurrent processes when elements of I can cross-relate to elements of a non-I in a shared event. Ettinger proposes moments of co-emergence and co-affection and even copoeisis. These are typically experienced in the transferential moments of analysis and of the aesthetic experience. None of this leads to psychosis. It leads to compassion.32 It is actually based on a compassion that is primordial to the human subject generated in the psychically affecting and subjectivising prenatal-prematernal encounter the theorisation of which is Ettinger’s distinctive contribution to psychoanalysis, ethics and aesthetics.33 The significance of this matrixial dimension, within the context of this chapter, is that Ettinger also questions the manner in which we understand the capacity for the aesthetic staging of encounters that transgress the boundary between – not life and death – but life and notyet-life and life and no-longer-life. This is not occultism or mysticism. It takes Freud’s Uncanny, the key concept for psychoanalytical thinking about the aesthetic, into zones of compassion which have consequences other than those which I have identified in writings by Barthes and Clark and the myth of Medusa. The matrixial is a resource by which a different reading of Barthes’s journal becomes possible when those divisions that form barriers of identity are released without assuming sympathy. In the central passage in Deadly Tales, I knew, however, that the public discussion of my own unborn children and my mother, a singular being like any other, and one whose non-being shaped my life as much as Henriette Barthes’s intelligent besidedness shaped that of her intellectual son, could never have the currency or frisson associated with the dead mothers of Barthes or Clark when they entered cultural circulation through their innovative forms of writing. Thus this question of death became a feminist issue. Could death since it is lived by the living be gendered? Of course, I hear readers respond to such a statement, what about Virginia Woolf? In ‘Sketch of the Past’ begun in 1939 several months before the outbreak of the war that would finally break her spirit to continue to live in a world of such death, Virginia Woolf wrote: Until I was in my forties – I could settle the date by seeing when I wrote To the Lighthouse […] [1927–29] – the presence of my mother obsessed me. I could hear her voice, see her, imagine what she would say or do as I went about my day’s doings. She was one of the invisible presences who after all play such an important part

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in every life […] It is perfectly true that she obsessed me, in spite of the fact that she died when I was thirteen until I was forty-four. Then one day, walking around Tavistock Square I made up, as I sometimes make up my books, To the Lighthouse in a great involuntary rush […] But I wrote the book very quickly; and when it was written, I ceased to be obsessed by my mother. I no longer hear her voice; I do not see her.34 In the course of the diaristic format of this memoir, Virginia Woolf gives two accounts of the night of the death of her mother. She draws two different scenarios in words. I leant out of the nursery window the morning she died. It was about six, I suppose. I saw Dr. Seton walk away up the street with his head bent and his hands clasped behind his back. I saw the pigeons floating and settling. I got a feeling of calm, sadness and finality. It was a beautiful spring morning, and very still. That brings back the feeling that everything had come to an end.35 The exact time, the weather, the surrounding conditions support a strange vision that is removed. Finality and change, these words have the quality of disavowal even while they touch a truth. There follows a series of remembrances and stories that attempt to reconstruct the life of this woman before she became the writer’s mother, and when she became the writer’s father’s wife: Perhaps there was pity in her love, certainly there was devout admiration for his mind; so she spanned the two marriages with two different men; and emerged from that corridor to live fifteen years more; to bear four children; and [to] die early on the morning of 5th May 1895. George took us to say goodbye. My father staggered from the bedroom as we came. I stretched out my arms to stop him, but he brushed past me, crying out something I could not catch: distraught. And George led me in to kiss my mother, who had just died.36 Woolf’s ‘Sketch’ is retrospective, hence confessional and revealing of the immediate moments after the death, the encounter with the reality of death recovered in articulate prose of the mature writer. It is, in the end, to Woolf’s writing that I feel indebted for her ability to hover over that moment, to underline that to understand that something was happening for which no words were adequate but which a certain kind of factual description might one day be valid. Like T. J. Clark, the teenage Virginia Stephens is brought

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to kiss the still warm skin of her just-dead mother and again a day later, she encounters the chill of the deceased. Each of the texts and images I have discussed bring us to some kind of confrontation with the rupture of life that we call death. Each of these texts places experiences of exceptional significance in utterly individual circumstances into the realm of culture through which we read ourselves, know our own experiences, lending their empty words the affects unarticulated in our own unwritten histories. I want to end by returning from the silence of the unresponsive face that is so shocking in the moment the living must meet the no longer living but ever-loved to a visual image. Adrian Rifkin is always one for suggestions that share his ever expanding and eccentric explorations. Many directions I have followed gratefully. But this is a return that will not be easily received. Helene Schjerbeck (1862–1946) was a Finnish artist, hence marginalised even within the feminist rediscovery of European women artists. Trained in Finland and Paris, she was forced into a retreat by her own fragile health and that of her mother, for whom she cared until she died in 1923. Remote from the metropolitan centres of art, linked by letters and borrowed journals, by means of which she kept abreast of artistic and cultural movements, she produced a series of startling selfportraits tracing her own journey into old age that not only track the shifts in visual regimes from naturalism to astonishingly minimal modernism, but that dare to trace aging through the face of woman. These images bring us to a confrontation, not with death, but with that passage towards it that must be lived by the subject, as a passage towards life’s ruin. Writing of both these portraits and Derrida Nicholas Royle quotes Derrida on images created by the blind: The ruin is not in front of us; it is neither a spectacle nor a love object. It is an experience itself; neither the abandoned yet still monumental fragment of a totality, nor, as Benjamin thought, simply a theme of baroque culture. It is precisely not a theme, for it is the ruins of a theme, the position, the presentation or representation of anything and everything. Then, introducing the late self-portraits by Helene Schjerfbeck, Royle writes: Schjerfbeck’s self-portraits testify to Derrida’s general ‘hypothec’ in Memoirs of the Blind, that ‘A work is at once an order and its ruins’. Schjerfbeck’s self-portraits are ghostly, stunning, even terrifying. They present us with a sense of what Derrida describes

Figure 8.3: Helene Schjerfbeck, Self Portrait with Red Spot (1944).

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as ‘the “Medusa” effect’, whereby one cannot look into the face without coming face to face with a petrified objectivity, with death or blindness. By the same deathly gesture, we encounter in these selfportraits the sense of a spectral force that divides narcissism from itself. If these Schjerfbeck self-portraits look imperious, they are so only as ghosts: these pictures address an impossibility of the face, both that of the self-portraitist and of our own.37 Here again writers find death in the face of a woman, who perhaps is writing grief or confronting the passing of time without horror but a kind of formalisation of a fading from life. Is this image Medusan, or that of an older woman in whose face time can be inscribed with compassion, selfcompassion? How is the older woman to be seen, and not only to be refound in herself as the child, as in Barthes’s case? I want to arrive at no-conclusion. Rather, in the spirit of Rifkinesque montage that also owes a shared debt to a Warburgian legacy, and Rifkenesque enquiry into the affectivity and effectivity of the image freed from the disciplinary limits of the visual and at the same time working at the limits of the imaginable: death, I have plotted out a terrain of difference that circles around the continuously fertile question: what is the womanother for any of us beyond that which hetero-phallocentrism fixates in its deadly anxiety? In what sense is a reading of the image beyond disciplinary confines an enquiry always into who we think we are because we seek to know the meaning of an other? Who is the other for us, but as Bracha Ettinger proposes, the m/Other?

Notes 1 Roland Barthes, Journal de deuil 26 octobre 1977–15 septembre 1979, edited by Nathalie Léger (Paris: Seuil/Imec, 2009). 2 Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992). 3 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (London: Fontana, 1984), p. 64. 4 Ibid., pp. 78–9. 5 David Carrier, Artwriting (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987). 6 Mieke Bal, Louise Bourgeois’s Spider: The Architecture of Art-writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 7 Griselda Pollock, ‘Territories Of Desire: Reconsiderations of an African Childhood’, in Travellers’ Tales edited by George Robertson et al. (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 63–92. 8 Adrienne Rich, ‘Towards a Woman-Centered University [1973–74], in Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose 1966–1978 (London: Virago, 1980), pp. 125–56.

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9 Nancy Miller, Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts (New York and London: Routledge, 1992). 10 Julia Kristeva, ‘Motherhood according to Giovanni Bellini’, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine and Leon S. Roudiez (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979), p. 237. 11 The performance piece became a textual piece published in Griselda Pollock, ‘Deadly Tales’, Looking Back to the Future: Essays on Art, Life and Death (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 371–90. 12 Sarah Kofman, Smothered Words, trans. Madeleine Dobie (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), p. 9. The reference is to Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, trans. R. E. B. Ashton (New York: Seabury Press, 1979), p. 362 and the quotation is Maurice Blanchot, ‘After the Fact’, Vicious Circles (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1985), p. 69. 13 Barthes, Journal de deuil, p. 264. 14 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 67. 15 Ibid., p. 72. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., pp. 74–5. 18 Barthes, Camera Obscura, p. 75. 19 T. J. Clark, The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Artwriting (London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 228. 20 Roland Barthes, ‘The Face of Garbo’, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (London: Paladin, 1972), p. 56. 21 Clark, The Sight of Death, p. 229. 22 Adriana Cavarero, Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence, [2007] trans. William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), p. 14. 23 Ibid., p. 16. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., p. 8. 26 Ibid., p. 17. 27 Jacques Lacan, ‘What is a Picture?’, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1981), p. 118. 28 Bracha L. Ettinger, ‘Fascinance and Girl-to-m/Other Matrixial Feminine Difference’, Psychoanalysis and the Image: Transdisciplinary Perspectives, edited by Griselda Pollock (Boston and Oxford: Blackwell’s, 2005), p. 61. 29 Ibid., pp. 61–2. 30 Ibid., p. 62. 31 Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Newman: The Instant’, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 79. 32 Bracha Ettinger,’ From Proto-Ethical Compassion to Responsibility: Besidedness and the Three Primal Mother-Phantasies of Not-Enoughness, Devouring and Abandonment’, Athena [Lithuania] no. 2 (2006), pp. 100–54. 33 Catherine de Zegher and Griselda Pollock, Bracha L Ettinger: Art as Compassion (Brussels: ASP Publishers, 2011). 34 Virginia Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past’, in Moments of Being: Autobiographical Writings, edited by Jeanne Schulkind (London: Pimlico, 2002), pp. 92–3. 35 Ibid., p. 96. 36 Ibid., p. 102. 37 Nicholas Royle, After Derrida (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), pp. 131–2.

Figure 8a: Roxy Walsh, Daphne, above (2011); Fancy Duck, opposite (2011).

9 Green Curtains and Picture Covers Towards an Archaeology of the Pictorial Closet Jas´ Elsner

This piece is for Adrian: friend, interlocutor, inspiration … A closet lock and key of villainous secrets Othello IV. Ii

A

rt history is a discipline famously in and out of the closet – at least it has been ever since Winckelmann, its modern founding father. As has recently been observed:

The single most important fact about Classical Greek art in Winckelmann’s account of its achievement of ideal form also remained unstated, though it was fully visible to the educated reader of his History and writings: the ideals of Greek art, he concluded, were constituted in pederasty.1 Now, there is little doubt that the practice of outing the ideological affiliations of those who construct and articulate the dominant narratives of our art history (at any period) is a necessary act. Otherwise, how are we to know on what basis the stories we take to be true are founded; and how are we to decide if our own ethical and political instincts can be in tune with the package we have been sold? The issue is as true of matters political as sexual – notably in relation to Nazi (and proto-Nazi) models of, as well as

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Jewish exilic responses to, the great edifice of Kunstgeschichte on which all post-War art histories are built, and it goes beyond the history of art to the heart of humanism itself. But I want here to worry a little about this practice of outing, on two counts. First it is necessary to remind ourselves that the outing of someone – e.g. Winckelmann as gay or the likes of Kantorowicz and Pevsner as German Jews with some sympathies at some moments strangely in tune with those upheld by those who would become their Nazi oppressors – is a very different thing from the adoption by an art historian of a self-conscious public position and voice as a Nazi (e.g. Hans Sedlmayr) or the adoption by many a modern scholar of a self-outed queer stance. The difference is whether one is in or out of the closet.2 Second, the contemporary space within which art historians work in the West is very much out of the closet – I mean not only the relatively uncensored space of our writings, but also the modernist post-sixties openness of the museum (where most of the objects we study have come to be displayed) in which pretty well anything can now be shown. The risk here is that we may lose sensitivity to the many complexities, seductions, veils, plays, delights that are fundamental to – indeed constitutive of – the culture of the closet, which contemporary progressivism has rejected. Whatever one’s views of how things should be now, the question is significant historically. My aim here, in exploring a number of deeply controversial pictures in the great tradition, is to highlight some of the contexts and demands of ‘closeting’ art and to show how some of painting’s most powerful philosophical contributions were made by confronting the very boundaries between that which might be publicly presentable and socially normative and that which was held to need veiling or concealment.

Paris 1860s Let us begin with a most scandalous picture (Fig. 9.1). If one happens upon Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde displayed on the walls of the Musée d’Orsay, the picture still engenders the power to shock that the expression of the English word, which best describes its subject matter continues to elicit in the culture, even in these most unprudish of times. That word is ‘cunt’. But L’Origine du Monde was never painted to be publicly displayed, outed, in this way.3 L’Origine was commissioned in 1866 by the Turkish diplomat, Khalil Bey (1831–79), for a collection that came to include numerous distinguished

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pictures and some of a salacious character – notably Courbet’s famous lesbian image Le Sommeil, known also as Les Dormeuses, also of 1866, and Le Bain Turc, painted by the 82-year-old Ingres in 1862 and acquired by Bey in 1865.4 Certainly these images were not intended for public display: none were exhibited in a public Salon, and one may surmise they adorned ever more discrete or select spaces in Bey’s Paris residence. But L’Origine du Monde was concealed behind a green veil – according at least to the testimony of Maxime du Camp:5 In the toilet of a foreign personage […] one saw a small painting hidden under a green veil. Lifting the veil, one was stupefied to see a life-sized woman in frontal view, extraordinary, convulsively aroused, remarkably painted con amore, as the Italians say – and offering the last word on realism. But by some incredible oversight the craftsman, who copied his model from the life, had omitted to show the feet, legs, thighs, hips, bosom, hand, arms, shoulders, neck and head.6 This account, although caught between irony and indignation, is not a bad description – except that its author has forgotten the white sheet splayed all around the picture’s object of focalisation, like a kind of halo around a sacred site, and that hint of the nipple of the right breast peeping out of the sheet at the top. One might ask also if his swift leaps to the real – inspired by the picture’s ‘last word on realism’ – that is, the insistence on the subject’s ‘convulsive arousal’ and on the imagined scenario whereby the image ‘was copied from the life’, are not themselves the result of the painting’s seductive enchantment even in one who affirms resistance to its construction of desire.7 The embarrassment of the picture outed – removed from the defences of its green curtain and placed on public display in a national museum – is evident from the gestures of current distinguished commentators in trying to deal with it in the open space of academic prose. Discussions include the swift turn to Freud – from male castration anxiety (Courbet’s own, mirrored perhaps by Du Camp’s),8 to the chase for its deeper meanings in Courbet’s obsession with caves in the landscape (‘a manifestation of the psychoanalytic process of displacement in Courbet’s oeuvre’).9 For my purposes here, however, what matters is that throughout its private life – that is, its life as a picture in private hands – L’Origine was rarely without a protective fig-leaf. Indeed, in a cartoon of 1867 on the front cover of a magazine called Le Hanneton (vol. 18, 1 June), Léonce Petit depicted Courbet amidst some of his more prominent works, including a large green fig-leaf, which appears to refer to L’Origine behind its green curtain, as already a classic case of concealment and desired revelation

Figure 9.1: Gustave Courbet, L’Origine du monde (1866).

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in its time.10 The painting was sold by Khalil Bey to cover gambling debts probably in 1868, but not in the official January sale of his main collection.11 The picture surfaces again in the account of Edmond de Goncourt’s visit to the gallery of Antoine de La Narde in 1889, this time concealed beneath Courbet’s Château de Blonay of 1875, now in Budapest, in a contraption that involved unlocking the cover before the revelation of the inner vision.12 The fact that Goncourt took the cover-painting to show ‘a village church in the snow’ plays well with Courbet’s anticlericalism and the picture’s pseudo-sacred title, which may have been conferred by the painter himself.13 This contraption of L’Origine beneath the Château de Blonay lasted through various owners’ hands until, immediately before World War I, the two pictures ended up in Hungary in the collection of Baron Mor Lipot Herzog, who kept the landscape but passed L’Origine on to Baron Ferenc Hatvany, also a wealthy collector and an amateur painter.14 Hatvany kept the picture – like Khalil Bey – in his bathroom, screened by a landscape (put over it ‘like the cover on a box’), which he may have painted himself.15 Looted by the Soviet army in 1945 and reclaimed by Hatvany in the late 1940s, the picture ended up in Paris where it was purchased by Jacques Lacan and his wife Sylvia (formerly married to Georges Bataille and sister of the partner of the surrealist painter André Masson) in the early 1950s.16 Lacan commissioned his brother-in-law to paint a sliding cover that would both conceal and suggest the Courbet, and Masson produced Terre érotique, a landscape whose contours effectively hugged the form of Courbet’s displayed body-parts with abstract floral designs to intimate pubic hair and pudenda – a landscape which effectively could only be understood after the painting beneath it had been uncovered.17 Installed in the studio of their country house at La Prévoté outside Paris, the Lacans performed the ritual of unveiling Masson’s landscape to reveal Courbet’s L’Origine for select guests in what amounts to a mock pilgrimage. Of course, the last private owner of Courbet’s painting, which turns out to be le con de Lacan, is almost too good to be true – one only wishes he had conducted his psychoanalytic sessions in the room in which it was displayed beneath its surrealist lid (unfortunately, this is my fantasy).18 But any reading of the picture – and above all any psychoanalytic one, it seems to me – needs to take account of the painting’s process of concealment and revelation, which constitutes a structure of visual experience that in a variety of forms determined the consistent context of its showing until it was acquired by the French state from Lacan’s heirs in lieu of taxes (a kind of financial castration, one might suppose). Ironically, much better than a Lacanian interpretation here, is Freud’s model of the obscene joke.19 For Freud captures the peculiar and profoundly gendered structure that

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triangulates a speaker (classically male) who directs smut about a second person (female) to a third person (again male): Generally speaking, a tendentious joke calls for three people: in addition to the one who makes the joke, there must be a second who is taken as the object of hostile or sexual aggressiveness, and a third in whom the joke’s aim of producing pleasure is fulfilled […] Through the first person’s smutty speech, the woman is exposed before the third, who, as listener, has now been bribed by the effortless satisfaction of his own libido. (143–4) In the case of the unveiling of L’Origine, the process of triangulation has moved beyond speech to sight, a topic on which Freud is quite clear in this section of Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious: It cannot be doubted that the desire to see what is sexual is the original motive of smut […] A desire to see the organs peculiar to each sex is one of the original components of our libido. It may itself be a substitute for something earlier and go back to a hypothetical primary desire to touch the sexual parts. As so often, looking has replaced touching. (141) Clearly the owner – who pulls aside the curtain, unlocks the Château, lifts off the landscape or slides back the Terre érotique – is Freud’s first person, while the privileged viewer, granted ‘the effortless satisfaction of his libido’ through sight rather than speech, is the third. The picture itself – le con de Courbet, Khalil Bey, Hatvany or Lacan – is the effaced female: an agent, perhaps, but never an active subject in her own right, rendered invisible in all individuality save her sexual organ, universalised to the point of banality in a male-centred drive of desire, turned fragment, dare one say part-object?, even fetish,20 in her halo of sheets. Freud again recognised the effacement of the second person in this structure of relations: The woman who is thought of as having been present in the initial situation is afterwards retained as though she were still present, or in her absence her influence still has an intimidating effect on the men. (145) At the same time in their alliance against the woman, the object of their desire and aggression, the men find common cause: [The obscene joke] turns the third person who originally interfered with the sexual situation into an ally, before whom the woman must feel shame, by bribing him with the gift of its yield of pleasure. (183)

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It is this dynamic of revelation, as a social structure of visual experience and indeed a technology of display, that is fundamental to the anonymity and universality of Courbet’s picture – both of which are indicated by the work’s super-pretentious title. The painting is brutally sexist – a dialogue of ownership and male solidarity at the expense of the faceless, identityless female body-part which forms the ‘intimidating’ bond, the ‘bribe’ and the ‘yield of pleasure’ created in the picture’s ritual of concealment and ostentation.21 But simultaneously, and outrageously, L’Origine is a very learned picture. Its conditions of display echo those depicted by Delacroix in a panel of about 1825 entitled Louis d’Orléans Showing His Mistress (Fig. 9.2).22 Whatever cover historical fancy-dress and semimythical anecdote may offer to the subject of this picture, what it shows is one man unveiling the sex organs of a woman for the delectation of another. Her face is turned away and covered by the raised sheets from the internal viewer’s gaze, which is on her pudenda (we, the picture’s audience, are voyeurs who see her face but not the revealed object of genital desire). The story behind the image has the medieval Duke of Orleans taking as his mistress the wife of the Seigneur de Cany and then tricking the unwitting cuckold by revealing her to the failed recognition of her husband, while covering her face. Its intimidating bond of apparent male solidarity effectively belies an act of aggression against the Seigneur by a social superior, but the woman is no more than object and possession (whether as mistress or as wife) on both levels of alliance and hostility implied in this triangulation. While Delacroix figures the Freudian triangular dynamic – one might say describes it pictorially – he excludes the viewer, who is made outside observer of a process, distanced by its placement in a historical far-past, a past before the Revolution, before modernity. Courbet, by contrast, enacts the Freudian triangle directly and on two levels. He takes Delacroix’s Seigneur inside the picture, looking at the lower body on display, and replaces him with the viewer outside the painting focalising what the picture shows down to just the object of the Seigneur’s gaze and excluding the figure of Louis as impresario of this particular form of theatre. On this model, the viewer takes on the role of Freud’s third person, so that the painting’s owner becomes the ally of the painter (as collective first person). Its spectators, as specially sanctioned entrants into the owner’s secret space behind the curtain or the cover, become the third-person allies of the owner and painter (as joint first persons). What Courbet shows is (precisely) what Louis d’Orleans reveals, and in doing so he casts L’Origine’s owner, or himself as painter, in the role of Louis and his picture’s viewer both as the Freudian third person bribed by the pleasure of the painting’s libidinal satisfaction and potentially also as Delacroix’s cuckold.

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Although clearly a choice piece of high-art, Courbet’s painting hugs the contours of contemporary pornographic photographs of anonymous women’s legs spread wide to reveal the genitals with petticoats and underskirts raised to efface the identity of the woman represented and to frame the inner sanctum of feminine sex.23 At the same time, Courbet’s painting of 1866 is everything that Manet’s Olympia (Fig. 9.3) is not (Olympia was painted in 1863, but shown in the Salon of 1865 to a stupendous scandal and much brouhaha).24 Where Olympia was a public nude, made for the most extreme conditions of universal display in the Salon and arguably a challenge to its proprieties,25 L’Origine is for private eyes only and behind a veil. L’Origine shows all that the infamous hand of Olympia so firmly hides,26 although what is hidden may be said to be figured in the black cat, that caused so much fuss, at the bottom of Olympia’s bed.27 Yet L’Origine is a picture of exposure behind the concealments of its cover and the concealment of the identity of its subject as an individual in the pure and anonymous sex of its revelation. Olympia in all its public exposure is a painting of concealment; that hand covers all – what may be called desirable both in the nude and in the prostitute – and the hand draws attention not just to what it hides but to what the viewer’s desires really are, whatever the pretences and pretentions of high art may attempt to disguise them as. In particular, Courbet’s picture delights in pubic hair and the hint of the opening of the vulva, which the conventions of the public nude absolutely forbade (the conventions reach back deep in the tradition, to antiquity’s avoidance of pubic hair and any opening in the genitals of its female nudes)28 and which even Manet had avoided, although one might speculate that the threat of hair (and everything else) lay beneath that aggressively placed hand.29 Here Courbet refers to another masterly nude kept privately and hidden, Goya’s Maja Desnuda of about 1800,30 which has wisps of pubic hair but nothing like the revelry of Courbet’s realism. Even the green curtain that Khalil Bey used to veil his mons Veneris is arguably a genuflection to the curtain at the upper left of Olympia.31 The public nature of Olympia – not only in exhibition but in its painted space of a potentially identifiable woman with a black servant, admirer’s flowers, naked and open for service, clearly a prostitute,32 at best a courtesan – is fundamentally and constitutively reversed by Courbet’s L’Origine in the intense, universal and yet anonymous primacy of the viewer and his con, the viewer to whom the con is revealed in its intimate reality (hair and all) in a pseudo-religious ritual of discrete ostentation. The differences between the two pictures – one painted for public Salon exposure and the other for private revelation in conditions of privileged secrecy – and the fundamental difference between L’Origine as veiled

Figure 9.2: Eugène Delacroix, Louis d’Orléans Showing His Mistress (1825–6).

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object of private display and L’Origine as outed canvas in the ‘flat art’ panopticon of the modern museum, is most clearly caught in the attempt to subject the two paintings to a Lacanian model of visuality.33 In the famous autobiographical story of Lacan’s Séminaire XI, the sardine can – floating in the water and glinting in the sunlight – is pointed out to Lacan by a third person who says ‘You see that can? Do you see it? Well, it doesn’t see you!’, and yet what is troubling to Lacan (the first person) is that the can (the second person) ‘in a sense … was looking at me all the same’.34 This story – in its sea setting en plein aire in Brittany – describes the optic space of public viewing, where the spectator is observed in his or her act of looking, and cannot control its conditions. In a fundamental sense Lacan’s model here reconfigures the triangulation of Freud’s structure in the discussion of jokes since it empowers the ‘exposed’ and yet ‘absent’ second person – Freud’s occluded woman, but Lacan’s animated sardine can – to ‘look back’. Lacan’s new configuration (which owes much to Merleau-Ponty and to Sartre as well as to Freud) places the viewer (once Freud’s third person, whose libido was to be satisfied as audience for the joke) between an object (a painting, a sardine can, a con whether vividly realised as by Courbet or shockingly announced by deliberate occlusion as in Manet’s hand) which is animated, in that on some level it ‘looks back’, and an observing world which watches the viewer caught in his or her gaze at the object.35 It is the outrage of Olympia, in the Lacanian structure of visuality, that her semi-abstracted gaze looks out beyond the viewer to the client in the room, indeed plausibly looks to the viewer as client, and does so not only in the presence of her black servant (carrying the flowers sent by someone else) and the cat but also of all the spectators in the gallery, noticing one as one looks. But the aggression of her gaze is secondary to the aggression of her hand – that ‘trap’, the place where the networks of vision, desire and occlusion cross ‘in the form of a screen’, which is itself a ‘mediation of masks’ where ‘the masculine and the feminine meet in the most acute, most intensive way’.36 For it is the hand and everything that the hand may be imagined to mask (‘what I look at is never what I wish to see’)37 that most insistently looks back at the viewer – gendering him or her not only as aggressively male (a client with one thing on his mind) but also as a punter being watched by every one else in the gallery space as he makes his way in what ought to be the secrecy of shame to the sexual transaction Olympia promises. The gaze of L’Origine in the open space of the Orsay, that the picture now shares with Olympia, performs the aggression of the Lacanian gaze still more forcefully, especially in the presence of others who catch you looking at it. It is, in fact, a testament to the painting’s power that even today (when pornography, pubic hair, scenes of sexuality both intimate and excessive are available on every computer, in the most mainstream of movies, ubiquitously

Figure 9.3: Edouard Manet, Olympia (1863).

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across the culture) it still retains an aggression that shocks. But the point is that Olympia was painted for a public space to do the job of challenging the public’s gaze, whereas, before its outing at the behest of the French State, L’Origine was constitutively not intended for this role. The rituals of its occlusion and special showing are rituals also of controlling its maternal energy (as Origin of the World, source of childbirth as well as penetration, an oculus whose hint of opening looks back disturbingly at the viewer, whether female or male)38 and of containing its power to seduce as ultimate object of male desire, at least in the hetero-normative society in which it was produced. Yet these rituals function at least as much to protect the owner, and his chosen viewers, from the power of the picture (their focus of interest), and from the dangers of being seen in this particular act of gazing. The making of L’Origine as a work to be veiled is in direct contradiction of the logic of Olympia, as an object to be publicly displayed, or indeed of Courbet’s own public nudes of precisely this period, notably La Femme au Perroquet, exhibited in direct response to Olympia, and to great success, in the Salon of 1866.39 Indeed, the logic of concealment and revelation that underlies L’Origine du Monde is in precise and self-differentiating dialogue with the open discourse of the Salon; but equally – at least in the case of Courbet and perhaps across the academic tradition of painting – the public nude and the specific rules about exactly what she might reveal and how, was itself constructed in relation to the secret tradition of which L’Origine is the masterpiece.

Rome, 1600s The clash and mutual co-dependence of two visual cultures in midnineteenth-century Paris – the open display of the Salon and the private closet where elite patrons and their guests could be pleasured by such objects as Courbet’s con – is heir to an ancient tradition. If we backtrack to another controversial painter and examples of his work that have proved disturbing, we find the same issues at play in Caravaggio’s Rome. Here, in the early 1600s, the open display was not the Salon but the church, with Caravaggio producing a clutch of brilliant commissions from the Matthew cycle in the Cantarella chapel of San Luigi dei Francesci in 1599–1602, the martyrdoms of Peter and Paul in the Cesari chapel of Sta Maria del Popolo in 1601 and the Madonna of Loreto in the Cavalletti chapel of Sant’ Agostino between 1604 and 1606.40 Beside such subjects – magnificent in the Counter-Reformation call for drama, viewer-absorption and epiphany – went a group of private commissions, whose disturbing nature in relation to normative models of sexuality is no less acute than Courbet’s, although very

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differently modulated. Most directly, the picture now in Berlin, known as Victorious Cupid or Amor Vincit Omnia (Fig. 9.4), painted for the Marchese Vicenzio Giustiniani in 1601–2,41 and shown in that discerning collector’s palace in a room with 120 other paintings, was ‘given a dark green silk covering’ – ostensibly ‘because it made all other rarities seem insignificant, so that with good reason it could be said to eclipse all other paintings’.42 Shocking in its provocative, frontal sexuality; its subject impudent, inviting in pose, smiling in invitation, with the arrows of desire in his right hand and reaching behind himself with his left ‘to indicate the source of the pleasure he is offering the viewer’;43 the ‘trophies’ (as Bellori put it)44 of a cultured life scattered beneath him as the spectator turns to the seduction of a transcendent desire; this picture blatantly breaks the rules by which the desirable nude is female, and it constructs its normatively male viewer – whether heterosexual or homosexual – as pederast. That the pose is explicitly and learnedly indebted to Michelangelo,45 only makes the homoeroticism more targeted and artistically rooted, but hardly less disturbing. That the subject – amor vincit omnia – was the kind of allegory used specifically as the theme of portrait covers in the previous century, for instance Titian’s Triumph of Love (c.1544–6), now in the Ashmolean (Fig. 9.5),46 turned with a brilliant conceit by Caravaggio into a treatment that needed covering in its own right, only confirms the picture’s reversals of the normative. Titian’s painting, a cover for a female portrait which no longer survives, has a standing amorino with bow and arrows riding a lion (the Lion of Venice?) and seen through a fictive oculus. Its play with a mediated gaze through a window and its general allegory of the triumph of love were preparation for the revelation of the work’s final vision of aristocratic beauty – ‘the portrait of a lady dressed in black with her right hand to her breast’.47 Caravaggio not only makes his reinvention of the theme such that it must remain behind a cover, but the teasing frontality and invitation of his subject is itself a cover for the bliss of the unseen rectum which his Cupid implies and to which that left hand appears to point. Whatever the realities of Caravaggio’s sexuality, still a topic of heated debate,48 this picture takes the erotic nude, perfected for instance by Titian’s Venus of Urbino (Fig. 9.6) as an exemplary and normative model of heterosexual desire,49 and reconfigures it as homosexual. The challenge to conventions – both social and painterly – is direct, radical and quite brilliantly accomplished. Instead of the many pictorial lines in Titian – hand, upper outline of the right leg, the shadow of the crotch, the dark screen which divides the picture’s background – all converging on the goddess’s sexual organs which are both covered and indicated by the hand in its famous and ancient pudica gesture (all of these themes on which Manet

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would riff), Caravaggio places his Cupid’s uncovered male genitals centre stage. The main lines of his picture – the bow of the violin, the arrows in Cupid’s right hand, the upthrusts of his wings, the shadows of his crotch all point to the genitals, but the left hand awkwardly, deliberately gestures behind to the delectation concealed by frontal nudity. No wonder the image needed covering. Not content with one shocking attempt to rewrite the norms of pictorial seduction by transforming its sexual orientation, Caravaggio produced a second – arguably still more outrageous – pederastic picture (Fig. 9.7), possibly a little later if we believe the model to be the same boy but somewhat older.50 Only rediscovered in the 1950s and hanging now in the Capitoline Museum, the conditions of its original hang in the house of its first owner, the Marchese Ciriaco Mattei (1542–1614), and in the subsequent Roman collections to which it passed, cannot be reconstructed. The painting shows a boy with a slight smile turned to make eye-contact with the viewer but hugging a ram which is behind him to the right. It is as if the spectator has surprised him with the ram in a rustic boudoir of pelts, sheets and crumpled cloths; but the gaze he returns to us is hardly one of fear, shock or shame: it is a direct come-on.51 Its subject has been much disputed and remains unresolved – the majority perhaps preferring John the Baptist but some batting for Isaac hugging the ram who will be sacrificed in his place and others for a profane theme like a Phrygian shepherd or Vergil’s Corydon. But whatever sacred or mythological subject one might marshal as a fig-leaf to protect the painting’s (or the painter’s) decency (as the mythological figure of Cupid is used to cover the sexual provocation of Amor Vincit Omnia), this work’s sexual intensity, its potential for seduction (of the artist, of the viewer) are hardly in question.52 Arguably, the transgression of this painting is not just its homosexuality, but that it triangulates (as the Amor does not) the directly addressed viewer, the delicious youth and the ram, whom the boy seems on the point of turning to kiss, when called away by sudden eye-contact with the observer. The spectator, caught at the point of being voyeur of a very strange act of love, is entangled in a web of inclusion where the boy veers between ram and us, between internal (and bestial) love-object and external viewer, turned into potential love-object by the animated pederastic image of desire, who ‘looks back’ enticingly.53 There is no doubt that Caravaggio’s ‘John the Baptist’ (or whatever its subject pretends to be) looks back in the Lacanian sense: the boy may be the object of the viewer’s desire – but his glance and turn from the ram makes the viewer the potential object of John’s desire, offers the imagined reversal of painting’s thrust of subjectivities (now with viewer as the love-object of the painted John). That is, the painting performs a kind of mirroring whereby

Figure 9.4: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Amor Vincit Omnia (1601–2).

Figure 9.5: Titian, Triumph of Love (c.1544–6).

Figure 9.6: Titian, Venus of Urbino (1538).

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the spectator’s engagement with the picture is like that of Narcissus with the image in the pool which looks back so potently at him. It may be added that the problems of the erotic gaze, both created artistically and turned into a visually-interrogated topic of philosophical problematics in this picture, are brilliantly described by Caravaggio from a viewer-centred perspective in the painting of Narcissus, now in the Palazzo Barberini in Rome, of about the same date, although some have doubted its authenticity (Fig. 9.8).54 There, Narcissus may be clothed but he is immersed – drunk one may say – in the self-reflective love-object of his own desires, lost and doomed in the sexually-charged engagement which St John figures through its protagonist’s gaze back at the viewer who has caught him unawares in his bestial boudoir. But Narcissus is less disturbing than St John because it figures the problematics, describing them visually as it were, while St John enacts them with the picture’s viewer turned into direct addressee (the parallel is precisely that between Delacroix’s pictorial description of male sexual aggression in Louis d’Orléans and Courbet’s enactment of it in L’Origine du monde). But what looks back? Just the boy, or the ram as well? The painting’s question – its challenge, on the level of painting as a visual system for formulating conceptual problems, both to the sexuality of painting and to painting as a means for formulating a sexual discourse – is whether, in responding to its brilliantly artificed seduction, the viewer does not place him- (or her-?) self in the role of the ram. To be capable of being seduced by art is to rise to the heights of love itself (as in the Amor), but it is also to cross a line where reason is suspended because we imagine the painted to be real, the purely material pigment to be animate, the representation to be epiphanic reality. That suspension of disbelief – which is the apogee of good taste, sensitivity and artistic passion – is also the point where, in the suspension of reason, the viewer may become bestial. Caravaggio’s queering of the female nude is much more than a challenge to sexual normativity: it assaults the entire visuality of seduction (even as – in Caravaggio’s supreme hand – it performs the visuality of seduction as never before) and it questions the desire (even to the point of the end of reason) that underlies the naturalistic idiom of Renaissance art which Caravaggio has inherited.55 Caravaggio’s triangulated St John – where the painted human figure is the second person, caught between viewer and ram – goes beyond either the Freudian or the Lacanian models of viewing we have been exploring. In Freud the feminised ‘second person’ is the occluded absence that turns first and third person into allies. In Lacan, the second person – the painted figure – ‘looks back’ amid a world that itself watches the complex of gazes, structuring a kaleidoscope of paranoias into the viewer’s subjectivity.

Figure 9.7: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, John the Baptist (c.1602–3).

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In Caravaggio, even as a socially awkward, arguably dangerous (because homosexual) form of desire is made to govern the viewing relationship, the object that looks back – the desirable boy – comes to govern both the ram and the viewer (the interchangeable first and third persons) as objects of his own desire, his own play. Are the ram’s curved and rigid horns the emblem of its sexuality or our own (perhaps unacknowledged) desire? Or are they the sign of cuckoldry – both ours and the ram’s? Does John look at me or at one of the other people in the room, seducing and jilting me at the same moment with his impudent glance? Much is fundamentally different between Caravaggio’s interrogation of the normative and Courbet’s in the pictures we have been exploring. The need for veiling is in common (at least for L’Origine du monde and Amor Vincit Omnia, we have no information about John the Baptist). These are pictures for the closet, in which a fundamental philosophical confrontation of painting, realism, the willingness of viewers to suspend their disbelief in the pursuit of desire, becomes possible. This is not a public conversation (either in the 1600s or the 1860s). In profound ways however the dynamics of veiling work differently in the two cases. I have argued that the variety of closets out of which L’Origine could be made to show herself were designed to defend the viewer from the outrage of the picture’s gaze and indeed to domesticate Courbet’s still shocking image, with the painter’s full collusion. But unveiling Caravaggio – which is to say, being caught by the gaze of his forbidden but enticing boys – is to enter a deliberately disturbing and challenging world, an intimacy of personal viewer confrontation that was itself thematised in the painting of Narcissus. Caravaggio’s closet is no place of safety or complacency.

By Way of a Conclusion: Pre-Histories and Religious Dialectics of the Pictorial Closet The key painting, on which all those that I have been discussing may be said to be commentaries (perhaps even variants) is Titian’s great nude, the Venus of Urbino, painted in the 1530s and delivered to Guidobaldo della Rovere, Duke of Camerino and subsequently of Urbino, in 1538 (Fig. 9.6). We do not know where or how it was displayed, whether its subject was Venus or some actual woman,56 whether its gesture is the pudica self-covering inherited from antiquity or an act of self-caress,57 whether it was a marriage picture designed to enhance the fertility of Guidobaldo’s bride, Giulia Varano, married to him at the age of 10 in 1534,58 or is a semi-pornographic ‘startlingly direct and unambiguous sexual invitation’.59

Figure 9.8: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Narcissus (c.1599–1600).

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Clearly the picture thematises the issue of concealment – from the hand that covers and points in the lower centre of the canvas and situated where the vertical line of the wall behind the goddess severs the picture’s background, via the dishevelled sheets, the green curtain drawn back at the upper left, to the two cassoni with figural patterns in the back right, one closed and the other open with servants rummaging within. The range of concealments play against the direct address of her gaze, but reflect (both in the oblong shape of the painting and its subject matter) the kind of nude iconography found painted inside the lids of cassoni in the period (and so hidden from viewers until the lid was raised).60 We cannot know how open or restricted was Guidobaldo’s display of Titian’s Venus. But it belongs to a world of the Kunstkammer in which it was normal for pictures – entirely uncontroversial pictures and especially portraits – to be veiled by painted covers or curtains.61 The Venetian word for such covers made from canvas – like Titian’s Amor Vincit Omnia – was timpano, and we know of several painted by the likes of Titian and Lorenzo Lotto. The complexity and richness of this world of paintings hidden by other paintings, locked in tabernacles, cupboards and closets, wrapped in silks, behind curtains,62 slid into pouches63 – where the materials evoked on the canvas (lavish dress, and all the textiles that thematised the nude from the Venus of Urbino via Caravaggio’s boys to Olympia and L’Origine) themselves play against the actual textiles that facilitated their concealment and display64 – is entirely lost in the cold lighting of modern museums and the flat-art openness of a display culture which has collapsed the architectural theatricality of paintings and turned the three-dimensional materiality of their siting, unpacking and intimacy of engagement into the flatness of wall screens and two-dimensional exhibition. It is obvious that this social world – one we are forced to reconstruct in our imaginations since the contexts in which we find pictures on display today are so fundamentally inimical to it – owes much to the great tradition of veiling and ostentation in sacred art.65 To quote Leonardo da Vinci: Do we not see pictures representing divine beings constantly kept under coverlets of the greatest price? And whenever they are unveiled there is first great ecclesiastical solemnity with much hymn singing, and then at the moment of unveiling the great multitude who have gathered there immediately throw themselves to the ground, worshipping and praying to the deity, who is represented in the picture, for the repairing of their lost health and for their eternal salvation, exactly as if this goddess were there as a living presence.66

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Here, before the high altar, pictorial revelation is at its peak – accompanied by the synaesthetic orchestration of emotions in music and physical prostration, large crowds and the management of collective subjectivity, the yearning for healing and salvation, the structuring of the epiphanic performance of real presence. Yet Leonardo’s text is a peculiar conflation of pre-Reformation religious actualities in the Catholic Church and a strange fantasy of this world transposed back into antiquity with its particular deities represented in religious images that embody the living presence of goddesses as well as the One God.67 On a smaller scale, including that of the portable icon, the concealment and revelation of images takes us into the world of diptychs, triptychs, polyptychs and reliquaries, all in a constant dynamic of opening and closure within the liturgical flow of the church space, of boxes sealed and unlocked, of relics shrouded in precious cloths and unwrapped, effectively the entire performativity of the sacred.68 The strategy of constructing sanctity through framing, obscuring, selective revelation (to specific people, at specific places and at specific times) is extremely ancient, reaching well back beyond Christianity to the traditions of ancient religion.69 It is striking that the prime objects of concealment and revelation in the medieval tradition (one certainly still alive as late as Leonardo’s Renaissance) are sacred, whereas all the examples on which I have focused – supreme instances in the post-Renaissance world – are hardly religious and are controversial because of their overt and challenging sexuality. In this, pictures like Caravaggio’s boys and Courbet’s L’Origine pick out one aspect of theological focus in Renaissance sacred painting, namely the sexuality of Christ and the ostentatio genitalium, which has been so systematically (and controversially) traced by Leo Steinberg.70 Steinberg’s account is not concerned with how the sacred panels he discusses were displayed or (potentially) covered and unveiled in ritual usage and viewing, but rather with their repeated depiction of genital revelation and their pointing to Christ’s sex organs within a discourse of the Incarnation. But of course the subject-matter of such pictures cannot be entirely unrelated to their means of display nor to the great tradition of covering and unveiling in Christian religious art in general. Yet one issue not discussed by Steinberg is that the sexual theme he pointed to goes with a move from the direct gaze of the sacred icon at the viewer (usually the gaze of the Virgin and Child, sometimes just the Virgin), which was normal throughout Byzantium and medieval Italy. Hardly a single one of the nearly three hundred examples illustrated by Steinberg (both Madonnas and grown Christs) gazes out of the picture at the viewer:71 almost all are caught in naturalism’s wilful fantasy that the narrative world of the picture is self-sustaining, with the viewer looking in as a kind of unacknowledged voyeur, as if through a window.72 It is secular imagery – the portrait and above all the nude in the tradition

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of the Venus of Urbino, developed by Caravaggio’s boys and finding its way to the Salon nude and Manet’s Olympia – that looks back in postRenaissance art, replacing the mediating gaze of the Virgin and saints, that once promised a link to heaven, with a direct address in shared profane space or the come-on of potentially eroticised private desire. I want to end here by touching on three aspects, all to do with religion, that play in certain targeted, if not entirely conscious, ways on the turns to a philosophically thoughtful pictorial discourse of sexuality, largely sequestered behind the green curtain, but exceptionally and radically taken from behind the curtain’s screen in the exhibition of Manet’s Olympia at the Salon of 1865. It seems to me that Caravaggio’s obsession with pictorial desire – its limits, trangressions and ultimately its failure to attain the love-object (because painted canvas can never be flesh, pigment can never provide affection or sexual union) – a desire so acutely enacted in the realism of his beautiful boys, cannot be separated from the Counter-Reformation’s obsession with making Catholic Christian sacred reality vivid, visible and epiphanic.73 Caravaggio is arguably the supreme master of this moment – the artist who brought a recognisably real (all too familiarly street-walker type of) Madonna of Loreto face to face with pilgrims of intense piety and genuinely humble status in his great Sant’ Agostino altarpiece of 1603–6 (Fig. 9.9). At this painting’s magnificently absent centre, the praying hands of the male pilgrim approach but just fail to touch, or overlap with, the feet of the blessing Christ child – feet echoed so distinctively in the bare feet of the Virgin herself and of the pilgrim at the picture’s lower right. Is there no parallel between the evocation of a passionately desired spiritual vision of salvation itself, yet one only just not grasped in that gap between praying hands and holy foot, and the evocation of sexual desire both proffered in the vision of St John and not quite delivered, just as the boy’s mouth fails (only just!) to make contact with the ram’s? Is it too much to think that, in the privacy of the closet and in the closet’s special arena of sexuality as opposed to religion, Caravaggio chose to confront pictorially the philosophical instabilities and problematics of the anti-Protestant political project of painting as visual instantiation of the desires of the Catholic sacred world? At the very least the two sets of themes – Counter-Reformation propaganda as affirmation of the real and an intense interrogation of sexuality in the field of vision – go hand in hand in his project and painterly imaginaire at the same moment of a brief and brilliant career. The 1860s moment of Courbet’s L’Origine and Manet’s Olympia is fundamentally different in every specific social and political respect

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from the Counter-Reformation. But its religious politics are both fraught and extremely complex in a France that lived through the nineteenth century carrying the burden of the political and sacred implications of the Revolution and in particular the commitment to a multiple series of restitutions of an ancient ritual culture and landscape which the Revolution had devastated.74 Another way of putting this is that, in the wake of the Revolution, French culture was a battlefield between redemptive Catholicism and progressive anticlericalism – which, it has been argued, structured even the very concept of the ‘unconscious’ in nineteenthcentury France.75 Too single-minded a focus on the materialist themes of interest to contemporary secular scholarship risks underestimating the extent of religious revival and (more important) the ways religion impacted upon other areas of social life in a complex dialogue.76 One thinks of the process of the sanctification of Joan of Arc (which culminated in her being declared venerable in 1894 and formally canonised in 1920),77 the extraordinary rise of pilgrimage in the middle of the nineteenth century (of which the shrine at Lourdes is only the most famous instance),78 the restoration of churches depredated by the Revolution in a neo-gothic frenzy.79 Of course this was in significant conflict, and arguably in direct dialectic,80 with various forms of materialist and socialist anticlerical politics, such as the views directly espoused by Courbet,81 and such replays of the Revolution as the uprising of February 1848, or the Paris Commune of 1871. But in terms of the visual and artistic environment of France, while the nineteenth century oversaw the restitution of ruined churches, it could not put back the relics which had formed their sacred centres – even if many of the reliquaries that had contained them were now exhibits in various national collections.82 The Revolution had been an orgy of ‘outing’ the sacred from its special concealments, boxes and precious cloths; and however much modernity reconstituted the fabric of holiness, it could only do so with a sense of mourning and loss – or in the new charismatic spirituality of visions and apparitions. Specifically the 1860s are a moment of vibrant Catholic revival in continental Europe, between the promulgation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception by Pius IX in 1854 and the First Vatican Council of 1870, the decade when Notre-Dame in Paris was re-consecrated (on 31 March 1864),83 following the restoration of the Sainte-Chapelle in 1855,84 and when the cult at Lourdes took off (especially after an Episcopal Commission came out in favour of the apparitions in 1862).85 It is in this context that Courbet’s L’Origine and its green curtain, in a Turk’s bathroom, may be read as an explicitly aggressive statement against the contemporary revival of the culture of the sacred, which the Revolution had trampled. It specifically appropriates the pre-Revolutionary Catholic

Figure 9.9: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Madonna of Loreto (c.1603–6).

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practice of reliquary concealment in order – as part of its effect and force – to shock by the replacement of its own materialist, realist, utterly sexual model of origin instead of the sacred matter or the sacred icon normatively behind the veil in the discourse of religious ritual.86 Not only is the picture anti-clerical, but its collection by a Muslim is both counter-Orientalist and counter-Christian – at least insofar as it uncovers the under-belly of Christian revelatory performance. Here Courbet in the 1860s is not so far from Caravaggio in the 1600s: both use the visuality of naturalism, of male sexual desire and of the performative play between concealment and revelation in the form of green curtains, to interrogate the visuality of the sexual in terms archetypally reserved for the sacred – although from very different places, since Caravaggio is one of the Counter-Reformation’s most brilliant creators of sacred images while Courbet is one of the nineteenth century’s most anti-religious artistic voices. But the effect of Courbet’s L’Origine is not only due to its aggressive hyperrealism of hair and vulva and its impersonal focalisation on the pure genital object of desire, by contrast with the normative aesthetics of the nude; it is also potentially its deliberate act of blasphemy. The elevation of the green curtain reveals not a sacred icon or a holy relic which was once part of or attached to a holy body, but an ostentatio genitalium such as the Renaissance imagery of Christ never imagined. Let us return to Olympia. Unlike Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde, and indeed any other picture discussed in this essay, Olympia was painted to brazen it out before the gaze of any passer-by in the public space of the Salon. It is an outed image and was made to be so by its artist. It was painted in 1863 but Manet waited till 1865 to show it; and when he did, his picture had a companion piece – a chaperone, as it were – to which scholarship has devoted significantly less attention and little intellectual acuity (Fig. 9.10). That painting, highly relevant to questions of religion, concealment and revelation, was Jésus Insulté par les Soldats, painted in 1864–5 and shown juxtaposed with Olympia in room M in the Salon of 1865, probably immediately above her.87 It is obvious that the pairing of the two paintings was deliberate and had an edge. Olympia is an all female composition; Jésus is an all male group. Olympia is a female nude amidst modern accoutrements; Jésus is a male nude amidst figures whose dress deliberately avoids the historical situating of biblical imagery in an Orientalist wonderland, as was normal in mid-nineteenth-century France.88 Olympia, with a Classical name and adopting Manet’s aggressive version of antiquity’s pudica gesture in the imagery of the goddess Aphrodite,89 points to a pagan model of sexuality and religion by contrast with the Christian model suggested by Jésus. The palette of both pictures is sombre, the backgrounds dark, the handling of paint thickly materialist. While the principal figure in Olympia challenges

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the viewer directly with her gaze, the gaze of Jesus is averted – marking a fundamental difference between the protagonists of the two paintings. But the figure behind Jesus on the right – wearing an odd and rather theatrical bright orange headband, fur jacket and antique sword – both holds the viewer’s gaze and raises the robe with which the insulting of Christ as a mock monarch will be complete. While the picture, like Olympia, draws on a model from Titian (itself in the Louvre) via a version by Van Dyck,90 the man in the fur jacket on the right has no part in the precursor paintings (as does the posture of Jesus, and the two figures to the left). Instead, the man raises the purple robe in a gesture that has hints of revelatory ostentatio and looks out to the viewer to mark the specific nature of his framing of Christ in the robe as something done for the viewer’s own eyes. The man is both involved in the painting’s narrative world of the mocking of Jesus and is performing his act of unveiling for the spectator whose gaze he holds – an act that reveals the sacred displayed before a curtain of the cloth of the robe. At the same time, the direct gaze of the man at the spectator means that the picture ‘looks back’ at its viewers, marking their presence and their potential involvement in its narrative of the mocking of the Saviour. The man in the fur jacket stands as a modern addition and commentary in relation both to the Scriptural scene depicted and its pictorial precedents in the works of Titian and Van Dyck. His actions and gaze evoke a certain parallel with the themes of visual arrest and surrounding by cloth in Olympia. Olympia’s gaze is a direct challenge to the viewer, a mark of her humiliation as whore and of the spectator’s humiliation as customer, who can be seen in the process of conducting the transaction of the gaze with her by everyone else in the room. The gaze of the man in the fur jacket, as he is about to complete the humiliation of Jesus by the act of robing, is also a challenge to the spectator – a mark of his or her humiliation as (albeit vicarious) participant in the act of mocking the Saviour. That it is not Christ who looks back but one of his mockers, does as little for the viewer’s spiritual comfort as Olympia’s gaze does for his or her sense of social propriety and security. Even the attributes of the protagonists are in play with each other – Olympia’s carelessly balanced shoe and Jesus’ naked feet, Olympia’s pink ribbon and Jesus’ crown of thorns, Olympia’s choker and bracelet and Christ’s wrists bound with ropes, above all perhaps the specific avoidance of any ostentatio genitalium in Olympia’s hand and Jesus’ white cloth. We know, from the flood of criticism directed against both paintings in 1865, that neither was a success.91 But it is striking that the viewing of the one clearly changed the meaning of the other in the Salon exhibition.

Figure 9.10: Edouard Manet, Jésus Insulté par les Soldats (1865).

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When Théophile Gautier speculated that the name ‘Olympia’ evoked a courtesan, the notorious mistress of Pope Innocent X, he was reading Olympia through the religious politics implied by Jésus Insulté.92 When Jean Ravenel wrote that Olympia was ‘the scapegoat of the Salon, the victim of Parisian lynch law. Each passer-by takes a stone and throws it in her face’,93 he turned Manet’s contemporary prostitute into the Gospel’s woman taken in adultery (John 8.2-11), but in this case not saved by Jesus’ intervention, while at the same time introducing a touch of revolutionary violence into the response of the public. Again effectively Olympia is being read through the biblical connotations evoked by Jésus Insulté. Even more impressive in the linkage of the pictures is Ravenel’s comment on the ‘cat arching its back’ in Olympia which ‘saves M. Manet from a popular execution’, and the verse into which his review then breaks which refers to ‘its black and brown fur’. Since the cat’s fur is black, and the only brown fur is that of the man in the fur jacket in Jésus Insulté, one might presume a kind of conflation of the paintings where Christ’s humiliation is compared to Manet’s in the 1865 Salon and the press, but the difference in the end result (no execution for Manet) is also noted. All this comes from a critic whose direct comment on the Jésus was that ‘it is hideous, but all the same it is something’. What is clear is that Manet’s test of the limits of sexuality in representation in Olympia – even more explicitly and directly than the work of Caravaggio and Courbet – is set against and beside an overt genuflection to sacred art and the representation of a religious reality. The power of Olympia’s exposure – as woman, as prostitute, as challenge to propriety and the norms of representation – cannot be separated from that of her pair, the humiliation and naked exposure of Jesus himself. The commentary this coupling provides is edgy and awkward. Is it the social world of modernity itself that is like the mocking of Christ, or is it rather its representation? Is the insulting of the Lord to be seen as the approach to an urban prostitute in the modern age? Is all religion in the contemporary materialist, realist world no more than what Olympia offers or means? Worse than either picture, and powerfully reinforcing of the difficulties that the Paris of 1865 clearly had with both, is the ambiguity, uncertainty and yet obviously heavy import of the message that the deliberate juxtaposition of a transgressively aggressive nude in the great tradition with a major essay in sacred history painting, was designed to create. For it is not at all clear from the paintings themselves whether Manet’s pairing of the two pictures offers a reactionary sermon on contemporary moral decline, or a scandalous equation of realities (sacred and contemporary, pious and illicit), or a blasphemous assault on religious proprieties.94

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The difference from previous tradition embodied in Olympia and Jésus Insulté is that they take the philosophical probing of realism in relation to the desires of both flesh and spirit from inside the closet (where Caravaggio and Courbet explored them) and put them onto the public stage. The juxtaposition of Olympia and Jésus democratises and popularises a philosophical discourse in and about painting previously available to elites only in the curtained closet of high art. Of course, we must celebrate the outing of this discourse – and Manet’s brilliantly radical gesture. But – to return to the point where I started – to begin (as we moderns usually begin now) with the assumption that this kind of outing was ever normal and normative in the tradition before the later nineteenth century, to experience our paintings (not only Courbet’s con but every altarpiece and most Renaissance portraits) as outed, is to operate with a fundamentally unhistorical and ahistorical set of assumptions. It is also to relegate the force of our images to the blandness of the even lighting of the modern art gallery. It is to miss not only something of the philosophical edge of images that negotiate with their coverings in so many ways, but also the multiplicities of seduction and desire that are fundamental to the performance of pictorial illusion as the epiphanic condition between revelation and concealment.

My special thanks are due to Dana Arnold, Milette Gaifman, Tamar Garb, Françoise Meltzer, David Nirenberg, Verity Platt, Gervase Rosser and Martha Ward.

Notes 1 W. Davis, Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2010), p. 10. 2 On Pevsner, see Stephen Games, Pevsner: The Early Life – Germany and Art (London: Continuum, 2010), pp. 151–3, 170–2, 178–84, 195–7, 205; on Kantorowicz, see Martin Ruehl, ‘“In this Time without Emperors”: The Politics of Ernst Kantorowicz’s Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite Reconsidered’ Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 63 (2000), pp. 187–242. 3 Predictably there is now a large literature on this picture. Most substantive are the monographs of B. Teyssèdre, Le roman de l’Origine (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1996), reissued in a new edition in 2007 (which I use here) and T. Savatier, L’Origine du Monde: Histoire d’un tableau de Gustave Courbet (Paris: Editions Bartillat, 2006). 4 On Khalil Bey’s collection see F. Haskell, ‘A Turk and His Pictures in Nineteenth-Century Paris’ in Past and Present in Art and Taste (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), pp. 175–85, Teyssèdre (2007) pp. 27–40 and M. Haddad, Khalil-Bey: Un homme, une collection (Paris: Broche, 2000), esp. pp. 49–60 on the erotica. On Le Sommeil, see D. de Font-Reaulx, ‘Sleep’ in Gustave Courbet (catalogue of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Exhibition of 2008; Ostfilden, 2008), pp. 362–3 with bibliography.

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5 On women, veiling and art in Paris in the second half of the nineteenth century, see M. Kessler, Sheer Presence: The Veil in Manet’s Paris (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). Of course, veiling Courbet’s con is not quite the same thing as veiling the face – but it has resonances with a Lacanian reading of Courbet’s L’Origine as an image that ‘looks back’, on which see further below. 6 M. du Camp, Les convulsions de Paris (Paris: Hachette, 1878), vol. 2, pp. 263–4 with V. Bajou, Courbet (Paris: Adam Biro, 2003), p. 347; L. Nochlin, Courbet (London: Thames & Hudson, 2007), p. 148 (republishing her classic 1986 article from October 37); Savatier (2006), pp. 77–9; Teyssèdre (2007), pp. 107–113; L. de Cars, ‘The Origin of the World’ in Gustave Courbet (2008), pp. 378–84, esp. p. 380. It is not surprising that under the veil of an Italian conjunction, du Camp manages to articulate the French word which most brutally describes the painting, a word he would under no circumstances have used in publishable prose – the word being con. 7 In this sense du Camp’s pursuit of the picture’s eliciting of desire for the real is ancestor to the delicious insanity of the current Wikipedia entry on the painting (http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Origine_du_monde) which follows Savatier (2006), pp. 53–69 and Teyssèdre (2007), pp. 331–41 in attempting to identify the model: as if that could possibly be the point of a picture which excludes all identity but pure female sex. On du Camp’s descriptive projections in this passage, see S. Barzilai, Lacan and the Myth of Origins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 10 and A. Jones, ‘Meaning, Identity, Embodiment: The Uses of Mearleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology in Art History’ in D. Arnold and M. Iversen (eds), Art and Thought (Oxford: Wiley, 2003), pp. 71–90, esp. pp. 73 and 79 on du Camp’s ‘investment’. 8 See J. Rubin, Courbet (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 1997), p. 208. 9 See e.g. M. Fried, Courbet’s Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 210–14; Badou (2003), p. 348; Nochlin (2007), pp. 149–50, whence the quote. 10 Savatier (2006), p. 74, Teyssèdre (2007), pp. 71–2 and de Cars (2008), p. 380. 11 Haskell (1987), p. 183. The sale catalogue (published with Théophile Gautier’s introduction in Haddad (2000), pp. 139–84) excludes both Le Sommeil and L’Origine but includes Le Bain Turc. 12 Savatier (2006), p. 113 and de Cars (2008), pp. 380–1, quoting Goncourt’s diary of 29 June 1889 in E. and J. de Goncourt, Journal. Mémoires de la vie littéraire (Paris: Monaco, 1956), vol. 3, p. 996. 13 I can find no confirmation of when and from whom L’Origine acquired the title which it now bears. 14 Savatier (2006), pp. 123–5 and Teyssèdre (2007), pp. 167–77. 15 Savatier (2006), pp. 128–9, quoting the memoires of Jean Oberlé. 16 Savatier (2006), pp. 173–9, Teyssèdre (2007), pp. 227–35 and de Cars (2008), p. 381. 17 E. Roudinesco, L bataille de cent ans. Histoire de al psychanalyse en France. Vol. 2: 1925–85 (Paris: Seuil, 1986), p. 305; Barzilai (1999), pp. 8–9; B. Landry, Vaga-bondage derrière un tableau d’ André Masson (Paris: Temps Cerises, 2000), p. 12; Savatier (2006), pp. 180, 185–6, 192–3; Teyssèdre (2007), pp. 236–42; de Cars (2008), p. 381. 18 It may not be just fantasy. Such fishing as I have done (via the ministrations of my friend David Nirenberg, whose sources among people psychoanalysed by Lacan have all insisted on anonymity and that what they say be retailed at second-hand) indicates that the picture, masked by the Masson cover, was at times in Lacan’s Paris consulting room and that even in the country, Lacan would conduct psychoanalytic camps where people were analysed in the presence of the picture in the day and dined together as a party in the evening. Oral history in the form of Chinese whispers is about right for a picture that no one could see except through formal revelation at the behest of its owner. 19 S. Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), pp. 140–6, 183 (originally published as Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Umbewussten, Vienna, 1905). For brief discussion in relation to ekphrasis, see J.

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Elsner, ‘Seeing and Saying: A Psycho-Analytic Account of Ekphrasis’ Helios 31 (2004), pp. 157–85, esp. pp. 158–9. 20 In principle the full-on female genitalia can hardly be a fetish for the female genitalia – since a fetish should shield the sight yet suggest the attraction (as Masson’s Terre érotique certainly does). But arguably it is as painting (that is, as the imitative but not real) that the picture shields an imagined reality, both evoking male desire and protecting its anxieties, which may range from castration to the failure to perform. 21 Further on questions of concealment and occlusion of female sexuality in the period, see T. Garb, Bodies of Modernity: Figure and Flesh in Fin-de-Siècle France (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998), pp. 179–95. 22 L. Johnson, The Paintings of Eugène Delacroix: A Critical Catalogue 1816–1831 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981), no. 111, pp. 97–8. 23 Courbet collected such material, some of which (e.g. by Auguste Belloc) was of high technical quality. See D. de Font-Réaulx, ‘Auguste Belloc’ in Gustave Courbet (2008), pp. 383–4. On this form of pornography – the ‘beaver shot’, which we are told was one of photography’s signal contributions to pornographic imagery – see A. SolomonGodeau, ‘The Legs of the Countess’, October 39 (1986), pp. 65–108, esp. pp. 97–8; E. McCauley, Industrial Madness: Commercial Photography in Paris, 1848–1871 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 175–8; K. Dennis, Art/Porn: A History of Seeing and Touching (Oxford: Berg, 2009), p. 60; 64–73. On the photographic nude in nineteenth-century Paris, see further McCauley (1994), pp. 149–94. As Marty Ward reminds me, in photographs in nineteenth-century albums, including pornographic prints of this kind, a sheet of tissue paper would have veiled the image which would have had to be drawn back, just like Khalil Bey’s green curtain. 24 On Olympia, the literature is vast. The classic modern study is T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985), pp. 77–146, esp. pp. 82–100 on the scandal. Oddly, the relationship of L’Origine and Olympia appears not to have been discussed despite the closeness of their dates, their joint but different assault on the line between what can be depicted and what should not, and their similarly challenging sexual content. For the later history of the nude in nineteenth-century Paris, see H. Clayson, Painted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991) and H. Dawkins, The Nude in French Art and Culture, 1870–1910 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 25 On the kinds of pictures Olympia was made to challenge, see e.g. J. Shaw, ‘The Figure of Venus: Rhetoric of the Ideal and the Salon of 1863’ in C. Arscott and K. Scott (eds), Manifestations of Venus: Art and Sexuality (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 90–108. 26 For the outrage of Olympia’s hand, see T. Reff, Manet: Olympia (London: Viking, 1976), p. 58; Clark (1985), pp. 135–6; C. Bernheimer, Figures of Ill repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 117–8; M. Fried, Manet’s Modernism: Or, the Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 314. 27 See e.g. Bertall’s engraving of the cat with erect tail in place of the hand, in Clark (1985), pp. 144–5; also Reff (1976), pp. 96–103. 28 For a synopsis of the theme, see M. Squire, The Art of the Body: Antiquity and Its Legacy (London: I.B.Tauris, 2011), pp. 69–114, esp. pp. 84–6 on the lack of pubic hair and vulva; also A. Stewart, Art, Desire and the Body in Ancient Greece (Cambridge, 1997), p. 99. 29 For the absence of pubic hair in Olympia see Clark (1985), p. 136: ‘there is honestly nothing beneath her open hand but shadow’. Of course, T. J. is here undone by the honesty of his materialism: what is actually there does not matter, what matters is what the viewer may imagine to be there. 30 Goya’s Maja Desnuda was painted for the private cabinet of Manuel Godoy, chief minister of the Bourbon kings in Spain 1792–7 and 1801–8, at a time when the nude was banned

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by the Inquisition. There is no evidence that it was covered but it was certainly privately displayed to very selective visitors. Seized by the Inquisition in 1813, it was ultimately sequestered in the Academia di San Fernando with very restricted access until it was brought to the Prado in 1910. See J. Luna and M. Moreno de las Heras (eds) Goya: 250 Aniversario (Madrid: Museodel Prado, 1996), no. 94, p. 371; J. Tomlinson, Goya in the Twilight of Enlightenment (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 115–27. 31 A much more likely reference it seems to me than the green curtains of Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, suggested by de Cars (2008), p. 382, or an assertion of Khalil Bey’s Islamic identity as proposed (preposterously) by Savatier (2006), p. 73. Note that green is overdetermined in the various pictures with which L’Origine is in conversation – one thinks of the green couch of Goya’s Maja Desnuda; the green background to the upper left (as well as the green shadow of the sheets) in Delacroix’s Louis d’Orléans Showing His Mistress; and the green curtain (to which that in Olympia certainly refers) on the left upper side of Titian’s Venus of Urbino. And, as we shall see in seventeenth-century Rome, green was the colour of veiling there too. 32 So the avant-garde’s development of the Olympia motif – particularly in the ‘Modern Olympia’ pictures of Cézanne – certainly moves into the realm of prostitution. Cézanne’s pictures also put the figure of the observer directly into the painting. See Clayson (1991), pp. 16–26 and, on Dégas, pp. 27–55; also Garb (1998), p. 183 on Cézanne. 33 As attempted for L’Origine by Jones (2003), pp. 82–4 on ‘the “gaze” of the cunt in Origin of the World’ (p. 83), also J. Elkins, The Object Stares Back (New York: Mariner, 1996), pp. 103–7 which reads L’Origine against Bataille. The extent to which responding to L’Origine was itself formative for Lacan’s thinking about such issues as the gaze, the veil and female sexuality is moot and unprovable – but the subject has potential. See Jones (2003), p. 83 and Savatier (2006), pp. 195–8. But the L’Origine is never mentioned in Lacan’s published work, and may only have been shared with his closest adherents (such as Jacques-Alain Miller, the editor of his séminaire and his sonin-law). I think that it is too simplistic to attribute particular aspects of his writing to a specific engagement with a painting with which he lived for the final quarter century of his life, covered up as accounts of other paintings like Holbein’s Ambassadors or Leonardo’s Virgin and Child with St Anne and John the Baptist. But L’Origine certainly resonates with texts such as ‘Guiding Remarks for a Convention on Female Sexuality’ (1958–60) or ‘The Signification of the Phallus’ (1958) both in Ecrits (New York, 2006), pp. 575–84 and 610–20; his thoughts about pictures, the gaze and the screen in séminaire XI (1964), esp. chapters 6–9 of J. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (London: Hogarth, 1977), pp. 67–119, and voyeurism at p. 82; perhaps above all séminaire IV (1957) and its discussion of the ‘function of the veil’ in relation to fetishism, desire and absence: see J. Lacan, Le séminaire IV: Le relation d’objet (Paris: Seuil, 1994), pp. 151–64. 34 Lacan (1977), pp. 95–6. 35 A good discussion is N. Bryson, ‘The Gaze in the Expanded Field’ in H. Foster (ed.), Vision and Visuality (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988), pp. 87–114, esp. pp. 87–94, 104–8. 36 Lacan (1977), pp. 92–3 on the trap; pp. 93, 96, 106–8 on the screen; p. 107 on masks and the mediation of masculine and feminine. This material recapitulates in slightly different form the earlier discussion of the curtain and the veil in Lacan (1994), pp. 155–6. 37 Lacan (1977), p. 103. 38 It is the issue of childbirth, which is implied by the picture’s title L’Origine, and that theme’s nineteenth-century associations with death (of the mother, of the newborn child) as well as generation, that draws a line against the excess of purely sexual interpretations of the painting, whether celebratory (i.e. seeing it as erotic) or condemnatory (i.e. seeing it as pornographic). What looks back from the eye of the opening vulva is not just the seeing of the viewer as he or she gazes at the forbidden object, but the cognisance of

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what sexual contact can entail, of what it is the origin, whether in new life or instant mortality. 39 On La Femme au Perroquet, see Fried (1990), pp. 201–5; Badou (2003), pp. 328–30; de Cars ‘Woman with a Parrot’ in Gustave Courbet (2008), pp. 367–71 and ‘A Legacy of Truth’ ibid., pp. 64–6. 40 San Luigi dei Francesci: e.g. H. Hibbard, Caravaggio (London: Harper & Row, 1983), pp. 91–117 and 138–48; C. Gilbert, Caravaggio and His Two Cardinals (University Park: Penn State Press, 1995), pp. 159–89; J. Spike, Caravaggio (New York, 2001), pp. 92– 101; V. Sgarbo, Caravaggio (Milan: Skira, 2007), pp. 100–7; M. Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), pp. 195–209. Sta Maria del Popolo: L. Steinberg, ‘Observations in the Cerasi Chapel’ Art Bulletin 41 (1959), pp. 183–90; Hibbard (1983), pp. 118–37; M. B. Bernadini, Caravaggio, Carracci, Maderno: La Capella Cerasi in Sta Maria del Popolo a Roma (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2001); Spike (2001), pp. 105–13; Sgarbi (2007), pp. 110–13. Sant’ Agostino: Hibbard (1983), pp. 184–91; Spike (2001), pp. 146–50; Sgarbi (2007), pp. 128–9; P. Jones, Altarpieces and their viewers in the churches of Rome from Caravaggio to Guido Reni (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 75–136. Generally also, M. Hall, The sacred image in the age of art: Titian, Tintoretto, Barocci, El Greco, Caravaggio (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), pp. 249–67. 41 On the Giustianini collection, see E. Cropper and C. Dempsey, Nicholas Poussin: Friendship and the Love of Painting (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 23–105. On Caravaggio and Giustianini, see S. Danesi Squarzina, ‘Caravaggio e I Giustianini’ in S. Macioce (ed.), Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio: la vita e le opere attraverso i documenti (Rome: Logart, 1996), pp. 94–122 and S. Danesi Squarzina (ed.) Caravaggio e I Giustianini (Milan: Electa, 2001). 42 This is the testimony of J. von Sandrart (1606–88), Giustiniani’s curator from 1632–5, in a text published in 1675. See for the original and translation Hibbard (1983), pp. 378–9. On the picture see Hibbard (1983), pp. 155–60; Gilbert (1995), pp. 89–91; G. Hammill, Sexuality and Form: Caravaggio, Marlowe and Bacon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 86–90; M. Marini, Caravaggio ‘Pictor Praestantissimus’, Rome (2001), 3rd edn, no. 55, pp. 468–70; S. Danesi Squarzina, ‘Amore vincitore’ in Danesi Squarzina (2001), pp. 282–6; Spike (2001), pp. 102–4; Sgarbi (2007), pp. 116–17; Fried (2010), pp. 113–14; B. Lindemann, ‘Love Triumphant (Amor Vincit Omnia)’ in C. Strinati (ed.), Caravaggio (Milan: Skira, 2010), pp. 141–5; S. Richards, ‘Caravaggio’s Roman Collectors’ in D. Franklin and S. Schütze, Caravaggio and His Followers in Rome (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), pp. 48–72, esp. p. 62. 43 I quote Fried (2010), p. 113. 44 G. P. Bellori, The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects: Caravaggio (1672), tr. A. Wohl (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 182 and Hibbard (1983), p. 366 who gives both Italian and English. 45 See W. Friedlaender, Caravaggio Studies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1955), pp. 89–94; Hibbard (1983), pp. 151–60; Gilbert (1995), pp. 5–9. 46 See C. Whistler, ‘Titian’s “Triumph of Love”’, The Burlington Magazine 151 (August, 2009), pp. 536–41. 47 Ibid., pp. 536, 539, quoting the Vendramin collection inventory of 1602. 48 Discussions include D. Carrier, Principles of Art History Writing (University Park: Penn State Press, 1991), pp. 64–7; Gilbert (1995), pp. 191–261; L. Bersani and U. Dutoit, Caravaggio’s Secrets (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Hammill (2000), pp. 63–96. 49 See e.g. D. Rosand, ‘So-and-So Reclining on Her Couch’ in J. Manca (ed.) Titian 500, Studies in the History of Art 45 (Washington, DC, 1993), pp. 101–20; R. Goffen (ed.), Titian’s Venus of Urbino (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); R. Goffen, Titian’s Women (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 146–57; O. Calabrese,

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‘La Venere di Urbino di Tiziano Vecellio’ in O. Calabrese (ed.), Venere svelata: la Venere di Urbino di Tiziano (Milan: Silvan, 2003), pp. 29–45. 50 See Hibbard (1983), pp. 151–5; S. Freedberg, Circa 1600: A Revolution of Style (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 52–60; Gilbert (1995), pp. 2–34; C. Strinati (ed.), Caravaggio ela collezione Mattei (Milan: Electa, 1995), pp. 120–3; Marini (2001), no. 59, pp. 476–8; Spike (2001), pp. 126–31; C. Rudolph and S. Ostrow, ‘Isaac Laughing: Caravaggio, Non-Traditional Imagery and Traditional Interpretation’ Art History 24 (2001), pp. 646–81; Sgarbi (2007), pp. 120–2; C. Whitfield, ‘Caravaggio’s “Shepherd Corydon”’ Paragone 73 (2007), pp. 55–68; S. Guarino, ‘John the Baptist’ in C. Strinati (ed.), Caravaggio (Milan: Skira, 2010), pp. 125–31. 51 The picture’s right-hand corner – which contains a ‘hyperactive, not to say “ecstatic” plant’ in a ‘highly charged zone in Caravaggio’s paintings’, see Fried (2010), pp. 110– 11, cf. pp. 123, 125, 130, 202–3 – and its leaves at the upper right again hint at the green of veiling and uncovering that appears to accompany so many of the controversial pictures discussed here. 52 Good accounts include Freedberg (1983), p. 54; Bersani and Dutoit (1998), pp. 79– 83; Fried (2010), pp. 109–11. The latter quotes Freedberg with approval but rightly takes issue with Freedberg’s emphasis on voyeurism. Arguably the picture’s scandal is that it constructs and seduces its viewer beyond voyeurism into a forbidden homoerotic relationship, whether or not the viewer wants to make that choice. 53 For a seventeenth-century version of the St John which retains Caravaggio’s composition but removes its problematic elements (including nudity, the indeterminacy of its subject, and the ram being hugged by the boy which becomes a lamb), see V. von Rosen, ‘Implicit Decontextualization: Visual Discourse of Religious Paintings in Roman Collections Circa 1600’ in G. Feigenbaum and S. Ebert-Schifferer (eds), Sacred Possessions: Collecting Italian Religious Art 1500–1900 (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2011), pp. 39–54, esp. pp. 46–9. 54 Discussions include S. Bann, The True Vine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 133–40; S. Vodret, ‘Il restauro del “Narciso”’ in Macioce (1995), pp. 167– 83; Marini (2001) no. 39, pp. 445–6; Spike (2001), pp. 224–6 (although he dates it late, to 1608–10); S. Bann, ‘Philostratus and the Narcissus of Caravaggio’ in S. Bowie and J. Elsner (eds) Philostratus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 343–55; Fried (2010), pp. 134–9. 55 See Fried (2010) for a powerful meditation on realism, naturalism, absorption and theatricality in Caravaggio’s art. 56 Goffen, Titian’s Women (1997), pp. 150–1. 57 Ibid., pp. 151–3. 58 T. Reff, ‘The Meaning of Titian’s Venus of Urbino’ Pantheon 21 (1963), pp. 359–66; Rosand (1993), pp. 104–5; Goffen, Titian’s Women (1997), pp. 155–8. 59 C. Hope, Titian (London: Jupiter Books, 1980), p. 82. 60 See Rosand (1993), pp. 105–8 on the ‘furniture format’. For examples, see P. Schubring, Cassoni. Truhen und Truhenbilder der italienischen Frührenaissance (Leipzig: K. W. Hiersemann, 1915), 2 vols, nos 156, 157, 184, 185, 289, 290 (paired cassoni with male and female nudes); J. Musacchio, Art, Marriage and Family in the Florentine Renaissance Palace (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 151–6. 61 The principal study is A. Dülberg, Privatporträts (Berlin: Gebrüder Mann Verlag, 1990), esp. pp. 45–78; also J. Cranstoun, The Poetics of Portraiture in the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 18–28; N. Penny, The Sixteenth Century Italian Paintings. 1 Paintings from Bergamo, Brescia and Cremona (London: National Gallery, 2004), appendix 1, pp. 99–101, 238–41, 242; Whistler (2009). 62 For some literary evidence of tabernacles, veils and curtains covering pictures in palaces in Florence see Musacchio (2008), pp. 226–8.

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63 A lovely example of 1479 by Nicholas Froment is the Matheron diptych of René I of Anjou and his wife Jeanne de Laval, which not only closed but was encased in a (surviving) red-velvet pouch. See Dülbeerg (1990) no. 174, p. 230 and J. Hand, C. Metzger and R. Spork (eds), Prayers and Portraits: Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 82–6. 64 For a suggestive discussion of some of these issues in relation to Gian Gerolamo Savoldo’s Magdalene, of which various versions were painted between 1524 and 36, see M. Pardo, ‘The Subject of Savoldo’s Magdalene’ The Art Bulletin 71 (1989), pp. 67–91, esp. pp. 84–91. 65 On curtains, covers and shutters for altarpieces see A. Nova, ‘Hangings, Curtains and Shutters of Sixteenth-Century Lombard Altarpieces’ in E. Borsook and F. Gioffredi (eds), Italian Altarpieces 1250–1550: Function and Design (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 177–99; V. Schmidt, ‘Curtains, Revelatio, and Pictorial Reality in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy’, in K. Rudy and B. Baert (eds), Weaving, Veiling, and Dressing. Textiles and their Metaphors in the Late Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), pp. 191–213; S. Nethersole, Italian Altarpieces before 1500 (London: National Gallery, 2011), p. 22; P. Hills, The Renaissance Image Unveiled: From Madonna to Venus (the Gordon Watson lecture, 2009) (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, 2010), on the play of the veiling of sacred images and the imagery of veils within them; also G. von Teuffel, From Duccio’s Maestà to Raphael’s Transfiguration: Italian Altarpieces and Their Settings (London: Pindar Press, 2005), pp. 505–22 on casse, variations of protective boxing and curtaining for fifteenth- and sixteenth-century altarpieces. An excellent theoretical discussion is K. Krüger, Das Bild als Schleier des Unsichtbaren: Ästhetische Illusion in der Kunst der frühen Neuzeit in Italien (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2001), pp. 11–132. 66 Leonardo in Codex Urbinas 2v-3v in M. Kemp (ed.) Leonardo on Painting (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 20. 67 Not to speak of the passage’s sophistic word plays: see H. Belting, Likeness and Presence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 554. Leonardo’s hyper-real conflation of pasts and desires (for healing, for salvation) is echoed in the actual painting of the right-hand panel of the predella of Gentile da Fabriano’s Quaratesi Altarpiece of 1425 (now in Washington) which envisages pilgrims in everyman’s clothing, that may be contemporary, at the tomb of St Nicholas in a fantastical church space (part apse but with no altar, part crypt but with a clerestory) of whom one is healed and walks away carrying his crutches. See M. Boskovits and D. Brown, Italian Paintings of the Fifteenth Century (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2003), pp. 293–8 and A. Nagel and C. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New York: MIT Press, 2010), pp. 336–7. 68 The literature is large but not really targeted on issues of concealment and revelation. But see e.g. on folding panels: V. Schmidt, Painted Piety: Panel Paintings for Personal Devotion in Tuscany (Florence: Centro Di, 2005); Hand, Metzger and Spork (2006); J. Hand and R. Spork (eds), Essays in Context: Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006); on reliquaries, C. Hahn, Strange Beauty: Issues in the Making and Meaning of Reliquaries, 400 to c.1204 (University Park: Penn State Press, forthcoming); for some documented Italian altarpiece curtains, see M. Israëls (ed.), Sassetta: The Borgo San Sepolchro Altarpiece (Leiden: Brill, 2009), pp. 131 and 584 for the curtains (commissioned at a cost of 110 lire in 1442) and the wonderful trompe-l’oeil polyptych with a drawn-back curtain painted by Benozzo Gozzoli in the chapel of St Jerome in San Francesco at Montefalco in 1452, with D. Ahl, Benozzo Gozzoli (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 64, 68–9 (although why she says the curtain is scarlet when the reproductions show it as dark green I cannot explain); on curtains and icons in Byzantium: V. Nunn, ‘The Encheiridion as Adjunct to the Icon in the Middle Byzantine Period’, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 10 (1986), pp. 73–102; R. Trexler, ‘Habiller et déshabiller les images: esquisse d’une analyse’ in F.

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Dunand, J. Speiser and J. Wirth (eds), L’image et la production de sacré (Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck, 1991), pp. 195–231; Belting (1990), pp. 398, 407, 481; B. Pentcheva, Icons and Power (University Park: Penn State Press, 2006), pp. 157–60. 69 From an archaeological angle, see e.g. T. Mattern, ‘Griechische Kultbildschranken’, Mitteilungen des deutschen Archäologischen Instituts. Attenische Abteilung 122 (2007), pp. 139–59; for a series of passages in Pausanias’ Description of Greece, see J. Elsner, Art and the Roman Viewer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 345 n. 69. 70 L. Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, revised and expanded edn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). For specific parallels of sexuality and spirituality in relation to secrecy in seventeenth-century Rome, see R. Zorach, ‘“A Secret Kind of Charm Not to Be Expressed or Discerned”: On Claude Mallon’s Insinuating Lines’, RES 55/6 (2009), pp. 235–51 and J. Clifton, ‘“Being Lustful He Would Delight in Her Beauty”: Looking at St Agatha in Seventeenth-Century Italy’ in P. Jones and T. Worcester (eds), From Rome to Eternity: Catholicism and the Arts in Italy, ca. 1550–1650 (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 143–77, esp. pp. 158–68. It is hardly irrelevant that much of the greatest Counter-Reformation writing is highly erotic in its spirituality – one thinks of St John of the Cross and of St Teresa of Avila, who was so strikingly represented in ecstasy by Bernini in 1651 in the church of Sta Maria della Vittoria in Rome: see R. Petersson, The Art of Ecstasy: Teresa, Bernini and Crashaw (New York: Atheneum, 1970); I. Lavin, Bernini and the Unity of the Visual Arts (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 77–137. 71 The post-1400 exceptions are Steinberg (1996) figs. 25, 36, 41, 42, 176 and 197; pre-1400: figs 29, 161, 163, 166. 72 Steinberg (1996), p. 6 emphasises ‘winning naturalism’, p. 10 ‘naturalistic detail’, p. 14 ‘realism’. 73 See e.g. Hall (2011), pp. 1–39 on the Council of Trent and its precursors, pp. 117– 41 on its aftermath. On devotional and didactic roles for sacred art in the CounterReformation, see P. Jones, Federico Borromeo and the Ambrosiana: Art Patronage and Reform in Seventeenth Century Milan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 64–167, esp. pp. 68–71 and 118 on the role of vision in the ascent of the mind to grace. Generally on pictorial art in the Counter-Reformation context, see e.g. Jones and Worcester (2002). 74 For the religious culture of France in the century after the revolution see T. Kselman, Miracles and Prophesies in Nineteenth-Century France (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983); on Catholic education in France before the Third Republic established secular education in the 1870s, see S. Curtis, Educating the Faithful: Religion, Schooling and Society in Nineteenth-Century France (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000), pp. 17–203. 75 See R. Harris, ‘The “Unconscious” and Catholicism in France’, The Historical Journal 47 (2004), pp. 331–54, esp. p. 333, cf. p. 353 for the same conflicts between religion and secularism in Foucault and de Certeau in the 1970s. 76 Note the chapter in Clark (1985), pp. 23–78 called ‘The View from Notre-Dame’ has nothing about Notre-Dame and its restoration, and is entirely about ‘Haussmanisation’. 77 See N. Heimann, Joan of Arc in French Art and Culture (1700–1855). From Satire to Sanctity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005) and F. Meltzer, ‘Reviving the Fairy Tree: Tales of European Sanctity’, Critical Inquiry 35 (2009), pp. 493–522. 78 See M. and S. Nolan, Christian Pilgrimage in Modern Western Europe (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), pp. 102–4; on Lourdes, see R. Harris, Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age (Harmondsworth: Viking, 1999) and S. Kaufman, Consuming Visions: Modern Culture and the Lourdes Shrine (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005). But note also the mass appeal of the cult of Jean-Marie Vianney in Ars in the 1850s and those at Mont-St-Michel and Paray-le-Monial (the Sacre Coeur) in the 1870s – Kaufman (2005), p. 12; Harris (1999), p. 256.

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79 For a wonderful account of the reinvention of Notre-Dame de Paris between the late 1840s and 1869, focusing especially on gargoyles, see M. Camille, The Gargoyles of Notre Dame (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). For the rise of medievalism by the fin de siècle, see E. Emery and L. Morwitz, Consuming the Past: The Medieval Revival in Fin-de-Siècle France (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003). For the responses of artists to the place of religion in nineteenth-century France, see M. Driskel, Representing Belief: Religion, Art and Society in Nineteenth-Century France (University Park: Penn State Press, 1992). 80 Effectively this is the historical thesis of Harris (1999), pp. 210–26. 81 See T. J. Clark, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (London: University of California Press, 1973); Fried (1990), pp. 254–63; Nochlin (2007), pp. 184–94 and 116–27. 82 The major Parisian relic collections were the Treasury of St-Denis, taken apart between 1791 and 1796 (see Le trésor de Saint-Denis (Paris: Musee du Louvre, 1991), pp. 345–56) and the Treasury at the Sainte-Chapelle (on which see J. Durand, Le trésor de la Sainte Chapelle (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2001)). 83 Camille (2009), pp. 191–8. 84 See A. Jordan, ‘Rationalizing the Narrative: Theory and Practice in the Nineteenth-Century Restoration of the Windows of the Sainte-Chapelle’, Gesta 37.2 (1998), pp. 192–200, esp. pp. 192–3. 85 Harris (1999), pp. 169–245 for the history of the development of the cult in the 1860s and 1870s; also Kaufman (2005), pp. 16–61. 86 Of particular significance in the significance of image-veiling in the nineteenth century is the Synod of Pistoia, promulgated in 1786 by the Jansenist bishop Scipione Ricci, and its aftermath. The Synod condemned image worship within Roman Catholicism, including the use of veils: See P. Stella (ed.), Atti e decreti del concilio diocesano di Pistoia dell’anno 1786, vol. 1 (Florence: Olschki, 1986), p. 202 (Session 6, paragraph 17). Hostile reaction was swift: see e.g. M. Pieroni Francini, ‘Immagini sacre in Toscana dal tumulto di Prato al “Viva Maria”’, in S. Boesch Gajano and L. Sebastiani (eds), Culto dei santi, istituzioni e classi sociali in età preindustriale (Rome: Aquila, 1960), pp. 837–72. The views of Pistoia were strongly condemned by the Vatican in the Papal Bull Auctorem Fidei (1794), which was produced partly in relation to the attacks on the Church by the French Revolution. The result of Pistoia was that in the nineteenth century traditional practices of image worship – including the use of veils – were heavily promoted by the Church. See C. Bolton, Church Reform in Eighteenth-Century Italy (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1969) and J. Garnett and G. Rosser, Spectacular Miracles: Transforming Images in Italy from the Renaissance to the Present (London: Reaktion Books, 2013), pp. 51–2 and 111. My thanks to Gervase Rosser for discussion of this topic. 87 On Jésus, see e.g. C. S. Moffett, ‘Jesus Mocked by the Soldiers’ in J. Wilson-Bareau, F. Cachin, M. Melot and C. Moffett (eds), Manet, 1832–1883 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1983), pp. 226–9; Driskel (1992), pp. 188–93. On Manet as a religious painter, see M. Reymert and R. Kashey (eds) Christian Imagery in French Nineteenth-Century Art, 1789–1906 (New York: Shepherd Gallery, 1980), pp. 24–5, 334–40 and S. Guégan, ‘A Suspicious Catholicism’ in S. Guégan (ed.), Manet: The Man who Invented Modernity (Paris: Musée d’Orsay, 2011), pp. 159–60. On the pairing with Olympia, see K. Adler, Manet (Oxford: Phaidon, 1986), pp. 62–9 and C. Armstrong, Manet/Manette (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 157–9; and for the hang at the Salon of 1865 see Clark (1985), p. 83. The two pictures appeared again in Manet’s one-man show in Paris in 1867, on which see Armstrong (2002), pp. 10–30. 88 See Driskel (1992), pp. 193–226 on the model of ‘historicist’ naturalism in religious painting.

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89 On the pudica and its appriations between sexuality and religions, see J. Elsner, Roman Eyes: Visuality and Subjectivity in Art and Text (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 115–20, 293–6. 90 See A. de Leiris, ‘Manet’s Christ Scourged and the Problem of His Religious Paintings’ The Art Bulletin 41 (1959), pp. 199–201; Reff (1976), pp. 45–7; Moffett (1983). 91 See e.g. Clark (1985), pp. 82–100 and G. Hamilton, Manet and His Critics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 65–80. 92 Clark (1985), p. 86 and Driskel (1992), p. 191. The passage is quoted in R. Snell, Théophile : A Romantic Critic of the Visual Arts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 137 and 230–1. 93 Clark (1985), pp. 139–40, 296 n. 144. 94 It is a problem with the modern secularist account of Olympia that the overt and deliberate theological problems of Manet’s choice to place her beside Jésus insulté has been so underplayed in the scholarship. Adler (1986), pp. 68–9 intriguingly speculates that Jésus insulté was deliberately targeted against the explicit materialism of Courbet within the competition of the two painters, which would in turn make L’Origine a riposte that refers not only to Olympia but to the Jésus: the ultimate in anticlerical insult, behind the green veil of the sacred image.

10 Back to the Beginning Adrian Rifkin

Epigraph to: ‘Travel for men: from Claude Lévi-Strauss to the Sailor Hans’ in Travellers’ Tales. Narratives of Home and Displacement, eds George Robertson et al. (London: Routledge, 1994)

T

his marks the first appearance of Davida Pendleton, one of a number of pseudonymous characters, who have, over the years, helped to say things that may not, strictly speaking, have been theoretically correct. Here the task was to make a link between Tristes Tropiques (1955) and a pot boiler ‘roman de gare’ of 1929, Édouard Peisson’s Hans le marin. Kitty was sick to death of time travel. As she leaned back to wait for that oh-so-sensationless moment of transference from here to whenever or back again, she tried to remember what it had been like before. Vaguely she could recall how, as a child, she had thrilled to the point where a transport would exceed the speed of light, that marginal but profoundly sexy – she now realised – shock of the transformation of your matter between time and space. Somewhere too she had read about ‘differential time’, a concept that went back to the very early days of human thought, and she groped for an idea, a notion, that would not be the same as simultaneity that now made up the textures of the everyday. Textures?, she mused. Where did that word come from? She didn’t even know what it meant. All she really knew was that when, like she, a busy administrator of the Hegelian process, you had to do a lot of time travel, it was terribly important to hang on to a sense of origin. But, come to think of it, how could she do even that, when neither did she have any clear idea of the meaning of difference? (Davida Pendleton, from Time and Kitty, unpublished ms c.1992)