Seeing Whole : Toward an Ethics and Ecology of Sight [1 ed.] 9781443888660, 9781443887076

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Seeing Whole

Seeing Whole: Toward an Ethics and Ecology of Sight Edited by

Mark Ledbetter and Asbjørn Grønstad

Seeing Whole: Toward an Ethics and Ecology of Sight Edited by Mark Ledbetter and Asbjørn Grønstad This book first published 2016 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2016 by Mark Ledbetter, Asbjørn Grønstad and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-8707-2 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-8707-6

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ................................................................................... vii List of Illustrations ..................................................................................... ix Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Mark Ledbetter and Asbjørn Grønstad Chapter One ................................................................................................. 7 Tropes of Globalization Jillian Sandell Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 19 Ideological Mappings of Gendered Bodies, Nations, and Spaces in Louis Chu’s 1961 Chinatown Novel, Eat a Bowl of Tea Jean Amato Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 49 Public and Private in Light of Lingerie: Images within Images Lucy Bowditch Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 63 Street Art as “Exerciser for Vision”: Hamburg Graffiti Writer Oz and the Community of Smileys Natalia Samutina Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 101 Nature as Image in Olafur Eliasson’s Art: A Media Ecological Perspective Synnøve Marie Vik Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 119 In/Visible Disability, Stare Theory, and Video’s Ecologies of Seeing/Seeing Whole: Bill Shannon in Perspective(s) Susan G. Cumings

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Table of Contents

Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 173 Defying Description: Ambiguous Bodies in Victorian Discourse about Disability Darby Jean Walters Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 191 “Lost in Space: the ‘Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is’ or The Blind Men and the Elephant” Mark Ledbetter Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 203 Painting that ‘Holds the Eyes and Moves the Souls of Its Spectators’: Vision and Response in Leon Batista Alberti’s Renaissance Treatise On Painting Theresa Flanigan Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 237 Performing Painting: On the Time of Embodied Vision Robert R. Shane Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 261 The ‘Art of Seeing’ in Bruegel’s Paintings Jean-Louis Claret Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 275 Seeing Red: Bergman’s Cries and Whispers Brigitte Peucker Contributors ............................................................................................. 289

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Asbjørn would like to thank the Bergen Research Foundation and his wonderful colleagues in Nomadikon: Tonje Haugland Sørensen, Pauline Hoath, Synnøve Vik, Henrik Gustafsson, Øyvind Vågnes and Gjartrud Kolås. Mark would like to thank his student assistant Priscilla Ly for her work in keeping everyone involved with the book aware of deadlines and formatting issues and the people of Cambridge Scholars Publishing for their commitment to the success of this project. Asbjørn and Mark also wish to thank all the participants in the Ecologies Conference in Albany, New York, who were inspiring, and in particular the contributors to this book for bringing their scholarly, creative, and imaginative gifts to this very important conversation.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

**Please see center folder for color illustrations. Fig. 3-1. Boucher, François (1703-1770). La Toilette. 1742. Oil on Canvas, 52.5 x 66.5 cm. , Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Photo Credit: Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza / Scala / Art Resource, NY. Fig. 3-2. Henri de Toulouse-LAUTREC (1864-1901). Jane Avril au Jardin de Paris (2nd state). 1893. Color Lithograph, 125 x 90 cm. Bibliotheque Nationale de France (BnF), © BnF, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. Fig. 3-3. John Sloan (1871-1951). Night Windows. c. 1910. Etching. 133 x 171 mm. The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C. © ARS, New York, Photo Credit: Art Resource, NY. Fig. 3-4. Richard Hamilton (1922-2011). Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? c. 1956. Collage. 260 mm x 247.6 mm. Kunsthalle Türbingen, Türbingen, Germany. © R. Hamilton. Fig. 3-5. Pauline Boty (1938-1966). Celia Birtwell and Some of her Heroes. c. 1963. Oil on Canvas. 152 x 122 cm. Museu Colecção Berardo, Portugal, Photo Credit: Courtesy Museu Colecção Berardo. Fig. 3-6. Catherine Murphy (1946-). Pendant. 2005. Oil on Canvas. 106.6 x 121.2 cm. Photo credit: Image provided courtesy of Peter Freeman, Inc. New York. Fig. 4-1. Fig. 4-2. Fig. 4-3. Fig.4-4. Street art in London and Berlin, European street art capitals. Fig. 4-5. Fig. 4-6. Venetian street art: always subtle and place-sensitive. Fig. 4-7. Fig. 4-8. Clet Abraham street signs in different parts of Florence. Fig. 4-9. Fig. 4-10. Fig. 4-11. Fig. 4-12.

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Fig. 4-13. The controversial Roa mural with dead animals in Kreuzberg, Berlin (Turkish community district). Two locals stopped to observe and discuss it. Fig. 4-14. 1010 (Hamburg, Gaengeviertel). Fig. 4-15. Alias (Hamburg, Gaengeviertel). Fig. 4-16. Los Piratoz (Hamburg, Sankt Pauli). Fig. 4-17. Fig. 4-18. Fig. 4-19. Fig. 4-20. Fig. 4-21. Fig. 4-22. Fig. 4-23. References to Oz in street images all around Sternschanze (the last one says in German “it looks like shit but it is art”). Fig. 4-24. Fig. 4-25. “Cult movie” about Oz tags and spirals at the periphery of touristic frames. Near Elbe. Fig. 4-26. Examples of “Oz” Hamburg geography: Barmbek. Fig. 4-27. Examples of “Oz” Hamburg geography: Hamburg-Altstadt (Alster-Colonnaden ). Fig. 4-28. Examples of “Oz” Hamburg geography: Altona S-Bahn station. Fig. 4-29. Fig. 4-29. Examples of “Oz” Hamburg geography: Sankt Georg. Fig. 4-30. Examples of “Oz” Hamburg geography: Landungsbrücken (Elbe). Fig. 4-31. Fig. 4-32. Fig. 4-33. Oz portrait spotted on S-Bahn wall near Barmbek in January 2015; the memorial stickers and the memorial piece of chalk with his favorite slogan “Fuck the Norm”. Fig. 6-1. Shannon, Graphic Strategy (skateboard symbols). Fig. 6-2. “Mobility System William Shannon.” Fig. 6-3. Fig. 6.4. Fig. 6-5. Fig. 6-6. Fig. 6-7. Fig. 6-8. Fig. 6-9. Bill Shannon, Fragmentation Series: Live. Fig. 6-10. Bill Shannon, 1980; “Dogleg Freeze,” 2007, Serbia.

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Fig. 8-1. The Brooklyn Bridge, New York. Walker Evans, 1929. Fig. 8-2. The Brooklyn Bridge, New York. Walker Evans, 1929. Fig. 8-3. The Brooklyn Bridge, New York. Walker Evans, 1929. Fig. 8-4. The Brooklyn Bridge, Photographer unknown. Fig. 10-1. Bill T. Jones, choreographer, Story/Time, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. Alexander Kasser Theater, Montclair State University , New Jersey, January 2012. 70min. Photograph by Matt Rainey/The New York Times/Redux. Fig. 10-2. Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition: White on White, 1918, oil on canvas, 31¼ x 31¼" (79.4 x 79.4 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. 1935 Acquisition confirmed in 1999 by agreement with the Estate of Kazimir Malevich and made possible with funds from the Mrs. John Hay Whitney Bequest (by exchange). © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY. Fig. 10-3. Hans Hofmann, Magnum Opus, 1962, oil on canvas, 84 x 78 inches (214 x 198 cm), University of California, University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, gift of the artist. Fig. 11-1. The Mill and the Cross (1564) Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum. Fig. 11-2. Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (around 1560). Brussels, David and Alice van Buuren Museum. Fig. 11-3. The Triumph of Death (around 1569) Madrid, Prado Museum. © Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado. Fig. 11-4. Children’s Games (1560) Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum. Fig. 11-5. Hunters in the Snow (1565) Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum. Fig. 11-6. Carnival and Lent (1559) Boston, Museum of Fine Arts.

INTRODUCTION SEEING WHOLE: TOWARD AN ETHICS AND ECOLOGY OF SEEING MARK LEDBETTER AND ASBJØRN GRØNSTAD

[I]f one is interested in the visual, one’s interest must be limited to a technique of somehow treating the visual1

In his book About Looking (1980), John Berger brings up the issue of what one might call fragmented visuality. Our investment in the visual world is too sectional, he observes, and our acquired proclivity for compartmentalization risks producing an insubstantial understanding of the visual. This optic one-dimensionality divides visuality into genres of “special interest” such as photography, painting and dreams. This comes at a cost, Berger says, because “what is forgotten – like all essential questions in a positivist culture – is the meaning and enigma of visibility itself.”2 The alternative to such atomistic practices, as well as to attendant conditions such as myopia, prejudice and narrow-mindedness, is seeing whole. But what does that entail? And is it really possible? For some, the concept might recall some dubious historical models, like for instance that of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, 3 which has a certain resonance in our contemporary moment in the extensive reliance on various surveillance regimes. The notion of seeing whole is possibly also evocative of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s idea of the transparent eyeball, a permeable eye that draws in all of nature and heralds an existential state in which “all mean egotism vanishes.”4 This book’s conceptualization of “seeing whole” is a different one. We do not intend for the term to signify any kind of ubiquitous vision. Instead, we would like to emphasize the degree to which processes of seeing are always embedded in particular material and symbolic contexts; in a living body, in a social setting, in

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textual and aesthetic traditions. This applies not only to vision, to the act of seeing, but also to the things looked at – objects, paintings, buildings, photographs, drawings, films, landscapes, and other people. No visual artifact or act of looking can be separated from all the “stuff” that surrounds it, be it physical matter or immaterial signs. The visual world is a supremely relational one, which means that both images and processes of seeing are fundamentally inextricable from their immediate environment. No wonder, therefore, that research in the field of visual culture often requires approaches that are interdisciplinary. This volume explores the phenomena of sight and of seeing as embodied processes that straddle both mediality and perception, the psychic and the corporeal, the visual and the verbal, and the aesthetic and the political. Importantly, the essays in the anthology draw attention to the contextual dimensions of seeing, suggesting that the act of looking is always embroiled in a complex network of relations and conditions of possibility whose coordinates resemble, or may in fact even constitute, a visual ecology. The conceptualization at the heart of this book, then, may be grasped as a belated response to Susan Sontag’s closing appeal in her book On Photography (1977), in which she writes: “If there can be a better way for the real world to include the one of images, it will require an ecology not only of real things but of images as well.” 5 In line with this thematic orientation, the essays below address and are particularly interested in images and modes of seeing that either generate or are expressive of visual ecosystems: intermedial encounters, overlapping spaces, images that produce their own spaces, images within images, and transaesthetic fields, to name a few. Resisting the compartmentalization of discrete media and art forms still all too common in art history and media studies, the articles in this book never lose sight of the inherent continuity of the various visual and forms, such as film, painting, photography, and performance. It is precisely the relations that exist between those media, we argue, along with the relations they establish with spectators and the public sphere, that constitute what we call ecologies of seeing, understood both as conceptual and material entities. As the following essays make clear, seeing whole really means seeing better. In its own distinctive way, each chapter sensitizes us to the myriad connections that exist between images (and between images and their worldly contexts), as well as to the complex chemistry between visibility and invisibility, the local and the global, and the public and the private. How such relational issues are negotiated in ways that are often precarious is the subject of several of the contributions in this volume. In her work on the Hamburg cult figure Oz (Walter Fischer), Natalia Samutina develops

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the striking concept of street art as an exerciser for vision, a new cultural practice that captures the rhythms, movements and sensations of metropolitan life in a way that rejuvenates the vision of those who occupy urban spaces. One important function of Oz’s street art is to educate citizens to view their environment differently, both through disclosing urban problems and through drawing the viewers’ attention to things routinely overlooked on one’s paths through the city. The practices of street art, Samutina suggests, create images that can problematize the conditions of visibility impinging upon urban spaces. At the same time, these images also enable new communities of vision. This special power that some artistic practices enjoy to make us see what we do not normally see is also manifest in the work of the Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson. In the large installation project New York City Waterfalls (2008), for example – in which the artist constructed four artificial waterfalls along the East River – public space is mobilized as an operational element in a process of aesthetic visualization. Both the street signs sprayed by Oz in Hamburg and these artificial waterfalls partake in what Claire Bishop has called “the ongoing struggle to find artistic equivalents for political positions.” 6 In her perceptive reading of Eliasson’s projects, Synnøve Marie Vik emphasizes their ecological context and suggests that they invite a particular kind of sensory and spatial experience. More concisely, works such as New York City Waterfalls foreground the technological mediation of nature and the ramifications of this process for our relationship with the natural world. Lucy Bowditch shifts the nuance of conversation about public visualities by insightfully exploring the tensions between public and private space, addressing what she considers to be Baudrillard’s “desperate claim that,” “It is the end of interiority and intimacy.” Looking at seven seminal works, Bowditch powerfully reminds us that “the binary construction of public and private is a mere starting point,” and in turn takes the reader on a wonderful journey of interrogating the fullness of what it means to talk about “seeing whole.” But examinations of symbolic interventions into urban spaces are not the province of visual art alone. Literary fiction can also explore the architecture of the visual world, with all its spatial stratifications, indistinct zones, and convoluted geographies. In her astute, historically informed analysis of Louis Chu’s 1961 novel Eat a Bowl of Tea, Jean Amato shows how geopolitical, cross-cultural and transnational forces in the first half of the 20th century map out bodies and spaces according to an ideological and symbolic binary of inside and outside. Chu’s novel reimagines the cultural paradigm of new/wai, in which Chinese immigrant

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women in New York’s male-dominated Chinatown of the 1940s come to inhabit a space that represents domesticity, home and cultural belonging from a (normative) male point of view. Through her reading of Chu’s narrative, Amato finds that urban spaces are permeable entities and that “no space can ever remain culturally isolated.” People carry ideas with them, and these ideas animate a city’s lived spaces, in the process reconfiguring them. The preoccupation with transnational ways of seeing is also a key concern in Jillian Sandell’s essay about the current shift in cultural representations of globalization in American popular media. Keeping in mind the ways in which geopolitical, economic and affective factors are imbricated into one another, Sandell charts what she sees as the four central tropes of globalization. The first two – the idea of culture as a floating world, and the domestication of difference – are linked to neocolonial ways of seeing, whereas the other two – the network and the palimpsest – are more progressive tropes that, in the author’s words, articulate “the possibilities of linking cultural representations and circuits of exchange to modes of accountability, shared responsibility, and complicity.” As the contributions by Samutina, Vik, Amato, Bowditch, and Sandell demonstrate, the process of seeing whole that aesthetic experience might instigate implies an amplification of our sensitivity to the cultural environment. But seeing whole can also be a phenomenon that is akin to a synaesthetic experience. In her incisive reading of Cries and Whispers (1972), cinema scholar Brigitte Peucker examines the intermediality of Ingmar Bergman’s film, with a particular focus on color and décor. The film’s multi-sensory aesthetic, she argues, produces an embodied form of seeing through the orchestration of tactile, painterly, theatrical, and olfactory modes of engagement. Seeing whole also requires that we ask the question, “What do we not see when we look?” Theresa Flanigan answers this question with a question. How do we see the movement of the soul? She suggests that to see whole implies a conversation between the visual object and the viewer, but not merely to produce some definable other dimension of understanding and seeing, but rather an encounter in which the soul is believed to undergo “physical, psychological, and ethical changes.” Flanigan does this through an engaging exploration of Alberti’s On Painting and placing the treatise in an historical context that would allow for such expectation. Robert Shane, echoing Flanigan’s notion that there is more to seeing than “meets the eye,” reminds us, drawing on the rich tradition of Thomas Mann and Michael Fried, that seeing is not a static exercise, “based on a

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centuries old assumption of painting’s atemporality.” When we view paintings, Shane suggests that we awaken within us a rhythmic connection to what we see, much like we do when we “watch” dance, where looking alone is never enough, and suggests that our engagement with seeing whole is an exercise of performance where the very nature of our participation creates a moment that was not originally “seen.” In other words, seeing whole for both Shane and Flanigan is a moment of unavoidable embodiment. Thus the very nature of “seeing” becomes aesthetically redefined. And Mark Ledbetter agrees. His essay suggests that an ecology of seeing is much less about defining or naming a culturally agreed upon object and much more about an experiential need that is present in the act of seeing. There are no real images apart from experience, and even experience lacks any certainty outside the person who sees and what is seen. Ledbetter suggests that we not simply ignore boundaries of seeing but ask that we attempt to “not see” boundary at all and in turn see the possibility that whatever we may see is and can be something other than the obvious, what he calls “visual anarchy,” or resistance to the iconic. Jean-Louis Claret might well agree that there is a “visual anarchy” implicit in all works of art, the “obviously unseen” of an image. Claret suggests that it is the interrogation of the “in/visibilities” that inform our seeing whole. Looking in particular at Peter Bruegel’s paintings, he playfully and seriously suggests that, “paintings help us see what is otherwise too directly accessible to be noticed.” Bruegel’s paintings move beyond the limits of visibility to arouse other senses and insights that are both unsuspected if not surprising. Is this Flanigan’s movement of the soul, Shane’s performance, Ledbetter’s absent boundary? Perhaps, maybe, and not at all, which is why these essays remind us that seeing whole must make the seemingly invisible an important part of the conversation. On a similar note, yet through a different medium, Susan Cuming’s essay takes us into the world of “cripping,” and suggests that disability and disability politics play an important role as an ecology of seeing video. With her wonderful engagement of the work of performer, dancer, choreographer and b-boy skater Bill Shannon, who has a visually ambiguous disability, Cumings poignantly reminds us that we must always be tentative in our assumption that we have seen the whole of anything and calls us to a “rare beauty” that will find us dare we open our eyes to the visibly disabled. Cumings wants us to look at disability and to allow spectacle to lead to an intimate knowing that participates in and celebrates the wonder and fullness of all lives.

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In Darby Jean Walters beautifully engaging essay, she takes us into the world of Victorian Literature to explore the language and image of disability, and reminds us that how we see whole and what we see as whole, certainly as such ideas relate to normativity, have been problematic for a very long time. Such seminal works, as Harriet Martineau’s Deerbrook and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, must be returned to again to learn that must never settle for “inscribing static meaning on dynamic flesh.” Walters offers fresh voices from the past, which is to say that there is no “past” at all when it comes to the ecology of seeing, to remind us that we our need to even have an image of what is normal challenges our humanity. All the essays of this volume echo her sentiments. Thus, we are back to our beginning. Each essay in this book is an invitation to embrace what Berger calls “the enigma of visibility.” To see the world in its fullness, to see whole, is not to reduce embodied vision to homogenization, but rather to embrace a complex definition of wholeness that does not merely include space for the many in difference, but a wholeness that exists only in the context of the many and the different. With these essays, we invite the reader to enter such a complex, challenging, and ethically necessary conversation.

Notes 1

John Berger, About Looking, (New York: Vintage, 1980) 45. Berger, 45. 3 Jeremy Bentham, Panopticon: or, the inspection-house, (Dublin, Thomas Byrne, 1791). 4 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, (Boston: James Munroe and Company, 1836) 13. 5 Susan Sontag, On Photography, (London: Penguin, 1977) 180. 6 Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, (London: Verso, 2012). 2

CHAPTER ONE TROPES OF GLOBALIZATION JILLIAN SANDELL

The transnational focus in Women and Gender Studies, American Studies, and Visual Studies has brought critical attention to the ways that nationalism, empire, and global capitalism have shaped our methods, objects of study, and fields. As such, a transnational analysis typically brings into focus and helps us “see” the connections between geopolitical, economic, cultural, and affective registers. United States popular media from the first decade of the twenty-first century displayed a renewed interest in confronting how the United States is located within a broader global context. From TV shows about outsourcing to documentaries about climate change and hip-hop songs about blood diamonds, filmmakers, artists, and musicians increasingly address the uneven ways that the United States is connected to the rest of the world. But what forms of knowing and social relations are possible when we look and see with a transnational lens? What are the conditions of possibility for apprehending the myriad and starkly uneven ways that the local and global are intertwined? To invoke John Berger’s famous phrase about looking practices (1972), what kinds of cultural representations might invite “transnational ways of seeing”?1 In noting the increasing interest in depicting the United States in a transnational context, I do not want to downplay the resilience of the Eurocentric and neocolonial gaze that sees the rest of the world as an exotic backdrop against which U.S. dramas can unfold. For every Battlestar Galactica and Syriana that offer complex narratives about interweaving global networks there is also a Survivor and The Last Samurai that recenter U.S. exceptionalism. I am also not suggesting that there have not been cultural representations of globalization prior to our own historical moment, whether hegemonic representations of colonial others or complex depictions of cultural contact and intersecting lives (cf. Grewal and Kaplan 1994 and 2001, Shohat 1998, Shohat and Stam 1994,

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Spivak 1988). But the first decade of the twenty-first century witnessed a proliferation of representations that place the U.S. in a global context. In one recent survey of “the cinema of globalization” from the last seventy years, for example, three-quarters of the films discussed were made since 2000 (Zaniello 2007). Yet, even as some of these histories come into greater focus, other elements––and particularly those associated with long histories of militarism and with the intensification of neoliberalism–– typically remain off-screen. In my discussion below, I trace the contours of what I argue are four central tropes of globalization––recurring images and themes in cultural representations of the U.S. in a global context. Drawing on a range of media from the first decade of the twenty-first century, I take stock of this shift in cultural representations and identify recurring modes of representation, each of which make possible different understandings of globalization while also foreclosing others. Given that many of the images and technologies that invite a global consciousness (such as maps, photographs of the globe taken from space, the internet, or Google Earth) have historically been made possible by military and imperial missions and funding, it is perhaps not surprising that militarism affects our ways of seeing the world (cf. Enloe 2000, Mirzoeff 2013, Sturken and Cartwright 2009). I argue that even the cultural tropes we use to depict or invoke globalization sometimes confirm and normalize militarized neoliberalism.

Culture as a Floating World The trope of culture as a floating world sees culture as a site for crossnational identification and solidarity outside of commerce and politics. This is part of a long tradition of U.S. cultural representations of globalization that celebrate depoliticized notions of transculturalism and cosmopolitanism, and this history haunts contemporary versions. In the 2000s, one such example is Claude Grunitzky’s book Transculturalism: How the World is Coming Together (2004), in which he argues that people can transcend national, racial, ethnic, linguistic, and other differences through a shared appreciation for culture. His book is filled with images of artists, musicians, architectural styles, fashions, and city neighborhoods that exemplify this mixing of global cultures. The trope of culture as a floating world also appears in the long-standing and often neocolonial theme in U.S. culture of Americans traveling around the world to “find themselves,” which found its twenty-first century iteration in the popularity of Elizabeth Gilbert’s 2006 memoir Eat, Pray, Love (2010), and in the films Sex and the City II (2010), and Woody Allen’s end-of-decade

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trilogy Vicki Cristina Barcelona (2008), Midnight in Paris (2011), and To Rome with Love (2012). The trope was evident also in two films released at decade’s end, each of which compiles footage from around the world taken on a single day in 2010, Life in a Day (2011) and One Day on Earth (2012). The enduring influence of the trope of culture as a floating world and the ways it erases the U.S. military is also evident in such recent films as Argo (2012) and The Act of Killing (2013). While both explicitly show how U.S. film culture is one important way to understand, respectively, the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis and the 1965 Indonesian military coup, the formative role of the US military in establishing the regimes of Shah Mohammad Reza Palavi and President Suharto is marginalized. Audiences are invited to see important connections to the culture of the United States, but not to its military politics. The phrase “the floating world” comes from and is associated with Japanese ukiyo-e prints and refers to the separation of the world they depict from the world from which they come. While the metaphor of culture as a floating world is evident across a range of media, it found its most literal enactment in the U.S. in the 2000s with a renewed interest in Japan––and particularly the figure of the geisha––following the publication of Arthur Golden’s bestselling 1997 novel Memoirs of a Geisha. Golden’s novel and its subsequent film adaptation, and the proliferation of coffee table books and exhibitions about the geisha, reinforce familiar narratives about globalization that recenter the United States. The resilience of the figure of the geisha in U.S. popular culture since the late nineteenth century can be traced directly to the U.S. military presence in Japan, with the 2000s being no exception. But the enthusiastic embrace of the geisha rarely makes this military history apprehensible. Memoirs of a Geisha inspired at least two other meditations on Japan in the 2000s in which a shared appreciation of culture becomes the vehicle for a broader understanding of globalization: in Sofia Coppola’s 2003 film Lost in Translation, the experience of feeling dislocated and jetlagged (a product of time-space compression associated with globalization) is temporarily resolved by singing English-language songs at a karaoke bar in Tokyo, which becomes key to the characters’ understanding of Japan. In Iona Rozeal Brown’s series of paintings entitled “Afro-Asiatic Allegory,” it is a shared love for hip-hop that allows viewers to perceive connections between Japan and the United States. What is unseeable, within these representations, is that the presence and popularity of both karaoke and hip-hop in Japan is a result of the U.S. military occupation. The celebration of karaoke and hip-hop as forms of culture that travel around

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the world providing platforms for cross-national identification, masks the ways that their travel was set in motion and made possible by U.S. militarism. Brown, Coppola, and Golden each deploy the trope of the floating world to depict an idealized world of culture and art separate from the world of commerce and politics. Their texts ostensibly depict U.S. fascination with Japan but enact its opposite, reframing U.S. cultural and military imperialism as Japanese love of American culture. What artists hope will be transnational ways of seeing thus often reproduce military routes: what is visible to U.S. audiences is Japanese appropriation of American culture, but the reverse––U.S. appropriation of Japanese culture––is naturalized. Ultimately, the trope of culture as a floating world outside of commerce and politics forecloses the possibility of identifying connections based on not consumerism and cultural appreciation but shared relationships to power.

Domesticating Difference The trope of domesticating difference uses cultural representations to make claims of similarity through difference and by managing and reframing forms of national and other difference into recognizably domestic paradigms. As with culture as a floating world, this trope has a troubling colonial and Eurocentric history. In its twenty-first century iteration, these neocolonial ways of seeing were often confirmed by “focalizing” (Shohat and Stam, 1996) international issues through western celebrities or frameworks, such as in films like Beyond Borders (2003) and Hotel Rwanda (2004). For example, Edward Zwick’s 2006 film Blood Diamond and Kanye West’s 2005 song “Diamonds from Sierra Leone,” both translated to US audiences the issue of diamonds being mined and sold to fund the Sierra Leone Civil War. Debates about foreign films in the U.S. also domesticate national difference. The Academy Awards, for example, has strict guidelines about what it considers appropriate congruence between a country and its national language (thus renationalizing and homogenizing what are often more multilingual and multicultural nations) and it typically honors films that confirm rather than challenge prevailing U.S. beliefs about other countries. In the 2000s, this trope also found expression within new forms of “neoliberal multiculturalism” and “multicultural nationalism” (Melamed 2006, Moallem and Boal 1999), where diversity within the United States becomes a signifier of managing populations in relation to global capitalism.

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While the trope of domesticating difference appeared across a range of cultural texts, the resurgence of the popularity of the musical represents its most exemplary iteration because of the way it domesticates national and racial differences into harmonious melodies and is widely understood to be a genre that allegorizes a philosophy of E Pluribus Unum. From TV’s American Idol, to Broadway’s The Book of Mormon, to the popularity of musical films such as Dreamgirls (2006) and the remake of Hairspray (2007), the musical as a genre gained renewed critical and commercial success in the 2000s. The musical is often celebrated as a particularly “American” genre because of its emergence out of specific historical forms such as vaudeville and tin pan alley, and its ability to resignify different popular musical traditions––including jazz, blues, swing, salsa, hip-hop, and punk– –while maintaining a familiar and secure structure of individualism, freedom, romance, and redemption, all of which resonates with the mythology of the United States, which celebrates even as it commodifies, multicultural differences (Altman 1996, 294; Hayward 234; Knapp 3, 1946). It is also a genre that has both historically and today been a particularly rich venue for queer characters and stories, both subtextually and textually. Yet the musical enacts a form of nationalism that erases transnational ways of seeing. What Richard Dyer calls the signature feature of the musical––how it makes you feel, rather than what it is about (Dyer 1977, 18)––conveys communitarian visions for the future that evoke the American Dream. Yet this national genealogy neglects the ways that the musical is less an American genre than it is a transnational genre and has been influenced by multiple non-U.S. musical traditions. Both formally and narratively, the musical thus often enacts a form of covert nationalism. This mythology of the American Dream undergirds TV’s Glee, which insists that all forms of difference can be mitigated or celebrated when included in a larger multicultural communitarian project. John Cameron Mitchell’s film Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001) also illustrates this dynamic. Though the film was widely discussed as being about trans identity, the film is equally or more about transnationality (Sandell 2010). The film uses musical antecedents and calls upon histories of racial and national discrimination to frame the film’s narrative about sexuality, domesticating sexual difference in relation to familiar forms of U.S. racial difference. The film acknowledges the presence of Armed Forces Radio and Television around the world, and that it can create desires to immigrate to the United States, but it does not link this to the presence of the U.S. military. Instead, the film reframes U.S. homophobic exclusions

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as Cold War political and national exclusions, recentering the U.S. as a space of enviable multicultural diversity and democracy. These first two tropes of globalization (culture as a floating world and domesticating difference) represent a continuation of nineteenth and twentieth century ways of seeing. Even as they circulate in complex ways to make visible more nuanced understandings of the U.S.’s relationship to the rest of the world, as tropes they exemplify the repetition rather than rupture in modes of representation. In this sense, they confirm what Geraldine Pratt (2010) argues, that seeing transnationally can sometimes mean seeing “like a state” (75), which leads to either humanitarianism (seeing other nations as in need of help) or multiculturalism (seeing other nations only in terms of how they shape the U.S.). The following two tropes (the network and the palimpsest) reflect emerging twenty-first century transnational modes of representation that explicitly try to dislodge neocolonial, assimilationist, isolationist, or exotifying ways of seeing. These tropes use rhetorical strategies to highlight the possibilities of linking cultural representations and circuits of exchange to modes of accountability, shared responsibility, and complicity.

The Web or Network The trope of the web is perhaps the most commonly deployed metaphor found in cultural representations of globalization in the 2000s, and these representations explicitly acknowledge the complex relationship between cultural, political, and economic registers and also different sites and scales of experience. The web has become particularly effective for cultural representations of border spaces and experiences. Films such as Maria Full of Grace (2004), Day Without a Mexican (2004), Fast Food Nation (2006), and Frozen River (2008) depict the interlinking political and economic networks that shape the experiences of people who live on or who cross the U.S. border. While Frozen River is set in upstate New York, the other films (and most recent films about the border) depict the U.S.’s southern border, which reflects the nation’s prevailing focus for discussions about immigration and border security. The web challenges the historically binary representations of borders that focus on fences, rivers, and walls (Fox 1999), not to downplay their presence but to depict the interweaving histories, geographies, and responsibilities. The trope of the web is also commonly invoked to depict the connections among state data collection agencies. The popularity of the Bourne films (2002-present), the Mission Impossible (1996-present) franchise, and TV shows like CSI (2000-present) and 24 (2001-2010)

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reinforces the importance of the trope of the web in the 2000s to depict an interlinking network of surveillance technologies that can track the location of an individual across different media and spaces. Images and evocations of the web or network are evident in television shows like The Wire and Battlestar Galactica. While there is nothing new about interweaving plots with multiple characters, the current importance of the web and network to cultural representations of globalization reflects debates about the network society and the centrality of the world-wideweb to modern life. Cultural representations of globalization that invoke the network explicitly acknowledge the complex relationship between not just cultural, political, and economic registers but also different sites and scales of experience. As a trope, the web recognizes that everything is interconnected and makes it possible for audiences to identify their location in the network of relationships. Perhaps for this reason, it has been commonly used in activist and independent media that offer critiques of state power and that want to identify sites of complicity. One example is the proliferation of cultural activism that has emerged to raise awareness about violence against women in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, where, since 1993, hundreds of women have been murdered or disappeared. Numerous documentaries, art projects, narrative films, and other forms of cultural representation have circulated since the turn of the century, protesting the inaction of state and legal agencies by invoking the broader networks of corporations, governments, and law enforcement agencies that are complicit in the violence. The web, as a metaphor, always implies something in which we are all caught. The web of complicity pushes this even further to suggest that we are all culpable. Lourdes Portillo’s documentary Señorita Extraviada (2001) and Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s novel Desert Blood (2005), for example, map out the myriad actors and agencies that together create the conditions of possibility for the violence to continue. Since discursive practices have been central to how information about the violence circulates––practices that include how officials name and respond to crimes; how journalists depict them; and how human rights organizations make claims about them––discursive practices will be an important element in ending the violence (Fregoso 2003). Gapsar de Alba and Portillo use the trope of the web of complicity to link the local to the global without recourse to liberal notions of universalism or fetishizing the local, providing effective opportunities for viewers, readers, and participants to apprehend and act upon the transnational dimensions of the violence. Yet as a trope, the web can sometimes unwittingly spatialize

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different forms of violence. The terms “blowback” and “spillover violence,” for example, acknowledge the connection between apparently unanticipated violence and its more deliberate forms. But by making these moments of “blowback” or “spillover” exceptional, the militarization of everyday life and violence associated with it is normalized as always being “elsewhere” not “here.”

The Palimpsest Where the network offers a mechanical image of interconnecting parts, the palimpsest attempts to dislodge realist notions of time and space to map multiple and discrepant networks of influence and power. Where the web directly references the network society and world-wide-web and often implies a closed network, the palimpsest deploys modes of representation associated with digitized data. From twitter trends revealing flu epidemics to the integration of social media in all forms of social and political life to Wordle images, the algorithmic mapping of information has become a commonplace way to understand one’s relationship to the world. Filmmakers, artists, and websites in the 2000s using juxtaposition rather than connection invoke the palimpsest to invite transnational ways of seeing. By arranging information in non-sequential and discontinuous ways, the palimpsest suggests not only the multiple histories and geographies that precede and make legible the U.S. in a global context but also the contingency and unexpected outcomes of these histories and geographies. The palimpsest gestures to rather than delineates multiple histories and geographies. As both M. Jacqui Alexander and Ella Shohat have suggested, it is a useful metaphor through which to think about the spatial and historical aspects of globalization and the ways that the “then and there” always haunt and are present in the “here and now” (Alexander 2005, 190; Shohat 1998). Juxtaposition allows texts to evoke the multiple, contradictory, and contingent nature of connections and to remap networks of power outside of real time and space. Mapping is always a representation of not the world but one’s relationship to the world, and since the 1990s, there has been a dramatic increase in artistic uses of maps and mapping. Unlike earlier colonial and Eurocentric uses of maps to depict conquered lands and peoples, artists such as Mark Bradford, Julie Mehretu, and Paula Scher resist the imperial and cartographic gaze and offer alternate maps of objects, languages, and social relationships that disrupt rather than consolidate hegemonic representations of the United States.

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As a physical representation of space and time that makes visible traces from the past, the palimpsest allows us to think about the uneven historical and geographical reverberations of globalization. Evident in the increasingly popular “scrambled” films such as Syriana (2005), the palimpsest is key to a style of film indebted to digital data that Alissa Quart (2005) calls “hyperlink cinema,” a term she uses to refer to what she calls “Google meets Robert Altman” (48), meaning texts that move back and forth across storylines, such as Crash and Magnolia. The technique was most enthusiastically embraced by Guillermo Arriaga and Alejandro González Iñárritu, two filmmakers who between them were involved (separately and together) in Amores Perros (2000), Babel (2006), Burning Plain (2008), The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005), and 21 Grams (2003), all of which exemplify hyperlink cinema. González Iñárritu’s critically acclaimed film Babel (2006), which depicts transnational connectivities among families from Japan, Morocco, Mexico, and the United States, offers perhaps the exemplary mainstream use of the palimpsest as a transnational way of seeing. With its multi-story structure that depicts a global chain-reaction of events, Babel powerfully communicates in both form and narrative the uneven violent reverberations of globalization. The film does not attempt to speak for those who are impacted by U.S. militarized neoliberalism, but rather selfreflexively depicts how U.S. desires, powers, and interests are centralized and violently impact the lives of others. Yet, the palimpsest as a device can still tacitly inhabit neoliberal ways of thinking such as individualism. Babel offers global humanism as a counter to the military might of the U.S. and this recourse to the most local of human relationships––love between parents and children, individual acts of love––centralizes the family and individuals rather than broader collective movements as the site of redemption.

Conclusion In tracing the contours of these recurring cultural tropes in US-based representations of globalization, my goal is to emphasize what I believe are some of the broader implications of the shift in U.S. cultural representations of globalization in the first decade of the twenty-first century. While at first glance the more mainstream representations associated with “Culture as a Floating World” and “Domesticating Difference” might seem easy targets of critique, I caution against seeing the documentaries or more avant-garde forms associated with “The Web” and “The Palimpsest” as having any kind of political guarantee. (I would

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argue that Crash, for example, a film both formally and thematically similar to Babel unwittingly consolidates rather than critiques the intersecting forms of prejudice it depicts). Finally, we must ask: whose interests are served in such representations––those doing the representing or those being represented? (Spivak 1999). Who benefits when the United States is depicted as part of a global network? As Nicholas Mirzoeff argues, the capacity to visualize human experience and social relations has been central to the operations of power: in warfare, in the plantation, in the colony, in the prison, on the border, in corporations, among other spaces. New regimes of visualization, even ones that ostensibly reveal important histories and geographies of power, thus deserve our critical attention. Even when texts confront U.S. complicity in geographies and histories of empire and immigration, what sometimes typically remains unseeable–– and depends upon remaining unseeable––is how militarized neoliberalism often make transnational ways of seeing even possible.

Notes 1

This essay is drawn from a book-length manuscript in progress entitled Transnational Ways of Seeing.

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Bibliography Alexander, M. Jacqui. 2005. Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred. Durham: Duke University Press. Altman, Rick. 1996. “The Musical.” In The Oxford History of World Cinema, ed. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 294-303. —. 1987. The American Film Musical. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Berger, John. 1972. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin and British Broadcasting Corporation. Dyer, Richard. 1977. “Entertainment and Utopia.” In Only Entertainment. New York: Routledge, 1992, 17-34. Enloe, Cynthia. 2000. Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives. Berkeley: University of California Press. Feuer, Jane. 1993. The Hollywood Musical. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Fox, Claire F. 1999. The Fence and the River: Culture and Politics at the US-Mexico Border. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Fregoso, Rosa Linda. 2003. “Toward a Planetary Civil Society.” In MeXicana Encounters: The Making of Social Identities on the Borderlands. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1-29. Grewal, Inderpal and Caren Kaplan. 1994. “Introduction: Transnational Feminist Practices and Questions of Postmodernity.” In Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, ed. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1-33. —. 2001. “Global Identities: Theorizing Transnational Studies of Sexuality.” GLQ. 7. 4: 663-679. Grunitzky, Claude, ed. 2004. Transculturalism: How the World is Coming Together. New York: True Agency. Hayward, Susan. 1996. Key Concepts in Cinema Studies. New York: Routledge. Knapp, Raymond. 2005. The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Melamed, Jodi. 2006. “The Spirit of Neoliberalism: From Racial Liberalism to Neoliberal Multiculturalism.” Social Text. 89:24-4: 1-24. Mirzoeff, Nicholas, ed. 2013. The Visual Culture Reader. New York: Routledge.

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Moallem, Minoo and Iain A. Boal. 1999. “Multicultural Nationalism and the Poetics of Inauguration.” In Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State. Eds. Caren Kaplan, Norma Alarcón, and Minoo Moallem. Durham: Duke University Press, 243-263. Pratt, Geraldine, in Collaboration with the Philippine Women Center of BC and Ugnayan Ng Kataatang Pilipino Sa Canada/The FilipinoCanadian Youth Alliance. 2010. “Seeing Beyond the State: Toward Transnational Feminist Organizing.” In Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis. Eds. Amanda Lock Swarr and Richa Nagar. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 65-86 Quart, Alissa. 2005. “Networked: Dysfunction families, reproductive acts, and multitasking minds making for Happy Endings.” Film Comment. Jul/Aug: 48-51. Sandell, Jillian. 2010. “Transnational Ways of Seeing: Sexual and National Belonging in Hedwig and the Angry Inch.” In Gender, Place, and Culture. 17. 2: 231-247. Shohat, Ella, ed. 1998. Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age. New York: New Museum and MIT Press. Shohat, Ella and Robert Stam. 1994. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. New York: Routledge. Smith, Susan. 2005. The Musical: Race, Gender, and Performance. London: Wallflower Press. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York: Routledge. —. 1999. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sturken, Marita, and Lisa Cartwright. Eds. 2009. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zaniello, Tom. 2007. The Cinema of Globalization: A Guide to Films about the New Economic Order. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

CHAPTER TWO IDEOLOGICAL MAPPINGS OF GENDERED BODIES, NATIONS, AND SPACES IN LOUIS CHU’S 1961 CHINATOWN NOVEL, EAT A BOWL OF TEA JEAN AMATO

I: Introduction Within the Chinese American population of the early 1900s, for every hundred American-born and immigrant men there were only seven women. By 1950 there were still only thirty-six women for every hundred men.1 This gender imbalance was caused by a combination of socioeconomic and patriarchal issues at play in the host and homeland and a legacy of racist policies and immigration restrictions in the U.S. from 1875 to 1965. I focus on how this social phenomenon is portrayed in Louis Chu’s 1961 novel Eat a Bowl of Tea. Set in 1940s New York Chinatown, Chu's novel reveals how a core relational aspect of traditional Chinese gender norms, the nei/wai 緉እ [inner/outer] system, is reassembled and disassembled under new cultural constraints in a Chinese American fictional context. I look at how ideological mappings of bodies, nations, and spaces are gendered and represented along symbolic nei/wai binaries in both regions. Specifically, I focus on how representational norms that relegate women to the inner world of the home were transmitted from social, economic, and political issues into a symbolic woman-at-home motif in Chu's fictional landscape. Eat a Bowl of Tea is commonly regarded as a realistic and historically reflective portrait of post-war New York Chinatown’s “near bachelor” society as it was undergoing radical social, economic, and ideological transformations caused in part by changing immigration restrictions (Chan 1961, 3). Although set in the late 1940s, Eat a Bowl of Tea was published

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in 1961, a date that directly precedes the radical social changes brought about from the Immigration Act of 1965, significant socioeconomic gains for Chinese American men, and the rise of Asian American cultural and social consciousness in the 1970s. 2 For the first ten years of its publication, the novel went virtually unnoticed until it was rediscovered during a surge in Asian American studies in the 1970s. In 1988, director Wayne Wang eventually adapted the novel into a popular film under the same title. Since its rediscovery, Chu’s novel has been well known for its importance as a Chinatown narrative that deals directly with the legal, political, economic, and social issues facing working class, primarily male, Chinese immigrants without catering to Western appetites for exoticism (Chan 1961, 2). Louis Chu broke many of the Chinese American literary norms of his time with his complex and unembellished depictions of Chinese American male and female sexuality, at a time when such topics were still relatively sensitive and taboo.3 Its straightforward representation of tensions born out of a disproportionate male to female Chinatown population made a radical suggestion for its time – that gender issues and sexism, for both male and female Chinese Americans, were inherently interrelated and that both genders suffered casualties from political, social, and representational forms of racism. Asian American literary debates around Chu’s novel focus primarily on its degree of social realism and accuracy of gender representations.4 There has been however, little research on the transnational, cross-cultural, and geopolitical forces behind the novel’s gendered spatial mapping of the woman-at-home motif in Chu’s work. Therefore, I examine the extent to which Eat a Bowl of Tea reinforces or challenges essentializing representations of the inner domestic world of the ancestral home and its female keepers through a nei/wai [inner/outer] cultural paradigm. I am not applying a foreign traditional Chinese nei/wai social binary to a work of Chinese American literature with its own specific historical, temporal, and social contexts: I instead focus on how a nei/wai cultural paradigm is transformed and reimagined in this modern work of fiction. The representation of an ancestral homeland is always in part a representation of the host land. Chinese American literature is an everevolving cultural product born out of gendered U.S. immigration laws and changing immigrant patterns at play in both host and homeland. Thus, the historical, transnational, and social realities that shape and surround Chu’s novel are crucial to this literary analysis. At the same time, I believe an inquiry into the material context of this novel should also probe the ideological subtexts of this fictional depiction.5 This project looks beyond the methodological and epistemological limitations of literary analysis

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with an interdisciplinary approach that also turns to Chinese and Asian American history, cultural geography, immigration law, postcolonial theory, diaspora and homeland studies, and theories of nationalism and gender. In the last two decades, more Asian American literary theorists are viewing nationalism, ethnicity, and gender as inextricably intertwined.6 Beginning in the early 1990s, scholars have begun to call for a wider scope in the Asian American literary canon to include more non-English, postcolonial, and diasporic works.7 This project also takes into account similar transnational shifts in the study of Chinese immigration that move beyond nation-based approaches by also considering U.S. and Chinese diasporic networks, documents, narratives, and statistics.8 Eat a Bowl of Tea exposes the impossibly inflated dreams of a disillusioned, male-dominated Chinese American immigrant community as they project their cultural nostalgia into an ideologically intimate, yet materially and geographically distant vision of a women-at-home trope from the Chinese homeland. In 1941, the 17-year-old protagonist Ben Loy, born and raised in China, moves to the U.S. in 1941 to live with his father Wah Gay who has been separated from his wife in China for twenty years. Due primarily to unjust immigration restrictions, patriarchal norms, and economics, Ben Loy’s parents have always lived apart, his mother in their native village in China and his father in America. Ben Loy’s mother never saw her husband again after their brief time together after their wedding. The plot in Eat a Bowl of Tea centers on a semi-arranged marriage between Ben Loy and Mei Oi, the new Chinese wife he is able to bring back to live with him in the U.S. due to a brief loosening of immigration restrictions and his U.S. World War II veteran status.9 This was not the case for most of the male New York Chinatown characters. In fact, the new home Ben Loy brings his bride to is represented in Chu’s novel as a stagnant and economically strangled community that was virtually womanless. Chu explores how the dream of bringing home a bride from the ancestral homeland is reappropriated into a beacon of essential cultural purity for this isolated, mostly-male Chinatown community in the 1940s. The central narrative conflict centers on the personal and communal effects of a scandal that arises when it becomes public knowledge that Ben Loy’s recent impotence led his new wife into an affair and illegitimate pregnancy with another Chinese American bachelor in the same community. Her unfaithfulness serves to unsettle the brotherhood, patriarchal ideals, and nostalgic vision of the Chinese homeland that holds this isolated male community together. According to Rosemary George’s study on homes and homelands, “the re-writing of home via the woman reveals the ideological struggles that are

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staged every day in the construction of subjects and their understanding of home-countries” (1996, 3). Ideas of home are often depicted as proxies for belonging while women are often called upon to embody this belonging. A gendered spatial mapping in Eat a Bowl of Tea reveals the interplay of the global and local in each imagining of the ancestral home and homeland. Here, home has a flexible representational meaning used to denote both the private, domestic sphere and the Chinese homeland. The female, who is often associated symbolically with domestic and local spaces, appears as a fixed centerpiece in this fictional landscape. Often in Chinese American overseas narratives of nostalgia for the homeland, the peasant mother or wife becomes an important symbol that lies outside of history and modernity as an icon of what the overseas males imagine as not having been lost or changed – the native land and its cultural essence. However, this attempt to insulate this woman-at-home motif from contact with the perceived “outer” foreign realm is futile since the perceived “inner” realm of female domesticity can also never truly escape material and temporal realities. More recently, many important studies in feminist cultural geography and nationalism focus on how gendered divisions between public and private spaces were traditionally built into cultural and national ideologies throughout the globe.10 Cultural geographers Gillian Rose and Doreen Massey explore how ideas of belonging and subjectivity reveal themselves in the geography of a home, where women are positioned in the symbolic site of static domesticity.11 Massey works to untangle the tendencies of dominant discourse to assign the female to the local, private, and domestic realms (1994, 3). Rose explains that the routines of everyday are bound to the power structures that normally limit and confine women (1993, 17). Social and spatial dichotomies between public/private spheres are central to feminist issues (Rose 1993, 17-18). Here I examine the everyday domestic realm of women as it relates to an evolving transnational experience of Chinese migration as played out in Chu’s work of fiction.

II: Interpretive Histories Actual realities of who migrated and who remained in the homeland were determined by gendered sociopolitical and patriarchal norms that cannot be overlooked in this study. Chu’s narrative portrayal of the Chinese wives who remained in the Chinese homeland as keepers of the home while the male immigrants resided in the U.S is also primarily reflective of historically determined social realities.12 As a result of political, legal, and cultural forces operating on a domestic and

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international arena, approximately 8.5 million wives were left behind in Mainland China by the mid-1950s (Pan 1990, 119). U.S. immigration restrictions and racist policies combined with a legacy of Chinese traditional norms where the wife was expected to remain in the family home of her in-laws, carry on kinship and filial responsibilities, and manage the household economy while the husband went abroad (Mann 1992, 36). This was part of a long cultural tradition, where Chinese men maintained dual residences, often living alone overseas while the wife and children remained in the Chinese mainland. While shifts toward establishing nuclear families in the U.S. were in place in the twentieth century, traditionally the so-called “sojourners” [⳹ൂ hua qiao] eventual return to the ancestral home was usually a presumed given in accordance with filial, patriarchal, communal, and national Chinese traditions. It is important to acknowledge the impact of such cultural imperatives that may have discouraged female immigration. However, this trend was changing with the radical social reforms, wars, political upheavals, and women’s movements surging up in China in the late 1800s through the1900s. Recently, historians are challenging a rigid view of this “sojourner” mentality as the universal explanation for this gender imbalance in the Chinese American population by focusing more on the transnational effect of U.S. immigration laws.13 In English, the term sojourner and its ideological implications are also problematic.14 The shortage of Chinese women in the U.S. is at the root of the personal and social struggles in Eat a Bowl of Tea. U.S. immigration restrictions are not made overt but Chu’s use of a historically contextualized narrative timeline adds another layer of social significance to the novel’s gender representation. It is difficult to explore issues of race and gender in Chinese American literature without first examining the cultural, political, and economic oppression the community faced during early immigration periods. Immigration policies prior to the mid-1900s were focused primarily on serving U.S. capitalist needs for Chinese immigrants as temporary male workers. Early U.S. laws and policies such as the Alien Land Act of 1913, were designed to discourage Chinese immigrants from permanent U.S. resident status by not allowing them to establish homes, families, have political rights, or own property in the U.S. (Espiritu 1997, 9 & 17). For the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Chinese women were deemed undesirable by U.S. immigration policies for fear of their reproductive powers. U.S. nativist concerns were especially wary of a surge in potential American-born Chinese children whose U.S. birth would entitle them to automatic U.S. citizenship. In 1875, Congress passed the

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Page Law, designed in part to prohibit those Chinese women whom immigration officials deemed as “prostitutes” from U.S. entry.15 The Page Law gave the U.S. government full authority to determine the morality and right of entry for a Chinese woman while also reinforcing the hegemonic code that a woman traveling abroad alone was automatically suspect. While difficult to trace its direct effects, the Page Law had a powerful impact at least in terms of deterring Chinese women from immigrating to the U.S. (Takaki 1990, 40 & Peffer 1992, 59). The greatest barrier however, was the Chinese Exclusion Act, which was the first federal exclusion act based on a specific nationality, in place from 1882-1943. It discouraged integration and denied immigrant Chinese Americans’ citizenship while refusing almost all Chinese family members entry into the U.S. for more than sixty years.16 For most Chinese male immigrants, a family life in the U.S. was virtually absent until after the 1930s (Lyman 1968, 323). Chinese American men were subject to anti-miscegenation laws while wives and children were prevented from entering the U.S. As a result, over ninety percent of the early Chinese immigrants to the U.S. were male. By the mid-twentieth century, there was still only one third the number of women to men within the Chinese American population (Zhou 1992, 79). According to Elaine Kim, before 1948, the majority of Chinese immigrants in the U.S. were "married bachelors" who saw their wives in China once every ten or twenty years (1982, 97). As Alfred Wang points out, “No other racial groups have been subjected to worse legalized…sexual deprivation than the Chinese male immigrants between 1869 and 1952.”17 This sexual deprivation was also true for the Chinese wives left behind in China. While the effect of traditional, economic, and cultural Chinese imperatives on these gendered migration trends clouds a clear analysis of the social effects of racist U.S. immigration laws, they were clearly an enormous obstacle for the development of more gender balanced Chinese American communities up until the Immigration Act of 1965 (which was not implemented until 1968) when race-based exclusions and low quotas for Chinese immigrants were actually lifted. Because Chinese Americans males were also subject to an altered form of sexism from the 1800s to late 1900s, Chinese American men were also often excluded from easy access to the wider public avenues of power and social agency in U.S. society. Thus, it is important to focus on immigrant experiences and gender relations as a whole. Legal scholar, Kitty Calavita explains, “conceptualizations of gender, race, and class were so entangled around discussions of Chinese exclusion that they often stood in for each other, or bled into and defined each other” (2006, 251). How then are

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literary critics to address the need for a more balanced look at gender relations in early Asian American history and literature, during a time when actual gender demographics were severely unbalanced? To address this concern, Gary Okihiro works to break down prior preconceptions that Asian immigrant men in the U.S. were solitary isolated figures, by reminding us that these men were “intimately connected to women in Asia…who built and maintained the solid world of family and community” (1994, 68). He is critical of a “male-centered periodization scheme of migration and settlement” that only fits Asian women into empty representational spaces (Okihiro 1994, 79). Okihiro argues that instead, we need to look more carefully at the global threads and dynamic international networks where the wives who remained in the homeland were central figures, while also acknowledging the vital role they played in U.S. immigration history (1994, 68). Okihiro’s argument calls for a more feminist approach to Asian American history that addresses the effects of global industrialization and cosmopolitanism on a loosening of patriarchal norms in the countries of origin and immigration for both genders (1994, 79). In addition, it is important to also problematize any pre-giving cultural assumptions, in both China and the U.S. that a woman’s place is in the home. The actual realities of who migrated and who remained in the homeland were determined by gendered sociopolitical and patriarchal norms that are essential for this literary analysis. For example, up until the late 1900s, opportunities for mobility and emigration were less available for Chinese women. According to Rachel Lee, we should view Asian American literature as a product of the gendered subtexts of U.S. immigration laws, changing immigrant patterns, and a gendering process that occurs not only when the immigrant arrives on U.S. shores, but as an ongoing practice in both the host and homeland (1989, 143). Lee reminds us that an inquiry into Asian American literature must fully addresses changing gender roles for both sexes in the U.S. and China. While addressing the capitalist and racist agendas behind gendered immigration and residency policies that restricted female entry into the U.S., our inquiry should not just stop there. Further, it is important to examine how a specific literary representation, such as Eat a Bowl of Tea, reflects back on a particular cultural and temporal juncture in Asian American history. Similar to Rachael Lee's argument, David Palumbo-Liu points out that the interplay between Asia and the U.S. is inseparable from Asian American history and literature. Palumbo-Liu views this geopolitical and historical interplay as "eminently situated in the politics of space" (1999, 11). Thus, we must view Asian American history and literature within the

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context of a respatialization of the nation whereby the memories and histories from the homeland that are part of the psychic makeup “constitute an irreducible perceptual grid through which the diasporic landscape is read” (Palumbo-Liu 1999, 218). For Palumbo-Liu, U.S. space, embedded with traces of both Asian and American memory works with “each one seeking to reestablish in and through space an image of a different past to guide the present (1999, 218). Palumbo-Liu reminds us that in fiction, representational spaces are simultaneously infused with material and symbolic imagery that is continually fashioned by personal and communal memories, desires, and histories. I am interested in how gender operates as an inherent aspect of this fictional mapping of space through an ideological and transnational nei/wai model in Louis Chu's novel.

III: Global Migrations of Nei/Wai [緉እ] While acknowledging the historical specificity of a 1940s Chinatown and Chinese American experience in Chu’s novel, I turn to an overview of how traditional nei/wai conceptions operated as a ruling paradigm throughout Chinese domestic and international history. By looking at how this nei/wai interplay was translated and transformed on a transnational scale in the modern period, we can gain insight into how ideas of woman and home and/or homeland are inextricably tied to gendered civic or ethnic nationalist norms of identity in both China and the U.S. Traditional Chinese gender ethics are built partially on a traditional doctrine of separate behavioral roles and spheres (male: outer / female: inner) with roots that extend as far back as Chinese cosmology. Although often rendered in English as domestic or private and public, in a Chinese context, nei/wai are relative terms that operated in a relational society beginning with each individual’s role in the family and spreading outward into one’s clan, community, cultural nation, and relations with foreign cultures. Nei/wai was traditionally conceived of as a natural ordering of geographical, social, and familial spaces to create harmony in Chinese culture (Fei 1948, 65-66). In the 1700s, Chinese historian Si Ma Guang paraphrased a Chinese classic Book of Rites [Li Ji ⚰グ], calling for the physical separation of the sexes as follows,, “In housing there should be a strict demarcation between the inner and outer parts…The men are in charge of all affairs on the outside: the women manage the inside affairs.” 18 In her study of nei/wai spheres and the lives of Sung Dynasty Chinese women, Patricia Ebrey explains that while this ideal of physical separation of the sexes also

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extended into separate functions and a differentiation of socially defined behaviors, it operated more as a complementary than antagonistic system (1993, 24 & 43). In her study on the women and the inner chambers in seventeenth-century China, Dorothy Ko also reminds us that women often had access to significant areas of power and authority within inner domestic worlds (1994, 13). According to Ko, rather than demarcate mutually exclusive social and symbolic spaces, nei/wai construction was more an “inner-outer continuum” of nested circles originating in the private but moving outward to the public whereby “the two define and constitute each other according to shifting contexts and perspectives” (Ko 1994, 144 & 13). In her research on women’s public spheres in contemporary transnational China, Mayfair Yang also explains that there was no sharp separation between nei/wai social formations but a continuity that was thought to prevent disorder in the home, society, and the state (1999, 18 & 25). While this nei/wai paradigm is clearly gendered, it should not be interpreted as absolute categories that only operate along male/female biological divisions but as a mapping that changes with context. Behaviors are also gendered with wai representing action, adventure, movement, and progress while nei is often aligned with stasis, cultural preservation, and the domestic interior. Not only women are aligned in the ideological realm of nei. Nei/wai is an overarching social and ideological paradigm whereby individuals, bodies, behaviors, and spaces can be gendered as either nei or wai on local, national, regional, and geopolitical levels. Further, nei/wai ideology has continually evolving meanings when applied to a larger transnational scale in the encounter with the ethnic or national other. Historically, the degree with which Han Chinese culture emphasized protecting the inner domestic world of nei from outside influence operated in direct response to collisions with foreign powers (Ko 1994, 148 & 152). In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the ideological scope of nei/wai spheres expanded to encompass and address China’s encounters with the West. Thus, the “uncorrupted” inner world of Chinese culture and its women were symbolically preserved within the nation’s domestic space against the external, ideological, and geographical spheres of foreign influence. Postcolonial theorists, Partha Chatterjee and R. Radhakrishnan, demonstrate how in early nineteenth-century Indian nationalist discourse, a similar response to foreign power also took shape, drawing on a traditional inner/outer gender distinction as an ideological response against Western colonialism. The discourse of nationalism shows that the material/spiritual distinction was condensed into an analogous, but ideologically far more

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powerful, dichotomy: that between the outer and the inner…Now apply the inner/outer distinction to the matter of concrete day-to-day living and you get a separation of the social space into ghar and bahir, the home and the world. The world is the external, the domain of the material; the home represents our inner spiritual self, our true identity…The home in its essence must remain unaffected by the profane activities of the material world and woman its representation (Chatterjee 1990, 238). Here, by mobilizing an inner/outer distinction against the “outerness” of the West, “woman” became the pure and ahistorical signifier of “interiority” (Radhakrishnan 1992, 84). The more compromises men had to make to the pressures of the material world and the impact of the “foreign” realms, the more they felt that the purity of “their woman” and their domestic haven had to be asserted as a contrast (Chatterjee 1990, 248). While somewhat similar, the traditional Chinese conception of nei/wai clearly has its own historical and cultural specificities.19 If we turn back to Eat a Bowl of Tea, when you expand the symbolic threat of the outer wai sphere to an overseas space, it is even more imperative to secure “one’s own women” in a safe nei world as domestic markers of an essentialist idea of cultural purity against the compromises forced on the male immigrant subject in these public realms. Thus, the threat of incursion into the feminized space of the home is even more symbolically intensified in Chu’s fictional Chinatown model.

IV: And the Dutiful Wife/Mother Waited… In China, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought about many reforms in the area of traditional nei/wai gender norms. However, it was not until after the Communist victory in 1949 that the social influence of the private and domestic spheres was radically reduced. The Communist state sought to expand a politicized public sphere to encompass the whole of social life and radically transform traditional models of gendered spheres of practice (Yang 2013, 25). In 1961, when Eat a Bowl of Tea was published, the People’s Republic of China was just embarking on a series of radical reforms and nation-wide collectivization campaigns that effectively weakened patriarchal affiliations and private domestic/familial spheres. 20 Chu’s novel presents a static image of an ancestral home and its female keepers (set in the 1940s) while ironically, radical upheavals in the public and domestic spheres were taking place in China.21 As Doreen Massey points out, women are often “assigned the role of personifying a place called home” that is presumed to never change (1994,

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164-167). The unchanging maternal figure at home in Chu’s novel operates as a foil to help the immigrant males view themselves as part of a larger dynamic world of wai that symbolizes progressive modernity as they try to forget their own confined positions. The male characters often portray themselves as forward thinking in contrast to their "tradition tyrant" wives at home that they refer to as “old rice cookers” (Chu 1961, 26 & 187). In Eat a Bowl of Tea Ben Loy’s mother, Lau Shee has not seen her husband in twenty years. Chu's text also inserts historical details that ground this woman-at-home motif in a social context. Lau Shee was not alone in her husbandless existence. There were hundreds and hundreds of women in Sunwei like her, whose men folk had sailed the wide seas for the Beautiful Country and never returned. There remained, however, always the hope that someday they would come back (Chu 1961, 45). This twenty-year separation was due to economics, tradition, and U.S. immigration restrictions. However, even when it is possible for Wah Gay to visit China in the 1940s, he only halfheartedly entertains the thought of going to see his wife. Wah Gay is barely able to earn a basic living while living in near squalor as his days devolve into routines of apathy. After a series of menial jobs in Chinatowns around the U.S., Wah Gay finally saves enough to run a cramped basement mahjong room for gambling. A well known, traditional Chinese idiom calls for overseas Chinese to bring honor to one’s ancestors [ග᐀⪀♽ (guƗng zǀng yào zԃ)] and return to one’s hometown “in silken robes,” (prosperous and full of glory) [⾰枵执⃰ (yì jӿn huán xiƗng)] (Yang 2012, 126). Thus, there is a large disparity between Wah Gay’s low social standing in the U.S. with the illusions he projects to keep face with his wife and home village in China. Many overseas Chinese males pressured to return to the homeland by filial and traditional imperatives chose to avoid returning and lived according to pragmatic, economic, and possibly more individualistic motives (Bonacich and Cheng 1984, 28). These men were not simply passive victims of a rigid patriarchal sojourner imperative but an array of diverse individuals with their own motives and priorities. With an ambivalent undercurrent it was much easier for Wah Gay to imagine his wife in the ancestral home as a fixed icon, always there to go back to even if he had no real intention to return. Whenever his wife pressures him to return for another visit Wah Gay uses his business as an excuse, “Maybe next year. Maybe the year after next. And the dutiful wife waited and hoped” (Chu 1961, 45). He vacillates between a nostalgic desire for a return and a nagging realization that he will probably never go back. The woman-waiting-at-home motif reveals what the David Eng calls

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“the burden of unlived symbolic promise” for Wah Gay (Chu 1961, 183). However, Wah Gay cannot admit this because of his underlying need for a sense of proximity and connection with his ancestral homeland and wife. Wah Gay’s nostalgia is a form that feeds on the safety of distance. Lao Shee writes, “Dearly beloved husband… More than twenty springs have passed since you left the village. Those who go overseas tend to forget home and remain abroad forever. I hope my husband is not one of those” (Chu 1961, 24). Each time he receives her letters, Wah Gay relives the past and feels a sense of guilt-induced dread. He knew it was not right to let the old woman stay in the village by herself. He often wondered, during lonely moments, if perhaps some day he and Lau Shee would have a joyous reunion. His mind began to wander to the clouds…the little old woman…she is a kind and good wife (Chu 1961, 24). Ling Jinqi reads Wah Gay’s “inconsistency” in his failure to return, “despite his rhetoric of traditional values and nostalgia for his homeland,” as a “selective use of ancestral cultural values” (1998, 63). For Wah Gay, this elusive figure of the woman at home, in addition to being politically and economically removed, often stands in for all that is missing in his immigrant life. Wah Gay often picks and chooses the symbolic ideas of his wife that help him bear hardships in the U.S. and ignores the material issues of her daily life. Other than sending her monetary remittances, Wah Gay tries to deal with his homeland and wife on a primarily metaphorical level. In Chu’s novel, the representation of the women and home converge into one trope for male-comfort and cultural identity. Wah Gay and the other male characters in the novel continually seek comfort in the trope of their “dutiful pining” wives left at home. The novel reveals that these women were also aware that there were both advantages and disadvantages to having an absent husband. 22 These mother characters are often the primary movers of the narrative action and forces of change in the novel. For example, it was only at Lau Shee’s insistence that their son Ben Loy marry. Mei Oi's mother who is also a "grass widow," hopes her daughter can marry and live with a Chinese American in the U.S. and avoid a life of separation like her own (Chu 1961, 65).23 Ling argues that Mei Oi's mother is indirectly contradicting this presumed "sympathy" for her immigrant husband and stoic acceptance of her lot, which the male characters in the novel count on for their own sense of subjectivity (1995, 42). It helps ease some of his guilt for never going back for a visit when Wah Gay sends his son back for his wife to approve and organize a wedding with a local “pure Chinese” girl that he arranged for his son to

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meet in 1948 (Chu 1961, 34). Unlike his parents, because Ben Loy served in the U.S. army in World War II, when he marries, he is able to bring his wife back to live with him in New York in 1948 (Chu 1961, 43). Interestingly, this is one year before the Chinese Communist victory in 1949 that began a long period of closed off relations between overseas and Mainland Chinese.

V: Migratory Projections of Nei/Wai [緉እ] Chu’s novel explores the use of a Chinese woman as icon marking the space of a dwelling as a home from a male point of view in both China and the U.S. In most normative cultural visions, women are presumed to ascribe meaning to a dwelling. Once Mei Oi joins him in the U.S. after their wedding, Ben Loy’s cramped “slum like” apartment, where he lived for seven years prior to his marriage (with prostitutes coming and going) is suddenly transformed into a real home, because for him – a wife equals the security of a home (Chu 1961, 10). For Ben Loy and his father, a woman as wife or mother contained the transformative ability to change any place, near or far, into a home and create a sense of feeling at home. However, at the same time, Chu’s narrative descriptions also make it clear this is not the case for Mei Oi. Because her husband thought it improper for her to take a job or go out alone, Mei Oi passes her days in a claustrophobic and stuffy one-room apartment where she grows increasingly isolated and lonely. She laments “In the village there is always something going on…there is a oneness, a togetherness. A sense of belonging. A proud identity” (Chu 1961, 79). Away from the lively kinship and community networks at home, Mei Oi’s migration to the U.S. creates much more domestic confinement. Chu’s plot seems to suggest that traditional nei/wai ideologies could no longer accommodate or contain the new female immigrant position that Mei Oi embodies in either space or nation. While Mei Oi’s restrictive life as new wife may be misread as simply reflective of actual social restrictions placed on women in traditional Chinese marriages, the position of married Chinese women in the U.S. and in China at this time was not usually as confining as the novel seems to suggest. By the 1940s, due to social reforms and the upheavals of war, a prescribed positioning of women in the home was undergoing rapid changes in Mainland China and the Chinese Diaspora. In fact, even in the nineteenth century, the majority of Asian wives that were able to immigrate to the U.S. worked, either in the home or outside the home, in

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domestic, agricultural, or service industries, and often along-side their husbands (Mazumdar 1989, 8). Jeffery Chan and Li Shu-yan argue that Louis Chu presents a confining Chinatown, almost untouched by changes in the larger society, that operates under conventions and traditions transplanted from a China that is no longer in existence and has already changed in their absence (Li 1993, 102 & Chan 1961, 5). As Geoffry Kain explains, the male Chinatown characters epitomize atrophy and “drift towards self-caricature” with their nostalgic patriarchal adherence to a “‘China of the mind’ while China itself changes” (2001, 192 & 194). This points to a central dilemma built into Chu's plot where his characters struggle to operate within the narrow confines of a relocated and outdated nei/wai cultural value system not well-suited to geographical and temporal relocations that were being simultaneously disassembled in Mainland China. Thus, Mei Oi's entry and non-compliant behavior in such a male-dominated and male-defined community that had assimilated into comfortable patterns of inertia and selective cultural illusions about the Chinese homeland, was bound to create disruption. Chu’s male characters transfer an irresolvable and internalized inner/outer dichotomy into an idealized vision of women, ancestral home, and homeland that could never sustain itself because it was built on what Radhakrishnan refers to as a “schizophrenic vision of itself” (1992, 85). In his research on the representation of masculinity in Asian American literature, David Eng interprets the cause of Ben Loy’s impotence as a “spatial impotence” that is a form of “male hysteria” (2001, 180). Eng argues that Ben Loy’s impotence is confined to the “spatial boundaries of New York Chinatown” (2001, 180).24 According to Eng, Ben Loy’s impotence is not organic in nature but rather, an “unconscious effect” of the limitations on his social roles in Chinatown and his inadequate access to the wider national space of agency and belonging in the U.S. (2001, 181). Here I expand Eng’s concept to argue that Chu’s novel reveals a layering of gendered nei/wai realms that affects both the male and female characters. In the beginning of Eat a Bowl of Tea the symbolic nei realm of the home, in the U.S. and in China, is gendered female. Chinatown is represented as a primarily masculine-defined wai realm of brotherhood, free from the domestic effects of family and home. Yet, at the same time, due to the limiting effects of prejudice and economics in the U.S., most of the male characters are confined to a symbolic nei world of a Chinatown ghetto where they have little access to the economic, political, and social aspects of the symbolic wai realm of U.S. society.25

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VI: A Village Girl Will Stay Home Ben Loy’s marriage in 1948 marks the beginning of an important period of social, geographical, and familial transition for Chinese Americans. In the late 1940s, we find a community about to undergo fundamental social transformations from the radical demographic shifts in the Chinese American population.26 In the novel’s time frame of the late 1940s, Chinatowns across the U.S. were still on the cusp of a slow shift from urban bachelor immigrant ghetto to more family-based Chinese American communities outside of isolated Chinatowns, which surged after 1965. The systematic degradation of the Chinese American male under a racist social and political system from the mid-1800s to mid-1900s created a community in moral and social crisis. Thus, in the gender-imbalanced Chinatown, these previously excluded Chinese women were desperately needed to help produce the next generation of Chinese Americans and establish roots in the U.S. It naturally follows that Chu's fictional community in the late 1940s inevitably elevated a Chinese female’s sexual and reproductive value. As a result, the male characters all celebrate Ben Loy and Mei Oi’s marriage as a symbolic marker for their community, which was just embarking on an attempt to restore a lost sense of patriarchal power, cultural agency and national belonging in the U.S. According to hegemonic state and ethnic nationalist ideologies, women are needed for both their prescribed biological and ideological reproductive roles (Mayer 2000, 7-8). In her study on gender and nationalism, Tamar Mayer explains that with regards to normative narratives of nationalism, “only pure and modest women [could] reproduce the pure nation (2000, 7). Thus, in an ethnic nationalistic sense, a woman’s prescribed role as producer of both a cultural and biological heritage, was even more urgently felt in this isolated Chinese American community. The metaphorical notion of a “pure” Chinese women set up to restore of a lost communal hope in patriarchal values was a logical narrative conclusion. However, if a Chinese woman was assigned to the role of creating a home, she could also be its undoing if she failed to conform to these idealized and antiquated patriarchal roles of womanhood. A common gendered binary built into masculine nationalist rhetoric presumes that a nation’s own women were more “pure” and “moral” than “foreign” women (Mayer 2000, 10). Eat a Bowl of Tea consistently portrays American-born ethnic Chinese women as failing to fulfill prescribed ideals of traditional womanhood. At this time, U.S.-born Chinese American women were rare and, according to the patriarchal

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codes circulating in the novel’s male-dominated immigrant community, often portrayed as too corrupted by their exposure to this wai “outer” layer of U.S. life to make suitable Chinese wives. Wah Gay warns his son, that if he did not go to China soon to find a bride, he could end up with one of those U.S.-born “no-good jook sing girls” who only “run around…going out and having a good time…and turning their husbands into virtual slave[s]” (Chu 1961, 44). By reframing ethnic Chinese women into territorial, pure-Chinese and corrupted “jook sing” binaries, what results is a geographical mapping of sexual purity that is built on patriarchal and ethnic nationalist, male-defined anxieties. According to Wah Gay, Mei Oi is a sound choice for a daughter-in-law because she is imported from the pure, ideological space of the homeland, We always say that jook sing girls are no good …that’s why everybody goes back to China to get married. A village girl will make a good wife, they say. She will not run around. She can tell right from wrong. She will stay home and cook rice for you (Chu 1961, 137).

The novel’s representation of an almost bachelor community claiming this pure maiden from the homeland trope as their own, reveals the powerful metaphorical weight and cultural burden assigned to Mei Oi in her new role as an immigrant bride, not just for her husband and kin, but for some members of the community and home village. Mei Oi’s marriage and move to the U.S. posits her at the center of a submerged nei/wai symbolic dichotomy that calls on her to represent an assortment of maledefined desires for this community. In Ben Loy's eyes, Mei Oi, with her classical Chinese looks, education and English language training, embodied the best of both worlds – a fusion of modern and traditional values. The male characters seem torn between a sense of nostalgic and nationalistic preservation of Chinese culture and the simultaneous goals of cosmopolitanism, independence, and a sense of U.S. belonging. Imported from the pure, ideological space of the homeland, Mei Oi must embody ideals of modernity and progress while at the same time maintaining traditionally defined womanly virtues and purity against the potentially "corrupting" world of U.S. Chinatown life. The social and familial burden of cultural and patriarchal ideals proves an impossible ideological construct for these young newlyweds to maintain. This construct leads to the central conflict of the novel, the subsequent scandal that ensues when Ben Loy’s impotence and a lack of restraint spurs his wife into an affair with another Chinese American bachelor in the Chinatown community, which eventually results in her pregnancy and public exposure.

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VII: Crossing an Imported Nei/Wai Threshold. There were often conflicting demands placed on immigrant women in Mei Oi’s position since they were idealized as “pure” moral guardians from the homeland, yet often desired as sex objects due to the extreme shortage of Chinese women in isolated Chinatowns. From ancient times into early twentieth-century China, a woman’s chastity and virtue, along with her filial and reproductive roles, were carefully safeguarded against contamination from over-exposure to the outer spheres of male society. In accordance with traditional Chinese norms, a woman outside of the patriarchal system was often viewed as a part of the public wai arena and thus, more vulnerable to the workings of male desire and seduction. Even while married, Mei Oi’s sexuality is represented as a matter of public property due to the male sexual repression within the community. According to Yen Le Espiritu, “the skewed sex ratio enhanced the social value of Asian immigrant women and gave them more options in their dealings with men. Given their small numbers, single women were highly prized as sexual and marital partners” (1997, 22). Mei Oi's entry into this community is also portrayed as a threat and disruption to the previously solid, brotherly bond of this male-centered world. The small talk in Chu’s novel often centers on the idea that a man is better off with an old wife than taking on the risks involved in bringing a young Chinese wife to the U.S., because, “everyone wants to sleep with a young one” (Chu 1961, 101). For example, when Ben Loy confides in his best friend, Chin Yuen, about his impotency and his wife's affair, this same friend is secretly tempted to also try to sleep with Mei Oi (Chu 1961, 232-237). When Mei Oi asks to find a job outside the home out of boredom, Ben Loy refuses to ask his father for permission because “the very question made him feel insecure" (Chu 1961, 80). He was "haunted" by the "threat" of Mei Oi meeting "all sorts of people," being exposed to gossip, or "running away with the boss" (Chu 1961, 80). There are many references to instances of runaway brides in the novel, which is a historically accurate depiction. Espiritu explains that anecdotal evidence indicates that in the first half of the 1900s in the U.S., this skewed sex ratio occasionally allowed some Asian immigrant women alternative routes to extricate themselves from unwanted marriages (1997, 23). The male characters all repeat the idea that "women nowadays are not to be trusted," like a mantra of male consensus that foreshadows the plot, with the Chinatown men all nodding their heads (Chu 1961, 12, 15 &137). Mei Oi’s “fall” into an extra-marital affair is set up in the narrative as almost inevitable and predictable. In fact, the tale of Mei Oi’s initial

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seduction into an extra-marital affair reads quite like many classical Chinese moral tales.27 The primary lessons of this classical instructive narrative are for men to keep their women safely within the inner nei realm and out of the tempting and corrupting world of wai and not to neglect their own husbandly duties. This formula warns of the threat of impropriety facing a woman who risks breaking convention by leaving her inner realm to expose herself to the threat of the outside male gaze. The threat of the outside realm is perceived as even more real in the new setting of a U.S. Chinatown. Mei Oi feels lonely and rejected due to her isolation and her husband’s long-term impotence that began as soon as they left China. As Natalie Friedman points out, her affair hinges not only on the multi-generational patriarchal pressure put on this young couple but also on Mei Oi’s own sense of entrapment, nostalgia, and homesickness (2009, 77). After eight months in a stuffy, run down apartment with nothing to do but wait for her husband to return late from his job as a waiter, Mei Oi eventually makes the fatal step out the door of her domestic nei world into the symbolic and presumably threatening wai realm of Chinatown. Unable to bear the suffocating heat of her apartment, Mei Oi symbolically breaks traditional ideals of propriety as she begins to sit just outside her door of her apartment to try to find a faint breeze. She does not even literally go outside, but only to her apartment’s indoor hallway. Mei Oi starts by simply standing inside the threshold of her apartment door and “inhaling deeply the fresh air”(Chu 1961, 92). Then she asks herself, “Why not get a chair and sit down by the door and be cool?” (Chu 1961, 92). This narrative tellingly draws out slowly just as it would in a traditional Chinese moral tale, where the first step signals a plot shift into the inevitable temptation of the wai realm for women. Mei Oi “goes so far as to expose her legs by lifting up the bottom of her dress above the knees to…When one day. As she was sitting thus in the doorway…it was too late” (Chu 1961, 92). As could be expected, the notorious womanizer, Ah Song, who already brazenly flirted with Mei Oi at her wedding banquet, just happens to be in the same apartment complex when he spots her. Mei Oi’s second mistake is to invite him in out of politeness and naiveté. Chu’s narrative reminds readers that this is her first time alone with a man other than her husband (Chu 1961, 93). Once they cross the symbolic nei/wai divide, Mei Oi’s persistent pleas and protests for Ah Song to leave only serve to seduce him more. The next few pages read like an inevitable trap for this gullible wife from China. Ah Song, in classic villain style, reveals the truth of her husband’s past forays with prostitutes to make Mei Oi more vulnerable. He then pleas with her to let him take her home as his bride and fabricates an absurd fantasy world with everything that she is

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missing in her present life, such as wealth, a good mother-in-law, a large family, and a mansion with lots of servants and activity. After Ah Song professes undying love for Mei Oi, her resistance and protests weaken as he carries her to the bed (Chu 1961, 93-99). This section marks the beginning of an extended affair between Mei Oi and Ah Song that eventually leads to her to become pregnant with Ah Song’s child.

VIII: Only a Dream Eat a Bowl of Tea makes clear that the greatest tragedy of the plot is not Mei Oi’s extra-marital affair, but how the knowledge of the affair and Ben Loy’s impotence spreads through the community. As stated, “Ben Loy’s biggest concern was over public disclosure of his wife’s infidelity (Chu 1961, 144). When gossip spreads about Mei Oi’s affair, it is a clear violation of a norm of chastity, whereby a woman’s sexuality was still perceived of as a public affair. The novel makes clear the larger social and symbolic implications of the affair, in both the host and homeland. Both father-in-laws worry that if news of this scandal got back to their ancestral village their wives would have “no place to hide…no place to go” (Chu 1961, 128 & 142). Even members of their local clan organization could lose face if word of this affair kept spreading (Chu 1961, 134). Eventually, everyone involved in the affair, including the father-in-laws, are forced to leave New York’s Chinatown to “save face” for themselves and their community. On some levels, Chu’s novel reinforces a cautionary male-centered and traditional tale that the socio-economic and cultural realities of U.S. life in the 1940s could spoil a “pure” Chinese woman from the homeland. At the same time, the novel’s more complex message does not simply establish blame for this infraction on either the husband’s impotence and neglect or the wife’s naïve lack of self-control or innocence (Chu 1961, 111). Mei Oi’s innocence is ambivalent at times yet the plot still allows for a positive resolution at the close.28 Chu’s defiant but subtle references to the gendered bias of U.S. immigration restrictions along with patriarchal and filial traditions that created this near bachelor society reveal the underlying social conflicts in the novel. Eat a Bowl of Tea illustrates how the social mechanisms of shame and pride that regulate female chastity are equally powerful in defining male power and agency through male potency. Ling argues that all the male characters “become multiple images of a male role that is mutually reflective and mutually transferable” (1995, 45). Ben Loy and Mei Oi’s wedding ceremony originally functions as a triumph of communal

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masculinity and cultural/ethnic nationalist pride for this male population until this communal burden proves too big for both husband and wife. By breaking social and sexual taboos, the novel portrays this couple’s fall as reflective of a symbolic mark of cultural decay and disempowerment embedded in the very structure of this gender imbalanced community. The symbolic force of Mei Oi’s illegitimate pregnancy is powerful enough to defile a sense of communal male empowerment because she is almost a pure symbol. In hegemonic ideologies, the metaphorical range of a woman’s sexuality is often made to manifest a masculine-defined ideal of honor and virtue for the entire community; this is especially true in times of communal crisis. According to Susan Mann, in a traditional nei/wai social system, “the ideal woman was centripetal in disposition, but the symbolic power of her virtues radiated from the inner chambers to change the world” (1992, 40-56). Mei Oi came to signify the dream of cultural purity from her homeland. However, as her father-in-law eventually realizes, “This beautiful picture was only a dream, a dream mirrored in the subconscious fantasy of the man. A mirror shattered by the alleged scandal of Ben Loy’s wife. A mirror shattered and irreparable. The destruction of a beautiful picture” (Chu 1961, 141). To Wah Gay, his wife’s affair reveals his own disillusionment and sense of cultural distance tied into his own ambivalent relationships with both his homeland and host land. Ben Loy holds up an impossible ideal of female purity for his wife, despite all the realities that suggest otherwise as the plot unfolds. Ling argues that to solve his impotence and save his marriage, Ben Loy must accept Mei Oi for who she is when her sexual purity reveals itself to be less than his ideal vision (1998, 64 & 68). Ben Loy’s polarized virgin/whore view of womanhood appears to resolve itself by the end of the novel with his new view of a post-scandal Mei Oi. Suddenly, “Ben Loy saw in his wife’s gaze a mingling of shyness and longing, question and challenge, invitation and animal urgency” (Chu 1961, 249). After they work out their differences he accepts the baby as his own and they move away from Chinatown. Mei Oi manages to maintain her role in her family, despite her previous affair, by convincing Ben Loy that she was a woman with actual needs and desires. Bronwen Walter explores how diasporic women can often be placed in a “paradoxical” relationship where the process of diasporic home making can be both a site of containment and “the basis for challenging dominant cultures both outside and inside their own ethnic group” (2001, 197). Additionally, Elaine Kim looks at how Mei Oi’s character functions with the “disruptive force of a young Mainland Chinese bride into a male-

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dominated brotherhood, whose mere presence shatters the collective male illusions of their own power in the host country and dreams of their homeland” (1990, 72). I argue that it is this disruptive aspect that also crashes through the symbolism attached to the woman-from-the-homeland motif in this novel. Kim’s idea that Mei Oi serves more as a catalyst and female reproach for the woman left behind in China, than as a real character in this novel, also supports this argument (1990, 72). Mei Oi’s role in this novel is primarily metaphorical. Although her presence and actions are at the core of the narrative and often an impetus for movement and change, she is still trapped in the symbolic realm. By having her act on her sexual desires, Chu’s narrative portrays Mei Oi more as a metaphorical warning sign or symptom of a social problem, than as an empowered subject. She is an emblem that chronicles Ben Loy’s metaphorical loss of agency and his masculine degradation as an immigrant subject. Mei Oi’s affair embodies the necessary fall of a cultural icon more than it functions as a revelation of an immigrant woman’s personal struggle, yet at the same time, her character takes on the representational weight of the actual social reality of gender imbalance in an early Chinese American immigrant community. Mei Oi, as a signifier of home and belonging, refuses to remain fixed in the representational space assigned her by the male Chinatown characters. Chu's novel provides an intentionally ambivalent message. By taking on the controversial topics of sexuality and gender dynamics that plagued an early immigrant Chinese community in the U.S, Mei Oi's affair almost turns the culturally constructed delusions of a male Chinatown community back on itself.

IX: Conclusion People take ideas with them and continually adapt them when they migrate. In China or the U.S., no space is purely nei or wai, and no space can ever remain culturally isolated or sacred. The inner world of the home, be it in the land of immigration or emigration, is permeated with the same conflicting affiliations to self, family, lineage, community, and nation that converge in the world outside the home. What Chu seems to suggest is that a social and ideological layering of confinements according to a traditional nei/wai dichotomy translates into new configurations for both the male and female ethnic Chinese characters. In the migration of existing nei/wai cultural values to a new sociopolitical and geographical setting, a spatial metamorphosis occurs in this symbolically and literally confining space of a U.S. Chinatown, which leads all the characters to adapt and change their

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views of gender, space, and culture. Eat a Bowl of Tea reminds us that bodies, histories, and places are always in flux and slide out from the imagined geography of memory and nostalgia. It is my hope that this interdisciplinary reading contributes to larger fields of research on gender, nationalism, and migration in how we construct the story of ourselves and our sense of belonging, through gendered bodies, homes, and geographies.

Notes 1

In the U.S. mainland this did not equalize until the 1980s (Zhuo 1992, 79). Between 1960 and 1970, Chinese American males underwent socioeconomic gains that exceeded the population at large (Wong 1999, 511-524). 3 When first published in 1961, many reviewers found it offensive and the language “tasteless and raw”(Chan 1961, 2). Sau-ling Wong and Jeffrey Santa Anna point to the novel’s importance as one of the “earliest articulations of the struggle for a new (masculine) Asian American identity” (1989, 190). 4 See P. Chu 2000, Eng 2001, Hom 1983, Kim 1982 &1991, Lee 1999, Ling 1995, and Okihiro 1994. 5 See Lee 1999, 143 and Ling 1998, 21 6 See Lee 1999 and Ling 1995 &1998. 7 See Cheong 1997, 1-38, Eng 2001, Kain 1997, Kim 1990, L. Wang 1995, Wong 1989, and Yang 1999. 8 See S. Chan 2008, Hsu 2000, and McKeown 2001 & 1999. 9 This short-lived opening in the otherwise exclusionary immigration laws was due to the lifting of the National Origins Law in 1943 and the War Brides Act of 1945 that briefly allowed World War II veterans to bring home their foreign wives and children or new brides (Kwang 1987, 29). 10 See Millett 1977 and Rose 1993, 60. 11 See Blunt 2005, Massey 1994, Rose 1993, and Young 1997. 12 By the 1900s, the practice of families or even entire lineages depending on remittances from overseas males was already a well established economic strategy and cultural system in many southern Chinese regions (McKeown 1999, 73-110). 13 See Peffer 1992 and Glick 1980, 165. 14 For an argument for the preferred use of the term “transmigrant” over sojourner see (Schiller, Basch, and Blanc 1995, 48). Historian Ronald Takaki also questions the selective application and myth of the sojourner label that was generally applied for Asian but not European immigrants to the U.S. and argues that this reliance on the homeland was also true for many early European immigrants (1990, 7). 15 In the actual workings of the Page Law Chinese women were generally assumed to be prostitutes (Calavita 2006, 251). See also Peffer 1992 & 1999. 16 In 1943, after China became a U.S. ally, some restrictions were loosened. Even after the repeal of the Exclusion Act in 1943 and the War Brides Act of 1945, annual quotas for Chinese immigration were still only around 100 (Zhou 1992, 43). 17 Wang 1988, 18 qtd. in Espiritu 1997, 19. 2

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18

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Trans. and qtd. Ebrey 1993, 23-24. For example, China was never a colony, however Chinese immigrants to the U.S. left a culture radically altered by the upheavals of neocolonial capitalism and U.S. cultural imperialism to arrive in a host land that was also redefining itself in relation to Asia and the effects of Asian immigrations. See also Lee 1999 and Palumbo-Liu 1999. 20 When Chu was writing his novel, there was still little informal contact and no official diplomatic relations between the U.S. and the P.R.C. and little was known about everyday life in the P.R.C. 21 Outside of fiction, time did not stay still in the ancestral homeland. Throughout the twentieth century, women in mainland China (a percentage of whom were married to overseas men) had wider access to education and played a large part in the social reforms that were sweeping the country, such as grass-root Communist party movements, female support networks, sisterhood societies and labor unions; along with marriage, health, and land reform movements. 22 For example, Wah Gay’s friend complains of his lonely life in the U.S. because his wife chose to remain in the village, “where she could watch over the rice paddies…and where the idols and spirits could watch over her" and her husband (Chu 1961, 187-188). 23 Geographers Cindy Fan and Youqin Huang argue for a need to move beyond conventional and passive depictions of women involved in female long-distance marriages and migration as dictated by traditional, patriarchal, and economic pressures. Instead they propose a more flexible analysis of the “complexities underlying female marriage migration, stressing institutional, economic, and sociocultural factors that impose constraints on and provide opportunities for women’s mobility” (1998, 227-228). 24 However, David Eng’s claim is not fully accurate since Ben Loy was also impotent in Hong Kong when he took his new Chinese wife to the same hotel where he once shared with prostitutes during his military leaves in the past. While it is true that while on vacation in Washington DC, in a new environment with no social or family pressures “he rediscovered his manliness” with his wife (Chu 1961, 85). The core of Eng’s important argument is what matters here – that the crisis in this Chinatown-based novel is not just about the “physical displacement from the borders of the nation” but also about “psychical displacement” (2001, 188). 25 Rather than refer to Chinatown as “ethnic enclave,” a commonly preferred and “less pejorative” term that “draws a rosier picture of racial-spatial segregation” and “does not carry the same sense of social deracination,” Yoonmee Chang argues for a return to the term “ghetto,” which she defines as “a space of structurally imposed, racialized class inequality, of involuntary containment to racialized poverty” (2010, 2). 26 The immigration reform act of 1965, along with global economic changes, and more flexible two-way migration patterns, led to a large growth in a new category of well educated, professional, and cosmopolitan overseas Chinese immigrants. The primarily American-born, ethnic Chinese population in the U.S. went from 19

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about 120,000 in the 1950’s to about two million in 1995. At the same time, the percentage of American-born Chinese fell to about thirty percent while naturalized U.S. citizens rose to about sixty percent in the last decade among the Chinese American population (Yin 1998, 176). 27 For example, see the Ming Dynasty oral tale “The Pearl-sewn Shirt” (1400s) in a 1924 collection Feng Meng-lung called Stories Old and New (Birch 1958, 37-96). Li Shu-yan also points to the meeting of Pan and the merchant in the Chinese Classic The Water Margin (103-05). 28 Mei Oi flirts directly with her husband’s best friend and attempts to continue her affair with Ah Song even after they are exposed.

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Bibliography Bach, Breyten. 1993. “The Long March from Hearth to Heart.” In Home: A Place in the World, ed. Arien Mack. New York: New York University Press, 65-79. Blunt, Alison. 2005. Domicile and Diaspora: Anglo-Indian Women and the Spatial Politics of Home. Oxford: Blackwell. Calavita, Kitty. 2006. “Collisions at the Intersection of Gender, Race and Class: Enforcing the Chinese Exclusion Laws.” Law & Society Review 40.2 (June): 249-281. Chan, Jeffery. 1961 [1990]. “Introduction to the 1979 Edition of Louis Chu’s Eat a Bowl of Tea.” New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1-5. Chan, Sucheng. 2008. “Chinese American Historiography: What Difference Has the Asian American Movement Made?” In Chinese Americans and the Politics of Race and Culture, Eds. Sucheng Chan and Madeline Hsu. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1-6. Chang, Yoonmee. 2010. Writing the Ghetto: Class, Authorship, and the Asian American Ethnic Enclave. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Chatterjee, Partha.1986. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse. London: Zed. —. 1990. “The Nationalist Resolution of the Women's Question.” In Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History, Eds. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 233-253. Cheng, Lucie and Edna Bonacich, Eds. 1984. Labor Immigration Under Capitalism: Asian Workers in the United States before World War II. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cheong, King-Kok. 1997. “Re-viewing Asian American Literary Studies.” In An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature, Ed. KingKok Cheung. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1-38. Chu, Louis. 1961 [1990]. Eat a Bowl of Tea. New York: L. Stuart. Chu, Patricia P. 2000. Assimilating Asians: Gendered Strategies of Authorship in Asian America. Durham: Duke University Press. Dawson, Andrew and Nigel Rapport. 1998.“The Topic and the Book.” In Migrants of Identity: Perceptions of Home in a World of Movement, Eds. Andrew Dawson and Nigel Rapport. New York: Berg, 1-18. de Bary, Wm. Theodore, Ed. 1960. Sources of Chinese Tradition: Volume II. trans. and comp. Wm. Theodore de Bary, Wing-tsit Chan and Chester Tan. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Dikotter, Frank. 1995. Sex Culture and Modernity in China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Ebrey, Patricia Buckley. 1993. The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period. Berkeley: University of California Press. Enevold, Jessica. 2000. “Men and Woman on the Move: Dramas of the Road.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 3.3: 404-420. Eng, David L. 2001. Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America. Durham: Duke University Press. Espiritu, Yen Le. 1997. Asian American Women and Men: Labor, Laws and Love. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications. Fan, Cindy and Youqin Huang. 1998. “Waves of Rural Brides: Female Marriage Migration in China,” Geographers Annals of the Association of American Geographers 88.2 (June): 227-251. Fei, Xiao Tong. 1992. From the Soil, the Foundations of Chinese Society: A Translation of Fei Xiaotong’s Xiangtu Zhongguo. [1948] trans. Gary G. Hamilton and Wang Zheng. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Friedman, Natalie. 2009. “Adultery and the Immigrant Narrative.” MELUS Racial Desires 34.3 (Fall): 71-91. George, Rosemary Marangoly. 1996. The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth-century Fiction. New York: Cambridge University Press. Gernet, Jacques. 1996. A History of Chinese Civilization. New York: Cambridge University Press. Glick, Clarence. 1980. Sojourners and Settlers: Chinese Migrants in Hawaii. Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii. Hamilton, Gary G. and Wang Zheng. 1992. “Introduction.” In From the Soil, the Foundations of Chinese Society: A Translation of Fei Xiaotong’s Xiangtu Zhongguo. [1948]. By Fei Xiao Tong. trans. Gary G. Hamilton and Wang Zheng. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1-36. Hom, Marlon Kau. 1983. "Some Cantonese Folksongs on the American Experience." Western Folklore 42.2: 129-130. Hsu, Madeline. 2000. Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration between the United States and South China, 1882-1943. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Kain, Geoffrey. 1997. "Introduction." In Ideas of Home: Literature of Asian Migration, Ed. Geoffrey Kain. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1-16.

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—. 2001. “Refracted Identit(ies) in Louis Chu’s Eat a Bowl of Tea: Insularity as Impotence.” MELUS 26.2 (Summer): 187-198. Kim, Elaine H. 1982. Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. —. 1990. “‘Such Opposite Creatures’: Men and Women in Asian American Literature.” Michigan Quarterly Review 29: 68-92. Ko, Dorothy. 1994. Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-century China. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Kwang, Peter. 1987. The New Chinatown. New York: Macmillan. Lee, Rachel C. 1999. The Americas of Asian American Literature: Gendered Fictions of Nation and Transnation. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Li, Shu-yan. 1993 “Otherness and Transformations in Eat a Bowl of Tea and Crossings.” MELUS 18.4 (Winter): 99-111. Ling, Jinqi. 1998. Narrating Nationalisms: Ideology and Form in Asian American Literature. New York: Oxford University Press. —. 1995. “Reading for Historical Specificities: gender negotiations in Louis Chu’s Eat a Bowl of Tea.” MELUS 20.1 (Spring): 35-52. Lyman, S. 1968. “Marriage and the Family Among Chinese Immigrants to America, 1850- 1960.” Phylon 19: 321-330. Mann, Susan. 1992. “Fuxue [Women’s Learning] by Zhang Xuecheng (1738-1801): “China’s First History of Women’s Culture.” Late Imperial China 13.1 (June): 40-56 (qtd. in Ko 165). —. 1997. Precious Records: Women in China's Long Eighteenth Century. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Massey, Doreen. 1994. Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mayer, Tamar. 2000. “Gender Ironies of Nationalism: Setting the Stage.” In Gender Ironies of Nationalism: Sexing the Nation, Ed. Tamar Mayer. New York: Routledge, 1-22. Mazumdar, Sucheta. 1989. “General Introduction: A Women-centered Perspective on Asian American History.” In Making Waves: an Anthology of Writings By and About Asian American Women, Eds. Asian Women United of California. Boston: Beacon Press, 1-24. McKeown, Adam. 2001. Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change: Peru, Chicago, Hawaii, 1900-1936. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —. 1999. “Transnational Chinese Families and Chinese Exclusion, 18751943” Journal of American Ethnic History 18.2 (Winter): 73-110. Millett, Kate. 1977. Sexual Politics. Virago: London.

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Nee, Victor Nee and Brett de Bary Nee. 1973. Longtime Californ': A Documentary Study of an American Chinatown. 1st ed. New York: Pantheon Books. Okihiro, Gary Y. 1994. Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Palumbo-Liu, David. 1999. Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Pan, Lynn. 1990. Sons of the Yellow Emperor: A History of the Chinese Diaspora. 1st U.S. ed. Boston: Little Brown. “The Pearl Sewn Shirt.” 1958. In Stories from a Ming Collection: the Art of the Chinese Storyteller, ed. and trans. Cyril Birch. New York: Grove Press, 37-96. Peffer, George Anthony. 1992. “From Under the Sojourner’s Shadow: A Historiographical Study of Chinese Female Immigration to America, 1852-1882.” Journal of American Ethnic History 11.3 (Spring): 41-67. —. 1999. If They Don’t Bring Their Women Here: Chinese Female Immigration Before Exclusion. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Radhakrishnan, R. 1996. Diasporic Mediations: Between Home and Location. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. —. 1991. “Nationalism, Gender, and the Narrative of Identity.” In Nationalism and Sexualities, ed. Andrew Parker. New York: Routledge, 77-96. Rose, Gillian. 1993. Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Schiller, Nina, Linda Basch and Christina Blanc. 1995. “From Immigrant to Transmigrant: Theorizing Transnational Migration,” (48). Anthropological Quarterly. 68.1 (January): 48-63. Shurmer-Smith, Pamela and Kevin Hannam. 1994. Worlds of Desire, Realms of Power: A Cultural Geography. New York: Routledge. Takaki, Ronald. 1990. Strangers From a Different Shore. New York: Penguin Books. Tong, Fei Xiao. 1992. Xiangtu Zhongguo [From the Soil, the foundations of Chinese society: a translation of Fei Xiaotong’s Xiangtu Zhongguo.] [1948] trans. Gary G. Hamilton and Wang Zheng. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wang, L. Ling-Chi. 1995. "The Structure of Dual Domination: Toward a Paradigm for the Study of the Chinese Diaspora in the United States." Amerasia Journal 21.1/2: 149-169. Wang, Wayne. 1988. Eat a Bowl of Tea. [film] Columbia Pictures Industries.

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Walter, Browen. 2001. Outsiders: Whiteness, Place and Irish Women. London: Routledge. Wong, Morrison. 1980. “Changes in Socioeconomic Status of the Chinese Male Population in the United States from 1960-1970.” International Migration Review. 14.4 (Winter): 511-524. Wong, Sau-ling. 1989. "What's in a Name? Defining Chinese American Literature of the Immigrant Generation." In Frontiers of Asian American Studies: Writing, Research, and Commentary. Russell Endo Et al. Washington: Washington State University Press, 159-167. Wong, Sau-ling and Jeffrey Santa Anna. 1999. “Gender and Sexuality in Asian American Literature.” Signs 25.2 (Autumn): 171-226. Woon, Yuen-Fong. 1998. The Excluded Wife. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press. Yang, Mayfair Mei-hui. 1999. “Introduction.” In Spaces of Their Own: Women's Public Sphere in Transnational China, ed. Mayfair Mei-hui Yang. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1-34. Yang, Philip Q. 2013. “From Sojourning to Settlement to Transnationalism: Transformations of the Chinese Immigrant Community in America. In Routledge Handbook of the Chinese Diaspora, ed. Chee-Beng Tan. New York: Routledge, 122-140. Yin, Xiao-huang. 1998. “Worlds of Difference: Lin Yutang, Lao She, and the Significance of Chinese-Language Writing in America.” In Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature, ed. Werner Sollors. New York: New York University Press, 176-85. Young, Iris Marion. 1997. “House Home: Feminist Variations on a Theme.” In Intersecting Voices: Dilemmas of Gender, Political Philosophy, and Policy, ed. Iris Marion Young. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 134-164. Zhou, Min. 1992. Chinatown: The Socioeconomic Potential of an Urban Enclave. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

CHAPTER THREE PUBLIC AND PRIVATE IN LIGHT OF LINGERIE: IMAGES WITHIN IMAGES LUCY BOWDITCH

“Images within Images,” a framework suggested by the research group Nomadikon for the body’s Sixth International Conference, invited me to consider my material regarding constructions of public and private space in a formal way. The approach generated an ideal escape from examining public and private as an abstract binary, and instead allowed me to easily visualize the concept as one component, or image, embedded in another.

Part I For many years, I have been considering the questions of what is public, and what is private? More specifically, what is the intersection between both spheres? The exploration for answers is both personal and academic. On the personal side, during the early 1990s, while I was writing my dissertation, I lived at the Pen and Brush, an anachronistic women’s club in downtown Manhattan. I had at the time a very private study, so private that it reminded me of what Mark Wigley—now Dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation—wrote regarding the first truly private space during the Renaissance: While one of the first signs of the growing desire for privacy for the individual, such that ‘a privacy within the house developed beyond the privacy of the house’ was the separation of the bedrooms that Alberti prescribes, which established a masculine space, this space is not completely private, since women can enter it, albeit only when allowed. The first truly private space was the man’s study, a small locked room off

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My experience of the little top floor writing/living space overlooking the Greenwich Village gardens between Ninth and Tenth Street, was the first time I had experienced such deep privacy, beyond the sometimes porous ebb and flow in a family household or a college dormitory. (Also, as the space was so small, having nothing but a bookshelf, large table, and small futon, I used the rest of the city as the extension of my living space.) Even more to the point regarding the tension between public and private— the brownstone that housed my extremely private room was listed in a book called Where to Go which is exactly what it sounds like, a nifty tourist guide detailing where you could find public comfort stations. Being an academic, scholar, and teacher as much by avocation as profession, I taught a course at the New School for Social Research in New York City, exploring the nature of public and private spaces, which was the moment I learned about POPS, not Pop Art, but rather Privately Owned Public Spaces, of which there are quite a few in New York. POPS are spaces open to the general public, but maintained and policed by private interests. In 1998, I chaired a panel at the annual College Art Association, the major professional organization in the field of Art History. The panel presentations ranged from Radio City Music Hall’s men’s bathrooms decorated by Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986), to the paintings of the seventeenth century Dutch artist De Hooch (1629-1684), photo albums, and the texts of German sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas. Around this time, I published the essay “Public and Private in Light of Lingerie”.2 The piece started with the observation that many of my female students were coming to class with their underwear showing, specifically bra straps. I was struck by the intentionality of the women’s desire to display an undergarment for all to see. What historical or cultural frameworks helped explain the sartorial phenomenon? What examples, if any, existed in the history of art? In the essay, I cited changes in communications, including the television and personal computers, as factors indicating the shift in public and private perceptions. I also considered the work of artists Vito Acconci, Charlie Citron, pop star Madonna, and fashion advertisements.3 In a wellknown 1983 essay, “The Ecstasy of Communication,” Jean Baudrillard, describes, with a degree of hysteria, the radical collapse of public and private fueled by the communication revolution:

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Thus, the body, the landscape, time all progressively disappear as scenes. And the same for public space: the theater of social and theater of politics are both reduced more and more to a large soft body with many hands. Advertising in its new version—which is no longer a more or less baroque, utopian or ecstatic scenario of objects and consumption, but the effect of an omnipresent visibility of enterprises, brands, social interlocutors, and social virtues of communication—advertising in its new dimension invades everything, as public space (the street, monument, market, scene) disappears. It realizes, or if one prefers, it materializes in all its obscenity.4

Baudrillard closes his essay on a desperate note, “It is the end of interiority and intimacy.”5 As I have stated in Afterimage, Baudrillard’s hysterical pitch reminds one of the public response to the 1903 Edwin S. Porter classic film, The Great Train Robbery.6 Seeing the larger than life train engine careening toward the audience, viewers took to their heels and ran terrified from the theater. Observing the early phase of the communication revolution, Baudrillard was horrified. Today many individuals acquiesce to or even embrace this loss of public and private space. Students live their lives more or less in public on Facebook. College Internet accounts are not private. The new College of Saint Rose Building, the Massry Center for the Arts, has 44 surveillance cameras. And, due to Edward Snowden’s National Security Association leaks, we now know all Americans are potentially subject to intermittent surveillance. That said, how can one understand the history, if not the origin, of such shifts, or what Baudrillard hyperbolically characterized as a total loss of interiority and intimacy? As an art historian, I decided to put the largely sociological question of public versus private notions in the context of paintings. So, I started to collect in my mind and more precisely, on my computer, paintings over the centuries that indicated some sort of tension between public and private. I selected images of people, almost always women. The works include intimate apparel, undergarments of some sort, in a space not strictly private or public. Of course, a clear opposition between the terms is almost impossible; a constant shift, or a continuum of some sort, is a better framework to imagine rather than a binary system. The selection test for any given work involves recognition of tension between public and private, usually manifested by a subtle, or not so subtle, breach of decorum by the standards of the day. Using this control system, a strictly erotic bedroom scene is irrelevant; so is simple descriptive advertising of a corset unless it implies this tension between the public and private space. The typical work is a figurative painting that has undergarments in public spaces or implied public spaces.

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I excluded the medium of photography and the application of overt advertising because these arenas do not generate a tight group. But even restricting myself to paintings, and an occasional print or collage, I was confronted with the problem of definition. What exactly did I mean by public or private? There is extensive literature on the topic, in fields including consumer culture, gender studies, economics, cultural criticism, critical theory, fashion studies, philosophy, history, art history, and sociology. I will mention just a few volumes in the context of sociology. Sociologists provide critical observations and interpretations. Fashion, Culture, and Identity (1992) by Fred Davis is relevant in terms of themes of fashion, culture, and identity, but it is not about paintings. Richard Sennett’s The Fall of Public Man: On the Social Psychology of Capitalism (1974) considers the shift in the understanding of “public man” in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Antoine Prost and Gérard Vincent’s five volume A History of Private Life (1987) offers detailed case studies of social changes. The work by sociologist Philip Rieff, Sacred Order/Social Order (2007), introduces an interesting theme of desire separated from a larger social good and the consequences of such a condition. Sharon Zukin and Jennifer Smith Maguire look at consumption with an eye toward the economy as well as sociology in Consumers and Consumption (2004). The work of social theorist JĦrgen Habermas is relevant, especially The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (1989). He links the conditions of public and private spheres to modernity. He also addresses the absence of freedom in modern society. As to gender studies, texts concerning the glance or gaze are relevant. I am thinking of Laura Mulvey and Timothy Beneke. In the 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey argued that the gaze (in film) privileged the male perspective. In Proving Manhood (1997), Timothy Beneke defines the male stolen glance, which is relevant for the images selected. Allowing that the terms “public” and “private” are notoriously challenging to define, I resolved to ground the discussion in selected historical moments, as expressed in particular artworks. Constantly shifting definitions emerge from empirical observation of the work rather than being imposed a priori in the research design. Using major monuments from a history of Western art as well as a selection of less well-known works, I explore the curious and elusive question, “How do we understand the point or tension between public and private space?” I ground the responses in a discrete group of figurative art works. The binary construction of public and private is a mere starting point. I will consider seven works.

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Part II In François Boucher’s borderline prurient 1742 painting, La Toilette, (Fig. 3-1), the public, the outside is provided by the painting within the Fig. 3-1. Boucher, François (1703-1770). La Toilette. 1742. Oil on Canvas, 52.5 x 66.5 cm. , Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Photo Credit: Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza / Scala / Art Resource, NY.

painting; it is located in the upper register. A lady in the painting within the painting peeps out of “her” pictorial space into the larger painting, over the edge of the decorative screen into the lively scene where a female attendant is helping another woman, who is seated. The maid offers a small chapeau as the central character secures her stocking with a pink garter. The other garter is dangling from the mantle where one also sees a letter. There are still smoky embers in the fireplace; the bellows are provocatively angled between the legs of the dressing woman. A cat, stretched on the floor between the splayed legs of the dressing woman, toys with a ball yarn, and steam rises from the teapot. The rococo swirl of

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the painting, the vortex-like movement is reinforced by the glance of the cropped figure in the painting who looks in the direction of, if not directly at, the lady by the fire, who in turn glances at her attendant. The image within the image contributes to a sense of a place beyond the chamber, to a more public space. It makes the narrative of the composition work more effective by adding that layer of tension, complexity, and complicity. The painting within the painting contributes to the circular movement defining the overall feeling of the work, but also provides a stolen glance, that Timothy Beneke associates with the male glance. In this case, a woman assumes the stolen glance; in another work, agency may be with the male. Henri Toulouse-Lautrec’s color-lithograph Jane Avril at the Jardin de Paris, (Fig. 3-2), also contains an image within an image, but it is continuous Fig. 3-2. Henri de Toulouse-LAUTREC (1864-1901). Jane Avril au Jardin de Paris (2nd state). 1893. Color Lithograph, 125 x 90 cm. Bibliotheque Nationale de France (BnF), © BnF, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.

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space that has been graphically divided, reinforcing a psychological break between the performer on stage and the lecherous bass player in the music pit to the lower right. The musician is rendered with a mask-like visage, with one eye intensely focused on the music. We do not see the other side of his face, but the exaggerated perspective of the phallic base handle, leaves the viewer in little doubt as to where his other eye might be wondering. Here we have a sound example of the stolen glance but the situation is curious because Jane Avril is there for all in the audience to see. It is just that the musician, based on the internal logic of the print’s image, is supposed to be concentrating on the sheet music before him. The clever composition offers an image of the public space and the interior thoughts or activity of the musician. The viewer is aware that the bass player is both playing the music and lusting after Jane, an inner psychological condition reinforced by the grotesque face associated with the satyr. John Sloan’s etching Night Windows, (Fig. 3-3), offers an image within Fig. 3-3. John Sloan (1871-1951). Night Windows. c. 1910. Etching. 133 x 171 mm. The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C. © ARS, New York, Photo Credit: Art Resource, NY.

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an image and a clear example of the male stolen glance. In Night Windows, Sloan uses the view from his own downtown New York City studio.7 A young woman, back lit, dressed in just a slip, framed by the window, leans forward toward the open window as she lifts her long hair up and away from her face. Seated precariously on the edge of the left-hand side rooftop, a peeping Tom peers in her direction. Sloan has conveniently not included the logical mullion on the fenestration making it easier to see the woman. The print also exemplifies a new social environment, a function of the twentieth century vertical city. It is purely the line of vision that secures or undermines presumed privacy; the new architectural structures, i.e., the skyscrapers, introduce new lines of vision. The woman in the window knows that there is a building higher than the one in which she dwells, and as such she knows someone can stare into her abode. A shadowy rooftop and anonymity make it possible for a surreptitious transgression. Not knowing who might see you or, for that matter, who you might be seeing creates another point in the public private matrix. Moving to mid-twentieth century, Richard Hamilton’s Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? (Fig. 3-4), offers Fig. 3-4. Richard Hamilton (1922-2011). Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? c. 1956. Collage. 260 mm x 247.6 mm. Kunsthalle Türbingen, Türbingen, Germany. © R. Hamilton.

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another look at images within images. The woman on the right wearing pasties and the beefcake man in briefs with a giant phallic popsicle, both highly sexualized figures in a living room filled with the latest consumer products of the period—a reel-to-reel tape, a large canned ham, a modern vacuum cleaner, a state of the art television. The work includes collaged images within a larger image and framed images within the image: the curious nineteenth century portrait of a man on the wall, the woman on the television, the large framed comic book “Young Romance” poster, and the movie marquee beyond the picture window. The collage speaks to a paradigmatic shift, the expansion of consumer culture in the decade following World War II. Accumulating images within images drives the pictorial strategy. The primary view is from the interior to the exterior, from a more private space within the home to a public place of entertainment. As in so much advertising, the sexy, provocative man and woman dominating the collage draw in the viewer. In Pauline Boty’s painting Portrait of Celia Birtwell and Some of her Heroes, (Fig. 3-5), a young blond woman with bangs stands in front of a Fig. 3-5. Pauline Boty (1938-1966). Celia Birtwell and Some of her Heroes. c. 1963. Oil on Canvas. 152 x 122 cm. Museu Colecção Berardo, Portugal, Photo Credit: Courtesy Museu Colecção Berardo.

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white wall covered with images of men, each an image within an image. Celia is wearing hip-hugger blue jeans and a white blouse totally unbuttoned to reveal a white lace-trimmed bra.8 By her knee, a full red rose dangles from her hands that are gently clasped before her. Tension between the primary figure and small images pinned to the background wall dramatizes an otherwise calm portrait. In the upper right, two dapper young men stare down at Celia’s open blouse. Moving clockwise to the lower right, David Hockney takes a drag on a cigarette; and moving to the left, an Elvis Presley type poses with slightly out-thrust hips. Above him, a man in a leather jacket looks in Celia’s direction. By her neck, one sees a squatting fellow in safari attire complete with plumed pith helmet. In suggestive disarray, the main figure is surrounded by at least six men. Staring at the viewer, not the images surrounding her, cool Celia remains pure and innocent.9 The Argentinean artist Antonio Berni may be understood in terms of consumer culture expressed using images within images. Consider “23:30 Waiting in the Station”. In an airport, four exhausted travelers, three men and one woman rendered in gray, collapse in chairs while waiting for international flights. The digital clock indicates 11:30 at night. In the upper left, the board lists São Paolo, Tokyo, New York, and Paris. The flight to São Paolo is four hours and forty-five minutes late lending a strong internal logic to the narrative. A giant advertisement for men and women’s underwear hangs above the sleeping travelers. Paradoxically, Berni uses a surrealist strategy: the inanimate figures are more alive than the animate ones. The people in the poster, even with their heads cropped out of the image, are more energized than the slumped real-life travelers. The artist accomplishes this through scale and color choices. The huge advertising image vibrates with electric yellow, bathing the nearly naked, closely nestled man and woman in bright light. Advertisers have for decades made any given consumer product more alive, more real than life itself. At times the item, whatever it may be, becomes a transformative object, as if to say, “buy this particular thing and you will be changed forever.” Berni has very successfully flipped the advertising strategy. The weird heightened reality in the underwear advertisement reinforces the exhaustion seen in the travelers. Upon close inspection, the advertisement figures are extremely odd; the man’s arm is not really around the woman but is missing or inserted into her chest cavity. Either way, the image is strange, if not creepy. Berni succeeds at critiquing advertising in particular and consumer culture in general.

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Fig. 3-6. Catherine Murphy (1946-). Pendant. 2005. Oil on Canvas. 106.6 x 121.2 cm. Photo credit: Image provided courtesy of Peter Freeman, Inc. New York.

Finally, I would like to turn to Pendant, (Fig. 3-6), a compelling painting by Catherine Murphy. The artist subtly and ambiguously works with public and private, the public figure of Christ and the private body— or is it the other way around? Pendant is a tightly cropped image showing the cleavage of a middle-aged woman. The center of the composition bears the gold Christ on the cross that on the left and right gently presses into the flesh of the heavy, veined, pendulous breasts. At the lower left and right, one sees just a bit of the woman’s simple white bra. Yes, it might be a dress or tank top, but according to the artist, it is in fact a representation of a bra.10 The work invites consideration of “sacred and profane” as well as public and private. Does the image allow us to see the sacred imbedded in the profane, Christ nestled into the human flesh? Then, is the sacred more public or more private? Is it public when part of organized religion and private when part of a personal spiritual consideration? What does

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Pendant present? We see a classic sacred subject—the crucifixion of Christ—here a faithfully rendered mass-produced commercial object against the very real, contemporary, and unflinching rendering of a woman’s flesh.11 The crucifixion necklace is at once quotidian and bizarre. Growing up Catholic, Murphy was familiar with the idea of a woman wearing a crucifixion pendant, but to paint the cleavage at over three-by- three feet packs a punch for the viewer. Murphy stuns the observer with what it is and is not. Oxymoronic as it may sound, the artist has made a secular, religious painting profoundly characteristic of her own aesthetic. The breasts are largely exposed, but the painting is not really sexy or erotic; it is, however, demanding. The composition provokes by visually embedding the religious image in the aging flesh. And while the overt image represents a woman’s chest, the long, triangular part of the composition into which the Christ figure is inserted also suggests a vaginal canal. Another inversion is that while the mass-produced image on the pendent recalls Jesus’s flesh being pierced, in the painting, it is the woman’s skin that is visibly pressed, almost pierced, by the large pendent. It is precisely the tension between the specificity of the flesh, slightly covered by the contemporary “T-shirt” type bra, combined with the massproduced crucifixion pendant with the generalized or schematic body forms that makes the image powerful. One without the other would be boring. As she so often does with figuration and abstraction, Murphy has permitted the profane and the sacred to coexist. In all seven artworks, the remarkably precise approach, seeking images within images, allows one to discuss, within a single framework, an amorphous, constantly shifting concept: the slippage between public and private domains. Moving from the eighteenth to the early twenty-first century, my discrete selection of works resonates with Roland Barthes’s mid-twentieth century speculation: There would be a case for listing all the changes in how a garment is worn. We might find a law that says that a garment is always pushed from the inside to the outside; only psychoanalysts have treated this question so far.12

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Notes 1

Mark Wigley, “Untitled: The Housing of Gender” in Sexuality in Space, ed. Beatriz Colomina (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992), p. 347. 2 Lucy Bowditch, “Public and Private in Light of Lingerie” in Afterimage: The Journal of Media Art and Cultural Criticism, vol 28, no 6, 2001, p. 6. 3 Ibid. 4 Jean Baudrillard,“The Ecstasy of Communication” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), p. 129. 5 Ibid. 6The Great Train Robbery, written, directed, and produced by Edwin S. Porter, is a twelve-minute silent Western selected by the Library of Congress for preservation. It includes innovative editing, including cross cutting, that makes two events appear to be happening simultaneously. 7 See Rebecca Zurier, Picturing the City: Urban Vision and the Ashcan School (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), p. 282. 8 One has to look to the 1960s to find bras and panties still creating some excitement or suggesting a breach of propriety. As inveterate gossip columnist Liz Smith mentioned, “Things didn’t get informal until, I’d say, the end of the ‘60s…I mean, I think the upper classes still—they preserve a little decorum.” She notes a shift and qualifies it by class distinction. See Doree Shafrir, “La Liz at 85,” in The New York Observer, March 24, 2008, p. 3. 9 Celia is a signifier of cool. She is cool about all the men in her midst and cool about her own semi-dressed state. As a model for David Hockney, she may be most well known as the woman in Mr. and Mrs. Clark & Percy. The concept of cool was by the 1960s a significant marketing strategy. The idea was expanded in Thomas Frank’s The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. 10 Author’s conversation with the artist at the Academy of Arts and Letters Award Ceremony, New York City, 2006. 11 The realism resonates with Roman Republican portraiture for example the Old Market Woman (1st century A.D.) in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum. 12 Roland Barthes, “History and Sociology of Clothing: Some Methodological Observations,” in The Language of Fashion (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 16.

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Bibliography Barthes, Roland. 2006. The Language of Fashion. Translated by Andy Stafford. Oakland: University of California Press. Baudrillard, Jean. 1883. “The Ecstasy of Communication” in The AntiAesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. by Hal Foster. Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press. Beneke, Timothy. 1997. Proving Manhood: Reflections on Men and Sexism. Oakland: University of California Press. Bowditch, Lucy. 2001. “Public and Private in Light of Lingerie.” Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism 28. Davis, Fred. 1992. Fashion, Culture and Identity. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Frank, Thomas. 1998. The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1989. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: MIT Press. Mulvey, Laura. 1989. Visual and Other Pleasures. New York: Saint Martin’s Press. Rieff, Philip. 2007. Sacred Order/Social Order: The Jew of Culture: Freud, Moses, and Modernity. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Sennett, Richard. 1974. The Fall of Public Man: On the Social Psychology of Capitalism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Shafrir, Doree. 2008. “La Liz at 85.” The New York Observer, 24 March 3. The Great Train Robbery. 1903. Film. United States: Edison Studios. Vincent, Gérad. 1987. A History of Private Life. Cambridge: First Harvard University Press. Wigley, Mark. 1992. “Untitled: The Housing of Gender” in Sexuality in Space. Edited by Beatriz Colomina. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 327-389. Zukin, Sharon and Maguire, Jennifer S. 2004. “Consumers and Consumption.” Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 30, pp. 173-197. Zurier, Rebecca. 2006. Picturing the City: Urban Vision and the Ashcan School. Berkeley: University

CHAPTER FOUR STREET ART AS “EXERCISER FOR VISION”: HAMBURG GRAFFITI WRITER OZ AND THE COMMUNITY OF SMILEYS NATALIA SAMUTINA

1. Street Art and the Problem of Urban (in)visibility Endless configurations of visible and invisible, of looks and glances, of hidden pockets and blind spots in the modern metropolis have already become a subject of reflection in different academic traditions, from gender theory and postmodern philosophy to urban studies.1 One of these traditions, rooted in visual studies and in the studies of modern experience in general, pays special attention to the similarities of visual perception between the city dweller and the cinema spectator (Jenks 1995; Charney, Schwartz 1995; Friedberg 1994; Webber, Wilson 2008).2 This line of thought is well represented, for example, in the arguments of Giuliana Bruno (Bruno 2007; Bruno 2008), who draws upon works by Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, upon Sergei Eisenstein’s theory of montage, and upon the recent research on early cinema and other optical devices from the second half of the nineteenth century (Gunning 1990). Bruno analyzes the film-viewing experience as “an engaged eye” movement along the presupposed “itinerary” or “path” (the last one is Eisenstein’s concept, which correlates with his idea of montage in film and architecture). This movement sutures fragmented filmic space. For Bruno, a montage “path” or “itinerary” corresponds also to the subject’s perception of the flow of urban movement in general. This is the key component of our experience of the visually oversaturated spaces of modernity, which manifests itself from the very beginning even in the construction of a movie house:

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Chapter Four The street turns into a movie house, a movie house turns into a street… The motion picture was largely born out of the pavement and has closely participated in its urban development. At the origin of cinema, one would watch films by moving from pavements into cinemas that were fundamentally “storefronts”…Watching film remained inseparable from one’s activity of flânerie: it was part of “street-walking,” a peripatetic use of the street and a variation of strutting” (Bruno 2008, 16-19).

Some types of modern transit architecture are especially connected to the peculiarities of modern perception: not only movie theaters, but also passages, lobbies of hotels, huge exhibition pavilions, and railway stations. All these urban spaces can be considered as “places of encounter where a community of strangers gathers to practice a public intimacy” (Bruno 2008, 19). All of them exercise and develop, via “architectural promenades,” the viewing abilities of the new citizens of the expanding metropolises. The perception of these places by modern spectators is essentially ambivalent. On the one hand, their shimmer and glitter, their intense flow of micro-shocks produced by peripatetic movement, create a specifically modern effect of suspension: a distraction and slowing down of attention, a relaxed regime of mindless glances sliding across surfaces. On the other hand, this suspension is inevitably temporary: it is succeeded by the physical movement across the space to other destinations. Giuliana Bruno concludes: Architecture and film came to be related on the cultural map that resulted, on which viewing ended up designed as a successive, picturesque, peripatetic activity... The itinerant spectator of the architectural-filmic ensemble reads moving views – constructions of the flow of life… Motions are territories mobilized internally, mappings of practiced places, landscapes of emotions. (Bruno 2008, 20-23)

The embodied visual perception of contemporary city dwellers, from early childhood acquainted with the flows of city images and images on numerous screens, correlates, first of all, with different speeds of movement, and different rhythms and intensities of sensations. Second, this perception is fragmented. It contains big peripheral zones but presupposes at the same time the possibility of immediate concentration upon “itineraries,” such as a path of sight as a sequence of eye movements from one “privileged object” to another, or a physical movement through crowded city space. Peripheral zones are absolutely essential for the existence of such itineraries in urban surroundings or on a screen. A cinematic spectator never perceives the surface of the screen entirely. The existence of the periphery becomes a sine qua non for a conscious “work

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of sight,” for visibility: there should be a possibility of not seeing, even while having something in front of one’s eyes, and there should be a possibility of seeing differently – maybe suddenly, while making a film still and examining it thoroughly. Such sudden revelations in film textures and surfaces have recently themselves become a subject of theoretical reflection in film studies, for example, in the late works of Laura Mulvey (Mulvey 2005). Both these actions, seeing and not seeing, are imbued with social and cultural sense. Sociological texts on visibility and invisibility in the cityscape tend to underline a social background for these dichotomies—visible/invisible and central/peripheral—in the immediate visual experience of city dwellers as well as in their “mental mapping.” Andrea Brighenti in his phenomenologically oriented book Visibility in Social Theory and Social Research gives “visible” a telling definition: “the field in which city and subject mutually interpenetrate and constitute each other” (Brighenti 2010, 134). This model of visibility in the city presupposes, according to the Italian sociologist, a deep saturation of the personal sight with bodily experience and emotions, micro-shocks and social relations in the broadest sense of the term. Zygmunt Bauman in Liquid Modernity gives a colorful example of socially motivated invisibility. He describes his visit to a city in southern Europe, where he was met at the airport by a young lecturer, a girl from a wealthy family living in the center of the city. The girl was driving him through the center for more than two hours while apologizing for enormous traffic jams on the only possible way from the airport. On his way back he took a taxi. The whole journey took him ten minutes, but “the taxi-driver went along winding rows of shabby, drab, Godforsaken slums, full of rather uncouth and evidently idle people and unwashed children in rags” (Bauman 2000, 104). For Bauman, the absence of this “other way” from the girl’s “mental map” was sincere and tells a lot about our perception of cityscapes in general: Each map has its empty spaces, though on different maps they are located in different places. The maps that guide the movements of various categories of inhabitants do not overlap, but for any map to 'make sense,' some areas of the city must be left out as senseless, and - as far as the sense-making is concerned - unpromising. Cutting out such places allows the rest to shine and bristle with meaning. (Bauman 2000, 104)

Concise parameters and reasons for this “bristling with meaning” or its absence can be different, of course, and sometimes they are not so obvious. Invisibility in the cityscape may be regarded as a symptom in varied social configurations, especially when one or another cultural

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practice works as a shifter that changes regimes from invisibility to visibility, from periphery to the center of attention. For example, urban photography or social advertisements traditionally provide mechanisms for such shifting, working with the problem of invisibility directly. In the early 2000s, new forms of cultural practice became recognizable in the visual landscapes of postmodern metropolises. The street art of this era turns out to be perfectly suitable for the task of shifting the borders between the invisible and the visible, and the unformed and the concentrated.3 Street art filled cityscapes with different images with a high potential to problematize the conditions of our vision. Some of them perform this task consciously; some of them can provide telling material for theoretical reflection in this respect. Street art images, sometimes sanctioned by different authorities, tamed by aesthetic restrictions and economic reasons, and sometimes free and unbridled, meet people’s desire to reclaim their cities. These images perform the task of teaching city dwellers “meaningful vision.” Thousands of street artists all around the globe, famous as Banksy, Blu, JR, Os Gemeos, Swoon, Roa, Isaak Cordial, Stik, Vhils, P183, or anonymous—but no less passionate or prolific—play this exciting new city game of trying to attract the attention of the unfocused gaze. They try to saturate this visual encounter with emotion and to produce a clear visual and social statement while suddenly shifting regimes of reception from invisibility to visibility. This game is based on the essential rules of visibility in the modern cityscape. It produces not only a more meaningful attitude to the city imagery, but also an ephemeral, changeable but still sometimes “graspable” (post)modern community of “those who see.”

Street Art as “Exerciser for Vision” Fig. 4-1.

Fig. 4-2.

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Fig. 4-3.

Fig. 4-4. Street art in London and Berlin, European street art capitals

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After witnessing this comparatively new cultural practice for more than two years in such diverse cities as London, Berlin, Hamburg, Dresden, Lisbon, Rome, Venice, Florence and Moscow, I would like to underline a core ability of street art to work as an “exerciser for vision” or as an instrument for reframing the optics of city dwellers. Street art, I argue, exposes the problematic aspects of city life and develops the potential for “communities of vision.” It is also able to work in different urban contexts and under different circumstances, contrary to popular belief. Street art, evidently, attracts maximum attention in gentrified “hip” districts of European metropolises, such as Shoreditch (London), Kreuzberg (Berlin), and Neustadt (Dresden), where it has even already brought to life organized street art tours. But it may impress equally while being unexpectedly met in the Moscow suburbs, on the walls of the Venetian palazzo or in the uncountable “non-places” of contemporary urban sprawls. Fig. 4-5.

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Fig. 4-6. Venetian street art: always subtle and place-sensitive

District and place notwithstanding, street art images hone, first of all, the visual competence of a city walker: pedestrian, flâneur, and urban traveler. They test his/her abilities to read the city; they check his/her level of curiosity and tolerance for altered streetscapes. Providing us with new sights, they also provide new strategies of vision. Street art forms ephemeral but emotionally important bonds in cities, sometimes transforming the whole micro-situation of collective viewing into a small but expressive episode of street choreography. For example: at the halfempty square in Florence one Sunday morning people wait silently for a city bus to Fiesole.4 Suddenly one of them notices a transformed street sign by famous Florentine street artist Clet Abraham, and then another sign across the square. Prohibitive traffic signs are transformed into little people: road workers, musicians and saints. The cheerless queue reconfigures itself in accordance with the new communicative situation.

Street Art as “Exerciser for Vision” Fig. 4-7.

Fig. 4-8. Clet Abraham street signs in different parts of Florence

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People turn to each other, talk about little figures on the signs, and laugh. A tourist girl rushes across the square in order to take a better picture, while suddenly a bus appears – and laughing people ask the driver to wait for the girl. Similarly, a man stops in the middle of Shoreditch one summer morning in front of a funny caterpillar made from trash bags. This humorous trash caterpillar with paper legs is actually a street art object by the Spanish sculptor Francisco de Pajaro: his manifestoes, proclaiming, “Art is trash,” (literally) are all over Shoreditch. Fig. 4-9.

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Fig. 4-10.

But it is unclear if the man knows about the artist’s existence. It looks like he just noticed the caterpillar and stopped to examine it. Several other people see that he is looking at the trash bags and stop as well, to see what he is looking at. Some people begin to take pictures with their mobile phones (definitely in order to share them later with friends), others discuss the London habit of putting trash bags in front of houses, and everyone laughs. Then the people leave one by one and the group dissolves. This ability of street art to work as an “exerciser for vision” and as a trigger for different sorts of communication is only one of its numerous functions; but this is the function I have become most interested in. So I leave alone direct political messages that a part of street art (such as Shepard Fairey posters, for example) conveys, and I also do not take into consideration that comparatively rare type of street art that works directly with already existing “solid” communities such as city neighborhoods – you can find telling examples of such street art in informative research such as Street Art, Sweet Art? Reclaiming the "Public” in Public Place (Visconti et al. 2010). One of the most appealing things about street art is its potential openness to any gaze. Street art works as a cultural practice and as a set of tools able to develop, or make visible, communities of

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vision, united spontaneously on the street and sometimes reinforced later via internet activity and communication—online or offline—about images. Street art is able to “wake up” the “dormant communities” of modern city dwellers. This “open access” option differentiates street art from graffiti, even though the two are closely connected genealogically (in the personal histories of their practitioners) and ideologically as well5. They both reject the dominant (“bourgeois”) ideology of contemporary public space, which presupposes that city space is and should be sterilized and “normalized” exclusively in accordance with the tastes and norms of powerful groups and authorities. But graffiti crews address their quite complicated messages first of all to those who can read their enigmatic language (i.e. to other graffiti crews), and second to “the system” (i.e. to the repressive social order in general). Street art, being mostly figurative and having a clearly decipherable symbolic dimension (Waclawek 2011), is defiantly open to spontaneous reactions and immediate interpretations on the street level. It believes in ordinary people’s ability to see and to communicate and tries to reinforce this communication. It tries to stop the flow of street movement and to arrest the attention of its participants. Finally, it is capable of translating personal stories and glances into collective stories of emotional city communities. The Internet helps here a lot as a medium for spreading images and providing people with necessary information about street art, with sites and networks for sharing opinions. But still, while researching street art as an “exerciser for vision” and examining the reception of street art imagery by different people in different cities, I was surprised by the sheer number of cases of unsuccessful visual communication. I would like to put this symptomatic invisibility of even the most excessive street art imagery (murals, for example) into the context of a previous line of reasoning: the structure of modern city vision, with huge marginal zones that tend to remain peripheral at any cost. Even the most artistically elaborated images, big in size, sophisticated in meaning and put in “proper” places, sometimes disappear in the personal “invisibility zone” if they are not supported by collective knowledge created by communities of vision, especially those of spontaneous, informal and personal origin. One of the most typical responses to any story about street art on non-specialized Internet sites would be: “I just can’t get how on earth I hadn’t seen this before!” In contemporary cities, people (gender, class and territorial belonging notwithstanding) look without seeing, and this “cloak of invisibility” needs special conditions to be torn. Street art tries to construct meaningful visual encounters, but I assume that factors such as the aesthetics of street art images and the authorities’ support or withholding of such support do

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not play a crucial part in the circumstances of their reception. What is really important is the images’ circulation in personal communication, even of the temporary and ephemeral kind. For example, straight in the middle of “hip” bohemian Shoreditch, an international Mecca of street art—where provocative images are literally on every corner and street art tours and galleries become routine—a lot of people are observing this activity but remaining totally blind to it. While attending a conference in London in 2012 I was renting a room in Shoreditch from a lovely host, G, a well-educated, efficient young woman. A huge hedgehog mural by the famous Belgian street artist Roa was just around the corner from her house: every day dozens of people stopped in front of the hedgehog, contemplating and photographing it. Fig. 4-11.

But G. was absolutely ignorant of the existence of street art before my arrival. She was noticing people photographing walls. She was noticing strange groups of tourists with a guide, kneeling in front of small images on the pavement, but this meant nothing to her. It became a part of a “zone of invisibility” from the beginning. After hearing my story about street art as a phenomenon she got excited about it. Next evening she turned up with

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bright eyes and with her cell phone full of street art images (including the hedgehog). She even remembered noticing the existence of the hedgehog before – but then she was just walking by, without stopping and looking at it properly. In general, she admitted that after being introduced to the concept of street art practice, she started to walk the streets at a different speed, doing different things (photographing or standing in front of the images for a long time). She started indeed to notice people who were behaving the same way – she became a part of a city community of “those who see” and began to use street art as an instrument to see the district differently. This often happens to local people who somehow become aware of street art as a cultural practice: they end up reconsidering the visual landscapes of their districts and ways of presenting these landscapes to their friends, for example. Fig. 4-12.

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Fig 4-13. The controversial Roa mural with dead animals in Kreuzberg, Berlin (Turkish community district). Two locals stopped to observe and discuss it.

This ability of street art to work as a common “exerciser for vision” makes this phase in the history of the visual development of contemporary cityscapes extremely interesting and informative. As an instrument of actualization of different visions of the city, street art in many ways changes the inhabitants’ relationships with their cities. It provokes and develops reflection on street imagery and on city life in general. In the presence of street art, the whole situation with the city imagery changes: sometimes even the other types of images (advertisements, graffiti, architectural elements etc.) gain different meanings. We need to create an “international catalogue” of the stories of street art (in)visibility in contemporary cities, composed of “thick descriptions” of telling local cases. Such a “catalogue” will help us to clarify the potential of this “exerciser for vision” for bringing to light emotional communities of different scales of ephemerality; for developing a “human dimension” of the city on a visual level. In the second part of the text I am going to introduce the readers to a particular case—to one of the pages of this “catalogue” of original and self-consistent work of street art on the border zone between the visible

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and the invisible. I conducted this research in Hamburg from autumn 2012 to autumn 2013; the last “chapter” was added to it at the beginning of 2015. Sources for this research include internet materials, personal observations and photographs, interviews and experiments made with the participation of Hamburg citizens.

2. “Hamburg without Oz is Munich!”: Cult Community and City Textures Hamburg is the second largest city in Germany, standing on the river Elbe. It has a huge picturesque port and a significant number of historical monuments and tourist attractions. It boasts not only financial and ecological well-being but also the visible diversity of its districts: from the touristic bourgeois centre Hamburg Altstadt to the bohemian Sternschanze and Altona; from the freshly renovated Hafencity—a Hamburg equivalent of the London Canary Wharf, where house prices rise above the clouds— to the ethnically mixed Barmbek, full of social housing and Turkish grocery shops. Hamburg street culture is no less affluent. Dozens of street festivals, sport competitions and informal events take place every year, and protest activity actions are sometimes combined with cultural events.6 City football club Sankt Pauli (Ultras St. Pauli, or USP) is a rare example of a leftist fan community. The striving for independence of thought and behaviour is well represented in the “skull and crossbones” pirate flag of Sankt Pauli district; the anarchist state of mind can be sensed in many parts of the city. Hamburg’s graffiti scene is well known as one of the most tense in Germany and in Europe in general, due to the “zero tolerance” politics of German authorities and the railway company “Deutsche Bahn,” combined with the length of the city railways. Strict prohibition and anti-vandalism squads notwithstanding, nearly every day brings new “victory reports” and visible evidence of graffiti writers’ activities, be it video and photographs shared on the Internet (via such Facebook communities as “Graffiti Hamburg” or “Hamburg Vandals”), or numerous traces on trains and on the elements of railway infrastructure. Sound protective shields along Ubahn and S-bahn railway lines are covered in tags, slogans and colorful graffiti pieces. The quantity—and quality—of street art in the city impresses a visitor as well. From this point of view, it looks like Hamburg is second only to Berlin among German cities. Apart from the whole district Sternschanze, where street art flourishes in accordance with the tastes of its bohemian inhabitants and where you can see the oldest squat “Rote Flora” totally covered in graffiti and street art, there are a lot of

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places in the city redefined and governed by creative communities. The old historical quarter Gaengeviertel in the middle of Hamburg and gateways in Sankt Pauli and Altona are full of images by street artists of the first rank. On the streets of Hamburg, especially in Sternschanze and Sankt Pauli, one can see many works by prominent local street artists, such as Rebelzer, Los Piratoz, 1010 and TONA, as well as numerous traces of visits from German and international street art stars: El Bocho, XooooX, Dave the Chimp, Alias, Funk25, Zonenkinder Collective, and others. Fig 4-14. 1010 (Hamburg, Gaengeviertel)

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Fig. 4-15. Alias (Hamburg, Gaengeviertel)

Fig. 4-16. Los Piratoz (Hamburg, Sankt Pauli)

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But the king of this saturated visual space of street images, and the cult figure of the Hamburg street scene, is an indiscernible, aged man with an impressive biography known under the pseudonym Oz7. His individual street career started as a typical graffiti writer’s protest against “the system.” But this career coincided with the actual conceptual direction of the street art movement at the beginning of the new century and brought the man unexpected fame far beyond graffiti communities. If we remember that in the Emerald City of L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz, all the dwellers wore emerald eyeglasses to see the reality differently, we have to admit that Oz truly is the king of Hamburg: for more than 20 years he has been trying to teach Hamburg citizens to see their city differently. Oz’s real name is Walter Fischer. He was born in 1950 and started his graffiti career in 1977, so he is one of the first ever graffiti writers in Germany. He has been working on Hamburg streets since the end of the seventies – with the telling exception of the eight years in total spent in prison for damaging public and private property with graffiti. He is well known as a “true” graffiti writer who has proven his unwillingness to compromise – and consequently he has become a legend in graffiti communities. There is a personal article dedicated to him in German Wikipedia, where some tales are retold: for example, a story of one night when he was arrested while spraying, taken to the police station, then set free – at which point he returned to the same activity the same night, only to be caught red-handed again.8 In 2009, a local cult of Oz was shaped in and through an album-format book called Es lebe der sprühling (“Long Live Spraying”). This book includes many photographs of Oz’s works on the streets of Hamburg and short texts on the “Oz phenomenon” by representatives of Hamburg’s graffiti and artistic communities. Another book on Oz called Free Oz! Streetart [sic] Zwischen Revolte, Repression und Kommerz was published in Berlin in 2014. It contains thoughtful essays on the “Oz phenomenon” by German art critics and urbanists, together with an Oz biography and an impressive survey of other street artists’ images of solidarity with him. Most of the images were made in 2011-2013 as a part of public “Free Oz” campaign (during these years the graffiti writer was involved in ongoing trials). Several gallery exhibitions by Oz have recently been shown in Hamburg and Berlin as well. At the beginning of 2013 I visited one of them, called, unpretentiously, “An exhibition by Oz,” at the OZM gallery in Hamburg, which is closely associated with the graffiti movement. Alex Heimkind, the OZM gallery owner who has been acquainted with Oz since his childhood, told me that all the paintings had been specially made for the exhibition but it had not been easy to persuade Oz to work

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for money. All of Oz’s sympathy belongs to the street and to free uncontrollable spraying. Oz has never ever considered himself an artist, so he agreed to paint canvases in the gallery only in order to collaborate with famous graffiti writers DAIM and Loomit, and with Hamburg artist Darko Caramello. All these people, in their turn, have chosen to support Oz this way, because he was in need of money, being in the middle of a trial, prosecuted for graffiti activities. In the course of the last Oz trials one thing became clearly visible. Oz was supported at least by part of Hamburg’s citizens: they created internet communities dedicated to him, sold and bought t-shirts with his tags; they held «Oz rulez!» banners during football matches. Sankt Pauli football club offered the graffiti writer its consistent support: the club even has an unofficial logo with the tag “Oz” in the middle of it. In 2011, hundreds of Hamburg citizens participated in a joyous demonstration under creative slogans “Free Oz! The city is for everyone!” and “Hamburg without Oz is Munich!” (Video evidence of this event is available on YouTube).9 Hamburg without Oz is indeed in a way unimaginable, especially from the moment when one of your friends shows you his tags in the process of an informal city tour. From that moment on it is difficult to stop noticing innumerable traces of his activity on every possible surface: on elements of railway infrastructure, on the walls of city houses, on bus stops, on grey electricity boxes, on street signs, on billboards, etc. This activity is unprecedented in quantity, duration and coverage. Additionally, the unparalleled openness of the “Oz project” lets it be continued from any point or literally any place in the cityscape by any city dweller (some graffiti writers had always supported Oz during his trials when he was monitored by the anti-graffiti squad: they wrote his tags around the city together with him or instead of him). This openness is provided by the ultimate simplicity of Oz vocabulary. He just uses a small variation of basic signs. His tag is “Oz;” simple, although full of expression, with several kinds of smileys, varying from the elementary ones—two points and an arc—to the smiling “suns” and spirals similar to comet tails.10

Street Art as “Exerciser for Vision” Fig. 4-17.

Fig. 4-18.

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Fig. 4-19.

Quite often, smileys are framed with anti-Nazi slogans typical of the anarchist districts of Hamburg and obviously very close to the artist’s heart. And on the greyest fences in the most depressed “non-places” Oz draws big primitivist paintings that somewhat resemble colonies of bugs or cells or big colorful pizzas, if we use the metaphor provided by the photographer of the book Es lebe der sprühling. “Pizzas” and tags are usually made with spray paint, but quite often Oz just uses a marker or even a piece of chalk for his drawings, especially for the spirals.

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Fig. 4-20.

At first glance, his more-than-20-years of street activity can be identified as typical graffiti writing: extensive, minimal, but immediately recognizable expressive tags in dangerous and sometimes nearly unreachable places of writing. Oz is really professional in the “art of getting over the fence,” as this sort of occupation was called in the recent Berlin book on train graffiti: Action Painting: Bringing Art to the Trains (Kutschera 2009, 20). This could explain his respected status in graffiti communities and the appearance of numerous “Free Oz” signs on S-Bahn sound protective shields. But this cannot explain the sudden sympathy with an old graffiti writer from young girls who buy his “spiral t-shirts,” or from immigrants who tell each other his story, or from Hamburg street artists of a completely new generation who quote him in their works.

86 Fig. 4-21.

Fig. 4-22.

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Fig. 4-23. References to Oz in street images all around Sternschanze (the last one says in German “it looks like shit but it is art”.)

This also does not explain why the “Oz phenomenon” interests even those who are ignorant of the graffiti writer’s existence, and even those who do not have enough intuition to connect numerous publications in central and local media with the data of their personal experience.11 One example of such uninformed enthusiasts, for example, is the author of a short ethnographic commentary in the local paper of Ottensen (one of the remote Hamburg districts),12 whose severe message about the impermissibility of damaging private and communal property contradicts visibly and even humorously with the emotional warmth of the photographs of smileys this fascinated author has collected. Something has developed with the “Oz phenomenon” over the years, something that encourages different people to describe him as a part of the city’s identity. As one of the Es lebe der sprühling authors proclaimed: “OZ belongs to Hamburg like certain buildings or establishments. He's simply belonged to the city for over 20 years - whether you like it or not (Es lebe der sprühling 2009, 16). The “Oz project”—its generic form and its creator’s intentions notwithstanding—can be considered today, in the changing conditions of

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our reflection on street images, as a conceptual instrument. Its author’s appealing unpretentiousness does not cancel the effectiveness of the smileys and the spirals as an “exerciser for city vision” and as an indicator of the potential presence (or production) of the invisible city communities. Never mind the fact that these communities are only temporarily invisible and undeveloped; they become quite visible in the process of organizing demonstrations, publishing books and reproducing the tag “Oz” as an important Hamburg landscape element in films or on postcards.13 So, let us ask what exactly it is that imbues simple spirals and primitivist ornamental “pizzas” with such an effect, which normally accompanies much more complicated images. First of all—I would like to underline this one more time—there is the unprecedented openness of the “Oz project:” its potential for being shared. Smiles and other Oz signs look blatantly “unprofessional” and archaic in the saturated visual space of the contemporary city, where graffiti and street art both are much more complicated in design and individual in style. Spirals and even “pizzas” can be easily compared to children’s chalk drawings or—if we take a rich graffiti and street art history—to the equally expressive ornamental graffiti walls by Keith Haring. This visual vocabulary can be used by anyone, including children indeed, and nobody knows how many people who draw smileys on Hamburg walls or on flower beds support Oz or even know about him at all. The “Oz phenomenon” thus potentially includes all Hamburg citizens, their hands, glances, and the trajectories of their movements. This is a dormant community with an open invitation to join, and it definitely has something to do with the “city identity,” as one of the previously quoted Hamburg citizens had noticed. Second, the “Oz phenomenon” works carefully with the possibilities of switching urban sight while balancing on the borderline between visibility and invisibility; any movement across this borderline is closely related to the “community effect” (where “community” is a personally associated but still open group of people). This is a community of friendship formed in a process of exchange between friends; it is a community of those who notice spirals together and tell their friends about them, a city game with an open number of participants and innumerable traces to be detected. You just meet someone one day who tells you the story and makes you pay attention to a huge zone of invisibility or non-actualized knowledge (perhaps defined in “Spiegel” publications but still remaining a blind spot in personal experience). Nothing is easier in Hamburg than not to see Oz signs. They are everywhere indeed, an ornamental net on the city surfaces, but they mostly appear in the “peripheral zones” of ordinary city sight: on metal bridges, on concrete beams, on dirty grey elements of S-Bahn

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roadbed, on empty billboard frames, etc.14 All these surfaces and places are eliminated from the vernacular city sight, and in order to dig them out you need something more than just information: you need some personal, emotionally saturated knowledge, something to get you started. A set of experiments with a group of Russian immigrants and their German friends in Hamburg showed that unequivocally. My respondents (about 20 people in total) were men and women from young to middle age, deeply immersed in the city life and well informed about its details via local press and the Internet. Nearly all of them had positively known or had just heard something about the Oz trials, before I showed them the smileys and the spirals in different parts of Hamburg. But only that kind of personal communication with the bearer of the specific knowledge encouraged them to start seeing Oz signs all around the city and in front of their houses on their own account. An act of refocusing the sight took place: visual noise became a visual story—or a city film—produced by the community. While thinking of this “community of vision,” we can come back to the beginning of the text: to the correspondence between “city experience” and the “cinematographic city,” between the street and the screen. Contemporary cinema theory has a well-defined concept for alternative strategies of viewers’ reception: for those ways of watching a film that pay attention to marginalia and exoticisms instead of the main plot meanings; for viewing habits that deliberately prefer periphery to the center and ignore the ideology of the film text in order to feast on the film texture. This kind of reception, practiced by passionate communities of “midnight movie” lovers and by those who engage in rituals of collective rewatching, is called “cult cinema experience” (Corrigan 1991; Mendik, Harper 2000; Mathijs, Mendik 2008). “Cult viewing” is a strategy of cinematographic reception produced by sophisticated communities of experienced cinema devotees at the late stages of the development of cinema history. To watch a film as a cult movie is to re-watch it together with someone, with the participation of other “chosen” passionate spectators, even if you happen to watch it alone this time. Examples of such types of cinematographic pleasure are numerous and well-researched: Rocky Horror Picture Show costume gatherings, Quentin Tarantino movies collective re-watching, Casablanca and Plan 9 from Outer Space line by line reenactment, and so on. Cult film experience is a very concentrated strategy for watching a film “differently.” It gratifies a spectator with the pleasures of the exhibitionist “performance of reception” shared within the community of the “like-minded” active cult viewers.

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I suspect that in the general frame of modern vision, this city game of noticing smileys and spirals can be productively compared to the experience of cult moviegoers. In both cases, movement along specific itineraries is involved, in both cases this movement causes spectators to switch priority zones of sight and to deliberately see things that otherwise remain invisible. In both cases community is involved: watching smileys in Hamburg and watching Blade Runner as a cult movie equally requires knowledge that is both communal and quite personal. In both cases, affection and “personalization” of an otherwise global entity (cinema or city) take place. Finally, in both cases we can speak about the broadening of the existent “normative” strategies of reception. While producing a “cult movie” about Hamburg (with his spirals and smileys), Oz enriches the repertoire of city vision. Those who are united in his open air movie theater definitely watch a different film – different from, for example, a tourist advertisement about the “rich Hanseatic city” with picturesque ships and the snow white Alster Colonnades, or from the genre drama of everyday automatism cloaked in invisibility. Fig. 4-24.

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Fig. 4-25. “Cult movie” about Oz tags and spirals at the periphery of tourist frames. Near Elbe.

So, my third argument concerns the image of the city Oz produces on this improvised screen – which is literally equal to the whole city surface. What exactly is at the center of our attention with the smileys and the spirals? I think that with his highly unusual “exerciser for vision,” Oz makes an important statement about city textures, in all their invisible “everydayness.” He shows us the city in its coherence. It is dust and grey surfaces, plastic boards and metal patch-ups, all of the invisible universe of city things that Oz has collected and exhibited, thanks to his expansionist activity and the acuity of his embodied sight. His image of the city highlights the most ordinary, unnoticeable things, but it is far from being banal in itself. While in Hamburg, city dwellers or tourists are usually well aware of the contradictions between the bourgeois center and the anarchist Sankt Pauli, between the tremendously expensive Hafencity and the shabby ethnic “city pockets” – there are many ways to see and to describe these contrasts and social borders. But Oz shows us what we do not see without him: the omnipresence of unnoticeable materials, structures, and voids. It looks like Oz threaded the beads of Hamburg city imagery with his spray paint, marker and chalk, underlining similarity – invisible or at least not so visible otherwise. His “cult movie” appeals to our communal affect and presents us with an image of the “porous city” (Amin, Thrift 2002) where social borders and architectural differences

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make way for forces much more subtle, in the existing order of things, but quite powerful in their own fashion. Visibility is one of them. Fig. 4-26. Examples of “Oz” Hamburg geography: Barmbek.

Fig. 4-27. Examples of “Oz” Hamburg geography: Hamburg-Altstadt (AlsterColonnaden).

Street Art as “Exerciser for Vision” Fig. 4-28. Examples of “Oz” Hamburg geography: Altona S-Bahn station.

Fig. 4-29. Examples of “Oz” Hamburg geography: Sankt Georg

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Fig. 4-30. Examples of “Oz” Hamburg geography: Landungsbrücken (Elbe).

3. An Epilogue Written by Life Itself When this research had already been done and the paper completed, sad news came from Hamburg. On September 25, 2014 “the most prolific graffiti artist ever” and “graffiti legend” (as the press presented it immediately) Oz was hit by a train while tagging near the Hamburg main train station. His dead body was found on the rails, and a spray can was lying nearby: Oz literally was spraying until his last breath, as he promised a journalist in his touching last video appearance.15 This tragic incident was widely covered by the German press, more sympathetically than might have been expected. Some journalists meditated on the famous slogan “Hamburg without Oz is Munich” and asked questions about the future of this highly personal and obviously unrepeatable art project. Indeed, the death of the artist only highlighted his uniqueness and turned Hamburg street surfaces into an ephemeral memorial. This is a memorial with a higher form of visibility than what was previously possible. It is closely connected to the city identity, thanks to the press coverage, which persuaded many people to notice smileys in front of their houses or above their heads for the first time.

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Fig. 4-31.

But I want to stress the communal part of the memorial activities in Hamburg, in order to highlight one more time the ability of this “invisible community” to become visible and active, to produce a different dimension of city life. Street artists, graffiti writers, football fans and other Hamburg citizens performed a lot of different actions in memory of Oz. While graffiti communities reacted violently, with a burst of train “bombing” and tagging (tag “RIP Oz” being the most common one), other ways of representation of this tragic loss were also found. USP fans organized a colorful flash mob with hundreds of smileys during one of the matches at the Sankt Pauli stadium. The Facebook community “We love Oz Hamburg” was created after his death and counts at the moment around 4000 members, which is a significant number for the memorial community of a local graffiti writer.16 Eight thousand euros were collected in several days for the funeral of the artist and for a monument. The funeral ceremony, which was open for all citizens, looked like a demonstration, with the participation of many children with colorful balloons and of women with flowers. Memorial signs and even portraits of Oz continue to appear on the city walls, and friends of Oz produced memorial stickers in order to prolong his visible presence in the cityscape.

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Fig. 4-32.

Fig. 4-33. Oz portrait spotted on S-Bahn wall near Barmbek in January 2015—the memorial stickers and the memorial piece of chalk with his favorite slogan “Fuck the Norm.”

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So the fact of the artist’s death, however tragic and premature, only stressed and made more visible the existence of the city community of those who see Hamburg differently. His “cult movie” turned out to be a documentary.

Notes 1

This paper is the result of a research project implemented as part of the Basic Research Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE) in 2014. The author took all the photographs in this article. 2 The broadening of the field became important especially after the criticism of the narrowness of the “visuality” concept by Jonathan Crary in his Suspensions of Perception (2001). 3 There are numerous contemporary publications on street art ranging from album format collections to research articles published in sociological, geographical, and cultural studies journals. A succinct characterization of the phenomenon and an introductory bibliography can be found in Waclawek 2011. 4 I here use some results of my observations made in Florence in the winter of 2012 and in London in the summer of 2013. The specificity of the “choreography of reception” in Shoreditch is described in detail in my article on a street art project by London artist Pablo Delgado (Samutina, Zaporozhets, and Kobyshcha 2012). 5 At the same time it is necessary to notice that the general tension between graffiti writers and street artists has always existed and has grown over the years. Writers accuse street artists of “selling out” (the heaviest accusation in the graffiti world) and do not believe that many of them have ever worked on the streets. Street artists sometimes criticize the aesthetics and social implications of graffiti activities. 6 During the Altona district festival STAMP in 2012, graffiti workshops for kids were officially scheduled. 7 This prefix-title “king” indicates the highest respect when used by graffiti crews’ members. 8 http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oz_(Sprayer) 9 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FS73O34nPQ8 10 The symbolism of the spirals turns out to be more complicated, if we believe the evidence of Alex Heimkind. He told me that this “spiral phase” of the project was a part of the consistent antifascist views of the graffiti writer. Being obliged to change his tag during the last trials to something more general and less attributable, Oz chose a spiral—a cyclone—as a graphic sign of the notorious gas Zyclon B, which was used by the Nazis in the extermination camps during World War II. Oz had the idea to draw one spiral for every victim of the Nazis. 11 The Oz trials and his role in the Hamburg graffiti scene have been repeatedly covered in the last five years by the magazine Der Spiegel and smaller German publications; see, for example: http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/gesellschaft/hamburger-sprayer-mythos-der-zaubervon-oz-a-743065.html; http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/graffitiaccidents-not-enough-to-put-sprayers-off-their-tag-addiction-a-936930-2.html;

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http://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/prozess-um-graffiti-sprayer-oz-wenn-banksyhier-waere-1.1124897 12 http://stadtteilreporter-ottensen.abendblatt.de/Allgemein/graffiti-in-ottensen%E2%80%93-lacheln-konnen-hier-wohl-nur-die%E2%80%9Ekunstwerke%E2%80%9C-selbst/ 13 The Oz tag is clearly visible in the film Kurz und schmerzlos (1998) by Hamburg film director Fatih Akinm and also in the German-British-French coproduction Unknown (2011), although in this case it looks more like an homage because this film is set in Berlin. And here you can find an example of a postcard depicting Altona district with Oz tag: http://www.flickr.com/photos/udo/2083170007/ 14 While watching this video taken by an anonymous Hamburg citizen from a train window, you can estimate the density of the “Oz ornament” in some parts of Hamburg’s city center: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhU5BIuTc04 15 http://urbanshit.de/oz-most-prolific-graffiti-artist-ever 16 https://www.facebook.com/pages/We-Love-OzHamburg/657517847679129?fref=photo&sk=photos

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Bibliography Amin, Ash and Nigel Thrift. 2002. Cities: Reimagining the Urban. Cambridge: Polity. Bauman, Zygumt. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity. Brighenti, Andrea M. 2010. Visibility in Social Theory and Social Research. Basingstoke: Palgrave McMillan. Bruno, Giuliana. 2002. Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film. New York: Verso. —. 2008. “Motion and Emotion: Film and the Urban Fabric.” In Cities in Transition: The Moving Image and the Modern Metropolis. Andrew Webber and Emma Wilson, eds. London: Wallflower Press. Charney, Leo and Vanessa R. Schwartz, eds. 1995. Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Corrigan, Timothy. 1991. “Film and the Culture of Cult.” In The Cult Film Experience: Beyond all Reason, ed. J. P. Telotte, Austin: University of Texas Press. Crary, Jonathan. 1999. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture. Cambridge. Mass.: MIT Press. Es lebe der sprühling. 2009. Hamburg: Colortrip. Free Oz! Streetart [sic] Zwischen Revolte, Repression und Kommerz. Mit Fotos von Theo Bruns. 2014. Berlin: Assoziation A. Friedberg, Anne. 1994. Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gunning, Tom. 1990. “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, its Spectator and the Avant-Garde.” In Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser with Adam Barker. London: Routledge. Kutschera, Kristian. 2009. Action Painting: Bringing Art to the Trains. Berlin: Publikat. Mendik, Xavier and Ernest Mathijs, eds. 2008. The Cult Film Reader. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Mendik, Xavier and Graeme Harper, eds. 2000. Unruly Pleasures: The Cult Film and its Critics. Surrey: FAB Press. Mulvey, Laura. 2006. Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image. London: Reaction Books. Samutina, Natalia, Oksana N. Zaporozhets and V. Kobyshcha. 2012. “Not only Banksy: Street Art in the Contemporary City.” Nepricosnovenny zapas 86.6: 221-244.

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Visconti, Luca M., John F. Serry Jr., et. al. 2010. “Street Art, Sweet Art? Reclaiming the ‘Public’ in Public Place.” Journal of Consumer Research 37: 511-529. Waclawek, Anna. 2011. Graffiti and Street Art. London: Thames & Hudson. Webber, Andrew and Emma Wilson, eds. 2008. Cities in Transition: The Moving Image and the Modern Metropolis. London: Wallflower Press.

CHAPTER FIVE NATURE AS IMAGE IN OLAFUR ELIASSON’S ART: A MEDIA ECOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE SYNNØVE MARIE VIK

Images of nature – and especially those that document nature’s vigor – continue to fascinate us, a fascination stemming partly from the failure of our technologically progressive societies to protect us from nature’s violent forces. Nature exerts immense power over our lives, and people have documented it for centuries and millennia, through drawings, paintings and photography. Representations of nature are powerful, and an image of nature conveys an idea of our relationship to nature. The work of the Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson always creates images of nature, thus embodying or representing the changing relationship between us the spectators, and the depicted nature. From installations of ice, moss or waterfalls to photography of Icelandic caves, rivers and rainbows he constantly tries to awaken the viewers’ awareness of their own relationship to nature and to their surroundings, and how this relationship is represented and mediated. While the reception of his work has traditionally been preoccupied with questions of the sublime and of phenomenology, I would in this essay like to frame his art in a media ecological perspective. The analysis is inspired by what Jussi Parikka, in his Media Ecologies and Imaginary Media terms a topological media ecology. This is a definition that through its reframing of nature as media both expands the standard notion of media ecology, and takes it further than the revived, materialist take on the term proposed by Matthew Fuller in his Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture and on which Parikka builds his analysis (Fuller 2005). I will attempt to show how Eliasson’s art projects both epitomize and challenge Parikka’s concepts of nature and media, nature and art.

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Eliasson has a pronounced interest in the individual and her conceptualization of her surroundings as part of a larger collective, oftentimes using the pronoun “You” in his titles, which could refer both to one person and a group. His installations rely heavily on sensory, spatial experience, creating artificial natural environments where the viewers are encouraged to experience nature and contemplate what they see and feel. He relies on technology in the production of the artwork; to him technology is a tool for the (re)creation of nature as art. Importantly, he always leaves traces of the technology involved. After he seduces you into seeing and sensing a rainbow, mist, the sun or a waterfall, he shows you the water hose, the light bulbs and the overall construction involved in making ‘the art’ happen. Eliasson’s large-scale installations are designed for, and exhibited in, major museums and public spaces worldwide, and his blockbuster shows have turned him into one of the most well known and popular artists of our time. In this regard one could argue that his work takes part in a contemporary hegemonic visual culture in a more powerful way than the majority of contemporary eco artists, and this is in part why his art makes a relevant and problematic case for a media ecological analysis. My discussions below will give a fuller understanding of the complexity of Eliasson’s art through three different projects, namely the public art project “New York City Waterfalls” (2008), “Bílar í ám/Cars in rivers”, first shown in the exhibition Limboland (2009), and, finally, the exhibition Volcanoes and Shelters (2012). A prominent feature of Eliasson’s work, as exemplified in these three projects, is – in one way or another – the mediation of nature by technology, and how his work presents nature and technology as interlinked. This is particularly to the point regarding his use of one of the oldest forms of “new media”, namely photography, but equally fascinating when reflecting on all his installations and projects as images of nature. According to W. J. T. Mitchell, the relation of images to media is contingent on the history of technology. He defines an image as: “[…] a sign or symbol of something by virtue of its sensuous resemblance to what it represents” . Furthermore, he writes, “[…] the image is the uncanny content of a medium, the shape or form it assumes, the thing that makes its appearance in a medium while making the medium itself appear as medium” (Mitchell 2010, 38, 40). Although Mitchell’s definition of an image refers mainly to mental processes, where, say, an image may appear in a poem or a painting, these words extend the definition to include objects and installations such as Eliasson’s work. Mitchell further stresses the inclusion of all the senses – not only the visual – in the image-media relation, which brings us to

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Parikka’s topological media ecology, and his strong emphasis on perception, space and time.

Parikka’s Topological Media Ecology Referring to the art project “Eco Media (Cross Talk)”, by Harwood, Wright and Yokokoji, where a number of subtle natural processes are reconceptualized as mediating events, Parikka sets the stage for his project: to rethink the relationship between nature and media.1 He defines media ecology as topological, i.e. as involving a set of unaltered relational properties even if the nature of the medium changes. Consequentially his focus is more on process than on substance, specifically on how the expansion, contraction and folding of time and space connect the processes of nature and media (36): Media ecology involves an expansion of media to include a number of processes, objects and modes of perception, motility and relationality that are not usually seen as media in its modern, cultural sense; in this expanded mode, media becomes an ethological relationality rather than merely a technological object. Hence, media ecologies can take its cue as much from flows and streams of nature or the modes of perception of animals as from conventional media technologies (46). An important aspect of media ecologies, as Parikka sees them, is how they engage in what he terms “transversal communication” or “cross talk” between media of nature and media culture (46). Art, and specifically eco art, is one way of opening up the (material) potentialities of the medium. Cross talk functions as a topological art method that extends to nature: “Art and media ecology as cross talk remind us of the non-human roots of both art and media, and hence extend the work of experimentality as an exposition of potentialities to what we have usually thought of as ‘solids’ – nature. Cross talking is therefore a topological method in art” (38). Parikka introduces the concept of media ecology as imaginary media, where imagination should be understood as realizing the potentiality that lies within any form of media. He argues that art projects such as the Eco Media project explore “[…] what could act as a medium; what flows, what carries, what bends time and space” (2011, 45–46). This practice pays special attention to media history, and thus connects media ecology to media archaeology: “[…] the use of history summons a new mode of temporality that is reminiscent of a media archaeological agenda; time becomes a rewiring of potentialities, not a stable archive of collected past presents. This supports wider reconsiderations of the place of nature in current technoculture

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where nature has been turned from an object of stability and stillness into a mode of becoming of heterogeneous bodies and relations, alongside an interest in the economic possibilities of the intensities of bodies […]. The supposed ‘stillness of nature’ turns out to be a multiplicity teeming with potentials that are increasingly also the motor for the production of value for the capitalist exploitation of lived bodies. Media ecological projects have in this sense to be aware of the contexts of capitalism in which ‘ecologies’ are produced” (46). As an example, Parikka mentions Garnet Hertz’s project ”Dead Media”, where dead technologies – technologies that have fallen out of use – are reused, reallocated or reframed. Parikka’s analysis of these projects show how imaginary media functions as a creative practice where time should not be understood in its traditional sense as a flow through different events, but rather as “a continuous shifting of emphases” which suggests we may look to the past to find answers to our concerns for the future (44). Although the projects Parikka uses to exemplify his notion of media ecology at the onset differ greatly from Olafur Eliasson’s art, his perspective offers a relevant set of tools for analysis of Eliasson’s engagement with nature and technology.

New York City Waterfalls The “New York City Waterfalls,” the most high-profile public art project Olafur Eliasson has done so far, was commissioned by Public Art Fund in collaboration with the City of New York in 2008.2 Four enormous artificial waterfalls were installed at four different points along the East River between Manhattan and Brooklyn, at Pier 35, underneath the Brooklyn Bridge, between Pier 4 and 5, and at Governor’s Island. During the course of the summer they generated massive publicity, a large audience, and numerous amateur snapshots. They ranged in height from 90 ft. to 120 ft., each pumping up to 132 500 liters of water a minute up and over their giant frames. Illuminated at night, they added a level of artificiality or even surrealism to the river. The structure and the technology involved in creating the waterfalls were integral and crucial parts of the installation. What had made these almost perfect renditions of massive natural waterfalls in the middle of the calm East River possible – the technology, the scaffolding and the pumps – were exposed and visible both from close-up and afar. The mechanics were in the open, and the artifice was laid bare. Four great natural machines stood in the East River, providing a spectacle. The technologically complex waterfalls were easy

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to grasp – their aesthetic impressiveness was immediate – and at the same time conceptually noteworthy. A fountain is a contraption that sends a jet of water into the air for decorative purposes. It is a kind of sculpture, and as such what the fountain communicates is its own shape. Clearly the “New York City Waterfalls” may be described as fountains. However, Eliasson went to great lengths to make fountains that in their massive scale resembled something far wilder than the traditional, pleasant and pretty fountains found in public gardens and parks. He borrowed the aesthetics of nature – the waterfall – and that of industry – the scaffolding and the pumps. That way, he filled the sculptural function with the forms of both nature and industry. Eliasson thus steps into a long historical tradition ranging from the depiction of wilderness in Romanticism in the early 19th Century, to Land Art and the Light and Space Movement in the 1960s, all aiming to tear down the boundaries between art and nature and pointing to nature’s fundamental formal features. At the same time he steps into the tradition that sees art and industry as one.3 A phenomenon such as the waterfall is a recurring form or event in nature. By creating artificial waterfalls Eliasson is turning the natural phenomenon into the medium of his art (although the phenomenon is technologically mediated). A medium is a recording and a distribution of information. The information recorded and distributed by the sculpture as medium, its content, is the reference of the object or person it depicts and its form. By using the natural form of the waterfall as his medium, Eliasson highlights the form of the natural phenomenon, and underlines that this form is also the information that nature distributes. His practice rests upon, and makes visible, the topological relationship of art and nature: both “systems” create and distribute material forms unendingly. Eliasson set up four different, yet very similar waterfall installations, showing off the consistency of the form of falling masses of water. By way of their technological construction the waterfalls function as sites of cross talk between the river and city, between nature and the technological endeavor. The aim of the project was to give New Yorkers back their sense of nature in the city, their river, and their surrounding landmarks by activating the river and making them aware of its presence as a river. Were we prone to ideas of dramatic irony, we might also read them as reminders of the threat of flooding that became decidedly material with the storm surge that followed the 2012 Hurricane Sandy. The idea of turning on and off waterfalls in the river in a big city like New York resonates with the overall threat of destruction that faces our cultivated landscapes, where conditions shift from draught to floods in short time

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spans and shorefronts change because of rise in sea level or storm surges. But it also resonates with the threat to nature itself, where rivers and waterfalls are cut off to give energy to hydropower plants, or large dams are being built for industrial purposes and drinking water that through damming up the rivers changes the natural waterways, drying up natural habitats and farmland, and leading to more vulnerable land. Parikka asks for all media ecological projects “to be aware of the contexts of capitalism in which ‘ecologies’ are produced” (46). While we acknowledge that Eliasson may share Parikka’s awareness of the capitalist system that enables the production of the media ecologies that his works contribute to, his stance towards this political system may not be as critical as that of Parikka.4 Although his art is concerned with individual perception and responsibility, and with considering one’s place in society at large, Eliasson’s resource intensive productions nevertheless take an active part in, and depend upon the global profit- driven art scene, an integral part of late global capitalism. So too with “New York City Waterfalls”, that without any great reservations plays into the long lasting strategy of transforming New York City from a demographically multifaceted metropolis into a real estate hotspot and a major tourist destination. The waterfalls naturally add to the city’s ambience as a postindustrial theme park. This was made especially evident by the festive lighting of the waterfalls at night, and the exposed scaffolding that resonated very well visually with the architectural remnants of the industrial parts of the city. Social geographer David Harvey claims that the question of ecology is intimately linked to the economic time and social space we live in, arguing that: “All critical examinations of the relation to nature are simultaneously critical examinations of society” (Harvey 1996, 174). He points to a connection between space, place, the body and society, which relates critically to representations of nature: In so far as “alienation from nature” is a widely acknowledged problem in contemporary society, then place comes into its own as a locus of some potentially unalienated direct sensuous interaction with environs. But it does so by hiding within the fetishism of commodities and ends up fetishizing the human body, the Self, and the realms of human sensation as the locus of all being in the world (303–304). Harvey’s analysis – which does not originally deal with art – may be read as a quite striking critique of “New York City Waterfalls.” Eliasson’s transportation of the natural form of the waterfall into the city smacks of this dream of the “unalienated direct sensuous interaction with the environs.” And as an art star with a fascination for a phenomenological

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approach, one may without a doubt accuse Eliasson of setting up this relationship between the fetishism of commodities and human sensation. Nevertheless, Eliasson’s installations carry within them something else that leaves us unsatisfied with such a dismissal. The potentiality that is made visible in Eliasson’s media ecology, where “unalienated” natural form is brought to us through the art installation’s artifice of the scaffolding and pumps, destabilizes the stillness of nature. Parikka is alert to the threat of this practice’s increasing importance in our economic system today. But it might also be that even if Eliasson is not explicitly taking a critical stance towards capital’s exploitation, his works may enable us to envision the relevant media ecological relationalities, to remind us of the material conditions at the base of all aesthetic form. In the following analysis, I answer this hypothesis with a tentative yes.

Cars in Rivers Eliasson’s “Bílar í ám/Cars in rivers” features 35 photographs of cars of various kinds, stranded in flooded rivers in the Icelandic countryside.5 The project started with Eliasson advertising in the local Icelandic media, where he asked people to submit images of cars in rivers for inclusion in his gallery exhibition Limboland. Lots of Icelandic daredevils and other adventurous and unlucky people sent in their amateur photographs of cars stranded in rivers and on flooded riverbanks. This is a yearly rite of passage in the Icelandic countryside, as melting snow and ice make rivers flood in spring, and turn regular crossing points untraversable. Eliasson selected which images to include in the exhibition, during which the audience was invited to submit additional images that were added to the work. When the exhibition ended Eliasson chose 35 images to be part of the final work, on which I base my analysis. Eliasson directs our attention to the very dichotomy and interrelationship between technological mastery and the power of nature. All of the photographs show a similar motif. A vehicle is stranded in the middle of a river. Several are shot from afar but most are quite closely framed. Some show gloomy mountains or barren riverbanks, but the focus is always (intended to be) on the car while the surrounding landscape serves as a natural backdrop without specific characteristics that draw attention. The weather conditions are variable, from snowy wintery landscapes with grey skies to green and brown hills with gleams of blue skies typical for the Icelandic spring.

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The most striking feature is how the cars are situated in the rivers, stranded in the middle of the gushing water: a piece of technology totally overpowered by nature. Several of the photographs portray people. Some seem as if they have surrendered to the elements, not knowing what to do next, standing on top of their car roofs waiting for rescue, or sitting inside, not wanting or daring to get out. Others are out in the water busily trying to get the car on track again by any means possible, pushing and pulling with shovels, ropes or their bare hands. In several of the photographs there are rescue teams with tractors and trucks. Even four buses are pictured in the water, one leaning scarily to the side while the passengers are watching by the riverbank, another with passengers up on the roof, trying to get to the safety of a rescue truck. The general feeling is one of intense drama. An arresting contributor to this is the violent appearance of the rivers, whether they have almost entirely engulfed the cars – one car is only visible as a piece of red metal and two wheels upside down in a black river at night – or if the rivers are steadily flowing and gleaming in the sun. The rivers also take up different colors adding to the variation and instability of the situations: Most are grey, white and blue, some with the clarity of melted glacier water, but several are brown with mud from heavy rainfall and the overpowered riverbanks. The stranded cars in the overwhelming landscapes are evidence of a quite recent human experience, as it is not very many years ago that cars were first used in the exploration of the highlands. Recently people have increasingly tried to master off-road paths where driving is almost impossible, thus damaging the landscape and the wildlife. Yet the images do not only showcase the misadventures of explorers, but also relate the misfortunes of the average Icelandic men and women who are entirely dependent on cars for transportation in their everyday lives in remote parts of Iceland. Turning to Parikka’s notion of media ecology as topology, we may argue that both the rivers and the cars are means of transportation, and thus forms of media. Both rivers and cars may bend time and space, moving what is remote closer, not by transmitting representations as we normally think is a medium’s function, but in actual fact.6 These two media find themselves in conflict with one another because the river is contingent on seasonal changes that the car has failed to consider in its search for a stable network of paths of communication, roads. Regarded in such a perspective – using Parikka’s admittedly wide definition of media ecology – “Bílar í ám/Cars in rivers” may be viewed as a work that deliberately discusses media ecological topics. What does this discussion entail then? One take would be to consider the different

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functions of the different media involved in the work, especially how they distribute that which they transmit, and how the media themselves are distributed. Rivers are natural phenomena – a result of topography and gravity – distributive networks for transporting water from one body of water to another. In addition, they may be used by anyone who needs to move across the landscape in the direction that the river follows. As such, rivers are quite restricted as media, prone to seasonal and topographical changes, and difficult to manipulate for any person – even if it is certainly possible. They are, however, completely open, completely accessible for anyone able to reach and navigate them.7 Cars, on the other hand, are highly technical contraptions, made to conform to the drivers’ wishes. Given suitable surroundings and infrastructure, the car may transport its driver to a great many places. It is, however, not as accessible as the river, one must be able to afford a car to get access to one. That is not to say that the car is not a widely distributed means of transportation, which for instance has made large parts of Iceland accessible for a great number of people. A third medium involved in Eliasson’s work is of course photography, the technology that makes possible the visual remediation of the conflict between rivers and cars. This technology has gone through a similar, but more radical, development to that of the car: from relying on very expensive technical equipment used by trained professionals, it has become an everyday technology for many of us, to the extent that a great number of people who are taking part in global capitalism as consumers carry a camera in their pocket. This historical development is the technological precondition for the realization of “Bílar í ám/Cars in rivers”. If people were not carrying around cameras, no one could have photographed the cars that were stuck. However, it is not only the distribution of the technology itself that has changed. During the last twenty years, since the maturing of the Internet and the creation of the World Wide Web, and since the proliferation of digital cameras, the pace and magnitude of the distribution and redistribution of photographs have grown profoundly. This shift has contributed to a new and richer culture of images, where the distance from the solitary photographer to public visual arenas has shortened significantly. This new visual culture has a more democratic composition of contributors – although it will never manifest itself as a truly representative expression of collective life – and Eliasson’s work is a part of this visual culture of sharing. When viewed in this manner “Bílar í ám/Cars in rivers” discusses the relationship between the different media’s material foundations, the

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distribution of the media, and the distribution that the media make possible. It can be understood as a progressive version of the history of communication, where one, despite natural barriers, is able to let ever more people take part in the exchange. However, the consistent focus of the images, the stranded car, underscores the halfhearted nature of such a reading. The motive of the images insists on communication’s material basis, its dependence upon technology and infrastructure. This focus on infrastructure is taken further in the creation of the project. The collective exhibition was the product of a technologically founded milieu that Eliasson utilized. In this milieu he identified the potentiality for a work of art, collecting other people’s images, and assembling them in a way that makes us see the common structures in the individual situations of crisis, and the individual actions as forming a collective resistance. In the repetitiveness of the series that again and again reformulates the relationship between nature and technology, a critical space is opened. Despite the fact that the images show the individual struggling with nature, they may be seen as a parable of the ways in which humanity must face the challenges posed by nature, as a collective. This reading rests upon a topological understanding of media ecology that makes possible the transversal cross talk taking place between the media ecology of nature and media culture that Parikka talks about. The cross talking does not end in the work, however, since the images’ insistence upon materiality in turn raises the question of the materiality of photography. We have already mentioned the role that the historic distribution of photography plays in the work, but there are also important material preconditions for this increased distribution: the decreasing price of consumer electronics rests upon an evermore productive industry that due to falling profit rates is compelled to intensify its exploitation of its work force and natural resources. At the same time, electronic waste due to sped up innovation and phenomena such as planned obsolescence create new and serious environmental problems. While the photos clearly show the material limitations of the car when its surroundings change dramatically, no reference is found to the material underpinnings of the technology of photography.

Volcanoes and Shelters Volcanoes and shelters was the title of Olafur Eliasson’s exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York in 2012.8 The title pointed to nature’s destructive force, and to our attempts at protecting ourselves from it, which is the basis of all culture. The exhibition consisted of a series of

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photographs and installations, all taken in or otherwise inspired by the particular natural formations of the Icelandic landscape. Iceland, being a volcanic island, consists mainly of open landscapes of mountains and fields, volcanoes, craters, hot springs, caves, glaciers, rivers and lakes. The exhibition spanned two floors. In the downstairs main gallery the audience encountered three large photographic series taken on Iceland, “The hut series,” “The volcano series,” and “The hot spring series”, all from 2012 and consisting of respectively 56, 63 and 48 framed C-prints – as well as “The large Iceland series”, consisting of five individual largescale C-prints. The series portrayed the various motifs mentioned in the titles: huts, volcanoes, hot springs, and fragments of Icelandic landscapes, all pointing to the power of nature, and the relationship between nature and the people who live there. On the top floor Eliasson showed “Your disappearing garden”, an installation of black, obsidian lava rocks covering the floor of a white cube. In an adjacent, pitch-dark room, the three installations “Object defined by activity (soon),” “Object defined by activity (then),” and “Object defined by activity (now)” (2009). The installations were cascading water fountains at eye-level placed under strobe lights. As pulsating white light hit the water from the fountains, illuminating the drops, it created the illusion of the water being suspended in mid-air. If we are to study the four series of photography in terms of Parikka’s media ecology, we must consider Eliasson’s choice of motives. The three larger series are all respectively dedicated to one feature in the Icelandic landscape: huts, volcanoes and hot springs. Following Parikka, we may consider their mediating functions to better grasp the interrelationship between the motives and Eliasson’s greater artistic project. As objects of architecture, the huts in Eliasson’s series are all media for a specific part of culture, the human endeavor of creating shelter and finding place for oneself in nature. This type of architectural work points explicitly to architecture’s function as a threefold medium for preservation: first and foremost the buildings shall preserve their inhabitants, keeping nature at bay. Secondly, the buildings must preserve themselves, and be able to withstand the forces that surround them. The photographed huts are all somewhat similar in style, simplistic and functional, with few windows making them safer in strong winds, and steep roofs to let the snow slide off. Thirdly, the architectural form functions as a medium for the information that is the accumulated strategies for survival in nature, collected through generations of building and rebuilding. In this sense the architectural object is a medium of humanity’s ethological history.

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The serial format supports this reading. The images show the huts photographed from the outside, at ground level, from approximately the same distance and at a distance just far enough to see the entire structures nicely situated in the landscape. The horizon is on the same level in virtually all the photographs. The huts’ distinctly simple architecture and color scheme – painted in red, white or left untreated – and their framing together in a series of 56 identically sized images, turn these structures into a natural feature of the Icelandic landscape, a human den. “The volcano series” and “The hot spring series” show two related natural phenomena that are emblematic for the Icelandic landscape, results of the island’s position on the mid-Atlantic ridge, where the North American and European tectonic plates go in opposite directions. The tectonic rift lets lava from earth’s interior come to the surface in volcanoes, and lets magma come into contact with water, creating hot springs. This natural flow, from the inside of the earth towards the surface, may be seen as a folding in space, a place where earth’s interior is exteriorized. And as volcanic activity was a prominent feature of early earth, volcanoes and geothermal springs may also be said to represent a folding in time, as they offer the shadow of an experience of what the world was like long before humans evolved. In this sense, Eliasson’s photographs depict natural, material media. Nature is of course a medium in a different sense in these pictures. As the motive for Eliasson’s photographs, nature is the medium that creates the shapes and forms we are presented with in the images. Similarly to the “New York City Waterfalls,” the natural phenomena depicted relay the information of their own forms. In “The volcano series,” 63 volcanic craters are all photographed from above. Only in the top line of the photographs do we see the larger landscape that surrounds the volcanoes, including the horizon. In the rest, the craters are portrayed in close-up, excluding the landscape and focusing on the forms and specificities of each individual crater: some are covered in ice, several are filled with water, and some are rough around the edges while others are smooth. The same effect appears in “The hot spring series,” where only a very few of the 48 photographs show the surrounding landscape, while most are closeups of hot springs. Because of the lack of surrounding landscape it is difficult to get a sense of scale in any of the images of craters, hot springs or volcanoes. The motifs take up most of the image-frame. By choosing the same angle for photographing and further grouping them into series, the motifs at first resemble each other and patterns appear; a principal shape emerges, before the individual traits of each volcano crater and hot spring– their shapes, lines, colors – come to light.

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This effect becomes obvious when the series of smaller pictures of volcanoes and hot springs is compared to the “The large Iceland series,” consisting of five large-scale photographs presented individually. Although these images show the greater landscape, they are clearly honoring the specifics of that landscape. The photographs are extremely detailed: the rainbow emerging in a waterfall off of the edge of a mountainside, onto a blackened-of-age glacier, the green lake, the textured surface of a hillside, the greens and the reds of moss and lichens mixing with the greys and blacks of the lava stone formations. In these different approaches Eliasson shifts between a conceptual mapping of natural forms and a much more erotic visualization of the Icelandic landscape. In all of the series it is only the huts that are depicted in a manner similar to how we would normally encounter them, hiking in the Icelandic landscape. The volcanoes and hot springs are photographed from above, requiring technical equipment such as cars with extensive ladders and camera stands or, even more technically demanding, using helicopters, planes or drones. These different points of view present us with a variety of what Parikka calls the ethological relationality of media ecology. While the huts are presented in a “human” perspective, the volcanoes and hot springs, and the larger landscape photographs are presented through a technologically mediated bird’s-eye view. This difference in scale makes possible both a conceptualization and an eroticization of the landscape and its components that would otherwise be inaccessible. In the gallery, the reality of the photographed landscapes becomes literally palpable in the installation “Your disappearing garden.” Obsidian, the lava rock that is common in the Icelandic landscape, created when hot lava is submerged into water, was laid out on the floor almost as a thick carpet covering the space.9 The black rocks in the white cube created an alluring aesthetic experience and seemed almost alien, but the fact that they were real also made their presence as nature stronger. Materially presenting the differing scales between the photographs and the landscape, the stones facilitated a cross talk between technology and nature. The hardened obsidian had preserved the shapes of lava, and as such functioned as a material folding in time. Shiny as they were, the lava rocks reflected their surroundings, both the space and the visitors, further underlining their mediating effect. The “freezing” of time and the connection to photography was taken further in the aesthetic effect of the three installations “Object defined by activity (soon),” “Object defined by activity (then),” and “Object defined by activity (now)” (2009). Pulsating strobe lights illuminated fountains, revealing fixed forms in what would otherwise look like steady flows of

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water. The seemingly endless process of light falling on running water was broken down into individual parts. What the audience saw was not a waterfall or a fountain, but the constantly changing nature of nature. This is underlined by the use of the temporal adverbs “soon,” “then,” and “now” in the titles of the seemingly undistinguishable installations, pointing to the co-presence of different times in any given moment. Technology makes visible the unique fragments and ever-changing nature of water. Volcanoes and shelters present the audience with a diverse collection of works, all dealing with the media ecology of the (Icelandic) landscape, raising the question of form and its preservation. Approaching the landscape through photographic representation, inclusion of natural objects and formal studies of water, Eliasson establishes the topological relationalities of a changing nature and its technological mediation through photography. This cross talk between the media ecology of nature and photography discloses differing scales of perception in time and space, capturing the constant and flowing nature of volcanoes and water. The mediation of history, and its information, takes place not only in human cultural artifacts, but also in the slow shifts of landscape itself and in the streams of fountains. “The Cross Talk mode of communication” as Parikka writes, “is in this sense communication as a topological weaving of various scales of perception, motility and sensation into a joint assemblage in which human media are able to touch animal and natural media” (Parikka 2011, 40).

Conclusion Parikka’s concept of a widely defined media ecology, where the flows and processes of natural phenomena are understood as media, may be used to great advantage in an analysis of Olafur Eliasson’s work. Focusing on Eliasson’s use and display of natural phenomena and their relationship to technology in a media ecological framework, we gain a more profound understanding of these elements in the artworks. They are involved in a topological cross talk, making accessible a great variety of perceptions not usually available to a human perspective. This cross talk rests upon and reveals the material basis of the functioning of the media involved. “New York City Waterfalls” lets the technological mediation of natural form take center stage, pointing towards the topological relationality of form in art and nature. The focus of “Cars in rivers” is also on topological relationalities, but accompanied by a much more acute sense of tension, showing the conflict between two media that bend both time and space. In

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addition, through the cross talk with photography, in this work we are able to gain an understanding of the concept of distribution, of how media distribute the information they mediate, and are in turn themselves distributed. Eliasson’s exhibition Volcanoes and shelters takes up the themes of both the other works but expands on them by putting added weight on differing scales of perception and time. Showing photographs of the Icelandic landscape, as well as natural objects and instants of natural flows that would otherwise pass us by, he ends up in a discussion of the material basis of both human and non-human memory and preservation. Taking a media ecological perspective to Eliasson’s art and the images it presents of nature produces a sense of vertigo when coupled with Mitchell’s double definition of the image as both referencing something through resemblance, and the content or form of a medium that makes the medium appear as medium (38–40). Like that of so many others, Eliasson’s art depicts and engages with the non-art of nature to create new artistic forms. However, Eliasson is constantly engaged in a reflection with regards to the question of how nature itself is already mediating itself, and how our mediation in turn is a part of nature. Eliasson’s images of nature are images of the images produced by nature.

Notes 1

An integral component in Parikka’s understanding of a medium is Claude Shannon’s concept of “empty” information (Shannon 1948). 2 The project is presented at The Public Art Fund’s web site (PublicArtFund.org 2013). 3 Eliasson is in this sense a textbook example of an artist of what Jacques Rancière in The Politics of Aesthetics has called the aesthetic regime of art, which ”asserts the absolute singularity of art and, at the same time, destroys any pragmatic criterion for isolating this singularity. It simultaneously establishes the autonomy of art and the identity of its forms with the forms that life uses to shape itself” (2006, 23). 4 Eliasson has labeled himself a non-marxist, and has stated that he believes “profoundly that the capitalist system may be more democratic than alternative systems” (Vik 2008). This is not to say that he is uncritical of the distribution of power in the western world, or that his art does not take a critical stance. 5 The work is documented in a catalog published by the National Gallery of Iceland (Runólfsson and Sveinsson 2011). 6 For “traditional” media this form of communication has only been possible in the science fictional fantasy of teleportation, but is also being developed in the nascent 3D-printing technology. 7 The river as a motif and medium is further developed in Eliasson’s “Jokla series” (2004), exhibited in the Limboland exhibition together with “Bílar í ám/Cars in

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rivers.” The “Jokla series” consists of 48 color prints documenting the river Jokla, the longest river in eastern Iceland. The river is photographed in all its length, from its source to its mouth. Eliasson has captured the river’s features by aerial photography taken while flying quite high above the river, undermining its magnitude in order to map it and portray it as if in an atlas. Arranged in proper sequence the photographs show the river the way it is rarely seen – complete with its twists and turns, narrowing and widening. In other words, it is a completely different way of approaching the river than “Bílar í ám/Cars in rivers”. 8 The exhibition is documented at the gallery’s web site (Tanya Bonakdar Gallery 2015). 9 Eliasson has several works where a natural ”element” such as ice, stones or moss covers the surface of a floor or wall.

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Bibliography Fuller, Matthew. 2005. Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Harvey, David. 1996. Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Cambridge, Mass: Blackwell. Mitchell, W.J.T. 2010. “Image.” Critical Terms for Media Studies, ed. W.J.T Mitchell & Mark Hansen. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Parikka, Jussi. 2011. “Media Ecologies and Imaginary Media: Transversal Expansions, Contractions, and Foldings.” The Fibreculture Journal, 17. Accessed March 6, 2015. http://seventeen.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-116-media-ecologies-andimaginary-media-transversal-expansions-contractions-and-foldings/. PublicArtFund.org. 2013. “Public Art Fundௗ: The New York City Waterfalls.” Accessed March 6, 2015. http://www.publicartfund.org/view/exhibitions/5717_the_new_york_ci ty_waterfalls. Rancière, Jacques. 2006. The Politics of Aesthetics. London and New York: Continuum. Runólfsson, Halldór B., and Hjálmar Sveinsson. 2011. Ólafur Elíasson Bílar Í Ám Cars in Rivers, ed. Olafur Eliasson. Reykjavik: Crymogea/Listasafn Íslands (National Gallery of Iceland). Shannon, CE. 1948. “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.” The Bell System Technical Journal, 100. 3: 379–423. http://www3.alcatellucent.com/bstj/vol27-1948/articles/bstj27-3-379.pdf. Tanya Bonakdar Gallery. 2015. “Olafur Eliasson - Exhibitions - Tanya Bonakdar Gallery.” Accessed March 1, 2015. http://www.tanyabonakdargallery.com/exhibitions/olafur-eliasson. Vik, Synnøve Marie. 2008. “Eliassons Institusjoner.” Billedkunst, 6. http://www.billedkunstmag.no/node/1440.

CHAPTER SIX IN/VISIBLE DISABILITY, STARE THEORY, AND VIDEO’S ECOLOGIES OF SEEING/SEEING WHOLE: BILL SHANNON IN PERSPECTIVE(S) SUSAN G. CUMINGS

The meaning of our bodies is produced in continuous, lifelong negotiations between how we see ourselves and how our culture sees us. If we have physical disabilities, we may be aware every day of our lives of these negotiations: not only with doorways or stairs but also with language, stares, assumptions, and policies. - Martha Stoddard Holmes (2001, 27) The disabled body must be explained, or at least tolerate the inquisitive gaze (or the averted glance) of the questioner. The question never has to be put because it is always actively in a default mode—it is always already asked. - Lennard J. Davis (1995, xvi) [People] easily perceive when someone is different from them, but rarely acknowledge the violence of their perceptions. - Tobin Siebers (2006, 174) Change arises not as the effect of a discrete cause, but from the dance of perturbation and response as agents interact. - Marilyn Cooper (2011, 421)

My contribution to this volume is to argue that by “cripping”—that is making disability and disability politics central to—our studies of video as a medium, we discover new aspects of ecologies of seeing and especially how video can facilitate or disrupt seeing whole. This project also serves to address an area of inquiry as yet not sufficiently addressed in disability

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studies: while there has been now ample work done on representations of disability in autobiography, literary fiction, and cinema, video as a distinct medium needs more attention as a form of visual, though not always narrative, storytelling about disability and the lives of the disabled. To address these needs, this chapter examines the ecologies of seeing at work in three videos by and about the American conceptual artist, street performer, dancer, choreographer and b-boy skater Bill Shannon. As I will show, while their featured subject may be the same, their visual rhetorics about life with disability in public space are sometimes strikingly different. Because Shannon is a person with a visually ambiguous disability, his presence in any scene draws out assumptions and practices concerning both persons with visible and with invisible disabilities. An examination in the first section of my essay establishes visibility as a unique problem for disability (which is important to understand if we are to address video as a visual mode of communication) and how the visibly anomalous become experts at managing situations in which they are subject to the stares of others. Understanding how Shannon engages visual conventions (disability images, medical symbols, expected body postures) will lay the groundwork for the rest of the chapter’s analysis of video by and about Shannon, and what bringing a disability lens to the study of video can teach us about how we see ideologically and how sequences and montages constructed in this particularly accessible and manipulable medium can broaden, test, or uphold a discriminatory status quo. In keeping with the symposium theme that gave birth to this examination, my next section will focus on ideas of image and space, and image within image, specifically in the visual regressions of Shannon’s video-analysis-driven lectures, where street performances designed to cause ripples in conventional habits of belief surrounding disability are displaced into electronically layered viewings for new engagement. Finally, I will engage the specific role of what Harriet McBryde Johnson calls “rare beauty” in the ethical project of visible disability literacy, taking up the symposium theme of seeing and seeing whole. Delving into particular technological and cinematic aspects of video as a medium for storytelling and a space of interpretation and (dis)belief, I will juxtapose two short videos each of which offers a visual “story” about Shannon. The first is a preview for a documentary about him, which, I will argue, presents varieties of “views” that allow viewers opportunities to “see him whole;”1 the other is a credit card advertisement featuring Shannon, which depicts his artistry in movement through public space but also makes use of a pernicious disability exceptionalism known in

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disability studies as the “supercrip” myth, with its attendant failure both to engage the whole individual and to depict or imagine possibilities for community.

Part I: Disability and the Problem of the Visual (or: The In/Visibility of Impairment, or, Visibility, Legibility, Legitimacy) When it comes to disability, twenty-first century culture still appears to rely far too consistently on two old habits: 1) thinking of disability as a clearly definable, binary identity: one “is” or one “isn’t” disabled, and 2) expecting that disability is something one can see. The first of these stems from the older, medical model of disability, which assumes disability is a deviation from “normal” form and functionality residing in the individual body, a state that must be managed (and hopefully “cured”) through medical diagnosis and treatment. The alternative to this is the social model, which posits that individual bodies have varieties of abilities and impairments, but what disables are attitudes and beliefs about what bodies should look like, how they should move and how they should act, attitudes reflected in everything from habits of pity to social policy to the shape of the built environment. As Christopher Baswell explained it several years ago in Times Higher Education, his paraplegia is an impairment (a bodily variation), but what disables him is a lack of ramps and elevators; in a building designed or retrofitted for access, he is able-bodied and can move and work without difficulty or assistance. It is to this social model that Bill Shannon’s personal attitude and activist work adhere, although, as I will show, he is subject to the medical model on a daily basis. I, too, take a social model perspective, and thus throughout this essay will most often choose terms like “disabled persons” over “persons with disabilities,” a practice that calls attention to the barriers (attitudinal, environmental, organizational) which prevent disabled persons from a full range of equal opportunity in housing, education, employment, and other activities (Carson 2009, 19; see also Young 2010). The binarity (yes/no, in absolute terms) of disability identity functions in public space predominantly through the second old habit, one important to the intervention I wish to make in this chapter: a reliance on a narrow range of visual cues. For those with non-visible disabilities, this is obviously problematic. Artist Joseph Grigely, for example, who is deaf, tells a story of being harassed by a museum guard for not responding to a verbal command, noting that the guard represents the way in which “we have been conditioned to presume difference to be a visual phenomenon”

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(2000, 28). That is, there is a presumption that if something is “wrong,” we can see it, and if we can’t, there’s “normalcy,” which translates to “no need for accommodation.” Cal Montgomery (2001) has responded to this crisis of legibility, writing persuasively of the need to avoid a language of “invisible disability” in favor of analyses focused not on what is hidden but on our collective failure in practicing how to understand and identify the barriers that limit others. It is we, the observers, who have not done our work, Montgomery suggests, though with time and attention we may yet develop these necessary interactive skills. Montgomery emphasizes, for example, the extent to which the disabled are only recognized if they bear certain accepted tools—the wheelchair, the white cane, the hearing aid— emphasizing that without them, they are “invisible.” Visibility, however, does not equate to transparency. Kerschbaum and Price (2014) are emphatic, for instance, that “even if a disability is readily noticeable by others […] there almost always remain significant gaps in understanding that affect access, accommodation, and social interaction.” Testimonies from disabled persons recognize that a new trouble arises, too, when there is a perceived discontinuity between appearance and behavior, for then the signifying tools risk being taken as false signs, or signs of falsification. Again, Cal Montgomery (2001): The person who uses a white cane when getting on the bus, but then pulls out a book to read while riding; the person who uses a wheelchair to get into the library stacks but then stands up to reach a book on a high shelf; the person who uses a picture-board to discuss philosophy; the person who challenges the particular expectations of disability that other people have is suspect. “I can't see what's wrong with him,” people say, meaning, “He's not acting the way I think he should.”

Impairments and other symptoms may of course also be episodic, as is the case with some chronic diseases like multiple sclerosis, providing still further complications to the attempts of others to apply definitive, stable categories to a person’s experience of impairment, disability, or need for accommodation (Lightman, Vick, Heard, and Mitchell, 2009), and provoking again suspicion and disbelief.2 In “Disability, Life Narrative, and Representation,” G. Thomas Couser argues that people with extraordinary bodies face an explanatory demand: they must account for their extraordinary bodies [why do you move like that? why do you look like that? what happened to you?], often to complete strangers, and “their accounts [must] serve to relieve the auditors’ discomfort” (2006, 400). The oddbodied must contend, then, with what I am calling in/visibility: a simultaneous drawing of attention due to visible anomaly (visibility), and

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a persistent othering due to observers’ lack of capacity to understand or consider them (invisibility). Tobin Siebers sums up for us this in/visibility problem: “[People] easily perceive when someone is different from them, but rarely acknowledge the violence of their perceptions” (2006, 174). “Surfaces,” to use Biddy Martin’s terms, “take priority over interiors and depths” (1994, 105-106). Whether as queer—Martin’s field of inquiry—or as disabled, coming out, as a process of “rendering visible,” is problematic not only because it presumes this can be done once and for all, when in practice “we must still make decisions about coming out on a daily basis, in personal, professional, and political contexts” (Samuels 2003, 237), but also and more saliently to our discussion here, because the emphasis on the visible has semantically structured the non-visible as the subordinate term (ibid, 236, after Schlossberg), always suspect, always, like the pain of another, unknowable. It also, of course, privileges sight as the uncontested conveyor of “truth,” and thus simultaneously privileges the sighted as those with access to and in possession of that truth. (More on the implications of this in our habits of interpreting still photography and motion pictures, later.) The need to render visible, or intelligible, one’s particular embodiment in ways that satisfy the expectations of others stems not only from a desire, in general, to be recognized and affirmed in one’s own uniqueness, nor always with a desire to challenge norms or to avoid suspicion of fraud, but also often in response to material needs in practical situations. Persons with dis/abilities seeking medical relief from pain or access to subsidized or customized tools and services, for example, must respond “appropriately” to questions designed to “measure” their physical pain “objectively.” Furthermore, for their physical pain to be believed, they must also not “look okay.” Elaine Scarry has written at length about language’s inability to “measure” or “convey” feelings of pain (see esp. Ch. 1 of The Body In Pain), leading Susannah Mintz to term the word “pain” the “ultimate empty signifier” (2011, 255). Since pain scales have no verifiable external reference point, they are not, strictly speaking, “measures,” but only requirements of discursive performance that seek but inevitably fail to make the pain of one body intelligible to another. As Mintz observes, however, despite the non-referentiality of pain scales, continuation of medical and especially pain management services frequently demand a “scaled” response, which means that “some degree of creative computation would seem inevitable” (ibid, 248). Faced with this conundrum of the coerced lie, we might well take our place with Judith Butler: “The critical question thus becomes,” she asks, “how might the world be reorganized so that this conflict can be

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ameliorated?” (2004, 5). In the remainder of this essay, I will explore a portion of the life and work of Bill Shannon, who contributes, though not all who use his image do, to such a reorganization by making use of what I will call his in/visibility to make strategic interventions designed to elicit change.

Drawing the Stare To be visibly outside mainstream norms, whether of body shape, facial features, style of movement, gender presentation, or a perceived discontinuity between dis/ability and behavior, is to be stared at. As disability theorist Rosemarie Garland-Thomson contended 15 years ago, “Staring is one of the definitive, unifying social practices that establishes disability identity and gives the disabled body meaning in the collective cultural imagination” (2003, 471). Garland-Thomson is squarely within the social model of disability here, contending that “we are marked not by our bodies themselves, but by responses to our bodies: by the stares that record our otherness, by the narratives that establish our inadequacy, by the barriers that keep us out, by the norms that render us abnormal” (ibid, emph. added). She characterizes staring as that which creates disability identity, claiming that “Staring … gives meaning to impairment by marking it as aberrant ... [S]taring constitutes disability identity by manifesting the power relations between the subject positions of the disabled and able-bodied” (2002, 56-7, emph. added). Furthermore, because of staring’s social proscription (“It’s not polite to stare”), staring’s furtivity (or its alternative, open visual aggression) “creates [oddbodiedness] as a state of absolute difference rather than simply one more variation in human form” (ibid, 57, emph. added).3 For those with visible dis/abilities, the stare not only marks, but assigns low rank – an expectation of incapacity, of “less than.” The stare also prescribes not only the expected behaviors I have discussed, but expected attitudes: the disabled should be humble, or cheerful, and above all grateful. The stare as imposed visibility, over-riding the polite custom of what sociologist Erving Goffman calls “civil inattention” (1980, 83-88), is not benign, as we heard from Siebers. Staring can be aggressive and cruel, as transgender and disability activist Eli Clare conveys by using torture imagery when describing his own particular experiences of the stare, with a pair of eyes acting as a predator with a “vise-like grip” and the project of tearing “skin from muscle, muscle from bone” (2003, 257). The analogy is vivid; the images of the infliction of bodily pain and destruction strike viscerally.

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The preceding description of the staring phenomenon provides a needed basis for understanding what is at stake in the visual representation of disabled persons. It remains unsatisfying, however, in one very important respect: it casts all starers as malicious and all starees as simply passive victims. Garland-Thomson set out more recently, in her 2009 book Staring: How We Look, to bring attention to the agency starees have in the staring relationship. She begins with a simple 2-part premise. First, staring is a neurologically driven, physiological response to a novel stimulus. We have the impulse to stare when we see something we’re unaccustomed to because our brains demand time to make sense of what we are seeing. Second, staring, because it is going to happen anyway, provides starers with an opportunity to know and starees with an opportunity to be known (2009, 15). Drawing then on published works by disability activists, interviews with disabled persons, and an analysis of material culture, particularly visual representations of starees that are self-produced or produced with their full participation, Garland-Thomson presents an alternative to the passive stareeas-victim, bringing to light the ways in which oddbodied persons become “expert starees” who develop a repertoire of strategies to respond to and take charge of the staring relationship. Such strategies may include: • engaging or even inviting potentially productive stares, • discouraging unwanted stares, • shutting down hostile stares • generously guiding awkward starers Bill Shannon, the subject of the videos I will be analyzing in this chapter, has a lifetime’s experience playing host to the starer, using the inevitability of his visibility for practical, artistic, and political purposes.

“Ambiguous Dis/Abilities” Provoke “Category Crisis” As a person who both uses crutches—devices customarily seen as a trans-national cultural signifier of impairment—and uses his feet and a skateboard—usually understood as tools of able-bodiedness—as part of his personal system of mobility, Shannon moves through public and social space exhibiting what he generously labels an “ambiguous” disability (Shannon 2011). In doing so, he provokes a “category crisis” (Garber 1994, 10), unseating easy binarity, challenging normative assumptions concerning the parameters of dis/ability, and heightening therefore his visibility or status as an inevitable staree. Category crises such as these do not so much introduce something new in the world as they make apparent

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the assumptions behind the organization of categories of identification, belonging and exclusion. By presenting to onlookers signs that place him culturally among both the (temporarily) able-bodied and the disabled, Shannon highlights the “failure of definitional distinction” (ibid, 16) between the two. Shannon’s disability is what I am calling in/visible, a term used to invoke both his anomalous appearance (he is highly visible) and our failure to learn to understand the barriers and challenges he faces (they are invisible). I have already discussed Cal Montgomery’s critique of a language of invisibility. I am using invisible here only in a critical sense. My term “in/visible” does not describe what Shannon is but invokes two cultural impositions upon him, both born of ignorance. First, Shannon’s embodiment is read against a binarist standard of norms/deviations and he is marked as deviant, therefore becoming very noticeable or “visible.” Second, his approaches to dealing with the challenges and barriers he faces are measured against a narrow binarist standard of able/disabled, and not seen there, thus they are “invisible.” The terms are only used to represent our collective social failure to embrace human diversity and to learn of others with compassion rather than suspicion.

Practicalities: Unique Security Requirements and Graphic Strategy At present, the oddbodied often become forced to try to “make visible”—both see-able and comprehensible—their particular embodiments in ways that satisfy the expectations of others. This is true not only in general circumstances but in transactions that have a practical materiality. Shannon’s public presence and actions must contend with projected narratives of either tragedy, heroism, or fraud, and he must draw on his experience and skill as an expert staree, choosing the strategy best suited to the particular rhetorical situation. To demonstrate how disabled persons must sometimes engage in “creative computation” to “accommodate” the interpretive needs of onlookers, I will introduce a section of Shannon’s blog where he explains his expedient use of the immediacy of image and the visual symbolic to negotiate airports as a social space and airport security as a site of heightened encounter the outcome of which will have immediate material consequences. We see here an expert staree at work. Shannon, who has a degenerative condition in both hips that does not prevent walking but makes it painful and damaging, discovered years ago that “the use of the crutches in combination with a skateboard prevented the pain [in his hips] better than either of them were able to separately”

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(2003b). Skateboards, however, are usually considered in the realm of toys and play, and while, in streetscapes, this distinctive way of getting around may make heads turn, its reception is quite different when introduced into an arena with far more restrictive codes of behavior and movement, such as an airport, with its aura (especially post-9/11, though even before) of “seriousness” and “security.” To attempt air travel using a skateboard, a “toy” associated with a (somewhat rebellious) youth culture is, to say the least, unorthodox, and likely to be strictly prohibited. Moving from one public space, such as a street, to another, such as an airport, does not change Shannon’s need for pain management, however, requiring negotiation with airport safety personnel not known for wanting to negotiate. As a habitual staree, Shannon knows his mobility tools (conventional and unconventional) make him highly visible, knows the evaluation of his identity and status begins in the mind of the viewer long before any direct verbal interaction, and so he devised a strategy for providing guidance to guards (and incidentally to others in the airport) as starers. Acknowledging that “communicating through symbols [...] is a very useful way to answer questions without them being asked” (2012), Shannon’s first visual strategy is to engage the still-common medical model of disability by customizing his board with variations on common medical symbols, coding both himself and his board as part of a medicalized situation. His chosen graphics include a centralized Red Cross (medical, first aid, charity) with the letters M-E-D (as an abbreviation for “medical”) also overlaid in black on the horizontal and vertical bars of the red cross. At each end of the board is a blue and white wheeling figure, invoking the universal wheelchair “handicap” symbol, though here they are not rudimentary blue and white wheelchair figures but rudimentary blue and white figures with rocker-bottom crutches on a skateboard (Fig. 6-1). Fig. 6-1. Shannon, Graphic Strategy (skateboard symbols)

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By altering the appearance of the object, Shannon seeks to reinforce through invoked associations the object's role as a medical or assistive device (rather than “skateboard”), and its appropriateness as part of his mobility system. Shannon comments that “figures of authority [...] trying to figure me out in a split second to get their job done need some level of help” (whatiswhat.com, “unique security requirements”), so this is what he proffers. This statement underscores how every act of disability disclosure is a situated rhetorical performance (cf. Kerschbaum 2014, 59). As such, it must consider spatial, dynamic, and temporal concerns (how can I physically occupy and move in this space, how fast is my interaction expected to be completed) in addition to constructing an anticipated interlocutor/narratee who likely has particular cultural habits regarding both the tools and the behaviours of the “disabled” (cf. Montgomery 2001). Each such disclosure also partakes of the emergent qualities of all performance; that is to say, whenever there is an audience, the response of that audience is never wholly predictable, and the outcome of the exchange thus always in suspension.4 Continuing to evoke the authority of medical discourse, once Shannon reaches the “interview” moment with airline and security personnel, he presents a doctor’s note, which he supplements with his second visual intervention: an annotated image of himself from the knees down using the combination of board and crutch (Fig. 6-2). The image is addressed to the attention of staff in Air Canada Medical, and titled “Mobility System William Shannon.” Fig. 6-2. “Mobility System William Shannon”

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The diagram uses defamiliarizing terminology to label the system's components (wooden platform, aluminum axle, urethane wheel, rockerbottom crutch with rubber tip) making the system as a whole seem purpose-built and integrated, the wheeled platform and crutches part of a unified medical equipment package. The image also, significantly, has Shannon in a pose he does not adopt in daily life, with one foot held up and back in a hanging position, a positioning more “traditional” of crutch users in the public mind, highlighting the “injury” or “weakness” that both invokes pity (like a limping dog) and makes assistive technologies seem needed and thus acceptable. Here Shannon plays to the binarity of the institution’s interpretive system. He calls this, with an implied wink, the “Blowfish strategy,” because it means “[inflating his] invisible mobility limitations” until they become “real enough” in the mind of the interlocutor (2011). Many disabled persons have similar fanciful terms for such inflations—“Disability Masquerade” is one, “running the Tiny Tim play” is another5—but a seriousness underlies the seeming playfulness of the names of these practices, which are called into being by a system that does not wish to see whole, and which presents the challenge, Siebers reminds us, to “meet the hundred daily obstacles that are not merely inconveniences but occasions for physical suffering” (2006, 177). Shannon is constrained through the proliferation of regulatory norms to perform his disability in ways that “fit” those norms. The in/visibly disabled, “like all who defy expectation, are suspect,” Montgomery tells us; “people ask us why we need accommodation rather than what accommodation we need.” Without Shannon’s skateboard, there is exponentially increased pain and the likelihood of permanent physical damage, and concomitantly curtailed mobility. If it helps avoid such outcomes, Blowfish it is. Airport security is an interactional public space where hierarchies of power are pre-established and openly stated and performed, which limits the control that can be exerted by any “civilian” passing through it. It is not a free space as we usually think of as existing in the public sphere.6 As Shannon demonstrates, however, he does have agency. As an expert staree, he uses a multifaceted visual strategy to guide how his person, including his accompanying tools, are interpreted, and thus to secure in the short term the greatest available freedom to address physical barriers and challenges and pain management in the ways most helpful to him. I will now move to examining another more complex strategy, whose aim is not short-term management but long-term change: Shannon’s video interventions, available via the online posting of his 2007 Poptech presentation. These video interventions, available for multiple viewings

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and longer contemplation, offer greater opportunities to create long-term change. This works not through a smoothing of the waters, as Blowfish and Mobility System William Shannon do, above, but by engaging in what Marilyn Cooper calls a “dance of perturbation and response” via street performance, then using video’s capacity for layering and regression to further guide interpretation and make learning possible not through confrontation but through seeing-with, fully exploiting staring’s opportunities to know and be known.

Part II: Redirecting the Stare, Teaching to See: Shannon’s Poptech and/as Video Intervention In 2007, Bill Shannon was a featured presenter at Poptech, an “ideas” conference/festival held annually for the past two decades in Camden, Maine that Wired calls “the TED for real thinkers” (Capps 2013).7 In his 20 minute Poptech presentation, now infinitely available via internet video “popcast,” Shannon discusses an interventionist street performance series in which he recreates ordinary daily actions in public space.8 Before beginning, he introduces the audience to his “four-legged style” (using both crutches and his feet) and provides what we might think of as his “crip credentials.” Here he addresses the question he expects is on people’s minds: if he does in some way make use of his legs, that must mean he doesn’t really “need” crutches, right? Shannon calls his ensuing explication of his degenerative hip deformity a “medical validation,” the type of explanation without which, he tells the audience, he’s sure they won’t be able to listen to anything else he says. Shannon is with Lennard Davis, here, who states that “the disabled body must be explained,” and that “the question never has to be put because it is always actively in a default mode—it is always already asked” (1995, xvi). “The question,” the one which causes observers to stare, takes over the mind until curiosity is satisfied, and because of the in/visibility of his disability, Shannon knows they will not figure it out for themselves. Before leaving the question of “what’s wrong with him,” Shannon also notes that a typical medical model approach to such a condition would replace his hip joints surgically, but that such intervention would last only ten years at best; he chooses instead a social model, finding the tools and movement strategies that best suit his needs in addressing the barriers that disable him. His strategy, he explains, is to spread out the load that his hips will bear over the course of a day by using rocker-bottom crutches to share the weight otherwise borne by his legs alone, and to supplement this with a skateboard when he needs to travel distances over the length of a city block. He stresses too, the

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difficulty of living with the two predominant (and conflicting) responses to his in/visible appearance, abject pity and accusations of faking, and reveals that his handling of such treatment over the years has gone from angry and confrontational to a repertoire of the analytical, theatrical, playful, and subversive as he has grown more secure in his place in the world.9 This process is that of becoming an expert staree, where, as Shannon puts it, “I am no longer subject; I am host” (2007, 5:12). Shannon also takes the time to give a brief lesson in “Shannon Technique,” which is a set of standardized moves and positions he has developed and codified for functional management of the crutches he uses as mobility aides. These are positions and transitional moves which, as he demonstrates, allow him a fuller range of mobility—from aerial dance moves and poses to floor work—than standard “crutch position,” and which he insists, once they are broken down and explained, can be learned by anyone. Of course, he adds with a flourish and a smile, when it comes to performance, you also have to have style. The rest of the presentation he devotes to analyzing video footage of a set of street performances collectively called “Regarding the Fall” carried out in Novgorod, Russia, in 1998, in which he recreated mundane aspects of his daily life in public spaces in order to engage passers-by in spontaneous interventions and to document their responses. “Over time, cumulatively, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, every simple utilitarian task in public is turned into this spectacle where someone is freezing and staring at you,” Shannon tells his Poptech audience. “Think about it…. Imagine going through that every day” (2007, 14:01-14:37). Shannon has elsewhere described as “condition arriving” the totalizing moment when a viewer simultaneously notices his presence and stops seeing him as a person, focusing solely on what they see as his deviance (his “condition,” though they do not know what that is). These “Regarding the Fall” performances of simple utilitarian tasks, like picking up a bottle after putting it down, or even sliding down a stair rail, he explains, are intended to disrupt the projected narratives of starers who see his very appearance in public, never mind his ways of doing things, as heroic or bizarre, and to normalize those acts for his starers through repetition. Shannon now enters streetscapes with the full intent of drawing the othering stare (which, of course, will come anyway), and then turns to video analysis to disrupt this in/visibility beyond the initial moment. If the original performance (featuring performer and chance “audience”) is his dance of perturbation and response, the video-based lesson provides the greater ripple effect.

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The two performed sequences he shows on video at the Poptech gathering are of the very ordinary act of picking up a drink that has been set down on the ground, and of him practicing sliding down a stair rail in a public area. The latter he uses to introduce briefly his “skater ethos” (approaching architecture and streetscape as interactive play space) and to point out how the presence of crutches in the scene takes over in the minds of onlookers, such that when he falls, they will think he is in trouble, whereas if he were just working with a skateboard, their response would not be as predictably strong. Showing a few seconds of video multiple times both at regular and slow speed, he encourages the audience to watch how a passer-by’s attitude first reflects this typical “oh, no” (cripple in trouble) response, then changes to “this guy is having too much fun” when he sees Shannon repeat the attempt, and realizes the act is not disaster but play, crutches notwithstanding. By calling attention to this shift in the onlooker’s exhibited response, Shannon exposes the onlooker’s learning, turning him into the one to be stared at, making it safe for us to look until we can take this act of learning as our model, learning ourselves both to see how the exchange has taken shape and to see how we could see a figure like Shannon in public space differently. Video, then, has become a tool to turn a limited lesson for one (the single, chance onlooker in the Novgorod stairwell who momentarily appears to catch on) into a lesson for many (the Poptech audience), now fully explained and illustrated and presented (and represented) at a slower-than-live speed that allows for thinking and processing. The implication, of course, is that audience members should begin to change their habits of seeing and looking; in this he is using video in service of the very kind of training Montgomery has said most of us lack when encountering in/visible disability. The addition of the next video layer—the production and internet posting of the “popcast”—further capitalizes on the ability of the spectator “to vary the temporality of film between movement and stillness” (Mulvey 2004, 145)—by, say, clicking YouTube’s pause button—so that now a potentially infinite number of viewers can study this lesson at their own pace, as many times as they wish. It is worth stopping to think a minute about this regression of images and acts of seeing here. If we access the popcast video on the Internet, as I did to write about it for this chapter, then we are watching a video in which a studio audience is watching Bill Shannon, explicator, showing an inset video in which Bill Shannon, performer, deliberately draws the stares of those watching him in the street. The concentric layers of action, reaction, recording, dissemination, analysis, and response, do begin to seem like ripples (see Fig. 6-3).

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Fig. 6-3.

Shannon reinforces his first Poptech lesson with his second video example of deliberately drawing the stare in Novgorod, in which he is observed by a “Russian babushka” (grandmother) while picking up a bottle set on the ground. This performance was imagined and staged intending to draw as little attention as possible. Shannon explains that on this day he carefully controlled for other potentially eye-catching variables. He performs no tricks, no dance or skater moves (examples of which he briefly shows in clips of a music video he was featured in), but only the most ordinary of acts, and he dresses in the same ordinary gray clothing worn by local youth. He is, to use Harvey Sacks’s term, “doing being ordinary” (1984), with only one small exception: the way in which, as a crutch user, he completes the ordinary task of picking up a drink. It is this maneuver, routine for Shannon but not commonplace, which will introduce such a perturbation in the scene and draw a stare so intense that it nearly sends a babushka careening down a set of steep stone steps. Having given a primer on Shannon Technique, Shannon as Poptech host can break down his maneuver to pick up the bottle, describing himself to his studio audience as being in a “high-mid/low mid split” position to make it easier to stay balanced while getting low to the ground. He will also at one point use his mouth to hold the bottle, he warns the audience, and points out that while someone who has broken their leg and is using

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crutches may not think they can carry anything, for him this “[comes] from my childhood, [comes] from play”; persons with childhood-onset or long-term disability frequently use their mouths to carry objects short distances, as well as developing vast repertoires of other adaptive moves he says collectively represent “disability-based utilitarianism” (2007, 15:04)10 In the video, we see an elderly woman stop to watch Shannon’s effort, or what she perceives as effort, and Shannon the Poptech host uses his cursor while slowing the play of the video down to make sure that viewers notice how she gestures repeatedly with her purse as if rooting for him to “get it! Get the bottle!” His point is that the way she interprets his physicality, she does not expect him to be able to complete the task, yet sees him trying, and is caught in the “drama” because success and failure, in her mind, hang in the balance. She has created a “projected narrative” about Shannon and his act (his narrative: just me, mundane, utilitarian; her narrative: brave cripple, amazing, attempting the impossible!), which causes her to stop and stare, and become wholly physically involved in the act of looking, to the point that she is no longer fully aware of her own movements and nearly falls down the stone steps before her. In Shannon’s terms, she has succumbed to the “fate of distraction,” which he further illustrates verbally by describing people back home who see him skateboarding with crutches in traffic and become so mesmerized that they run into the person in front of them (ibid, 15:37-15:47). Garland-Thomson calls this kind of flagrant staring “baroque staring,” describing it as a state of total, exhilarated fascination coupled with a “renunciation of agency” (no chance the starer will even try to stop themselves) and lacking the quality of knowledge-seeking present in curious staring or scientific/ medical staring (2009, 50). As Shannon demonstrates, such open-mouthed, baroque staring can be not only disturbing to the staree, but also hazardous to the health of the starer! By appearing both in public and to his video audiences, Shannon interferes in the future production of such hazards, simply because seeing a crutch user pick up a bottle, or use a skateboard, will no longer be utterly novel. For the studio and video audiences, who also have the benefit of Shannon’s narration, it is not just the sight of it that is no longer new, but also the thought of it, because he allows us time to understand it. Picking up a bottle presents no barrier to him. Worrying that the old lady will come to harm because of her staring… that is the “problem” in the situation. Finally, to make visible the type of curious starers who remain cognizant of staring’s supposed prohibition but stare anyway, thinking they won’t get caught, Shannon switches to another shot of the same performance, from a different camera’s angle. Shannon (the host)

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momentarily freezes the film. Shannon (in the street) is shown in profile in the foreground drinking from the now-”rescued” bottle, and two additional onlookers to his left are in the background, clearly staring at him. Using the cursor to make sure we are watching the starers not the performer, our host lets the film roll. As soon as Shannon with the bottle begins to turn toward them, the starers look away. This moment demonstrates Garland-Thomson’s observation concerning social prohibitions against staring and the resultant furtivity of most (nonbaroque) staring, to be sure, but here Shannon uses it to make the further point that starers who look away are not hiding their acts of staring. The camera, he explains, is helping us as viewers see what he is aware of every day: heads turning in his peripheral vision. He describes how he is sensitive to “peripheral fluctuation” that is, he is aware when heads turn as people turn and stare at him, and likewise aware when they look away, pretending not to have been looking at all.11 Here again, all the ease with which the display of video can be controlled contributes to the audience experience: with his cursor on his own screen, Shannon makes sure viewers in the studio audience can see on the larger projection screen (and we at home see on our own screens) how one man in particular stares just until Shannon (the performer) begins to turn his head, then looks away (Fig. 6-4). 12 Fig. 6-4.

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Through analyzing this popcast, we see how Shannon is a clear example of a visually anomalous person who has become an expert staree, one who moves from the position of object to taking charge of and hosting the staring relationship. His practice of strategic engagement begins when he enters public space, deliberately drawing the stare from a live, “accidental” audience in the street. His disability activist goal for that audience, we might say, is primarily one of dissonance reduction. Novelty is fragile. The more we see something, the less odd it seems. By simply being available to be seen, he is changing the visual landscape and the repository of visual experiences each interlocutor will have to draw on in the future. He is a generous host in these performances in that he engages these starers in no overt confrontation, but only makes use of what they provide in this dynamic, interpersonal and never wholly predictable exchange by collecting it, via video, for use in another context. The next layer of his expert strategy is then to record the staring relationship as it develops spontaneously around his street performance (a mimetic representation of his ordinary presence), in order to use it as a teaching tool. He then presents an analysis of the video recordings for a subsequent, more self-selecting audience whom he makes temporarily authorized starers. Here again, he is both an expert witness and a generous host, in that he again reduces dissonance, also reduces for a time the tension inherent in the conflict between the urge to and the prohibition against staring, and combines these visual and emotional experiences with insight into the social and psychological consequences acts of staring have for starees. Shannon is holding up what Leslie Frye calls a wise mirror (Frye and Shannon 2013) for audience members, asking them to think about how they currently respond, or could. He thus renders this audience potentially less likely to stare, and in the process also protects them somewhat from the likelihood that they might be confronted in the future for staring. Then, through still more layers of recording, editing, and publication via the popcast on the web, he creates the potential to engage an unlimited number of additional viewers. Guiding their gaze away from his own image, Shannon stares at the starers, and points, too. This, he says, this is what is odd in this picture that we need time to make sense of. Making others’ attitudes the oddity, he reinforces a social model perspective. The ultimate goal for all of these video-mediated layers of visual engagement is that audience members begin to recognize and take their turn in questioning the ecologies of seeing that shape our ideas and responses to dis/abled persons. Seeing of course isn’t a neutral act; John Berger (echoing Walter Benjamin) declares quite bluntly that what we see

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is conditioned by what we know and what we believe (Berger 2003, 8), and Harvey Sacks points out that viewers’ distinct and frequently conflicting understandings of what they believe they have simply “seen” demonstrate the differential organizing of the sheer perceiving of any event and underscore the “ideological foundations of perception” (Sacks 1984, 421). Shannon is precisely laying this bare in order to let us know both what is at stake and that we have the capacity to change the situation and its outcomes. He is encouraging us to address these ideologies, to reshape our practices of seeing and looking, and to understand that it takes bearing witness to many different moments with new intention to begin to learn to “see whole,” that is, to see past a tool or an anomalous shape or maneuver to the whole person. Such seeing whole, in turn, reduces the othering and suspicion now experienced daily by the oddbodied, and moves us, at least a little way, from a context of “norms and deviance” toward one of human variety and shared human connection.

Part III – Cunningham vs. Garfield: Montage as Narrative, but of What and of Whom? In this final section, I will examine the visual rhetorics and engagements of the stare in two other short videos featuring Bill Shannon. Both use the art of montage to tell a “story” about this fascinating figure. One, I will argue, encourages both wonder and seeing whole, the other a wonder that is detached, isolating and, while perhaps escaping the realm of pity, still leaves (as I will show) the door open for distrust, and bolsters, rather than questions, othering practices of staring. “CRUTCH!” is a 4-minute teaser for a biographical “documentary-inprogress” about Bill Shannon, directed by Sachi Cunningham and produced by Chandler Evans, available on YouTube. Here we will be introduced to the mobility artistry and performance of Shannon, exhibiting moves that are both distinctive and evoke recognizable cultural forms like break dancing or hip-hop, skateboarding and skater tricks, acrobatics and the pommel horse from gymnastics, with the occasional Fred Astaire moment thrown in. Elsewhere, Shannon has described his dancing and choreography as aiming to merge the Shannon Technique (his set of moves, positions, and weight-distributions vis-à-vis his crutches) with “freestyle street dancing, skateboarding and silent film poetics” (Cirque du Soleil 2011). We will see all of this here. “CRUTCH” begins with a black and white archival sequence, likely drawn from the “Regarding the Fall” performance series, in which a man (Shannon), using “typical” older-style single-point wooden crutches (and

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not his now-customary aluminum or chrome, rocker-bottom crutches) falls, or perhaps deliberately drops in the street into a pile of garbage. The film also shows the responses of bystanders, who are clearly shocked and move to help up the “poor cripple” they assume has fallen. In a particularly revealing moment, one helper, as he steps away afterward, crosses himself, as if to ward off the contagion or evil spirit causing the “cripple”’s condition.13 He believes himself out of Shannon’s field of vision, but he is not out of the camera’s, and this double perspective is an effective mini-introduction to the use of video to capture responses to disability in public (here: helpfulness, but colored with pity and aversion). Interrupting between the two black and white shots, one of the “cripple” falling, and the other of the men helping (and crossing themselves), are two title slides, the text of which is in a simple serif font, white letters on a black background (Fig. 6-5). The first reads: Bill Shannon has a bilateral hip deformity.

The second reads: A result of Legg Calvé Perthes, a disease which affects 1 in 1200 children.

This is the same act of “medical validation,” the same “crip credentialing” Shannon himself undertook in his Poptech talk, and like Shannon’s validation, Cunningham offers it very early, presumably again to fend off distrust or confusion that would otherwise overshadow a viewer’s ability to take in the rest of the video. The language includes the effect of the condition (a bi-lateral hip deformity, presumably explaining the use of crutches) and the medical diagnostic term, Legg Calvé Perthes, unfamiliar and drawing on the “authenticity” of medical discourse to “authenticate” Shannon’s status as disabled.

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Fig. 6-5.

Because of the way the montage is sequenced, here is its rough narrative effect: 1. There’s a man with crutches who fell (did he fall on purpose? No, surely…) 2. (Okay, I’m assuming “Bill Shannon” with the bilateral hip deformity this text is talking about is who I just saw with the crutches) 3. Okay, that’s a rare-ish childhood disease 4. People help him – they are glad they are not like him and want to keep it that way. Poor guy. 5. Title slide: CRUTCH (in purple, block capital letters – first color we’ve seen) 6. …But now the music rises and the film is in color and a hooded figure with rocker-bottom crutches dance-glides rhythmically toward the camera, then the video cuts to him still on rockerbottom crutches picking a bottle up with his feet, more gliding, then to playing his crutch like a guitar, then crutch-spinning down a flight of stairs, trying to slide down the rail (didn’t quite – fell), then dancing, acrobatic spinning, match cut to spinning while on a

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skateboard moving through traffic with headphones on, then trying the rail again and succeeding… (and all that only takes us to the end of the video’s first minute). What I’ve called Step 6 (which involves multiple very short shots edited in quick succession) allows us to read back to where the film began and see that no, this “Bill Shannon” was no one to be pitied, no one we wouldn’t want to be like. This guy is a dancer, an acrobat, daring (in traffic), self-assured (skating in traffic wearing headphones) and somewhat of a trickster too (bet he really did fall on purpose at the beginning). Fig. 6-6.

Regarding the Fall

Staged and real falling

These interpretations are only strengthened with the repeated viewings that web-enabled video posts allow.14 This person is someone to be reckoned with. Many, many additional clips make up the rest of the 4minute run time – too many to catalogue here. A few are particularly notable among them, though. Cunningham includes commentary from Shannon (partially speaking on camera, partially in voice-over) about how other people’s pity wears him down:

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Just take for example, how many people will say sorry to me in one day. Just imagine everywhere you go people say Sorry. SORRY. SORRY. Oh, I’m sorry. Sorry. After a while, that really starts to affect you. (1:33-1:41).

Shannon also describes (over clips of him skateboarding with crutches in the streets, weaving among cars and pedestrians, and even catching a boost by grabbing the rear wheel well of a moving taxi) how getting around, for him, is about relating to an urban environment as a skateboarder who also breakdances. “You’re relating to your environment on an improvisational free-style basis,” he explains in the voice-over; it’s “all about building your own path.” These appear to be thoughts applicable to the innovative Shannon style we see in every clip in Cunningham’s video, a style in step with the accompanying hip-hop & rap soundtrack featuring Diggable Planets, Blackalicious, Freestyle Fellowship, and Talib Kweli. Shannon mentions too how much of what he does he simply developed as a child trying to figure out how to do things with crutches; this is said over a clip of using his feet to place a suitcase on his skateboard then skating away with it (which we can recognize as a glimpse of disability-based utilitarianism). Another “interview” in the mix is with a dreadlocked, popping (dancing) Rennie Harris, director and choreographer (a caption tells viewers) of the Pure Movement Dance Company, who give “Mad props to Bill Shannon, a.k.a. ‘the Crutch!’.” Then, as the closing credits roll, we see Shannon (not for the first time) dancing on what is obviously a professional theatre stage. These additions (among all the rest) confirm the notion that pity is an inappropriate and damaging attitude to bring to encounters with the disabled; that Shannon has a philosophy of movement inspired by skateboarding and breakdancing (and that he is also apparently quite adept at staying alive while travelling in traffic); that he is part of a professional dance community where he has earned respect as an artist; and that he is also performer. That’s quite a bit in four minutes. We’ve also seen him as a worker and learner, practicing moves (like sliding down the stair rail) he doesn’t achieve immediately or every time, but that with time he gets better at. This is a full life, or at least a glimpse of many facets of it, and an entreaty to his audience to take it all in, to be open to understanding it through a different approach and ideology about what using crutches, having a hip deformity, or a childhood condition mean for the life that is lived. To see whole is to upend our ideologies, to see a learner whose successes are earned, and whose failures are temporary. It is to see a talented dancer who is also a professional; the stage lighting suggests the theatre clips are likely from paid performances, therefore we are not looking at an oddity/charity case. To see whole is also to go beyond sight: it is to hear the words and respect in the voices of

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other, apparently “able-bodied” dance professionals, suggesting Shannon is neither isolated nor siloed as a “disabled dancer.” It is to hear that he is aware that others pity him, and wishes peoples attitudes were different, because their constant need to speak their misplaced pity exhausts him. It is to hear the rhythmic hip-hop soundtrack that so easily syncs with his living. Seeing whole means using all of our senses, and being willing to have our imaginations expanded through these new perceptions. To see whole is to embrace what we stare at as an opportunity to know different. * The final video I wish to examine is a 2009 Visa credit card commercial, made for the European market by Saatchi & Saatchi London as the second of three television ads for the “Life flows better with Visa” campaign.15 It is directed by Joey Garfield, who directed Shannon in the RJD2 music video that Shannon briefly shows in his Poptech presentation.16 My thinking on this piece continues to evolve. Garfield, too, puts Shannon in the spotlight as an extraordinary figure who will draw stares. In this “picture,” we will see no hint of anyone’s pity; we will be encouraged only to admire the spectacle from a safe distance. What I will argue, though, is uninformed admiration has its limitations, for Shannon, for the disability community, and for viewers. There is little opportunity here to expand or challenge our ecologies of seeing because we are encouraged to see Shannon as exceptional and thus as the exception. The ad features all of what Shannon has elsewhere referred to as his “amazing eye candy and trick moves,” inviting a pleasurable watching and using rapidity of movement to keep us watching rather than staring fixedly (that is, we cannot fully achieve the hierarchy of the standard staring relationship because he cannot be “fixed” in our stare; he is too much in motion). It’s this dancing, gliding figure, flying through a charmed life, making, as Paul Silburn, Creative Director at the Saatchi & Saatchi London says, “a mundane shopping trip into something a lot more magical and a really good expression of flow, which obviously is the whole point of the Visa campaign” (“Making of”). So it’s magical; it flows. It also serves the interests of the promotion of capitalism and consumption, more, I will argue, than it disrupts ableism, despite its featuring a disabled artist at the height of his powers. To the strains of “Come On Train” by Don Thomas, Shannon, using his customary rocker-bottom crutches, rises from a bench where he sits alone. He glides and spins along a sidewalk, down a flight of steps, and through crowds. In moments of still pose, he deploys a conspicuous credit card bearing the Visa logo, which facilitates his quaffing a quick espresso at one kiosk, donning a new hat and admiring his own reflection at

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another, picking up a new jacket, and exiting a sports store as fast as he entered it but now with a new skateboard, on which he slaloms, pumping rhythmically with his crutches in time to the music, through the city streets and off into the distance.17 “Life flows better with Visa,” we are told through a curling script unfolding over the final frames, and Shannon’s unbroken movement in the spot’s longest and final shot appears to underscore this beautifully18. Knowing and loving the overt activism of the other two videos, I resisted this one at first. Here he comes and there he goes, I thought sarcastically, never actually touching or speaking to anyone but flying through on his magical conveyance. What we know, if we are honest, is that life doesn’t “flow” - at least not all the time. In the Cunningham compilation, we are directed to see moments of flow alongside moments of accident and disruption, where sometimes there’s pain, where sometimes you fly, but sometimes you fall. Cunningham’s and Shannon’s Poptech videos both succeed in giving us filmic constructions of this particular person as both extraordinary (a great dancer/skater) and simply ordinary, “mundane,” to apply Shannon’s term. Cunningham’s video lets us identify in a more real way with Shannon. Who of us, at least among the ambulatory, hasn’t tripped? Who has perfected a skateboard trick, or any other new skill, on the first try every time? Yet who of us doesn’t want also to be able to demonstrate the things we do well that are uniquely ours? Shannon’s Poptech presentation, for its part, uses staring’s practices of rendering conspicuous by staring back not at the starers but at their captured stares – not shaming the staring persons, but exposing the practices, and disrupting the projected narratives in favor of something more real. The first two videos were clearer to me in their methods and purposes, taking advantage of staring’s presenting what Garland-Thomson identified as an opportunity to be known. “Visa Flow,” by contrast, encourages a spectatorship of the unreal, while masquerading as the real. The framing of certain shots underscores this, as when Shannon glides down a banister with his crutches held up, figured as wings. We know from Shannon’s own commentary that longer continuous shots in Garfield’s earlier RJD2 music video, took 16 takes to get “right” (Shannon 2013; 2007), and that to recreate the espresso pause/pose from the “Visa Flow” ad in the streets of New York took Shannon 12 attempts (Jynx 2010). The flow, then, as seen in Garfield’s “Visa Flow” ad, is an artificial construction masking the reality of its production. It is, indeed, “movie magic,” in that even if the moves captured on film are all real, the effect of the montage created by careful editing is not.

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Fig 6-7.

Hold on, though, a viewer might say. As Tim Nudd writes in a 2009 blog for AdWeek magazine, “it's still nice to see Shannon getting a wider audience through advertising.” It’s possible to argue that Garfield’s directing, despite its portrayal of disability as exceptionalism, the “supercrip” flying through life without borders or barriers of attitude or physical pain or awkwardness, is interventionist on some level simply by virtue of featuring an artist like Shannon at the peak of his performance. On some level, we might argue, then, that all three videos, Cunningham’s “CRUTCH”, Shannon’s Poptech, and Garfield’s “Visa Flow,” share the interventionist practice of making visible anomalous figures in public spaces. The more that’s done, the less unusual they will seem, and the less our brains will need to use staring as a tool for processing what we see, making use of what Robert Zajonc first dubbed the “mere exposure effect” (Zajonc 1968; 2001). Zajonc’s work (building on that of Maslow and others before him) hypothesized that “mere repeated exposure of the individual to a stimulus is a sufficient condition for the enhancement of his attitude toward it” (1968, 1), or, as Garland-Thomson puts it, “we must encounter something foreign regularly to make it native” (2009, 50). Garfield’s video stops there, but perhaps as part of the array of options,

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that’s enough: to offer “mere exposure” as a contribution toward normalizing a wider array of embodiments and ways of interacting in and moving through space, or to encourage a perspective on anomalous physicality Harriet McBryde Johnson calls “rare beauty” (GarlandThomson 2009, 188). Perhaps idealized depictions are preferable to complete social erasure, and being seen as a treasure preferable to being seen as a “poor noble sufferer,” a threat, a curse or a waste, or not seen at all. Or perhaps not. It’s not that simple. How many times must we just be “grateful to be included at all”? The entire advertisement—and let’s not forget this is an advertisement—is structured around the image of the supercripple. That is, it is rooted in an imagined but persistent idea of super-enabled individuality that denies and impedes the political community crucial to acting for and making change. 19 It partakes of a long history of disability exceptionalism that creates no opportunities for others, precluding those opportunities by setting up unrealistic expectations by which the general population of the disabled are found wanting. Suppercripple narratives may be “true stories,” Tom Couser allows, “but they are not truly representative lives” (2001, 80). Couser goes on to attest to effects like those I see with Garfield’s video: “this rhetoric tends to remove the stigma of disability from the [person in focus], leaving it in place for other individuals with the condition in question” (ibid).20 Many more writers have likewise discussed the perils of exceptionalism in clear theoretical terms, but I want to turn attention to the practical, habitual incorporation of anti-exceptionalism into Shannon’s public self-presentation in order to demonstrate further why the Visa portrait seems inappropriate; why to see him in Garfield’s Visa Ad is not to “see whole.” Rendering identification virtually impossible is a hallmark of the supercrip image as deployed in popular culture. Shannon’s public selfpresentation, however, includes a habitual dimension of antiexceptionalism and community-building. While Shannon is proud of his personal abilities as a four-legged dancer and skateboarder, and also as an innovative conceptual artist, we can know immediately that he rejects his own casting as a singular phenomenon, at least where his mobility artistry is concerned, by considering the “Shannon Technique.” By isolating and explaining the various positions and moves involved, and grouping them as a whole into a set or technique he names “The Shannon Technique,” Shannon makes the case for what he does as a teachable set of skills for use with particular technologies (crutches) – no

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different than teaching someone how to be a touch-typist or how to drive a car. Shannon extends offers to learn the Technique through professional choreography work, such as with Cirque du Soleil21, but also in the making and distribution of accessible public videos (Shannon 2008), through instructional websites (Shannon 2003c), and the frequency with which he raises the subject in interviews and other venues (e.g. “Making of” 2009; the “Condition Arriving” video lecture, or dance workshops conducted by Shannon designed for adults with physical disabilities). Shannon’s promotional statements about the Technique foster circles of community by encouraging both identification and individuation. Each mention of Shannon Technique in any setting typically includes at least two if not all three of the following elements: x an encouraging statement that “anyone can learn” the basic positions and movements of the Shannon technique, to which he often adds that rocker bottom crutches are not necessary, that he developed many of these strategies on regular, single-point crutches long before obtaining rocker-bottomed ones; x a descriptive verbal and visual vocabulary of poses and movements, including not just how-tos (how to position hands, legs, where weight is borne/distributed) but why-you-would-wantthis (for example, the low mid position or a high-mid/low-mid split make it easier to reach something on the floor) x a stress on how each crutch dancer will develop their own unique movement style, that his base technique is simply root positions and moves, tips for balance and weight distribution on crutches that may help speed another’s entry into their own artistic movement space The five-minute “Making of” video released by the Saatchi team after the rollout of the Shannon Visa Flow ad is an interesting case in point, as one of the places where Shannon promotes this shareable skill set. One can imagine Shannon, being asked what he would like to say to the home audience who will see the commercial, choosing to “speak back,” albeit indirectly, to the ad’s isolating rhetoric of exceptionalism, because here is what he says: Shannon technique is by definition the root set of movements that all of the dancing branches from. Everyone can learn those root positions and then create their own dancing that’s theirs; you know what I’m saying? It’s not my choreography; they just use my technique of the body in relation to the crutch, and weight distribution, to allow themselves to express it as a dance. (“Making of” 2009)

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We already know that isolation and exceptionalism are in direct contrast to what we see in the other two video depictions I’ve examined. The motto of the Poptech lecture series is to “[bring] together the world’s leading thinkers to share inspiration and ideas, igniting change and unlocking human potential” (Shannon 2007). In other words, the whole point is to teach people things they in turn can use, whether it’s having a better way of interacting with a person with a disability (not saying “sorry” all the time, not treating them with condescending amazement when they do mundane things), or learning to dance on crutches. Garfield as director and the Saatchi advertising team do not seem to realize that they could have done both, showcased Shannon’s talent and let him be real to his audience. Supercripple images of disability, Tobin Siebers has argued, are created for the benefit not of the disabled hero or spectator but of the ablebodied audience, who are reassured that ability trumps disability (2004, 13). As Rosemarie Garland Thompson describes it, the supercrip figure “amazes and inspires the viewer by performing feats that the nondisabled viewer cannot imagine doing” (2002, 60-61). Certainly some online commenters responding to the Garfield’s “Flow” ad seem to exhibit this perspective, calling Shannon “superiorly abled” (Gleeson 2011), asking “could you really call him disabled [because] he can do things I can't and i'm [sic] an able bodied person” (Lennox 2011) or even “I wish my legs where [sic] broken and I could do this” (MrDon 2010). Advertising professor Brian Sheehan makes similar comments. “His movements glide effortlessly and are a joy to watch,” Sheehan claims; “there is not a hint of disability, but rather a feeling that his crutches enable him to do amazing things others cannot do” (2013, 145). There is no pain, in these viewers’ eyes, and no problem; Shannon is not disabled, either by his body’s condition (the traditional medical model, which would involve pain) or by social barriers (the social model, which would involve ostracism, inaccessible structures and negative or dismissive attitudes) – in fact, he 22 has it better than the average person. These responses suggest that what we are offered here is only enviable magic, with no suggestion of concomitant work (Sheehan says what Shannon does is “effortless”) or struggle. The able-bodied spectator of Shannon’s “Visa Flow” is relieved of responsibility to confront either suffering or pain, or their own complicity in them, and the disabled viewer is, at the same time, rendered by this exceptionalism unable to find here full identification (unless they have already learned to dance & skate like Shannon) or any suggestion that social involvement is possible. There are two further factors that underscore how Garfield (and his Saatchi & Visa Europe bosses) isolated the supercrip by design. First off,

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although in all three ads of the original “Flow” series, there is a singledout individual featured, the others join communities by the end of their respective spots: “Running (naked) Man” arrives at a church filled with his friends and family and gets married (Visa “Running Man” 2008); “Couch Potato” joins the winning World Cup soccer team and engages in a group victory dance (“Visa Europe Ad: Football Evolution” 2009). Shannon, however, remains isolated, skating off through a crowd that parts around him, avoiding contact, keeping him distinctive, but alone. Second, it cannot be convincingly argued that the Shannon spot was simply assembled from available shots; not only is community not featured in the final cut of the Visa Flow ad (any of the three versions), but it has been actively eliminated. In the five-minute “Making of Visa’s new Flow Ad starring Bill Shannon” video also posted on YouTube by nivamc (as was the 60-second version of the ad), we see cameras filming (and the video filmed of) a sequence in which Shannon is dining in an open-air café with several friends, then pays with his trusty credit card before “flowing off” to other parts of his day (see Fig. 6-8). Fig. 6-8.

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In The Rhetoric of Film, John Harrington argues that while prose can often express ideas through abstraction, film as a visual medium relies on “statements” that can be seen (1973, 23), and which are often conveyed primarily through the practice of montage, “a rhetorical method of juxtaposing and arranging shots to produce an idea” (ibid, 24). I have relied on this argument, of course, in all of my analysis of “CRUTCH” and “Visa Flow” so far, but it is worth calling attention to here, because of what could have been accomplished by including a mere second or two of cut scenes. The dining-with-friends montage seen in the “Making of” video, or even any of the individual shots therein, could have conveyed Shannon’s social connections in the Flow advertisement, but although multiple shots were filmed, all were cut from the final narratives. Thus the idea of Shannon as having any community at all remains wholly absent, his only “communication” with others through the passing of the money symbol (the credit card), an exaggerated stage yawn Shannon aims at those waiting in line for a bank machine instead of flowing from purchase to purchase with their own cards, and the widening of the space around him in the crane shot with which the ad ends as people actively move away from him. All is separateness, and that is by the director’s choice, interested in “flow” but not attentive to the rhetorical message conveyed about Shannon’s supposedly “ordinary day.” Available writings about this ad emanating from the advertising world all demonstrate a failure to conceive of actual daily life with a disability. Saatchi & Saatchi’s press release, for example, says that the ad “captures an average day in the life of a unique man as he flows through his shopping trip using his Visa card for all kinds of purchases” (“New Visa Campaign” 2009). That Shannon is “unique” is unquestionable; his talents and creativity are not in dispute. That what we see in this commercial is an “average” day for him, however, is ridiculous for several reasons. First, there is an assumption that there is money to pay for all the things the Visa card lets him glide away with. A credit card offers a deferral of payment (for those who have been deemed ahead of time to have sufficient means, at least), but it does not excuse it. And second, an average day out and about includes minor mishaps, includes rest, and, I’ll wager, includes actual interactions with others. In Loveworks, a book on “building emotional connections” between audiences and brands through advertising, former ad executive turned advertising professor Brian Sheehan inadvertently provides more non-disability-literacy examples. He says of Shannon: Watching him coast through the crowd at the end of the commercial with skateboard and crutches in balletic synchronization provided the

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Sheehan later adds a quotation from Visa Europe’s Mariano Dima who sums up the Flow campaign using another phrase that will set off alarms for disability scholars and activists. According to Dima, the Flow campaign “showed how Visa can help people overcome barriers and get one step closer to making their dreams a reality, whatever they may be” (ibid, 148). Visa removes obstacles, you say? Visa helps people overcome barriers, you say? Not the significant social and environmental obstacles and barriers faced every day by the disabled. The brand and the card do not in and of themselves do anything of the kind. Of course a livable income would remove obstacles, as it is well documented that socioeconomic class plays a huge role in the wellbeing or lack thereof of disabled persons. As I have already pointed out, however, Visa cards are not a source of income, no matter how much the company wishes you to act like they are. Viewer Steffen Schürger makes a similar observation in the comment stream of the 60-second version, asking, “Is life for anyone on crutches or in a wheelchair easier/more comfortable just because he has a plastic card in his wallet????? Probably not.” [Ist das Leben für jemanden der auf Krücken oder einen Rollstuhl angenehmer nur weil er ne Plastikkarte im Portmonaie hat????? Wohl nicht.] So what are the “barriers” being removed for this person? Not the attitudes of staring, not physical obstacles like the garbage bags piled along the sidewalk that Shannon must get around or over (as seen in the 1:22 version of the ad at 0:570:58). The only “easing” depicted is the amount of time it takes to buy things (with money of unknown origin) through the use of the branded and technologized card (which not everyone qualifies for, the disabled statistically least of all, since their incomes are statistically well below average). Among Shannon’s purchases, we might argue that the skateboard he purchases offers a hint of actual real accommodation, because we can see (and those of us who know Shannon’s broader work know) that that one acquisition, at least, does literally speed his journey, although that it is his preferred mobility and pain management tool is not apparent in the ad itself, which simply uses the boardwork as another way for Shannon to display what he often refers to as his “eye candy” moves. Even this minor easing, then, remains at best highly ambiguous. If Visa Flow is supposed to be doing well for itself by doing good for persons with disabilities, I’ll argue that it needs to go beyond simply exploiting Shannon’s remarkable image to helping us see him either in

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community, or at least as a more nuanced, whole person. Persons with disabilities are already at greater risk than the general population of social and political isolation, and by regarding (literally looking upon) the cyborg body (Haraway’s term, and apt perhaps for a human-skateboard-rockerbottom-crutch figure) as conveying “marvelous advantage” (Siebers 2006, 178) to a separated individual, we deny work, talent, and pain, and in doing so, “[make others’] stories of suffering and victimization both politically impotent and difficult to believe” (ibid), and encourage ablebodied onlookers not to engage the disabled in conversation or community because they seem fine (or better than fine) all alone.

Still/Moving Images and the Question of the Real Up to this point, this chapter has not addressed a fairly fundamental question about video and what we think we see when we look at it. That is the question of the “real,” and I will attempt now to show where it comes into particular play in how we think about the Garfield “Visa Flow” ad. When it comes to recorded images, be they still photographs or motion pictures, our interpretive approach tends to be framed by one of two very different sets of conventions, one based on an assumption of the image(s) to be mechanical representations of the real, one based on an assumption of the unreal, the manipulated, the constructed. Reading Garfield’s advertisement through either lens is problematic from a disability studies perspective, and further underscores the ideological nature of perception. Let’s examine the first side of this coin: the assumption of the real. If we rely on assumptions of the real, we are in the company of the majority of viewers over the majority of the years of photography’s existence, moving back into the history of our relationship to the photograph as what Lisa Saltzman has called an “emblem of truth and proof.” Because of the photochemical processes by which, until relatively recently, photographs were created, the captured image relied on the existence, at least at the time of exposure, of a thing photographed. This is what Roland Barthes calls the “that-has-been;” the image simply cannot exist in the now without there having been the thing itself at some moment in the past (1981, 76-77)23. Not even the various analogue manipulations of the past (multiple exposures, deliberate erasures, trompe l’oeil subjects) that come from the play of early scientists and artists discovering the possibilities of the new medium have ever shaken our sense of the visual image as having what Saltzman describes as an unparalleled “evidentiary quality.” Photography evolved, and access to the production of image became easy; by the early-mid-twentieth century, equipment became affordable, and the

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proliferation of professional labs freed us to let someone else do the work of developing. Placed in our laps over and over were the family snapshots we ourselves had taken, teaching us that photos were indeed an “emblem of truth,” since we had seen with our own eyes a relative with a birthday cake and now here was that same relative and that same birthday cake in the photo. We were believers. Motion pictures, in their early days, seemed likewise to represent the real, in an even more enhanced way, speaking back to Rodin’s now famous declaration that “photography lies, because time, in reality, does not stand still” (1946, 109). Film, of course, was a series of sequenced still photographs, recreating a sense of the original motion without performing it, but thanks to the phenomenon of persistence of vision24, it looked real enough, as the story goes, that the first viewers of a film of an oncoming train ran in terror that they were about to be crushed.25 We give, or those of us who are conventionally sighted do, great credence to what we see “with our own eyes,” even if what we are seeing is at a photochemical, or videographic, remove. Since the 1990s, however, technologies of how we record, manipulate, and even create ex nihilo “realistic” still and moving images have undergone a significant transformation, and with awareness of those transformed capacities of digital capture, computer generation, enhancement, and production come new interpretive habits overlaid on the old. Laura Mulvey suggests that the advent of digital technologies with their “seamless special effects… [leave cinema’s] longstanding link with reality overshadowed by simulation” (2004, 143). Where once we expected the real, in other words, we now more often expect it to have been enhanced or faked. Think about the number of contemporary mainstream American movies that end with out-takes during the credits that expose the special effects used within the visual narrative. These are outtakes that now take place within the “run-time” of the film, and not as a separated “special feature.” Jackie Chan’s deft footwork didn’t really set a knocked down chair upright with one kick; he isn’t really able to set a bicycle spinning up on its rear wheel indefinitely, we discover by watching the included outtakes to “The Spy Next Door” (2010). In the outtakes, we see the martial artist grimace as the chair tips back over many times in many takes; we see the wire that holds the bicycle in the air spinning. We then, as a result, re-interpret our memory of the film: those moments in the narrative were fun, but of course they weren’t real. When disability is in the picture, as it is in the three videos I’ve been discussing, the idea of the fake is not benign, however, nor is it simply a

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lost innocence. Where depictions of the disabled are concerned, they simply pair up with other, older assumptions and suspicions, those of fraud or malingering. The disabled are already suspect, as I have discussed above, subject to scrutiny because they might be faking in order to collect some benefit to which they aren’t entitled. Their pain is suspect, as are their capacities. Bill Shannon’s gliding along looks cool, but how many viewers shared one commenter’s opinion that Shannon “definitely is wearing wheelies” (shoes with wheels built in), or suspect when he is spinning on crutches that Jackie Chan’s bicycle wire is somehow involved? I fear that we are collectively losing our sense of wonder, our capacity for marveling at beauty, hampered by a nagging sense of doubt, which in the case of this video is the double doubt that Shannon has any real impairments and that the video isn’t made with digital trickery. “That’s so cool,” we say, but immediately also add to ourselves, but of course it wasn’t real. 26 This is perhaps why I cannot rest, where video is concerned, with McBryde Johnson’s “rare beauty” as lens through which I can see the celebratory in Garfield’s work. I know Shannon does offer rare beauty, because I’ve seen so many other, realer, representations, and because those involved in the various unconnected productions have offered a testimony to their unmanipulated nature through oral or textual “medical validations.” But therein lies the trouble. We are always looking for some guarantor, wanting to believe what we see, but wanting still more not to be fooled by someone taking advantage of that cultural habit of or nostalgic desire for belief. Here I concur with Mark Ledbetter: “What we’re interested in is validation and invalidation, and those are the wrong questions.” These are questions, though, we seem unable to shake off. Or perhaps it is a genre question: in Hollywood’s “Spy Next Door,” my chosen example among hundreds of possibilities, the outtakes reinforce the unreality of the successes, whereas in the Cunningham documentary, the failures (falls) attest to the pictured successes as “true.” We know Hollywood is always fooling us, we think, whereas with a documentary style, we are suspicious, we expect—demand—truth. Which category does a commercial fall into, then? Does it, like Shannon, provoke a “category crisis”? Only, I would argue, because Shannon appears in it. The advertisement’s sleek production values are in keeping with Hollywood, the soundtrack only reinforcing the sense that this is compressed narrative fiction constructed for our entertainment. The other aspect of our relationship specifically to video as a medium is the control each viewer has over it, 27 and to what uses that power may be put. Any viewer, for instance, can freeze the images or make a “frame

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by frame” analysis28. This easy manipulability was useful to Shannon himself, of course, for his Poptech talk. He was easily able to run and rerun on a computer screen short pieces of the street performance recording (featuring the encouraging babushka with her purse, and the caught starer looking away). He could further enhance the Poptech spectators’ ability to take in what he wanted them to observe by using the computer’s cursor arrow to point to what, in the video, they should notice (the movement of the purse, or later, the turning of a starer’s head when caught staring). The spatial layering as well as opportunities for temporal control afforded by this technology made his lesson possible and relatively technically easy to bring to fruition. Yet for video spectators of Garfield’s “Visa Flow,” such manipulability also offers an opportunity to be more extreme in the means they use to question the integrity of what they are seeing. Now, a suspicious viewer, instead of simply saying, “well, it’s probably not real,” can by slowing it down, freezing it, or replaying it over and over, look for the “trickery” they expect has been used but know the eye might not register when the images are viewed at conventional speed. We see this suspicious technical review, for example, in the comment stream where “toyneybmx” says, “The dude is an insane dancer and I know in the info it says he isnt [sic] using heelies [sic] but look at 0:39, the way he slides backwards is impossible in normal shoes” (2009, emphasis added) 29. The commenter is showing that he has done just such a close analysis, to the point that he can indicate a precise time in seconds when the viewer will “see” Shannon doing something that is “impossible,” and thus must in his view, despite the attestations from other commenters more familiar with Shannon’s life and work, have been achieved by Shannon using some form of uncredited technical assistance. Close attention on our own part reveals, of course, that effects technology is not the sole origin of this spectator’s suspicion, but merely allows him a means by which to act on it, investigating in a way that assures him (because he believes in what he sees) that it will show the trickery he believes to be there (because he does not believe in what he feels he is being shown). The suspicion originates in two places: the video technology, which he knows makes fakery easier, and easier to hide, than ever before, but also his own generalizing from his limited personal experience that no one could actually do what Shannon does. It is the latter suspicion, that no one is really like what Bill Shannon looks like, that a disability studies perspective begs us examine more carefully, because it bears within it the broader suspicion and disbelief that persons with disabilities all suffer under, and that a person with in/visible, ambiguous or what we might call non-binary disability suffers from with the greatest regularity, as I explored earlier in my discussion of Shannon’s

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visual strategies for travel accommodation and his responses to being seen as a “faker.”30 Video, as we’ve seen in Shannon’s Poptech staring lessons, can be a great tool, but the expectation of special effects and the distrust of the realistic-but-surprising image thus also makes video a dangerous territory for disability, which is why, at least for the time being, we must ask more of directors who feature disabled performers. When we approach the question of ideologies at work in our ecologies of seeing, we must be aware of how our (outdated and incorrect) expectations about disability and our believing/disbelieving/parsing-to-the-nth-degree habits of using video can be put to use for positive change, or to bolster separation and inequality. Susannah Mintz argues that productive disability and illness narratives have as their “overt intention [...] to challenge the troping of disability in able-bodied culture as deviance, helplessness, insufficiency, and loss, as well as to speak openly about a form of embodiment often excluded from the conversation” (2007, 1). Garfield certainly presents an image that is not one of insufficiency or loss, but it is also not one that represents a useful engagement of the realities of life for the disabled. It represents artistry—and there is no question Bill Shannon’s artistry deserves recognition—but Shannon’s own ethic of community is missing, as is any sense of attainability. Does every image of a person with a disability have to be a PSA?31 No, that’s unfair. Shannon has said before that sometimes he feels like “an artist trapped in a human interest story” (O’Driscoll 2007). Yet there are still ways to celebrate that uniqueness that are not heavy-handed in their preaching, yet manage to convey a sense of fullness of life and of the work that leads to achievement. This is what Cunningham does in a few short minutes, does most of in 60 seconds, and leaves us wanting more. The Cunningham and Poptech videos have more layers to their interventions, I think, inviting not only the wondering (“baroque staring”), separated gaze – for I think there are touches of that in all the videos - but an opportunity for staring in service of finding connection and seeing whole.

Future Directions In examining the potential roles of video in ecologies of seeing and the project of seeing whole, an entire segment of Shannon’s oeuvre has not been touched: his work as a conceptual artist, in which he also makes innovative, though this time non-narrative use of the technical complexities of video technologies. Shannon often, for example, constructs his own multi-camera “rigs” to capture simultaneous multi-

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angle video footage of a solo dance/movement performance for later looping as part of multi-screen sculptural video installations. Some of these gallery and site-specific works have been described as “cubism for the 21st century” (Hsu 2014), presenting superimposed, composite, or fragmented video of Shannon himself or other dancers or martial artists, projected on floating holoscreens and often also combined with additional live performance elements. In 2010, Shannon added the capacity for a live performer to switch at will between pre-recorded and live self-capturing video stream, which he described as “a giant step forward for my own interest in exploring new territory for my dance expression through video” (Shannon 2010). A review of Make Moves, Shannon’s 2014 solo show at the Irma Freedman Gallery in Pittsburgh, described Shannon’s installations for that show (see still shot, Fig. 6-9, below) as “suggesting how our screen-oriented identities are neither solidified nor fluid,” adding that the screens floating in a darkened room offered “a mediated experience contrasting with the physical presence of the nearby model [i.e. live performer]” (Hsu 2014). Fig. 6-9. Bill Shannon, Fragmentation Series: Live.

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Clearly, there is much to be explored here in the intersections of video, movement, dance, the integrity and dis-integration of the body, the choices of which bodies and movements to feature, and the disruption of chronological time, to name just a few elements, projects that both disability studies and video studies might fruitfully undertake in thinking more deeply about our ecologies of seeing and the further implications of what it means to see whole. For this chapter, we have concentrated on three internet-available videos to begin our inquiry. In the Shannon Poptech video, Shannon intervenes through the near infinite-regressions of image-within-image lessons. He uses visual technologies to turn some of the staring back; that is, if one effect of staring, discussed by Garland-Thomson in her early piece on the poetics of the disabled body, is to remove the civil anonymity of the staree, Shannon uses the camera to turn around and remove the anonymity of the starers (or superstitious helpers, like the man crossing himself) who don’t think they can be seen. We see them now. We as viewers are invited to make them our starees, and the little cursor arrow makes sure we know exactly where to look, holds our attention to the purse of the narrative-projecting lady or the man who turns away as Shannon turns toward him, as Shannon advances and backs up the footage so that we look again and again.32 Yet Shannon is not out to dare, demand, object to these persons directly, to confront them in an aggressive stareback challenge. His starers are exposed in video without the potential shaming of face-to-face confrontations that are also within the staree’s power (if there is a social prohibition on staring, to be caught is to be shamed). Shannon is not so much after a direct shaming of the curious or untrained for their staring; he’s after understanding—and teaching viewers to understand—the effects of projected-narrative-driven staring on conceptions of the self as a dis/abled subject.33 The challenges he issues, instead, are to our habits of looking and the ideologies that shape them. He asks us, his “hostees” and authorized starers (i.e. guests and pupils, the Poptech live audience and the viewers of the popcast video afterward), to stop projecting false images onto those with disabilities, visible or in/visible, to understand that their presence and actions, like his, in both private and public space may be different from ours, but are simply part of the variety around us. The “CRUTCH” documentary preview, using Bill Shannon’s striking artistry (not just crutch use), provides such an opportunity for seeing (toward) whole, being known. Documentarian Cunningham strives in her montages not for transcendent exceptionalism like in Garfield’s Visa work, but for multifaceted immanence. Here we see realized some of what

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Couser calls the “counterhegemonic potential of disability narrative” (2001, 85). Shannon can be beheld as: a performer who exposes the worries and superstitions of others, a person with disability that does not fit into constructed binary categories (“is” or “isn’t”), a dancer with distinctive moves, and a skatepunk who hitches surreptitious rides by grabbing the backs of taxis and weaves in and out of the same architectural features of public streetscapes as all of us do, and—and this is important— occasionally fails at it, as all of us do. In contrast, Garfield’s Visa Ad offers through its narrative montage an idealized fiction where there is no pain, there is no failure… and there are also no friends. We witness there at once rare beauty and something, someone isolated and unreal, utterly unattainable. This is visibility – being seen, even perhaps being beheld with wonder, but it is not being known, and it does nothing to displace the ideologies of perception that contribute to the daily isolation and suspicion experienced by the disabled in public spaces and private lives. What we need are video depictions, montages that tell stories of both rare beauty and a full life. Fig. 6-10. Bill Shannon, 1980; “Dogleg Freeze,” 2007, Serbia.

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Notes 1

I will discuss this in depth through the course of this chapter, but want to be certain that I am clear from the start: “seeing whole” does not refer to some (real or imagined) reparation of an apparent physical lack (e.g. imagining a missing limb restored), but rather to an ability to engage the wholeness and reality, not reduced or carved up image, of a person’s life in and interactions with the world. The antithesis of seeing whole is seeing exception where there is utility, or viewing with unasked and in many cases unwarranted pity. Stella Young has described the deployment of images of disabled people, particularly in “inspirational stories,” as “disability porn,” choosing porn as a provocative term because the phenomenon she describes is one of the exploiting of one group for the benefit of another (Young 2010). “We’re not real people,” Young says of these images and their effects on the social imagination, “we are [simply] there to inspire” (ibid.). In calling for a seeing whole, I am not calling for ignoring what is truly exceptional, but for even exceptional individuals to be depicted in ways that allow them to be perceived as real and as social beings. 2 Nor does the suspicion of faking always come from the nondisabled: the frequency with which suspicions of slacking or exaggeration are evinced by some disabled persons against others, as discussed by Montgomery, is further cause to distrust the dis/ability border metaphor. Geographical borders as metaphors, after all, tend to suggest not only absolute separation, but also a certain unity of identity on each respective side, which here clearly does not exist. 3 In my work elsewhere bridging disability and queer theories to examine transgender autobiographies, I have developed the uniting notion of the “odd body,” or body at odds. The term oddbodies simultaneously connotes bodies that do not conform visually or socially to the forms or behaviours expected by a cisheterosexist, ableist, white supremacist, normate culture, and which thus, whether visibly so or not, also become “bodies at odds.” I use the term when considering disability in order to take in at once the visibly anomalous (bodies that appear odd), and those with not easily visually identified disabilities, who may “pass” or feel pressure to pass as normatively able-bodied (one way of being at odds), both of whom will find themselves negotiating aspects of a built environment and social and cultural expectations into which they do not “fit (another way of being “at odds”). I find it useful to substitute my term into Garland-Thomson’s idea: because of staring’s social proscription (“It’s not polite to stare”), staring’s furtiveness (or its alternative, open visual aggression) “creates [odd-bodiedness] as a state of absolute difference rather than simply one more variation in human form” (2002, 57). This will, I hope, allow us both to continue to consider Garland-Thomson’s original context, disability, and to think more broadly and intersectionally of the ways that other bodies, because of their gender expression or ways of behaving, for example, or in many cases also their (actual or perceived) race or ethnicity may find themselves at odds, and to work toward unseating the binaries so that instead of being seen as threat, these persons may be viewed as part of the spectrum of human variety. This will have broad implications

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as we pursue a deeper theoretical and political understanding of the difficulties and opportunities presented by video as a medium. 4 Regarding the emergence of disability disclosure as situated performance, the rhetorician Stephanie Kerschbaum, an expert staree who is deaf and wears hearing aids, notes, for example, that “every time I have to tell—or remind—someone that I am deaf, even though I have developed a variety of strategies for making these disclosures to mitigate undesirable responses, I do not know exactly how that person will respond” (2014, 59). Shannon has likewise had varying degrees of success with the mobility system strategy I am describing; he has succeeded in retaining his tools in several major US & international airports, but not, for example, at Charles De Gaulle in Paris. 5 I learned of Jean Flynn’s “Tiny Tim” phrases (variation: “pulling the Tiny Tim”) from Bridgett Williams-Searle. Siebers contributes “masquerade.” Though the term has many meanings in Siebers’s investigation, they include being applicable to Irving Zola’s adopting the use of a never-used-otherwise wheelchair to avoid confrontation about early boarding and ease his passage in airports (as told in his 1982 memoir, Missing Pieces). Zola, like Shannon, could walk short distances but would suffer for having done so, and both men’s strategies, Zola’s and Shannon’s, “[favour] independence and self-preservation” (Siebers 2004, 11). The two airport strategies differ in one significant way, though: Zola takes on an easily recognized tool, a wheelchair, where Shannon tries to help others recognize the tool he prefers as a disability tool. See Siebers 2004, 10-11. 6 Although, as I have written elsewhere, I agree with Deborah Halbert’s persuasive claim that public spaces are never fully free spaces. See Cumings 2012; Halbert 2012. 7 TED (“Technology, Entertainment, Design”) is a global set of conferences organized under the slogan “ideas worth sharing,” whose “Ted Talks” (of no more than 18 minutes) on a wide range of topics are recorded, produced, and made available via internet video. 8 I will discuss the “popcast” (internet video) of the talk from the Poptech festival largely as though it were a seamless recording, even though it, too, is technically an edited montage of shots from at least two or three cameras, put together by uncredited technicians and editors. 9 By presenting the validation, the differing medical and social management strategies, and examples of how and why he is accused of “faking,” Shannon dismantles for viewers the false binarism that says if you “can” walk, you don’t need crutches. 10 In the 2008 documentary “Examined Life,” American painter, animal rights and disability rights activist Sunaura Taylor, who uses a wheelchair, mentions to philosopher Judith Butler her own practice in cafés of carrying her paper coffee cup to a table with her mouth, prompting Butler to pose a series of rhetorical questions, applied to both disability and queer contexts, about what a body is good for and who gets to decide what parts can be used for what purposes.

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11 Siebers, too, mentions this idea of the furtive glance, “stolen when you are not looking, looking away when you look back” (2004, 3). Shannon’s point though, is that even when he is not looking, he is well aware of being looked at. 12 Shannon also directs his Poptech and popcast audiences to his website, whatiswhat.com, to see further video and read his explanations and analyses of “peripheral fluctuation,” “fate of distraction,” “projected narrative,” and other sociological phenomena concerning his in/visibility that he has collected there. 13 We can expand our understanding of this moment through Garland Thomson’s discussion of looking away: “Sometimes... truncated stares come from our distress at witnessing fellow humans so unusual that we cannot accord them a look of acknowledgement. [. . .] If the knowledge that staring delivers is unbearable, the expected elasticity of human connection that mutual looking offers becomes brittle. When we suddenly find ourselves face to face with some memento mori or our most dreaded fate—we look away” (2009, 79). 14 I have, since 2012, shown this video to 13 classes of students at two different US colleges, and among these viewers, wonder always deepens to respect. Students seeing the video multiple times also become more and more amused at the opening staged fall, recognizing it as staged not only because they notice how Shannon cast his crutches aside and sit-falls in a way that will keep him from injury, but also noticing he has chosen “standard” single-point wooden crutches that people in the street will recognize as symbols of impairment, rather than his more customary (but more unusual) rocker-bottoms, seen in every other clip, which street viewers might not fully recognize. They get all this in four minutes times 2+ viewings. 15 The first, from 2008, is colloquially referred to as “Running (Naked) Man.” The third, released in 2010 when Visa became a sponsor of World Cup Football (soccer), is colloquially referred to as “Couch Potato,” though its more official name is “Football Evolution.” Shannon’s 2009 ad was referred to in-house at Saatchi as “Bill,” though I will refer to it for clarity as Garfield’s “Visa Flow,” denoting the director of this ad only. 16 I will focus my discussion on the full version of the ad featuring Bill Shannon, with a run time of 1:21, uploaded to YouTube by “lifeflowsbetter,” although there is also a 60 second version (on YouTube as having a run time of 1:01, uploaded by “nivamc”) that includes Shannon pausing to down coffee at a kiosk, a moment not featured in the longer version but that I will bring into the discussion, and a 30second version (on YouTube as 0:31, uploaded by TVAdvertsUK) that uses a different closing crane shot, where Shannon pulls a “rolling no-footer,” balancing his crutches on his skateboard with his feet in the air as he rolls down the street. References to the advertisement will be to the longest version unless otherwise specified. 17 The coffee kiosk appears only in the 60 second version, not the full 1:21 version, but is the shot I will mention Shannon trying to re-create in the streets of New York, needing 12 attempts to achieve it. 18 The final shot clocks in at 16 seconds long, whereas most other shots are cut down to under 6, and is shot from a slowly rising crane, creating an “off into the sunset” feeling. The 60-second version uses the same closing shot; the 30-second

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version, which doesn’t have time for a sunset or a slow crane rise uses a different crane shot of the same street scene, with Shannon performing a rolling no-footer (lifting himself on crutches balanced on a rolling skateboard, kicking his feet in the air) still visible at a distance. 19 For further discussion of the visual and hence ideological erasure of solidarity and political community in another series of public (though non-commercial) advertisements featuring disabled individuals, see Alison Kafer’s excellent chapter, “A Future for Whom? Passing on Billboard Liberation,” in Feminist, Queer, Crip. 20 Disability politics often means making sure that proving one’s own ability expands opportunities for others, not just for oneself. We see this clearly embedded, for example, in Rod Michalko’s careful wording in describing the relationship of his disability to his work as a professor: My difference sometimes seems very stark to me. ... I need to make a complicated set of arrangements before I am “able” to grade term papers... “differently.” ... I ... had to convince some people that blindness does not prevent me, or anyone else, from teaching at a university. (Michalko 2002, 80, emphasis added) For further examples of commitments to sharing skills, creating opportunities, and expanding what Garland-Thomson calls “circles of community” as practices of disability politics, see, e.g., Stella Young’s TedxSydney talk, or Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s description of the life and work of Simi Linton (GarlandThomson 2009, 195-196), or even some of the YouTube videos by Dergin Tokmak, the European crutch dancer also knows as “Stix” (Tokmak 2012). 21 Shannon choreographed the role of the Limping Angel for Cirque du Soleil’s “Varekai,” declining to dance it himself, but teaching Shannon Technique to two performers who would play it at different times, one an able-bodied tumbler, Vladimir Ignatenkov, one a disabled crutch dancer, Dergin Tokmak (Cirque du Soleil 2011; Sommer 2003; Tokmak, 2003). It is evident from Ignatenkov’s recollections that Shannon took seriously the teaching not just of “do this” but the technical names for Shannon Technique poses and moves (Sommer 2003). 22 Although of course advertising by its nature wants to offer you better than you can have – but usually does so by encouraging identification with the protagonists while telling you what you need to buy to complete the process of becoming them/having their life. 23 Although, as Rubenstein & Sluis (2013) write in response to Barthes’s confessed perspective as solely a viewer and subject of photographs, and not photographer or film processor, those photochemical processes are not straightforward or direct themselves, but must be carefully managed for an image to be the least bit recognizable or representative or its subject. Had Barthes known this better, he might have thought differently of his claim of direct translation from subject to indexically representative object; or, as Rubenstein & Sluis put it: “Consider what would happen to the indexicality of the image if the film chemistry was not at 20°C but at 90°C—instead of indexicality there would be porridge!” (2013, 28). 24 “The phenomenon of persistence of vision is due to the momentary retention of an image on the eye’s retina. This retention was found to be approximately 1/10 of a second by Chevalier d’Arcy in 1765 when he successfully carried out one of the

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first systematic scientific studies and presented his findings to the French Académie des Sciences” (Webster 1999, 62). 25 Though often disputed and sometimes called cinema’s “myth of origin,” Stephen Bottomore (1999) argues that it is both historically and psychologically plausible that certain audiences did react physically to the sight (and in some cases, synchronized sound) of an oncoming train in early films by both the Lumière brothers and Thomas Edison. 26 Of course, mainstream Hollywood movies have a long pattern of casting ablebodied actors in the roles of disabled characters, with ample accompanying press coverage and an abundance of awards for the “amazing” acting (Moyer 2015), further complicating our ability to believe what we see when disability appears on screen. 27 I mentioned this earlier, citing Mulvey on the ability of the spectator “to vary the temporality of the film between movement and stillness” (2004, 145). 28 I’m aware that video does not proceed in “frames” as film, at 23-4 frames per second, did, but I find the terminology still useful as metaphor, conveying that sense of breaking down and subjecting to analytic scrutiny tiny temporal increments, individually framed still moments and short movement sequences that have been captured and recorded. 29 Heelys is the brand name of a popular wheeled shoe. According to the manufacturer’s website, “There is a removable wheel in the heel, transforming the shoes into stealth skates and giving its users the freedom to seamlessly transition from walking or running to skating by shifting their weight to their heels” (“About Heelys”). It is such “stealth skating” that “toyneybmx” is accusing Shannon of, despite other commentators’ assertions to the contrary. Even the original video post includes the note: “Bill Shannon is for real, he isnt [sic] gliding along on wheelie shoes and he isn’t [sic] a stunt man” (“Visa TV Ad”). 30 Even when viewing is done with a more generous spirit, a comment by Pittsburgh columnist Bill O’Driscoll (2007) highlights the still-prevalent response to supercrip video: disbelief in its correlation to reality. When Shannon took the floor in a local nightclub in 2007, only moments after a video of some of his international dance performances has appeared on screen, O’Driscoll reports that “even having just seen him on video, it's hard to imagine [Shannon] performing that way in person.” 31 In the United States, a PSA or “Public Service Announcement” is a brief message in the public interest broadcast over television or radio without charge. PSAs may promote programs or services available through local, regional or federal government or non-profit agencies, or may encourage “healthy habits” like the use of seat belts or the avoidance of illegal drugs or using cellular telephones while driving. Broadcast licensing in the US is tied to the commitment of each broadcaster to serving the public, and PSAs are one way broadcasters meet this standard. My point is that disabled persons are not here to make others’ lives better, and should not always be, or be expected to be, an example of something (heroism, stoicism, a “good attitude”). The problem is that because of their noticeability, and our ideological ways of seeing, the ways their images are

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deployed often fall into such tropes. (See my discussion of Stella Young’s notion of “inspiration porn,” above, note 1.) 32 The use of digital visual media here works, similarly to the portraiture of Auld or Rush discussed by Garland-Thomson, “to enable visual pilgrimages of deliberate contemplation that might be scuttled in a face to face encounter on the street” (2009, 84). We see such “scuttling” in the man’s turning away when he believes he will be “caught looking.” 33 In his Poptech presentation, Shannon discusses how “good samaritanism” can become an obstacle, because although it comes from good intentions, those intentions themselves stem from a distorted picture of the situation. He makes similar comments in the Sterile Cowboys 9-minute documentary about him (available on his blog site), and on his original creativetime.org website, where he also discusses the difference between gestures of help and actual help.

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Bibliography Barthes, Roland. 1981. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang. Baswell, Christopher. 2006. “It is Only at the Bodleian that I am a Cripple.” Times Higher Education December 15. Berger, John. 2003 [1972]. Ways of Seeing. New York: Penguin. Bottomore, Stephen. 1999. “The Panicking Audience?: Early cinema and the ‘train effect’.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 19 (2), 177-216. Butler, Judith. 2004. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge. Capps, Rob. 2013. “Watch the Best of PopTech, the TED for Real Thinkers.” Wired, November 14. http://www.wired.com/2013/11/thebest-of-poptech-2013/ Carson, Grant. 2009. “The Social Model of Disability.” Scottish Accessible Information Forum. 36-page Pdf file. TSO [The Stationary Office]. http://www.ukdpc.net/site/images/library/Social%20Model%20of%20 Disability2.pdf Cirque Du Soleil. 2011. “Creators.” Varekai: Cirque du Soleil. Production website. Clare, Eli. 2003. “Gawking, Gaping, Staring.” GLQ 9 (1-2) (Special Edition: “Queer Theory Meets Disability Studies,” Robert McRuer & Abby Wilkerson, Eds.), 257-261. Cooper, Marilyn. 2011. “Rhetorical Agency as Emergent and Enacted.” CCC 62 (3), 421-449. Couser, G. Thomas. 2001. “Conflicting Paradigms: The Rhetorics of Disability Memoir.” In Embodied Rhetorics: Disability in Language and Culture, ed. James C. Wilson & Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson, 78-91. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. —. 2006. “Disability, Life Narrative, and Representation.” In The Disability Studies Reader, Second Edition, ed. Lennard J. Davis, 399401. New York: Routledge. “CRUTCH.” 2009. Dir. Sachi Cunningham. Perf. Bill Shannon. YouTube video, 4:03. Posted by Vayabobo, February 27. Cumings, Susan G. 2012. “Preface.” Imagination and the Public Sphere, xi-xvii. Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Davis, Lennard J. 1995. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. New York: Verso.

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“Examined Life.” 2008. DVD. Dir. Astra Taylor. Perf. Judith Butler, Sunaura Taylor, K. Anthony Appiah, Slavoj Žižek, Martha Nussbaum, et al. Documentary film. Zeitgeist Films. Frye, Lezlie, and Bill Shannon. 2013. “Otherly Abled Bodies in Performance.” Vimeo Video, 24:06. Posted by New York Live Arts, December 6. Come Early: Pre-show discussion of Jérôme Bel and Theater HORA ’s production, “Disabled Theater,” November 14. https://vimeo.com/81234895 Garber, Marjorie. 1992. Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. New York: Routledge. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. 2002. “The Politics of Staring: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular Photography.” In Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, ed. Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggeman, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, 56-75. New York: MLA. —. 2003. [1999] “Towards a Poetics of the Disabled Body.” In The Meaning of Difference: American Constructions of Sex and Gender, Social Class, and Sexual Orientation, Third Edition, ed. Karen E. Rosenblum & ToniMichelle C. Travis, 471-481. Boston, McGraw Hill. —. 2009. Staring: How We Look. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gleeson, Jamal. 2011. Comment on “Visa TV Ad Starring Bill Shannon.” (1:21 version). YouTube comment. https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=I6RGyJirL3g&lc=tirb5rH1htydoPb5GQQ0UqfKkgIngeI9Yj-8qtcezc Goffman, Erving. 1980. Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings. Westport: Greenwood Press. Grigely, Joseph. 2000. “Postcards to Sophie Calle.” In The Body Aesthetic: From Fine Art to Body Modification, ed. Tobin Siebers, 17-40. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Gunning, Tom. 2008. “What’s the Point of an Index? Or, Faking Photographs.” In Stillmoving: Between Cinema and Photography, ed. Karen Beckman and Jean Ma, 23-40. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Halbert, Deborah. 2012. “Temporary Autonomous Zones: The Construction of Radical Public Spheres.” In Cumings, Susan G., ed., Imagination and the Public Sphere, 15-36. Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Harrington, John. 1973. The Rhetoric of Film. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Heelys. 2015. “About Heelys.” http://www.heelys.com/heelys-life-byheelys.html

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Holmes, Martha Stoddard. “Working (with) the Rhetoric of Affliction: Autobiographical Narratives of Victorians with Physical Disabilities.” In Embodied Rhetorics: Disability in Language and Culture, ed. James Wilson & Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson, 27-44. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Hsu, Leo. 2014. “Bill Shannon’s Cubism for the 21st Century.” Pittsburgh City Paper, February 5. Jynx Productions. 2010. “Bill Shannon aka the Crutchmaster in New York City.” Perf. Bill Shannon. YouTube video, 3:44. Posted by jynxprod, January 13. https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=rpXHP3JHfHE Kafer, Alison. 2013. Feminist, Queer, Crip. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kerschbaum, Stephanie. 2014. “On Rhetorical Agency and Disclosing Disability in Academic Writing.” Rhetoric Review 33 (1), 55-71. Retrieved from Academic Search Complete. Kerschbaum, Stephanie, and Margaret Price. 2014. “Perils and Prospects of Disclosing Disability Identity in Higher Education.” Guest blog, University of Delaware Center for the Study of Disability, March 3. http://sites.udel.edu/csd/2014/03/03/perils-and-prospects-of-disclosingdisability-identity-in-higher-education/ Kerschbaum, Stephanie L., Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Sushil K. Oswal, Amy Vidali, Susan Ghiaciuc, Margaret Price, Jay Dolmage, Craig A. Meyer, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Ellen Samuels. 2013. “Faculty Members, Accommodation, and Access in Higher Education. Profession 2013. New York: MLA. Ledbetter, Mark. pers. comm., Albany NY, 3 June 2015. Lennox, Sy. 2011. Comment on “Visa TV Ad Starring Bill Shannon.” YouTube comment. https://www.youtube.com/all_comments?lc=tirb5rH1htxxOzwwAyFs9 NsfG8O38aIw648Rse_qC4c&v=I6RGyJirL3g Lightman, Ernie, Andrea Vick, Dean Herd, and Andrew Mitchell. 2009. “‘Not Disabled Enough’: Episodic disabilities and the Ontario Disability Support Program.” Disability Studies Quarterly 29 (3). “The Making of Visa’s new Flow Ad starring Bill Shannon.” 2009. Perf. Bill Shannon, Joey Garfield, Paul Silburn. YouTube video, 5:12. Posted by nivamc, February 27. https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=UmRoSeVV94 Martin, Biddy. 1994. “Sexualities without Genders and Other Queer Utopias.” Diacritics 24 (2/3) (special issue: “Critical Crossings”), 104121.

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Michalko, Rod. 2002. The Difference that Disability Makes. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Mintz, Susannah B. 2007. Unruly Bodies: Life Writing by Women with Disabilities. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. —. 2011. “On a Scale from 1 to 10: Life Writing and Lyrical Pain.” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 5(3), 243-260. Retrieved from Academic OneFile. Montgomery, Cal. 2001. “A Hard Look at Invisible Disability.” Ragged Edge 2. 4 pages. http://www.ragged-edge-mag.com/0301/0301ft1.htm Moyer, Justin William. 2015. “Welcome, Eddie Redmayne: Since ‘Rain Man,’ Majority of Best Actor Oscar winners Played Sick or Disabled.” Washington Post February 23. http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/02/23/ since-rain-man-majority-of-best-actor-winners-played-sick-or-disabled/ MrDon. 2010. Comment on “Visa TV Ad starring Bill Shannon” (1:21 version uploaded by lifeflowsbetter). YouTube comment. https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=I6RGyJirL3g Mulvey, Laura. 2004. “Passing Time: Reflections on Cinema from a New Technological Age.” Screen 45(2), 142-155. Retrieved from Oxford Journals. “New Flow Faster Marketing Campaign Launches in 19 Countries.” 2013. Visa Europe Press Release, London, May 31. PDF file. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd =1&ved=0CB8QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocs.noodls.com%2Fvi ewDoc.asp%3Ffilename%3D40688%2FEXT%2F8A51C80D1DB0706 B331F5A6177A4D61A73D015D4_445741936B755ECEF3FE5764AF B0E49990833792.PDF&ei=27CEVdHIOqTIsQTW7YGIAg&usg=AF QjCNFeFiFxilR9VUW92ahMSv1L_sitfg&sig2=HeqdZMUyEhRRme dx7e7xuQ&bvm=bv.96339352,d.cWc. “New Visa Campaign from Saatchi & Saatchi London.” 2009. Press blog. February 26. http://saatchi.com/en-us/news/new_visa_campaign_ from_saatchi__saatchi_london Nudd, Tim. 2009. “Disabled Dancer Going with the Flow for Visa.” AdWeek blogs. March 11. http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/disableddancer-going-flow-visa-14516 2007. O’Driscoll, Bill. “Turning the Tables: Artist and Performer Bill Shannon Keeps Audiences Off-Balance.” Pittsburgh City Paper, March 29. Feature Article. Price, Margaret. 2014. “Defining Kairotic Space.” In Yergeau, Melanie, Elizabeth Brewer, Stephanie Kerschbaum, Sushil Oswal, Margaret Price, Michael Salvo, Cynthia Selfe, and Franny

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Howes. “Multimodality in Motion: Disability and Kairotic Spaces.” Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy 18 (1). RJD2. “Work It Out – HD.” 2009. Dir. Joey Garfield. Perf. Bill Shannon. [later version – RJD2 in final shot] YouTube video, 3:24. Posted by combatfetus, November 8. https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=2In4l23xkrk —. “Work It Out.” 2011. [originally aired 11 Jan 2008] Dir. Joey Garfield. Perf. Bill Shannon. [earlier version – RJD2 not in final shot] YouTube video, Posted by RocektboomArchives, October 20. https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=Xd5BkDUNhac Rodin, Auguste. 1946. L’Art. Entretiens réunis par Paul Gsell. Lausanne: Mermod. Rubenstein, Daniel, and Katrina Sluis. 2013. “The Digital Image and Photographic Culture: Algorithmic photography and the crisis of representation.” In The Photographic Image in Digital Culture, Second Edition, ed. Martin Lister, 22-40. London: Routledge. Sacks, Harvey. 1984. “On Doing “Being Ordinary.” In Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis, ed. J. Maxwell Atkinson and John Heritage, 413-440. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Saltzman, Lisa. 2015. “Photographic Memories, Fugitive Subjects, Contemporary Objects.” Public Lecture. Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, PA, May 30. (See also Daguerreotypes: Fugitive Subjects, Contemporary Objects – forthcoming University of Chicago Press, July 2015.) Samuels, Ellen. 2003. “My Body, My Closet: Invisible Disability and the Limits of Coming Out Discourse.” GLQ 9 (1-2), 233-255. Scarry, Elaine. 1985. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schürger, Steffen. 2010. Comment on “Visa ‘Flow’ TV Ad 2009 starring Bill Shannon” (60 second version uploaded by nivamc). YouTube comment. Shannon, Bill. 2003a. “THISISWHATISWHATIS EVERYDAY EVERYDAY EVERYDAY.” [His explanation of basics about himself and his diagnosis.] WhatisWhat [v. 1.0] creativetime.org. http://whatiswhat.com/content/often-times-i-send-you-here-because-ihave-just-met-you-and-you-have-asked-me-question —. 2003b. “What Came First, the Crutches or Skateboard?” WhatisWhat [v. 1.0]. CreativeTime.org. http://www.creativetime.org/programs/archive/2003/WhatisWhat/what iswhat/whatiswhat.htm

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—. 2003c. “What is Shannon Technique?” WhatisWhat [v. 1.0] creativetime.org. http://www.creativetime.org/programs/archive/2003/WhatisWhat/what iswhat/whatiswhat.htm —. 2007. “Bill Shannon: Dancing with Crutches.” Poptech Popcasts. Vimeo video, 20:23. http://Poptech.org/popcasts/bill_shannon__Poptech_2007 —. 2008. “Bill Shannon: The Shannon Technique.” Instructional video. YouTube video, 6:06. Posted by Bill Shannon, February 3. (also embedded in whatiswhat.com). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIcNjyN0N6s —. 2010. “Video Installation: New Content and New Application for existing media and assembly process.” Bill Shannon: What is What. Blog post. February 15. http://www.whatiswhat.com/content/videoinstallation-new-content-and-new-application-existing-media-andassembly-process —. 2011. “Unique Security Requirements.” Bill Shannon: What is What. Blog post. November 4. http://www.whatiswhat.com/content/securityrequirements —. 2012. “Skateboard Graphic Strategy to Validate Medical Usage.” Bill Shannon: What is What. Blog post. July 2. http://www.whatiswhat.com/content/skateboard-graphic-strategyvalidate-medical-usage —. 2013. Comment on RJD2, “Work It Out-HD.” YouTube comment. 2013. https://www.YouTube.com/all_comments?v=2In4l23xkrk&lc=_ ereloYxFhU37cbNP7SwLdoxIZTauPrJRi7I-9ZYB3s Sheehan, Brian. 2013. “Body Language.” Loveworks: How the world's top marketers make emotional connections to win in the marketplace. Brooklyn, NY: PowerHouse Books. Pdf. Retrieved from Advertising Education Foundation. http://www.aef.com/pdf/loveworks_chapter9.pdf Siebers, Tobin. 2004. “Disability as Masquerade.” Literature and Medicine 23(1), 1-22. Retrieved from Project MUSE.. —. 2006. “Disability in Theory: From Social Constructionism to the New Realism of the Body.” In The Disability Studies Reader, Second Edition, ed. Lennard J. Davis, 173-183. New York: Routledge. Sommer, Sally. 2003. “Dance; Have Crutches, Will Choreograph.” New York Times April 13. “The Spy Next Door.” 2010. DVD. Dir. Brian Levant. Perf. Jackie Chan, Billy Ray Cyrus, George Lopez. Lionsgate.

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Tokmak, Dergin. 2003. “Wie bist du zum Cirque Du Soleil gekommen?” [How did you come to Cirque du Soleil?]. Biografie. http://stixsteps.de/?page_id=194. —. 2012. “Stixsteps: Official Website Dergin Tokmak.” 2012. [in German] http://stixsteps.de Toyneybmx. 2009. Comment on “Visa TV Ad Starring Bill Shannon.” YouTube comment. https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=I6RGyJirL3g “Visa ‘Crutches’ TV ad 2009 30 sec advert.” 2009. Dir. Joey Garfield. Perf. Bill Shannon. YouTube video, 0:30. Posted by TVAdvertsUK, March 17. “Visa Europe Ad: Football Evolution” (aka “Couch Potato”). 2010. Dir. Chris Palmer. YouTube video, 1:00. Posted by fnv2001, February 16. https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=5MHL1l_n9Xs “Visa 'flow' TV ad 2009 starring Bill Shannon.” 2009. [60 second version] Dir. Joey Garfield. Perf. Bill Shannon. YouTube video, 1:01. Posted by nivamc, February 26. Saatchi & Saatchi.

“Visa ‘Running Man’ 60 sec.” 2008. Dir. Antoine Bardou-Jacquet. YouTube video, 1:01. Posted by workpost, November 20. https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=ZzHHFmnQxxU “Visa TV Ad starring Bill Shannon.” 2009. [1 min 22 second version] Dir. Joey Garfield. Perf Bill Shannon. YouTube video, 1:22. Posted by lifeflowsbetter. Posted by lifeflowsbetter February 27.

Webster, Chris. 1999. “Film and Technology.” in An Introduction to Film Studies, Second Edition, ed. Jill Nelmes, 59-87. London: Routledge. Williams-Searle, Bridgett. “Tiny Tim.” Message to the author. 10 July 2014. E-mail. Young, Stella. (2010, April) “I’m Not Your Inspiration, Thank You Very Much.” Video, 9:16. TedxSydney. http://www.ted.com/talks/stella_young_i_m_not_your_inspiration_tha nk_you_very_much?language=en Zajonc, Robert B. 1968. “Attitudinal Effects of Mere Exposure.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Monograph Supplement 9(2), Part 2 (June), 1-27. Retrieved from Ovid PsychArticles. —. 2001. “Mere Exposure: A Gateway to the Subliminal.” Current Directions I Psychological Science 10(6), 224-228. http://www.communicationcache.com/uploads/1/0/8/8/10887248/mere _exposure_gate_way_to_the_subliminal.pdf

CHAPTER SEVEN DEFYING DESCRIPTION: AMBIGUOUS BODIES IN VICTORIAN DISCOURSE ABOUT DISABILITY DARBY JEAN WALTERS

“The literary-aesthetic domain does indeed remind us of reality, but in such a way as to interrupt our memory or recognition of it in order to place different emphases on what might be taken for granted. Because disability in the real world already incites interpretation, literary representations of disability are not merely reflecting disability; they are refractions of that reality, with varying emphases of both an aesthetic and ethical kind” - Ato Quayson Aesthetic Nervousness1

While no representation of the body can coincide with lived corporeal experience, representations of the disabled body, especially, seem to deviate from the realities of impairment and the disabling effects of an ablest society and range instead into the far reaches of abstraction. Images of disabled bodies have frequently served, as Quayson suggests, as loci at which to explore aesthetic and ethical anxieties. Using a Lacanian model, Quayson suggests that anxieties about such questions stem, in part, from the constant threat posed by the “fragmented body” to the notion of “wholeness” formed during the mirror stage in infancy. He proposes that when the nondisabled subject first encounters a disabled person, he or she experiences a “primal scene” that is similar to the initial “primal scene” of infantile misrecognition. However, this second encounter leads to an arguably more accurate conceptualization of the body as “incomplete,” as the nondisabled viewer identifies, this time, with the limitations of the disabled body. This experience produces a complex affectivity as the nondisabled subject struggles to deal with the threat to his or her wholeness. This struggle can manifest as “guilt, bewilderment, fear, and in a happy moment of sublimation, as charity.”2

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Literary representations of disability are thus notably laden with signification. In Aesthetic Nervousness, Quayson provides an excellent (semi-comprehensive) typology of disability representation that delineates some of the most common ways in which impaired bodies are inscribed with meaning. Yet, the broad scope of Quayson’s investigation necessarily precludes a nuanced exploration of how the circumstances of a specific cultural moment dictate the formation of disability topoi. Both Rosemarie Garland Thomson and Martha Stoddard Holmes have contributed to the study of such representations in the context of nineteenth-century literature in America and Britain respectively. Thomson analyzes literary texts from 1852 to 1871 to show how “white maternal benefactresses” partially transcend gender oppression and exhibit virtue, agency, and power through their benevolent treatment of the female disabled figure, who concurrently becomes “increasingly subjugated, despairing, and impotent.” This relationship relieves anxiety about wholeness by clearly demarcating the boundary between ability and disability, thus allowing the nondisabled subject to distance herself from fragmentation and to define herself as “complete” in relationship to the otherized figure.3 Holmes provides an equally piquant analysis of how the strong affect associated with representations of disability became intertwined with the sentimentalism of the Victorian melodramatic stage, to the point that “the connection between emotion and impairment has become a kind of cultural shorthand: to indicate or produce emotional excess, add disability.”4 Both Holmes and Thomson rightly address how representations of disability reflect the culturally specific anxieties that surrounded disabled bodies during the nineteenth century. Like Quayson, they both do so by seeking to categorize disability into a series of standard images or topoi that constitute the possible meanings of the impaired body available to authors. This endeavor is useful to my own analysis, which specifically looks at Deerbrook (1839) and Jane Eyre (1847). Yet, this categorical approach to disability representation ultimately fails to capture one of the most important aspects of social consciousness regarding disability during this particular time period. What remains largely unnoticed is the extent to which disability “spills over” from overtly disabled figures on to the characters that surround them in such a way that defies categorization. I argue that this pattern of disability representation reflects the limited success of a cultural desire to partition bodies into constructed categories. Furthermore, I claim that both the attempt and failure of this project is shaped by three important factors of mid-nineteenth century life: the growing visibility of industrial injuries and illnesses; an increasingly

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valued concept of the “norm;” and the heightened medical uncertainty and cultural anxiety surrounding the etiology of disability. With the rise of industrialization, the nature of injuries, as well as the amount of publicity that such injuries received, changed dramatically during the first half of the century. Large machinery and moving parts meant that amputation and laceration became more common and work with acidic chemicals and explosive gases sometimes caused severe burns.5 Despite concurrent advances in medicine, these types of disabilities remained visible long after the actual accident was forgotten. Newspapers portraying factory accidents frequently borrowed narrative techniques from the popular genres of melodramatic theater and sensationalist fiction to appeal to their readership. The particularly gruesome nature of many factory accidents, further emphasized by the graphic narrative style of the reports, thrust the threatening image of the fragmented body into public consciousness. The distribution of such narratives increased as the circulation of newspapers became more widespread. Thus, during the first half of the nineteenth century, awareness of disability increased dramatically and new questions arose not only about the relationship of the disabled body to the nondisabled spectator, but also about the relationship of the disabled body to the workforce. At the same time that disability was becoming visible in new ways, ideas about normalcy were also beginning to take shape. As Lennard J. Davis argues in “Constructing Normalcy:” The word “normal” as “constituting, conforming to, not deviating or different from, the common type or standard, regular, usual” only enters the English language around 1840. […] If the lexicographical information is relevant, it is possible to date the coming into consciousness in English of an idea of “the norm” over the period 1840-1860.6

As the middle class began to expand in the 1830s, an increasingly large population became invested in shifting power towards the “center.” As a result, lifestyles, moralities, and bodies that were different now also became “deviant.” This emerging value system proved to be a psychologically beneficial way for the normative public to frame its burgeoning anxieties about disability. By classifying bodies into categories of “normal” and “deviant,” the nondisabled person could distance her or his “complete” self from the “fragmented” self of the nonnormative body. However, between 1830 and 1860, defining disability was a complex task due to the multiplicity of competing theories about how disabilities

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occurred and how they were transferred between bodies. Although factory accidents that resulted in amputation or other obvious physical mutilations had relatively clear superficial causes, both these injuries and other types of disabilities were frequently framed by multiple etiological narratives. Newspapers and preachers often framed news of factory deaths or accidents within a religious context that situated the cause of injury and disease in the heavenly realm. Additionally, the contagion model was beginning to take a tenuous hold, although it still encountered strenuous opposition.7 Even those who favored the contagion model usually also believed that the “constitution” of an individual affected the transmission and extent of a disease. Class often factored into theories of disease transmission, both in and out of the factory, as Holmes points out: The rhetoric of class difference that inflects descriptions of constitutional types and both sides of the contagion debates increases the vagueness of theories about the transmission of impairment-producing disease. In this context, any physical impairment had the potential to be perceived as transmissible by contact; by miasmatic air; by a combination of contact, environment, and individual constitution; or perhaps simply by the social class into which one was born.8

Concerns about the relationship between class and disability were accompanied by anxiety about morality and disability. Blindness, in particular, was often associated with either a lack of concern about cleanliness or with sexual promiscuity, stemming either from venereal disease or attributed to the wayward practices of mothers whose lack of “constant attention and affectionate care, which only a mother can supply,” resulted in the blindness of their children.9 Mothers were often held responsible for their children’s disabilities for other reasons as well. In 1831, a “surgeon-aurist” wrote in the Lancet about the power of impressions: At Dover, some years ago, a lady was frightened by a ferrit [sic] whilst in a state of pregnancy; the child, when born, had eyes precisely like that animal; every child after had the same kind of eyes, and they all became blind, or nearly so, about the age of puberty.10

Both the general public and the medical community commonly accepted the idea that the emotions and images experienced by the mother could affect the development of her child, at least through the 1850s.11 Thus, moral, socio-economic, familial, environmental, and biological explanations for disability frequently spilled over one another and were used in combination to explain any individual’s particular physical reality.

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As a result, bodies could not be classified into categories of disability and nondisability with as much (problematic) ease as they frequently are today, in spite of the pressures to do so caused by the anxieties of the nineteenth-century public.12 Because disability was so visible and the mechanisms of its transmission were so unclear, society often viewed the disabled body as a threat to its “normal” existence. Although Ato Quayson envisions this threat of fragmentation as a ubiquitous condition of the encounter between the disabled and nondisabled, I argue that the historical circumstances of the mid-nineteenth century gave this threat a particular intensity. Deerbrook and Jane Eyre illustrate certain thematic representations of the body that stem from their cultural moment. Both novels reflect a cultural desire to create a partition between disabled and nondisabled characters and to limit the social roles available to the former. Yet, this ontological project ultimately fails as characters defy categorization and reflect the unstable conceptions of disability emerging at the time. While the novels overtly label some individuals as disabled or “crippled” and accordingly describe them with the expected sentimental or stigmatizing tones, other characters either experience temporary disability, display ambiguous manifestations of disability, or are written about in terms usually reserved for the disabled. Within this landscape of ambiguous bodies, both novels investigate the limitations and expectations of bodies and navigate a social setting in which a strong desire to segregate disability is continually thwarted by the ambiguity of definitions of disability.

The Interrupting Sister The rolling hills and meandering lanes of Deerbrook seem far removed from the dirt and danger of urban mills and factories. Yet, the increasing mechanization of the Victorian landscape reveals itself even in Martineau’s description of this rural setting: The letter-carrier blew his horn as the times came round; the children shouted in the road; and their parents bought and sold, planted and delved, ate and slept, as they had ever done, and as if existence were as mechanical as the clock which told the hours without fail from the grey steeple.13

As ways of thinking about life, even in the countryside, became more and more influenced by the technological advances of the cities, ways of thinking about bodies also shifted to accommodate this new relationship between the body and the machine. Thus, even the portrayal of the countryside carriage accident that leads to the permanent disability of

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Maria is characterized by the same sentimental rhetoric becoming more and more prevalent in depictions of factory accidents in newspapers. As Margaret and Hester’s reaction upon hearing her story reveals, Maria’s disability provokes pity because it necessitates her isolation: “To the sisters there seemed a world of desolation in [Maria’s] words. They were always mourning for having no brother. Here was one who appeared to be entirely alone.”14 The unquestioned association between female disability and isolation stems, in part, from the assumption that disabled women’s bodies are unfit for marriage, an assumption which Maria, herself, believes to be self evident: “I am out of the game, and why should not I look upon its chances? I am quite alone; and why should I not watch for others?”15 The isolated, passive nature of Maria’s life contrasts with the normative, active nature of Margaret’s, despite the initial similarities in their life stories. Both women fall in love with Philip Enderby and both are racked by anxiety over whether Philip returns their love. Yet, as their names reflect, while the beginnings of their stories are the same, the endings are different. The point of departure between the two stories is the moment in which Maria has her disabling accident, while Margaret remains healthy. This one plot point relegates Maria to a life of isolation and reflection while Margaret experiences courtship and marriage. This narrative device, which “pairs a disabled woman with a nondisabled one and gives them distinctly different physical, emotional, and marital futures” has been documented by both Thomson and Holmes, and is referred to by the latter as a “twin structure.”16 For Holmes, The pathos of disability is the pathos of unrequited sexual longing. These fictions overdetermine the disabled woman’s unfitness for marriage by characterizing her as hopelessly alienated from normal life and her desire invisible to the nondisabled.”17

This certainly proves true for Maria, whose unrequited love for Enderby remains unvoiced and unacknowledged as she whole-heartedly supports her nondisabled friend’s engagement to the man they both love. The twin structure effectively creates the partition between the potential of able bodies and the thwarted potential of disabled bodies that Victorians so ardently craved. Yet, its cultural work does not stop there. As Thomson suggests, conventional depictions of disability “construct the disabled figure as burdened by the limitations and uncertainties of individual embodiment, displacing these burdens from the liberal individual onto that distant other marked by visible bodily difference” as part of a “larger

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nineteenth-century project that made an abstract, disembodied self the cultural ideal.”18 By so visibly showcasing the limitations of the human body in the overtly disabled Maria, the limitations of more normative bodies, such as Margaret’s, are overlooked. Indeed, Margaret appears to be superlatively healthy, remarkably falling through the ice of a winter river and subsequently nursing a family dying from an epidemic without any physical consequences. Furthermore, the physical needs of Maria not only mask the possible bodily limitations of Margaret, but also provide ample opportunity for Margaret to display her maternal compassion and worthiness. When Maria’s leg is broken during a riot, only Margaret has the empathic intuition to inquire after her and discover her plight, prompting approbation from her friends and family, and also from the ubiquitous narrator: “It was indeed a blessing that some one had thought of Maria.”19 Yet, while Margaret’s behavior towards Maria allows the former to “radiate a transcendent virtue, agency, and power,” Maria, notably, departs from the binary relationship at this point and never becomes “increasingly subjugated, despairing, and impotent” like the many disabled characters that Thomson observes in other novels.20 Indeed, when, at the very end of the novel, Margaret expresses concern about Maria’s future prospects, Maria quickly rejects her pity: “And why should you [be anxious], Margaret? If I were without object, without hope, without experience, without the power of self-rule, which such experience gives, you might well fear for me. But why now? […] It is not just to me.”21 It is hardly surprising that Martineau, a deaf woman who once described herself as “probably the happiest single woman in England,” should envision a more empowering role for her central disabled character.22 Yet, Holmes notes that other novelists, such as Dinah Craik and Charlotte Yonge, also created an alternative narrative in which: A disabled woman’s involvement in the marriage plot may indeed bring anguish and exclusion, but also strength, social power, and a surprising variety of fictional rewards. This much more optimistic placement of disabled women in culture is predicated on their being, or becoming, the polar opposites of the conventional melodramatic disabled heroines: if they suffer, or if they desire, these characters indicate it quietly and privately.23

Maria certainly refuses to dwell either upon her own pain or upon her unfulfilled desire for Philip Enderby. In return, she is endowed by the text with a certain “philosophical” aspect that Mr. Hope elucidates: “Call it enlargement of views, and you have wisdom, and the love of wisdom, and

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patience, all at once.”24 Additionally, without the commitments of a husband and children, Maria can pursue scholarly learning to a greater degree than her nondisabled peers. While Maria’s empowerment creates a narrative that deviates from the more prevalent one in which the disabled figure lacks agency, her story still participates in the ontological project to separate and assign hierarchical value to nondisabled and disabled bodies. Maria’s “twin,” Margaret, as the disembodied and idealized feminine self, reaps the rewards of love, marriage, and prosperity, while Maria is left in the end with her philosophy, which, according to the opinion of many of her fictional peers, is a scanty consolation prize. Up to this point in an examination of Deerbrook, it seems that Martineau’s approach to disability and embodiment exemplifies the “twin structure” topos that both Thomson and Holmes have so cogently examined. Yet, this discourse only reveals part of the text’s complex portrayal of bodies. While Maria’s and Margaret’s relationship does serve to ease pervasive anxiety about fragmentation by creating reassuring and easily recognizable partitions between the disabled and nondisabled, the presence of Margaret’s sister, Hester, serves as a constant disruption of such demarcations and challenges the viability of thinking about ability and disability in binary terms. The contradictory modes of discourse embodied by Maria and Hester reflect the opposing conceptualizations of a cultural moment in which an increasing desire to segregate disabled bodies was tempered, as we have seen, by widespread uncertainty about the nature of disability and illness. Throughout the novel, the text describes Hester in “pseudo-disabled” terms. Unlike Maria, Hester lacks a physical signifier of disability. Yet, she harbors an “affliction” that haunts her through the majority of the novel. Within the first few pages, she reveals the source of her suffering in a confession to Margaret: I have sometimes thought that I must be hopelessly bad, when I have found that the strongest affliction I have in the world has made me unjust and cruel to the person I love best. I have a jealous temper, Margaret; and a jealous temper is a wicked temper.25

The choice of the word “affliction,” meaning “sore pain of body or trouble of mind,”26 and the subsequent use of “malady” and “infirmity”27 in other parts of the novel, reveals a conceptualization of Hester’s condition that does not distinguish between problems of the body and problems of the mind. Additionally, Hester’s condition reflects the association of affliction with both emotional excess and wickedness. Thus, the use of vocabulary associated with physical disability, the conflation of affliction with excess

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temper, and the suggestion that Hester’s affliction makes her “hopelessly bad,” all serve to situate Hester in a discourse that labels her disabled/ emotionally excessive/bad, while it labels Maria as disabled/emotionally moderate/good. Yet, what remains notably absent is the actual physical sign of Hester’s disability. What she signifies departs from her embodied reality and disrupts the monolithic conventions that Maria so diligently upholds. The ambiguous status of Hester’s body also reveals itself in her relationship with her husband, Dr. Hope. The fact that Hester is eligible for marriage in the first place contrasts with the style of discourse that depicts her as disabled. The fact that she subsequently births a child further blurs the boundaries of what is possible for disabled and nondisabled bodies and challenges Holmes’s claim that “No matter how close [disabled women] get to being traditional heroines, however, the bar to biological parenthood remains.”28 Yet, while Hester can lead a normative life that includes biological children, she can only do so within the healing influence of Dr. Hope’s home, which doubles as his medical office. Hester’s marriage, which helps to assert her physical normativity, may also be read as her departure to live in a surgeon’s office where she asks Edward Hope to cure her: “Then you must sustain me – you must cure me – you must do what no one has ever yet been able to do.”29 At the same time, Dr. Hope himself does not adhere to the unambiguous role of healer in the way that his relationship to Hester might suggest. Despite having a profession that attempts to secure the transition between illness and health, Dr. Hope’s body, like Hester’s, lingers uncertainly within the liminal space between the two. Shortly after the novel begins, Dr. Hope has a riding accident and experiences a concussion of the brain that renders the status of his health dubious for many months as his busy-body neighbors first believe him to be completely recovered and then at other times frightfully “delicate.”30 As the epidemic that ravages Deerbrook begins to ebb, Dr. Hope very suddenly experiences a headache that causes his household to panic: At this moment, Hester burst in with a countenance of dismay. ‘Margaret, my husband has a head-ache!’ A head-ache was no trifle in these days.31

Later, Dr. Hope finally returns home from easing a patient’s last pain, and is greeted with hurried inquiries from his wife: “ ‘My husband’s knock!’ cried Hester, starting up. ‘How is your head-ache, love?’ asked she anxiously, as she met him at the room door” to which he anticlimactically responds, “Gone, quite gone.”32

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Hester’s anxiety (and the reader’s) stems from the possibility that her husband may have contracted the fatal epidemic from his patients. She cannot be sure whether the headache is the result of contagious transmission or the result of stress, fatigue, or other non-transmissible factors. In a moment where medical discourse significantly lacked etiological certainty, the epidemic symbolizes the transmissible potential of all impairment. Her fear reflects a larger cultural fear about the porousness of household and bodily boundaries. Additionally, Dr. Hope’s headache is important because it epitomizes the overall role of the Hope family. This odd moment, when the expected meaning of Dr. Hope’s pain fails to occur, reflects the propensity of both Edward and Hester Hope to disrupt traditional disability discourse by repeatedly departing from the expected meaning associated with the particulars of their embodiment. While Maria’s story reflects a larger cultural desire to segregate disability and distance the disabled from the normative public in an attempt to diffuse etiological and psychological anxieties, the story of Hester and her husband illustrates the inevitable failure of such a project. At a time when concepts of disability defy binary divisions such as mental/physical, hereditary/contagious, and moral/biological, it is unsurprising that the larger classification of disabled/nondisabled can only be imposed imperfectly on literary representations of embodiment. Thus, while the classification structures proposed by scholars such as Holmes and Thomson help elucidate the cultural desires that shape narratives such as Maria’s, it is equally important to acknowledge the ways in which representations of disability extend beyond such classification barriers, disrupting the expected meanings of the body and reflecting the ambiguity inherent in physical existence.

The Quest for Normativity “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day,” states Jane Eyre, and with these introductory words, she frames her narrative in terms of physical limitation. She continues: “I never liked long walks, especially on chilly afternoons: dreadful to me was the coming home in the raw twilight […] humbled by the consciousness of my physical inferiority to Eliza, John, and Georgiana Reed.”33 Jane’s body, like Hester’s in Deerbrook, is often represented as “pseudo-disabled.” She suffers from the stigma of having a non-normatively functioning body, but the impairment that usually accompanies such stigma is conspicuously absent, or at least not easily located. From the beginning, however, notions of Jane’s “physical inferiority” are perpetuated by interlocking ideologies of class and gender.

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Her anxiety about physical inferiority follows Jane throughout her narrative as she seeks, with only limited success, to establish herself as healthy and normative in contradistinction to a landscape of disabled figures. When Jane is sent to the red room for attacking John, the relationship between the discourses of class, gender, impairment, and morality that frame Jane’s notions of her “physical inferiority” become clearer. As Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar famously point out in The Madwoman in the Attic, the red room that served as the deathbed to her uncle is “a kind of patriarchal death chamber” that “represents her vision of the society in which she is trapped, an uneasy and elfin dependent.”34 Within this patriarchal setting, Jane sits and reflects on her moral failings: “All said I was wicked, and perhaps I might be so,” thereby acknowledging that moral reality largely depends upon the consensus of the social power structure.35 She meditates on escape from the double confinement of the room and power structure through flight or starvation before choosing “a third, even more terrifying, alternative: escape through madness.”36 While Gilbert and Gubar cogently associate Jane’s loss of consciousness with madness, and by association, rage, they seem to lose sight of the physical reality of what is happening. As Elizabeth Donaldson points out: “While Gilbert and Gubar make it clear that their discussion concerns madness as a metaphor, not mental illness in the clinical sense, this distinction proves impossible to maintain.”37 One cannot ignore that Jane’s madness is inextricable from the reality of physical impairment, which not only includes her temporary loss of consciousness, but also more long term effects: “It […] gave my nerves a shock, of which I feel the reverberation to this day. Yes, Mrs. Reed, to you I owe some fearful pangs of mental suffering.”38 Acknowledging the physically impairing aspect of Jane’s madness in the red room is imperative to understanding the reasons why Jane believes herself to be “physically inferior.” Her inferiority stems not from a permanent and easily identified impairment, but instead from “fearful pangs of mental suffering” caused by the complex associations of class, gender, and morality that all place her at the bottom of the hierarchical power structure and that sometimes manifest themselves in moments of physical impairment, such as her loss of consciousness in the red room. When Jane moves to Lowood Institution, she hopes to escape the interlocking power structures that oppress her at Gateshead Hall. Although, she cannot initially avoid the patriarchal authority of Mr. Brocklehurst, the outbreak of a typhus epidemic soon causes him to flee the school and simultaneously alleviates her anxiety about her “physical

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inferiority.”39 In the “cradle of fog and fog-bred pestilence”40 that surrounded the school, and with a supply of food “scarcely sufficient to keep alive a delicate invalid,”41 Jane not only survives the epidemic that kills so many of her schoolmates, but miraculously thrives, as well. Her relationship with her schoolmates allows her to participate in a paradigm in which she “escape[s] from the limitations of the female body by anchoring those limitations to someone who can be reified as ‘all body.’”42 Thus, her narrative emphasizes the separation between her body and the sick bodies of the other schoolgirls: While disease had thus become an inhabitant of Lowood, and death its frequent visitor; while there was gloom and fear within its walls; while its rooms and passages steamed with hospital smells, the drug and the pastille striving vainly to overcome the effluvia of mortality, that bright May shone unclouded over the bold hills and beautiful woodland out of doors. […] But I, and the rest who continued well, enjoyed fully the beauties of the scene and the season: they let us ramble in the wood, like gipsies [sic], from morning til night; we did what we liked, went where we liked: we lived better too.43

Jane’s freedom and agency derive from her identification with the healthy, nondisabled community that maintains its privilege of autonomy through the existence of the disabled Other. This distinction is short-lived, however. With Helen Burn’s death and the end of the typhus epidemic, the circumstances that clearly demarcated the differences between Jane’s body and disabled or unhealthy bodies (such as freedom versus confinement, outside versus inside, mobile versus stationary) come to an end. The reader finds Jane, after an eight-year narrative gap, back under patriarchal authority and with returning anxieties about the status of her body. Each of Jane’s three pictures that she shows Mr. Rochester shortly after arrival at Thornfield Hall portray images of the fragmented body: These pictures were in water-colors. The first represented clouds low and livid, rolling over a swollen sea. […] Sinking below the bird and mast, a drowned corpse glanced through the green water; a fair arm was the only limb clearly visible, whence the bracelet had been washed or torn. […] The second picture contained for foreground only the dim peak of a hill, with grass and some leaves slanting as if by a breeze. Beyond and above spread an expanse of sky, dark blue as a twilight: rising into the sky was a woman’s shape to the bust, portrayed in tings as dusk and soft as I could combine. […] The third showed the pinnacle of an iceberg piercing a polar winter sky: a muster of northern lights reared their dim lances, close serried, along the horizon. Throwing these into distance, rose, in the

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foreground, a head, -- a colossal head, inclined towards the iceberg, and resting against it. Two thin hands, joined under the forehead, and supporting it, drew up before the lower features a sable veil: a brow quite bloodless, white as bone, and an eye hollow and fixed, blank of meaning but for the glassiness of despair, alone were visible.44

Jane’s paintings reveal what Ato Quayson calls “an anxious fantasy of dismemberment.”45 Yet, for Jane, these images do not remain mere fantasy. The juxtaposition of the three fragmented figures -- one female corpse, one living but incomplete female body, and one dismembered male body -- foreshadow the fates of Bertha, Jane, and Mr. Rochester. The pictures not only reflect Jane’s anxieties, but also suggest the inevitable failure of Jane’s attempts to distance herself from the disabled body. This struggle is also reflected in Jane’s relationship with Bertha, Rochester’s first wife. The contradicting complexities of Jane’s encounter with Bertha can be read as an allegory for the encounter of the nondisabled subject with the disabled object. First, one can read Bertha as Jane’s double, not only reflecting her repressed desires, as Gilbert and Gubar suggest, but also her repressed anxieties.46 Bertha embodies Jane’s fear that she is impaired, which is reflected in the way Jane describes her: “I never saw a face like it! It was a discolored face – it was a savage face. I wish I could forget the roll of the red eyes and the fearful blackened inflation of the lineaments.”47 Yet, at the same time that Bertha reflects Jane’s anxieties about the fragmented body, she simultaneously assuages them. Jane’s status as a whole body is confirmed in contradistinction to Bertha’s impaired body. When Jane and Bertha meet on the fateful wedding day, Jane’s body, described elsewhere as plain and even unnatural, becomes pleasing in Rochester’s eyes by the comparison: “Look at the difference! Compare these clear eyes with the red balls yonder – this face with that mask – this form with that bulk.”48 The contradictory nature of these two readings reflects the contradictory nature of the nondisabled individual’s response to confrontation with disability. As Ato Quayson suggests, the nondisabled self identifies with the fragmented body, causing anxiety by disrupting the imagination of the self as “whole and powerful,”49 and yet, paradoxically, “the notions and stereotypes of wholeness are grounded on the repressed imagos of the fragmented body.”50 In this case, Jane’s anxiety is caused by her identification with her impaired double and yet, simultaneously, Bertha’s presence is necessary to formulate Jane’s sense of wholeness. As before in the red room, Jane’s concern about her “physical inferiority” is coupled with the pressures of patriarchal authority, as

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Rochester persuades, commands, and physically threatens Jane in order to convince her to become his mistress. Unsurprisingly, she later reflects upon her choice not only in terms of rebelling against or conforming to his demands, but also in terms of health or disease: Whether is it better, I ask, to be a slave in a fool’s paradise at Marseilles – fevered with delusive bliss one hour – suffocating with the bitterest tears of remorse and shame the next – or to be a village schoolmistress, free and honest, in a breezy mountain nook in the healthy heart of England.51

Although Jane’s escape from Thornfield Hall resembles her escape from Gateshead, her situation at Marsh End does not provide her with the same sense of freedom and physical normativity that Lowood did. Indeed, her body is rescripted as truly disabled in the sense that she is perceived to be un-able to perform the tasks that various outside forces expect of her. St. John, her unyielding, authoritative cousin, judges her lack of normative femininity to be sufficient impairment to prevent her from participating in a traditional marriage founded on sexual desire, stating: “You are formed for labour, not for love.”52 Instead, he desires her to marry him in order to conscript her for his own chosen labor. By reconfiguring the value of Jane’s body in terms of labor, St. John employs rhetoric frequently employed to describe disabled female bodies, as Holmes notes: The distinction between abled and disabled bodies in Victorian culture (and our own) was produced partly in terms of the distinction between men and women and beliefs about what ‘naturally’ characterized each gender […] For example, if what distinguishes men from women is that the latter stay home and produce children while the former go to a workplace and make money, the disabled woman’s difference is often imaginatively marked by her working.53

Yet, Jane’s body appears, at least in the eyes of her cousin, Diana, to be unfit for this secondary social task as well. She exhorts Jane to avoid the labor that St. John recommends by reminding her of her physical frailty: “Think of the task you undertook – one of incessant fatigue: where fatigue kills even the strong; and you are weak.”54 Ultimately, the people surrounding Jane during her time at Marsh End confirm her anxieties about her physical inferiority by reconceptualizing her body in terms reserved for the disabled. The perpetual oscillation of Jane’s body between modes of discourse that classify her as abled and disabled finally ceases when she reaches Ferndean. Yet, the status of her embodiment remains ambiguous to the very end. Ferndean’s retired and hidden setting reflects the ambiguity of its mistresses’ body. Previously, Rochester discussed the suitability of the

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manor as a place of confinement for his mad, first wife and dismissed it: I could have lodged her safely enough, had not a scruple about the unhealthiness of the situation, in the heart of a wood, made my conscience recoil from the arrangement. Probably those damp walls would have soon eased me of her charge. 55

Thus, like Lowood, Ferndean Manor is represented as a place of disease. Jane’s ability to reside and thrive there, just as she had at her old school, labels her as a survivor. Additionally, Jane’s relationship with the newly impaired Rochester allows Jane to reimagine herself as nurturer and caretaker and to subsume her own physical concerns with the desire to care for her husband’s far greater physical needs. Her marriage and the subsequent birth of her son affirm her status as a nondisabled woman. Yet, the imagery that Jane uses to describe her relationship with Rochester suggests that she views his body, impairment and all, as her own: “No woman was ever nearer to her mate than I am; ever more absolutely bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh.”56 Not only does this image suggest that she shares his impairment, but it also reiterates her conceptualization of her own body as incomplete. And in the end, while Ferndean emphasizes Jane’s ability to live, it also isolates her in an “ineligible and insalubrious site” that is a constant reminder of the possibility of disease.57 Ultimately, the oscillating ambiguities of Jane’s body, just like those of Hester’s in Deerbrook, reflect the thwarted attempts of the text to create impermeable barriers between disabled and nondisabled bodies. Jane’s narrative holds a complexity that belies the idea that classifications of ability can be determined in terms of physical impairment alone. Instead, the text reveals a much more intricate web of cause and effect, reflecting the ways that cultural constructions such as patriarchy, class systems and moral beliefs can contribute to and occasionally even cause impairment, as well as the ways in which they can shape the ramifications of existing impairment. For Jane, a poor female orphan with a penchant for subversive behavior, the quest for a normative body is lost from the start.

Conclusion Deerbrook and Jane Eyre reflect a critical moment for Victorian England that began to shift by 1859, when Charles Darwin finally published On The Origin of Species, which was widely read by the general public due to its accessible style.58 By 1863, his theory of evolution was generally accepted in spite of its problematic religious implications.59 At

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the same time that his theories were fundamentally shifting understanding about the nature of heredity, other models of the etiology of disease were changing as well; theories of maternal impressions of frights were debunked and the eugenics mania that characterized the next eighty years began. The contagion theory identifying transmission of microorganisms as the cause of many diseases became a dominant part of medical discourse.60 While these changes were taking place, England, and much of the Western world, continued to value conceptualizations of the norm. Thus, the social desire to segregate impaired individuals remained and the new conceptualizations of disease and heredity allowed that desire to be more fully expressed. Disability became increasingly framed by the discourse of pathology, which viewed impairment as a categorizable physical “defect” and the wealth of medico-socio-moral theories of disability began to gradually lessen. Yet, the literary representations of disability in mid-nineteenth century England are still extremely relevant. We can still see representations of disability that hearken back to an early Victorian rhetoric of disability, despite the introduction of new models.61 While these representations often serve as vessels of prejudice and ignorance, the disability rhetoric of early Victorian England can serve as an important intervention in current disability discourse, which still frequently relies heavily on pathology and medicalized terminology that segregates and classifies disabled bodies. The fact that such attempts to create partitions between abled and disabled bodies continually fail in these Victorian novels provides an important reminder to the modern day reader of the very real impossibilities of inscribing static meaning on dynamic flesh.

Notes 1

Ato Quayson, Aesthetic Nervousness (New York: Columbia UP, 2007), 36. Ato Quayson, “Looking Awry: Tropes of Disability in Post-Colonial Writing,” in An Introduction to Contemporary Fiction, ed. Rod Mengham (Malden, Massachusetts: Polity, 1999), 56-57. 3 Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies (New York: Columbia UP, 1997), 82. 4 Martha Stoddard Holmes, Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan, 2009), 3. 5 Jamie L. Bronstein, Caught in the Machinery: Workplace Accidents and Injured Workers in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008), 16. 6 Lennard J. Davis, “Constructing Normalcy: The Bell Curve, the Novel, and the Intervention of the Disabled Body in the Nineteenth Cenury,” in The Disability Studies Reader, ed. Lennard J. Davis, 2nd ed., (New York: Routledge, 2006), 4. 2

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Holmes, Fictions of Affliction, 63. Ibid., 63. 9 William Lawrence, “Lectures on the Anatomy, Physiology, and Diseases of the Eye,” XI, Lancet, 4 February 1826, 628-630, quoted in Martha Stoddard Holmes, Fictions of Affliction (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan, 2009), 64. 10 William Lawrence, “Lectures on the Anatomy, Physiology, and Diseases of the Eye,” XIII, Lancet, 25 March 1826, 849-855, quoted in Martha Stoddard Holmes, Fictions of Affliction (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan, 2009), 64. 11 Holmes, Fictions of Affliction, 65. 12 In Waist-High in the World, Nancy Mairs challenges the “age-old Western dichotomy between mind, active and in control, and body, that wayward slug with which it is afflicted” and encourages us to instead think of the self as a “biochemical dynamo cranking out consciousness much as it generates platelets, feces, or reproductive cells to ensure the manufacture of new dynamos.” Nancy Mairs, Waist-High in the World: A Life Among the Nondisabled (Boston: Beacon, 1996), 41-42. 13 Harriet Martineau, Deerbrook, ed. Valerie Sanders (New York: Penguin, 2004), 419. 14 Ibid., 28. 15 Ibid., 47. 16 Holmes, Fictions of Affliction, 38. 17 Ibid., 39. 18 Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies, 81. 19 Martineau, Deerbrook, 373. 20 Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies, 82. 21 Martineau, Deerbrook, 598. 22 Ibid., i. 23 Holmes, Fictions of Affliction, 48. 24 Martineau, Deerbrook, 64. 25 Ibid., 22. 26 Oxford English Dictionairy, 2nd ed., s.v. “Affliction.” (emphasis mine). 27 Martineau, Deerbrook, 497. 28 Holmes, Fictions of Affliction, 62. 29 Martineau, Deerbrook, 171. 30 Ibid., 217. 31 Ibid., 579. 32 Ibid., 587. 33 Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, ed. Richard J. Dunn, 3rd ed., (New York: Norton & Co., 2001), 5. (emphasis mine). 34 Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale UP, 2000), 340. 35 Brontë, Jane Eyre, 13. 36 Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, 341. 37 Elizabeth J. Donaldson, “The Corpus of the Madwoman Toward a Feminist 8

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Disability Studies Theory of Embodiment and Mental Illness,” Feminist Formations 14, no. 3 (2002): 101. 38 Brontë, Jane Eyre, 16. 39 As in Deerbrook, this epidemic serves as a focus of etiological anxieties. Mr. Brocklehurst (rightly) fears that his efforts to distance himself through signifiers of class, economic, and gender privilege from his impaired students will be insufficient to protect him from the replicating nature of impairment that the epidemic symbolizes. 40 Brontë, Jane Eyre, 64. 41 Ibid., 50. 42 Holmes, Fictions of Affliction, 61. 43 Brontë, Jane Eyre, 65. (emphasis mine). 44 Ibid., 107. (emphasis mine). 45 Ato Quayson, “Looking Awry,” 57. 46 Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, 359. 47 Brontë, Jane Eyre, 242. 48 Ibid., 251. 49 Ato Quayson, “Looking Awry,” 55. 50 Ibid., 57. 51 Brontë, Jane Eyre, 306. (emphasis mine). 52 Ibid., 343. 53 Holmes, Fictions of Affliction, 94. 54 Brontë, Jane Eyre, 354. 55 Ibid., 256. 56 Ibid. 384. 57 Ibid., 366. 58 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2004). 59 Levine, George, chronology to The Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin, viiixii. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2004. 60 Holmes, Fictions of Affliction, 63. 61 For example, the AIDS epidemic has moral and social meanings that extend beyond strictly medical discourse as Paula A. Trichler notes: “The AIDS epidemic -- with its genuine potential for a global devastation – is simultaneously an epidemic of a transmissible lethal disease and an epidemic of meanings or signification. Both epidemics are equally crucial for us to understand, for, try as we may to treat AIDS as an “infectious disease” and nothing more, meanings continue to multiply wildly and at an extraordinary rate.” She goes on to list thirtyeight conceptualizations of AIDS found in media sources since 1981 that include “A gay plague, probably emanating from San Francisco,” “a fascist plot to destroy homosexuals,” “the result of moral decay,” and “God’s punishment of our weakness” (32-33). Paula Treichler, “AIDS, Homophobia, and Biomedical Discourse: An Epidemic of Signification,” Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism 43 (1987): 32-33.

CHAPTER EIGHT “LOST IN SPACE: THE ‘NOTHING THAT IS NOT THERE AND THE NOTHING THAT IS’ OR THE BLIND MEN AND THE ELEPHANT”

MARK LEDBETTER

For the listener, who listens in the snow, And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. Wallace Stevens, “The Snowman”1

“The listener . . . nothing himself, beholds Nothing.” A listener beholds? Listening beholds? I am not sure that Wallace Stevens is mixing his metaphors even though I think he is mixing his metaphors. I like the confusion. The ear, the eye, the nose, the hands, they are the bits that make up who we are, each with a particular, if not peculiar function, and yet at the same time each is the other even in the other’s absence. Let’s hold that thought a moment. I have long loved the poetry of Wallace Stevens. The two of us have had some interesting conversations over the years. We do not always agree philosophically; he’s a bit pragmatic—well no, he’s a lot too pragmatic for me—but lines from his poetry haunt me. We are like lovers who find passion in disagreement. So the question becomes, “what keeps us a couple?” I think one of the answers is that while we “see” things differently, philosophically, we are both passionate about “seeing” things. And part of what keeps us talking to one another is this obsession with perspective.

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Chapter Eight Among twenty snowy mountains, The only moving thing Was the eye of the blackbird … I was of three minds Like a tree In which there are three blackbirds … I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just after Wallace Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”2 or I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill Wallace Stevens, “Anecdote of a Jar”3

Stevens and I share an appreciation, or maybe appetite is not too strong a word, for the subtlety of seeing and the implications of perspective. Where we tend to disagree is in the certainty of what we see. Stevens is convinced that perspective reflects the pieces of the puzzle, which create the real image that we are after. It’s a many-piece puzzle; the colors and shapes seduce and mislead, and unfortunately, the image you are after is not given to you on the box top. Still, in the end, there is only one whole and complete image. Where Stevens seeks order, clarity in perspective, I want disarray. Stevens wants the parts to point to a whole, a sum equal to if not greater than its parts. I want the whole not merely dependent on its parts. I want the sum that is the whole less than a part. Stevens wants the whole to make quiet the quest for knowing or to silence the parts which might reflect their own peculiar way of knowing, while I want the parts to be a whole loudly independent of the other while yet still intimately related. Perhaps the issue is one of boundary—why we need them and why we construct them.

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I want us to learn not simply to ignore boundary. I want us to learn to not see boundary; I want us to learn momentarily to not see at all. Stevens almost has it when he says, “for the listener, nothing himself [and let us add herself], beholds nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” The line is correct while Stevens’ intent misses the mark. He is chastising us for the failure to see. But “Not seeing” need not be prelude to vision but rather a dimension of seeing that however briefly sustained, is an end unto itself. (An aside: I should apologize to Wallace Stevens for a sort of/maybe/certain misappropriation of his poem, but of course all is fair in a lovers’ quarrel; he knows I’ll be back).

Visual Anarchy Human beings seem to be obsessed with predication, in particular when it comes to seeing. I know that the word predication, the claim of something self-evident, is rarely used as a noun, but predication works better than “prediction” for the point I want to make. And it’s intimately related to the verb “predicate,” which is to say something about the subject of a sentence. Perhaps what I should have said all along is that we are obsessed with saying something about ourselves. The story about the blind persons and the elephant is significant here. Six blind people are brought to see an elephant. Each person touches with hands and/or body some part of the elephant and has a moment of recognition, I would say a “not seeing,” that describes what they see. The elephant’s trunk is a thick branch; its side is a wall; its leg a pillar; its tusk a solid pipe, depending on which version of the story you’ve read or heard. When the story is interpreted, it’s given a rather positive slant in terms of perspective; that is, look at the various ways we can talk about an elephant. But the elephant is still an elephant. The problem with this view, this way of seeing the story is that the elephant remains at the center, perspective is failure or merely a part of the whole, and what is seen before the “touch” is privileged. In other words, the blind persons’ failures are predicated on what I see. We ask them to describe what we see. And of course, they begin to argue among themselves about what they see, which is really what we see. I am sure that I am being confusing because what I am saying confuses me. Language becomes skewed here. We often ask the blind, “what do you see?,” and we expect a response that speaks to our sense of seeing. “It’s dark.” Or, “I see shades of light.” We close our eyes to participate, but we close our eyes to see what we can’t see or can. There is not a language of reference that does not privilege sight in terms of seeing image. To make a

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language that privileges/celebrates not seeing as a way of engaging image is visual anarchy. A caveat or apologia: this is the point where I begin to worry about what I am saying. I do not presume to write a theory of blindness; in fact, I have no right to write such a thing. There are others who do it eloquently with tremendous “insight.” I’m thinking of the works of Nicholas Mirzoeff and Georgina Kleege.4 I do not jest about the blind persons and the elephant, and I do passionately believe that their story offers depth and imagination to blind theory and how we, sighted and unsighted, engage image, but I am a humbled and tentative participant in that place and space. There is an interesting tension between the words “not seeing” and seeing “no-thing.” Please know that I am not reducing disability to metaphor, though I believe that there can be positive metaphors to come from disability studies. I play in this serious and important game more than willing to be corrected. Back to my story and visual anarchy: you and I engage well critically about images, enjoy disagreeing, when the rules of engagement are agreed upon: a sort of Geneva Convention of seeing. But not seeing, seeing nothing as visual engagement is unsettling. Roland Barthes might call this the punctum, when an image accidently “pricks” or “bruises” a viewer.5 Lacan called it touché or trauma. It’s not that you and I are bothered by another way of seeing that challenges how I see, even what I see, but to privilege “seeing nothing” reveals the secret behind “seeing whole.” We have domesticated images. I think that the elephant is the least interesting and the most unnecessarily necessary image in the story. Can’t we have a not elephant and let there still be an elephant in the room? Certainly, if we take the sum of the parts of the blind persons, we don’t get the whole. Perhaps that’s the point. There is no whole, or at best the whole is decentered. Perhaps if we think of the blind persons’ encounters as performance, we are reminded that image is always in rehearsal. As Peter Brook reminds us in The Empty Space, how appropriate that a title, image, like performance, “asserts itself in the present.”6 The elephant is not in the viewing rehearsal of the six blind persons. But of course, the elephant, if not the story, is iconic. The elephant as icon is historically “fixed.” I suggest that nothing has contributed more to the domestication of images than the iconic. .

Icons I have a profound appreciation for the power and the utility of iconic images. Referentially they have become indispensable, in the art world,

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literary world, athletic world, film world, and military world. This list is endless. Every dimension of life has its “iconic” image or images. It’s a brilliant conversation piece, the iconic. We can talk about things that neither of us has experienced, and yet each of us knows intimately. I think of Alan Ginsberg, “In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images.”7 Here is the predication we began with; I know it before I see it. The icon feeds on “listless,” tired looking. Here’s my fear of the iconic, perhaps it need not be, but it has become a “spent” image. It is commodified and resistant to the other, any other, and in turn runs the risk of hopelessness in the name of certainty. It even loses its own identity in description: an iconic image of the Vietnam War, an iconic image of New York City or small town America. “There, look at that photograph, it is an iconic Ansel Adams,” and I’m still not sure what that means. I know all generalizations are false, including these. Perhaps this is my iconic moment. This is why I’m attracted to seeing “no-thing” as a way of seeing. In our story, we are reminded, or should be, that the blind do not have the iconic. There is no preconceived notion of eikon, nothing “pertaining” to image; in fact, there is no image in the traditional sense of seeing. But I am convinced that the “nothing that is not there” can become “the nothing that is” and can become an important trope for how we see whole, for the images within space and the images within images. In terms of image, any type of image, we think of nothing as a precondition of seeing; that is, the language of not seeing is of course sight’s language. To see nothing is not to give nothing presence but rather to re-assess the space or image we see. We think of not seeing as convenience. “What was that?” “Oh, Nothing.” No-thing means not to be bothered in terms of something. We must begin with the nothing to allow something other in image to emerge. And yet I am not talking about the emergence of the other image. To see no-thing is the image between images, the location of visual anarchy, the undomesticated home of image. I think Peter Brook is onto something when he says, “Everything is a language for something and nothing is a language for everything.”8 This is the fragment; this is the whole; each included with the other with no distinct boundary. If image is boundaryless, what we are looking for are the in-betweens of image. To see nothing as a means of visual engagement is to be in the in-betweens, it is, to paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari, to have rhythm.9 Frank Kermode, quite a few years back, in a wonderful little book called The Sense of an Ending, 10 began a conversation about the inbetweens of thought, when he suggested that one cannot, in reference to

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clock time, utter the word “tic” without the immediate thought of “tock.” And in the same fashion, once “tock” is spoken, “tic” re-presents itself. I like this conversation, and Kermode goes on to suggest that because we always have the assumption of an “end” in everything we do, we should learn to appreciate the “middest,” that evanescent moment that preludes life’s beginnings and endings. I think that too often we talk about image this way. We find important moments in an image that exist only in transition, tied intimately to its origins while pointing dramatically to its conclusions, that is the part seeking its whole. But when it comes to image, I do not assume a middle at all. This transitory place that Kermode calls “the middest,” however significant to image’s narrative, is the place of another image, “lost in space,” a selfcontained narrative, that lives in the wait—w-a-i-t—and it has weight—we-i-g-h-t, and it resists being defined by any transitional movement between the part and the whole or among the various parts. This “waiting” image is its own narrative. I think the in-between that is no-thing assumes nothing. What was the part is no more and what is the whole need not come into view. The blind persons with the elephant perpetually live in wait. While they have a part, it is not the part of traditional sight, and they will never have the whole. They have what they have, which is the no thing that we see, and we can learn something from that. Seeing no-thing requires rhythm.

Rhythm and Walker Evans I am aware that there is more than a little irony to suggest that visual anarchy requires rhythmic viewing. Let’s think briefly in terms of music. I can play a piece of music using the proper notes and keeping the correct time and still not have rhythm. I wish to suggest that the space between notes is sound too, and only the rhythmic hear it. If we keep the proper time in music, we are always coming from somewhere and going to somewhere. And timing often deafens us to the sounds between the notes because it is consumed by the whole. But rhythm is attuned to music’s every moment and senses completeness in each sound. I need never know the whole if I have rhythm. Deleuze and Guattari suggest that rhythm is the milieu’s answer to chaos. Indeed if you’ve seen someone without rhythm—for example, me dancing—you would agree. Rhythm lives comfortably in between, that is, in the waiting, and therefore possesses the ability to live in lost space, to see the image lost in space that others only see as becoming space in time. In other words, the question is not do the blind persons see the elephant I

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see but rather are they/I/we in rhythm with what we don’t see? Are Deleuze and Guattari right that “matters” of expression are superseded by a material capture?11 Are we now back to the icon? Has icon, with its own “sense of an ending,” become a synonym of sameness? I was never a fan of the brilliance of Hegel, in particular his philosophy of history, but he is keenly adept at understanding human desire. We are teleologically driven, consumed with ends or a great synthesis of the parts. We know they are culturally constructed, but they are profoundly seductive. If we are Marxist, we want the revolution. If we are Christian, we want the Kingdom of God. If we are Buddhist, we seek Nirvana, and the western laborer wants Friday. I understand this, and Hegel understands this about me. But I’m more inclined to agree with Beckett. We may be Marxist, Buddhist or Christian, but our names are Vladimir and Estragon; we are people who must make the parts whole while waiting for the “Godot” that never comes. I want us, sometimes, to think of images this way, and perhaps to allow images to remind us to think of life this way. There is a functional beauty in a moment, an image, lost in space, undefined by where it’s been or by where it is going. So I “asked” Walker Evans to photograph the Brooklyn Bridge, and he brought back to me images of the nothing that was there.

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Fig. 8-1. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Walker Evans Archive, (994.251.246) © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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It is a place of solitude and rest. The hands and feet reflect a comfortable passivity. This person is not afraid to be alone; in fact, he welcomes it with a naturally prayerful, pose. But of course this may mean that he is supplicant, waiting, not in the in-between, but in the very presence of the waiting itself. And Evans brought me this: Fig. 8-2. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Walker Evans Archive, 1972 (1972.742.3) © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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a view through the cathedral’s beautifully arched window. Yet we are reminded that hope and clarity exist only beyond the tangled webs and darkness that come with living in the world. And then this: Fig. 8-3. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Walker Evans Archive, (2004.23.19) © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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Evans saw the industrial complex that drives not only the hopes of New York City but also the dreams of a nation. Another skyscraper rises out of the heart of the City, bigger, larger, stronger than any of the others you see in its background. Evans’ series is called “Photographs of the Brooklyn Bridge,” but there is no photograph in his collection that looks like this. Fig. 8-4. The Brooklyn Bridge, Photographer unknown.

The bridge, as we so iconically know it, was the least interesting thing he saw, its necessity hidden by the whole in its parts. I think that he was willing to wait on that, the whole that is, or perhaps he simply beheld the nothing that is not there. None of what I’ve said is terribly new, and I’m really not after an interpretive paradigm shift. But I am suggesting that sometimes our nagging preoccupations with the insignificant minutiae of our lives are not so insignificant, and perhaps the distraction of a butterfly is no distraction at all. Horton really did hear a Who. These are the no-things that are not there, and they are prominently not there in the images we engage. Perhaps this is my hedonism. I can forget the sky for a cloud shaped like a frog. We are taught, ideologically, philosophically, to want the “big

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picture.” And, not but, and I want an aesthetically ethical relationship, a just relationship, with an image that finds beauty and meaning within that moment’s encounter and is independent of “a whole,” a “bigger image” for its importance and/or definition. Occasionally, I do not want Da Vinci or Mona Lisa to own the smile. Nor do I want Vietnam, a war, and napalm to own the pain of a little burned girl. I want the smile; I want the pain, and in the images lost in only those spaces, for a moment, I want those things to be enough.

Notes 1

Wallace Stevens, “The Snow Man,” in The Palm at the End of the Mind, Selected Poem and a Play, ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Vintage Books, 1972) 54. 2 Wallace Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” in The Palm, 20. 3 Wallace Stevens, “Anecdote of the Jar,” in The Palm, 46. 4 For example see Nicholas Mirzoeff’s A Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham: Duke University Press 2011) and Georgina Kleege’s Sight Unseen (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1999) to mention only two of many of these authors’ works. 5 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York, Hill and Wang, 1980), 27. 6 Peter Brook, The Empty Space: A Book About the Theatre: Deadly, Holy, Rough, Immediate (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968), 14-15. 7 Alan Ginsberg, “A Supermarket in California,” in Howl and Other Poems, intro, William Carlos Williams (San Francisco: City Light Books 1956), 29. 8 Peter Brook, The Empty Space, 119. 9 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. and foreword Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press), 313-329. 10 Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1967). 11 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 408-412.

CHAPTER NINE PAINTING THAT ‘HOLDS THE EYES AND MOVES THE SOULS OF ITS SPECTATORS’: VISION AND RESPONSE IN LEON BATISTA ALBERTI’S RENAISSANCE TREATISE ON PAINTING THERESA FLANIGAN

In the Latin version of his early fifteenth-century treatise On Painting (c. 1435),1 the Italian Renaissance humanist Leon Battista Alberti (140472) describes the painter’s job as follows (3.52): The function of the painter is to draw with lines and paint in colors on a surface any given bodies in such a way that, at a certain distance and with a certain, determined position of the centric ray, what you see represented appears to be in relief and just like those bodies. The aim of the painter is to obtain praise, thanks and benevolence for his work much more than riches. The painter will achieve this if his painting holds the eyes and moves the souls of its spectators (oculos et animos spectantium tenebit atque movebit).2

Alberti, therefore, claims movement, specifically movement of the soul, as one of the main objectives of a successfully painted historia, which he calls the “ultimate and absolute work of painting.” 3 In fact, Alberti also states (2.35, emphasis mine): “A true historia, one that merits to be praised and admired, shows itself to be an enticement and pleasure to the senses with its ornament, so as to detain the eye of the learned and unlearned spectator for a long while with pleasure and movement of the soul.”4 Throughout his treatise Alberti provides the artist with technical instructions for achieving this goal, which include recommendations for visually observed naturalism, spatial construction using linear perspective, and the illusion of volumetric relief achieved through color modeling.

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This essay examines the concept of movement, specifically movement of the soul, in Alberti’s On Painting and by association the early Renaissance works of art influenced by this treatise. Specifically addressed shall be how a visual object, such as a painting, was thought to move the souls of its spectators. This will be done by contextualizing Alberti’s text and its prescriptions for image making within a philosophical tradition that explains exactly how through the act of seeing, an inanimate visual object was thought capable of instigating movement (or response) within one’s soul and what physical, psychological, and ethical changes this movement was thought to entail.

Movement of the Soul and Its Relation to Optics (Perspectiva) How a soul is moved, what this movement is, and how this movement is expressed in the body are all questions addressed by a long history of natural philosophers and theologians, including (but not limited to): Aristotle (380-22 BC), St. Augustine (354-430), Avicenna (Ibn Sina, 9801037), Roger Bacon (c. 1214-94), and St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-74). As a university educated humanist and cleric, Alberti was certainly familiar, either directly or indirectly, with many, if not all, of these sources. As will be shown, by claiming that painting has the potential to move the soul, Alberti places painting within an existing philosophical discourse regarding physical causation, the ontology of matter, and the nature and motility of the soul. 5 Curiously, the word soul, which is critical to Alberti’s theory, has been avoided by most modern commentators on Alberti, appearing in only one of the complete modern English translations of his treatise.6 Others have translated animos, anima, and their conjugates as variously mind or heart; and animi motu (movimento d'animo) as emotion, feelings, or “palpitations of the heart.”7 According to ancient and late medieval philosophy, however, the phrase “movement of the soul” (animi motu) referred to psychological movements8 known as “affections” or “passions” (i.e., by Aquinas),9 which are neither wholly equivalent to the modern psychological categories of feelings (e.g. sentiments) or emotions, nor are they attributable to the heart.10 Rather, according to late medieval philosophy, the soul was considered the incorporeal and immortal force that animates the matter of the body, including the heart, the appetite, and the mind, thus the soul was itself a principle of movement, one that gave the body its life and its form. The soul was also attributed with power to move human will, character, and physical and emotional response.11

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How exactly the soul was thought to be moved was also the subject of a particular theoretical discourse. Motion (kinesis) implies change in place, quantity, or form. According to Aristotle’s Physics (book 8), “every motion has a mover,” therefore every change must result from an agent acting upon a moveable body.12 The most obvious demonstration of this principle is forced motion, which occurs when one moving object, such as a rolling stone, comes into physical contact with another object, causing the second object to change its position. However, what happens when an object is moved by something that does not make physical contact, such as a person’s soul being moved by a painting that s/he does not touch? Moreover, how can an inanimate object, such as a painting, be an agent of movement? Aristotle’s proposed that an object’s surrounding medium (such as air) had the power to move it.13 This idea, however, was rejected in the later Middle Ages in favor of a sensible force called species that radiated out from every point on an object’s surface.14 Species were thought capable of impressing their form into any transparent medium (such as air) and multiplying themselves in that medium until ultimately they were able to impress their form into receptive matter, thereby effecting the subject’s transformation or movement. “These species,” claimed the mid thirteenth-century Franciscan philosopher Roger Bacon, “produce every change in the world, our bodies, and our souls.”15 Movement of species also became the basis for late medieval theories of perception, including optics (perspectiva), composed by philosophers, such as Bacon.16 When Alberti (3.52) claims that a painted historia is successful if it “holds the eyes and moves the souls of its spectators,” he suggests that the primary aim of the painter should be to create a painting capable of affecting psychological response in the viewer instigated by sensory (in this case, visual) perception. In fact, Alberti’s artistic theory in On Painting is grounded in optical theory that betrays his indebtedness to the optics of Alhacen (Ibn alHaytham, 965-c.1040), Bacon, and their followers (called perspectivists), whose treatises were present in fifteenth-century Florence.17 According to the historian of science David C. Lindberg, Bacon’s theory was the primary source for optical thought in the West from the later Middle Ages to the beginning of the seventeenth-century.18 Copies of treatises by Alhacen, Bacon, and their perspectivist followers, most notably John Pecham (c. 1230-92) and Erazmus Ciolek Witelo (born c. 1230), were taught at the university and actively debated in fifteenth-century Florence by scholars, such as Paolo del Pozzo Toscanelli (1397-1482)19 and Biagio Pelacani da Parma (c. 1365-1416) .20 In Florence, perspectivist principles also could have been encountered in book collections of the city’s wealthy

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and learned families, such as the Medici.21 There also is indisputable evidence that perspectivist treatises were made directly available to Florentine artists, most notably Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378-1455), who was one of a handful of artists praised in the Italian prologue to Alberti’s treatise.22 Ghiberti’s Third Commentary (begun c. 1447) contains a lengthy discussion of optical theory in which, in addition to citing Bacon and his perspectivist followers, he includes substantial passages copied almost verbatim from a fourteenth-century Italian translation of Alhacen’s optical treatise De li aspecti (Book of Optics, a translation of an early eleventh-century Arabic treatise, entitled Kitab al-Manazir).23 In his treatise Perspectiva (originally part of his Opus Maius of circa 1260), Bacon used optical theory and Euclidean geometry to explain exactly how an object’s species were able to affect the soul and cause physical response in the human body. Bacon’s optics unite his theory of the multiplication of species (influenced by Robert Grosseteste, 11751253) with Aristotelian intromissive optics, as had been revived and expanded upon by the Arabic philosopher Alhacen.24 Bacon’s theory also combines Alhacen’s intromissive optics with the cognitive psychology of another Arabic philosopher, Avicenna (Ibn Sina, c. 980-1037), to explain exactly how an object’s species were able to enter the human body and move the soul. The main function of these species sensibiles (which Bacon also called forms, images, similitudes or likenesses, and intentions) was to convey information about an object’s “sensible” qualities to the sensing organ (i.e., eyes, ears, etc.) and, thus, to the interior senses of the soul.25 According to Bacon, each sensing organ was able to perceive its own special sensible from the object’s radiated species. 26 The eye’s special sensible was color. Species, therefore, were perceived by the eye as color, when illuminated by and mixed with light present in the surrounding medium. This enabled the perceived form to be comprehended as an abstracted sign of the visual object. Bacon, therefore, unites physics and optics (including the visual perception of color), with epistemology.27 According to perspectivist optics, the eye was an impressionable medium, capable of receiving a visual object’s radiated species (corporeal forms or likenesses) that travelled along straight paths, called visual rays, which formed a Euclidean cone or pyramid. In his treatise On Painting, Alberti (I.5) calls these rays “ministers of vision” because “by them the likenesses (simulacra) [a synonym for species] of things are imprinted on the sense.”28 Upon entering the eye, the image’s species propagated themselves as they moved through the eye’s anatomy, the optic nerve, and the internal senses within the brain.29 Alberti is mostly silent regarding these internal senses (except for memory), however, according to Bacon

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(following Avicenna), the brain’s internal senses were believed to consist of the common sense, imagination, cogitation, estimation, and memory, which were responsible for the coordination, reception, interpretation, and storage of information from the senses.30 Ultimately, the object’s unified likeness or ‘phantasm’ came to be fully impressed upon the soul’s memory located by Avicenna in the posterior ventricle of the brain. Thus, this impression of species or form without matter was thought to result in a transformation or ‘movement’ of the impressionable soul, which Aristotle, Bacon, and others compared to the imprint created in a wax seal.31 In fact, Alberti (1.5) claims that through the visual process the “likenesses (simulacra) of things are imprinted on the sense (sensui imprimantur),”32 revealing his understanding of sense perception as a permanently transformative impression (or movement). For Alberti (1.5-8), the visual cone is composed of an infinite number of straight lines or rays that “extend between the eye and the surface seen, [and] move rapidly with their own power and remarkable subtlety, penetrating the air and rare and transparent bodies until they encounter something dense or opaque where their points strike and they stick.”33 This description suggests a hybrid model of vision (much like Bacon’s) in which rays that project out from the eyes become the pathways along which species can travel from the object to the eye. In a later passage Alberti (1.7) places the vertex of his visual cone “within the eye” at the point “where lies the sense of sight,” yet he does not state with precision where this sense is located.34 According to Alberti (1.6 Latin), it was still debated whether sight occurs at the “surface of the eye, as it were in an animate mirror” (e.g. in the crystalline lens or pupil, where one can see visible objects reflected) or at the “juncture of the inner nerve of the eye” (e.g. the optic chiasma).35 Bacon had previously attempted to resolve this debate by claiming that the dense crystalline humor (lens or pupil) receives and retains briefly the radiated species from the visual object on its surface; and it is here on the eye’s surface that separate impressions projected from the individual parts of the visual object are “ordered and described” so that entire surfaces are reflected as in Alberti’s “animate mirror.”36 However, according to Bacon, vision is not completed in the eye. In addition to being thick or dense, Bacon claims that the crystalline humor is also transparent (like crystal), so species eventually pass through it, causing a slightly painful sensation (or passion). According to Bacon, this impression on the crystalline lens (pupil) is the first in what was a series of impressions or movements within the viewer’s body instigated by the passage of species through it. It was not, however, considered a

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permanent impression, but rather more of a pressure necessary to facilitate passage of the species into the eye and to the optic nerve.37 After penetrating the eye, an object’s species were thought to travel through the eye’s transparent humors into the “common nerve” (e.g., the optic nerve) to where the nerves from both eyes conjoin (e.g., the optic chiasma), which Bacon located at the anterior surface of the brain.38 Here species travelling from both eyes merged into a single unified second impression and it is here, for Bacon, where visual perception was completed. This, however, was not the end of their journey. Rather, it was believed that cognition was instigated within the internal senses of the mind by the movement through the brain’s ventricles of animal spirits that activated its cognitive powers. Therefore, in order to understand the method by which images were thought by Alberti to cause “movement of the soul,” one also must refer to the broader theory of vision that explains the process of comprehension once an image’s species moves beyond the eye.

Movement of the Internal Senses (the “Eyes of the Mind”) According to Bacon, the first true impression of the image’s species on the inner senses within the brain (the “eyes of the mind”) occurred in the common sense (sensus communis) – a sensory organ located by Avicenna in the anterior part of the front ventricle of the brain. Here preliminary judgments were made through a process of composition and division in which an object’s species were compared with one another in order to comprehend basic qualitative information about an object, such as whether it is rounder, bigger, redder, or more beautiful than other objects also present to the senses. 39 All objects acted upon by the common sense had to be present to the external senses and received through them, making common sense impression the first stage in mental abstraction, however, one that relied on the continued presence of the visual object. Common sense impression, however, was not considered a permanent impression because the matter of the common sense “owing,” according to Bacon, “to its excessive slipperiness” could not retain an image for long.40 Instead, impressions received by the common sense were thought to be retained in the “tempered moistness and dryness” of the imagination (imaginatio), as wax retains the images impressed upon it by a seal.41 This impression on the imagination conformed exactly to the form of the external object without any added associations. Together, these two faculties – common sense and imagination – made up the combined faculty of fantasy (phantasia), which had the capacity to receive, retain,

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and make preliminary judgments about the object’s sensed likenesses. As an object’s species passed from the common sense into the imagination, it came to be abstracted fully into a mental image - an intelligible species or phantasm - that continued to be acted upon once the physical object ceased to be present to the eyes.42 Once retained in the imagination, the intelligible species (now abstracted forms that no longer require the presence of the visual object) of perceived forms became available to the higher faculties of the mind located, according to Bacon (after Avicenna) in the brain’s middle ventricle.43 According to medieval psychology, these two faculties, conditioned two different types of response: appetitive movement and intellectual movement. Both types of response were believed to be governed by the will, a part of the rational soul that commands physiological change in the viewer.44 Appetitive movement was thought to involve estimation (estimativa) or instinct, the faculty that processes nonsensible intentions received directly from sensible objects, such as emotional associations like fear that motivate our “fight or flight” responses.45 Intellectual movement, however, was thought to involve rational judgment by the cogitative faculty (imaginativa or cogitativa), a higher level of imagination, which was also credited with the invention of new images (phantasms). This might include images of abstract or immaterial things based on sensible forms in nature and/or those that had been previously perceived directly from nature and were already stored in the (short term) imagination or (long term) memory. 46 The cogitative imagination, therefore, functioned more like what we currently call imagination, fantasy, or invention. 47 Cogitativa was also considered the soul’s rational faculty capable of reasoning, judging, and understanding via a quasi-syllogistic process, which Alhacen calls the virtus distinctiva, or distinctive power.48 Despite Alberti’s silence regarding the internal senses (except for memory), functions typically associated with the mind, specifically recognition and judgment, are discussed and are central to his artistic theory. As previously demonstrated by Jack M. Greenstein, Alberti based his three principles of painting – circumscription (or outlining), composition (the arrangement of parts), and “reception of light” (or color modeling) – on the three stages of visual perception and comprehension, first outlined by Alhacen and later Bacon.49 Specifically, Alberti (2.30) links circumscription with visual apprehension (sub aspectu veniat or literally “coming under aspect”). He further connects composition with recognition by intuition (intuentes...dignoscimus), and “reception of light” with comprehension via higher-order intellectual discernments made by

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distinction (aspicientes distinctius...discernimus).50 The first of these stages, visual apprehension was thought to result from a movement of the “sense of sight” within the eye. Intuition also involved movement, specifically the movement of the eye’s centric ray over an object to collect sensible data. The final stage of discernment involved deriving judgments or conclusions from the comparison of this perceived data with other objects under perception or recollected from the storehouse of the memory.51 An object’s sensible qualities (determined by intuition) include an object’s substantial qualities (the innate qualities an object has when it comes into being, its quiddity or essence) and its accidental qualities (qualities that are changeable), which Alberti (1.2) describes as follows: “Some of these qualities are inherent to the surface so they cannot be removed or separated from it without altering the surface. Other qualities present themselves to sight in such a way that the surface appears to the beholder to be altered, when in fact the form of the surface is unchanged [he later calls these ‘accidents’].”52 For example, according to Alberti (1.23), a surface’s inherent or substantial properties include its actual form conveyed by its outline because if the outline of a surface’s shape is altered the surface is no longer that shape.53 Another inherent property of a surface is its texture, specifically whether it is flat, concave, convex, or a composite of these.54 A surface’s accidental or changeable properties are those that vary depending upon position of the viewer (i.e., the viewer’s angle of vision) and on changes in color and light.55 These properties were comprehended by higher-order judgment, called discernment. Bacon (following Alhacen) lists the following visual properties that can be discerned from light and color: light per se, color per se, distance, position, figure, magnitude, continuity, discreteness or separation, number, motion, rest, roughness, smoothness, transparency, thickness, shadow, darkness, beauty, ugliness, similarity, difference and all things composed of them.56 Alberti (1.18) lists many of these same qualities as accidents when he states: “Big, little, long, short, high, low, wide, narrow, light, dark, bright [luminosum], darkness, and the like are all things which philosophers called accidents, because they may or may not be present in things; knowledge of them is made by comparison (fiat comparatione).”57 Greenstein argues that it is through the comparison of surfaces (as Alberti’s basic “sign”) that one comprehends how they relate to one another to compose members, which are joined together to form bodies. 58 Such intellectual comparison of these “signs” (also called composition) was thought to allow the viewer to recognize the relative positioning and coloration of the surfaces and

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members that make up painted bodies which, in turn, would have been necessary for the comprehension of bodily movement in a painting (i.e., to comprehend the placement of limbs relative to the ground plane and relative to the painting’s internal light source). Alberti goes on to claim that it is through judgment by comparison “with things most immediately known” (the example he gives is comparison with man’s own body) that is the “power which allows us to recognize.”59 This power to recognize (discern and distinguish) is the rational power of reason (virtus distinctiva) executed by the cogitative faculty. Recognition happens through comparison between sensations, experiences, and between things seen and things remembered, and therefore, with things “known” and, therefore, with what is already stored temporarily in the imagination and permanently in the memory from previous sense perception. 60 In fact, Alberti (2.25) claims that painted bodies have the “divine power” to make the absent present (or represent) by activating the power of recognition (literally cognition again).61 Thus, recognition and discernment (or judgment) cannot happen without activating the re-collective power of the memory. According to late medieval optical theory, the faculties of cogitation and estimation worked to comprehend meaning from species; yet neither was capable of retention. Instead, the object’s phantasm came to be ultimately and permanently impressed upon the soul’s faculty of memory (memorativa), located in the brain’s posterior ventricle. 62 What was impressed upon the memory could only be a phantasm of what was already present in the imagination because the memory was thought incapable of receiving species directly from the external senses at the time of apprehension. This is the final impression or movement within the soul’s faculties. This ultimate impression of a visual object’s immaterial form (species or phantasm) on the memory was thought to result in a permanent transformation or ‘movement’ of the impressionable soul, sometimes also compared to the imprint created in a wax seal. What was sensed becomes forever present within the beholder and available for retrieval and use in future cognition. As visual objects, therefore, the species (or likenesses) of painted images, or more specifically painted bodies within images, would have been able to enter the viewer’s body through the eyes and impress upon (or move) the soul via the sense of sight, and therefore, according to optical principles, such as those outlined in book one of Alberti’s treatise. After a painted body’s likeness was impressed into the soul’s internal senses, the newly moved soul had the potential to effect the movement of the will, which in turn had the power to animate the viewer’s physical

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response. This response was an expression of the newly transformed state of the viewer’s soul through externally visible bodily movements, such as actions and gestures. All sensitive bodies, therefore, were thought capable of embodying and reflecting the visual objects that moved them, making the viewer a potential likeness of what was viewed. 63 Movement, therefore, involved a continuous process of projection, incorporation, and reflection, with each stage of the process instigated by a previous movement.

Movement of the Viewer in Response to Painted Movement According to Alberti (2.41): ...a historia will move the souls of its viewers when the persons who are depicted there show most clearly the movements of their souls. For it is decreed by nature, according to which nothing can be found that is not grasping of its like, that we mourn with those who are mourning, that we laugh with those who are laughing, we grieve with those who are grieving. But these movements of the soul are known from the movements of the body.64

Alberti, thus, describes the desired viewer’s response to naturalistically depicted movement in painted bodies as empathetic, a type of response currently explained by the discovery of mirror neurons, which were unknown in the Renaissance.65 According to Aristotle (Rhetoric, 2.1.1378a), such movements of the soul, which Alberti (2.43) calls “affections” and we moderns call emotions, have the power to “change men as they affect their judgments.”66 Late medieval philosophy further claimed that affective responses, such as grief and laughter, could be set in motion by a variety of different causes, including the mind, the sensory appetite (or desire) or, as in this case, by an external object presented to the senses.67 Moreover, empathetic response was not considered wholly an involuntary response based on direct perception as it also often involved the imagination, recollection by the memory, and the will, which were all considered to be partially controlled by reason and thus able to be conditioned. According to the psychological model first proposed by Avicenna, sense cognition by the internal senses had the potential to activate an “executive motor power” responsible for commanding motive acts.68 Aquinas later associates this “motive power” with two types of appetite – the concupiscible appetite and the irascible appetite – both of which had the potential to be activated by the passions.69 The concupiscible appetite,

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which could be activated by love, hatred, desire, aversion, pleasure and sadness, controls movement toward (i.e., desire for) or away from (i.e., aversion to) sense objects judged as good or bad. The irascible appetite, activated by hope, despair, fear, courage, anger, controls movement toward sense objects judged as difficult to attain and away from away those judged difficult to avoid. Movement of the appetite through the passions thus becomes central to a late medieval theory of ethics. Alberti (2.40) claims that beauty and grace along with copiousness and variety in a painting could evoke pleasure – a passion that moves the concupiscible appetite.70 According to Aristotle (Rhetoric 1.11. 1369b1370a), “Pleasure is a movement, a movement by which the soul is consciously brought to its normal state of being.”71 Visual pleasure, such as described by Alberti, could incline the viewer’s concupiscible appetite to move toward the maintenance of such pleasure, thereby “detaining the eye,” which in turn could instigate a movement of the soul to allow the emotional and intellectual significance of the visible to become more deeply impressed into the memory.72 In addition, according to ancient and medieval rhetorical theory, the more “striking” or emotionally-charged an image - such as a graphic image of the Virgin’s or St. John’s extreme mourning at Christ’s Passion the more it was thought capable of catching the eye and overwhelming the rational faculties of the soul, thereby eliciting a greater response from the soul’s appetitive faculty.73 Such “striking” images also often were recommended as mnemonic triggers in memory training exercises, such as the so-called memory palace of Simonides described in the Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium.74 Mary Carruthers’s work on the art of memory has shown that such “striking” images were intended as mnemonic keys to unlock deeper levels of meaning within the mind. 75 According to Carruthers, meaning (intentio) was constructed in the mind through an association of impressed images with related moods. These informational members (or phantasms) were stored by the memory in a highly organized manner that allowed them to be easily recollected and remembered in “associational chains” whenever one member or the other was recalled. In their ability to cue “associational chains” of meaning and mood in the mind, visible movements within an image, such as actions, gestures, and emotions, would have functioned as “mnemonic hooks,” similar to verbal rhetorical embellishment or “ornament.”76 In fact, Alberti (On Painting, 2.35) states that ornament plays a role in this process by enticing and “detaining the eye…with pleasure and movement of the soul.”77 As noted above, Alberti (On Painting, 2.40) claims that in order to cause such pleasure, the bodies in a painting must be copious and demonstrate

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appropriate variety in their appearance, coloration, movement, and comportment (e.g. their ornament).78 Painted images depicting a copious variety of appropriate bodily or emotional movements could, therefore, function as pleasing and affective mnemonic ornament. The associations triggered by these bodily movements as mnemonic ornaments could be either collective, based on a shared public memory or individualized and, therefore, vary from person to person, depending upon one’s personal experiences and memories of these experiences. An individual’s personal memories were, of course, beyond another’s control. However, a common public memory could be somewhat consciously guided, constructed, and controlled through teaching, sermons, rituals, and the repeated use of canonical imagery.79 Further responsorial guidance could have been provided in painting by the inclusion of a didactic exemplar, as in Alberti’s so-called commentator figure, “who tells the spectators what is going on, and either beckons them with his hand to look, or with ferocious expression and forbidding glance challenges them not to come near...or points to some danger or remarkable thing in the picture, or by his gestures invites you to laugh or weep with them.”80 Painted figures that portray appropriate emotional and behavioral movement, therefore, could be used to condition viewer response. In addition to moving the viewer internally, images of moving bodies in paintings were thought to have the power to physically move or transform the viewer.81 Depending upon the judgments made by the internal senses, the appetites could move the members of the body by sending out “vital spirits” (descendants of Galen’s pneuma) through the blood stream to the muscles and tendons, making them expand or contract, thereby physically moving the body’s members towards or away from what was sensed and judged as good or bad.82 The result would have been similar to modern emotional or behavioral response, both expressed by visible facial movements, actions, and gestures.83 These spirits could also move the heart (a muscle) to expand or contract and affect the heart rate, making it increase or decrease. These changes to the heart might cause other changes to be expressed externally, such as the body’s reddened coloration from increased blood flow or a whitish pallor from decreased blood flow.84 “Movements of the soul,” therefore, could also become movements of the heart. Both physical and psychological types of movement could be signified by changes in the appearance of the body. In fact, Alberti (2.41) describes how the physical body might reflect such psychological movements of the soul:

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For example, [in] one who is sad, who is bound by care and besieged with grief, all the forces of the senses are sluggish, his members hold themselves very slow, they are pale, and wavering. One who is sorrowful has a face weighted down, languid neck, all [his members] are worn out and fall neglected. True anger, which is within the soul, has inflamed the will and the eyes become swollen and red, and all his members move in a frenzy of anger they are each very active and thrown about. [In] one who is happy and joyful his members are loose and have a bending welcome movement. 85

The viewer’s internal response thus came to be expressed in the form of the physically moved and visibly transformed body of the viewer. Alberti (2.43) further describes movement in painted bodies as follows: Some movements, which the learned call affections, are of souls, such as anger, grief, joy, fear, desire, and so on. Others are of the body, for bodies are said to move in various ways, as when they grow or diminish, when they fall ill and recover from sickness, and when they change position and so on. We painters, however, who wish to express affected souls through the movements of bodies, may leave other arguments aside and speak only of the movement that occurs when there is a change of position. [He then goes on to describe the seven directions of movement and recommend that all seven movements be included in a painting.]86

Alberti’s assertion that there is a necessary correspondence between externally visible physical movements of the body and invisible internal movements of the soul can be traced back to Aristotle and Galen.87 According to ancient and medieval hylemorphic theory, the body is matter that takes on or expresses the soul’s form. 88 This notion that that the body and the soul mutually affect each other and, therefore, the knowledge of one contributes to the knowledge of the other, was also the basis of Aristotelian physiognomic science (scientia physionomie), which had been revived in the thirteenth century by scholars including Bacon. By the fifteenth century, physiognomic analysis was widely recommended by natural philosophers, preachers, and spiritual advisors as a means to interpret the character (or Ɲthos) of one’s soul.89 Augustine in On Christian Doctrine (2.1.2) characterizes bodily movements, especially facial movements, as “natural signs” that visibly signify otherwise invisible affections or movements of the soul.90 Augustine’s theory of natural signs influenced medieval semiotics, including Bacon’s treatise On Signs (c. 1267), in which he defines a sign as “that which offered to the senses or to the intellect represents itself to the intellect.”91 Moreover, in De Signis (1.1) Bacon claims that the passiones anime (what Alberti calls affections) are both habits of the soul

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and signs (or species) of things expressed by the soul, therefore, they are capable of representing external things to the senses and the intellect.92 In his treatise On Painting (1.2), Alberti identifies the geometric point as the basic sign in painting because it is the smallest unit that is visible to the eye.93 In fact, Alberti (1.2) states that “a sign (signum) [is] anything that is in a surface so that it can be beheld by the eye.”94 When joined together points become lines, which create the outlines of surfaces, about which Alberti (2.35) states: “Thus the prime parts of the work are surfaces, because from them come members, from the members come the bodies, and from those comes the historia, indeed the ultimate and absolute work of painting.” 95 It is through the composition of these painted surfaces within space and relative to each other that the painter is able to convey physical and emotional movement, and hence the significance of the painted scene, to the viewer. During the late medieval and early Renaissance periods, semiotic analysis of visible physical data, such as appearance and movement, was considered necessary in order to determine a person’s true moral state and predict how one might act. This type of analysis was recommended as an ethical tool for the development of virtue, most notably prudence, which relied on good judgment based on past knowledge or experience.96 Dallas Denery has demonstrated a contemporary rise in concern for “seeing and being seen” on the part of Christian penitents, especially monastics, whose bodies were constantly being watched for signs of sin.97 Penitential Christians further believed that they could overcome the natural sinful inclinations of their souls by training their wills and transforming (or moving) their soul’s character or state through intellectual effort (studium) and meditation,98 which often included contemplation of a visual exemplar, such as Christ’s suffering body.99 In fact, Alberti’s contemporary St. Antoninus states in his Summa theologica (compiled between c.1440-54) that “[i]mages of saints are made in church not to be shown the worship of latria, but [rather] to impress their excellence effectively on the minds of men.”100 Thus, according to Antoninus, what was to be impressed into the viewer’s soul was the “excellence” or moral virtue signified by the body of the painted figure, making moving bodies in art potential instruments for the moral edification, transformation (e.g., movement), and salvation of human souls. 101

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Naturalism as Key to Response In order for any such ethical response to occur, however, images first had to be recognizable and comprehensible to the viewer. Alberti (2.42) continues: Therefore it is necessary that painters be most knowledgeable about the movements of bodies, which indeed I deem must be taken from nature with much skill.... For that reason, all things should be examined most diligently from nature herself, and the more appropriate things always should be imitated, and those things should be painted most prominently that yield more for the souls insofar as they think than for the eyes insofar as the perceive. 102

The above statement by Alberti also reveals that he did not advocate a strict ‘scientific’ or ‘realist’ imitation of what is visibly apparent in nature. Rather, he recommends a process of imitation that is edited by the mind’s faculty of judgment to include only nature’s “more appropriate” elements, especially those that convey the greatest significance to the soul’s intellect.103 Alberti’s technical recommendations for naturalistically rendered bodies, linear perspective, and color modeling to achieve the illusion of three-dimensional relief were all intended to contribute to a naturalistic-looking composition that, due to its similarity to the visible world, would best facilitate recognition and comprehension on the part of the viewer. For Alberti, therefore, the soul’s movement happened through both its emotional identification with and intellectual comprehension of naturalistically painted bodies, which the viewer would have been able to recognize and comprehend through a comparison with the viewer’s own body and knowledge of bodies, stored in the memory from past experience. 104 For example, if one never observed or physically felt actual pain or sorrow, one would not be able to accurately identify with and comprehend such sentiments within a painted image due to a lack of comparative data within the memory. Naturalism, therefore, was prescribed by Alberti not merely for scientific or naturalism’s sake as it is often interpreted, 105 but rather because it was the most effective means to move the soul and facilitate its recognition and comprehension. This recognition by the soul’s intellect in turn had the potential to trigger the body’s appropriate emotional and physical movement or response. The recommendations found in Alberti’s treatise On Painting are more than mere prescriptions for how to make a painting or how a painting should look in the formal sense. Rather, they are instructions for how a painting

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should appear in order to “detain the eye” and “move the soul” of its viewer with the potential to activate within the viewer an appropriate psychological, physical, and ethical response.

Notes 1

Leon Battista Alberti wrote two versions of his treatise On Painting – one in Latin (De Pictura) and one in Italian (Della Pittura). Both versions were published together by Cecil Grayson, De Pictura di Leon Battista Alberti (Rome: Laterza, 1980), republished electronically by Liber Liber in 1998, http://www.liberliber.it/mediateca/libri/a/alberti/de_pictura/html/. 2 Alberti, 3.52 (Latin), ed. Grayson, 1998, 45. All English translations of this text in this essay are based on the Latin treatise and are by T. Flanigan unless otherwise noted. 3 Alberti, 2.35, ed. Grayson, 1998, 14 (Italian) and 38 (Latin). Alberti’s historia is often translated as history painting or narrative painting. Neither of these translations expresses satisfactorily the term’s complex and debated relationship to both classical rhetoric and theological exegesis, which built on the same classical models. For various interpretations of Alberti’s historia see: Jack M. Greenstein, “Alberti on Historia: A Renaissance View of the Structure of Significance in Narrative Painting,” Viator 21 (1990): 273-299; and Anthony Grafton, "Historia and Istoria: Alberti's Terminology in Context," I Tatti Studies 8 (1999): 37-68. 4 Alberti, On Painting, 2.40, ed. Grayson, 1998, 16 (Italian) and 39-40 (Latin, italics mine). The italicized phrase reads in Latin: “ut oculos docti atque indocti spectatoris diutius quadam cum voluptate et animi motu detineat.” The Italian reads: “che ella terrà con diletto e movimento d'animo qualunque dotto o indotto la miri.” 5 The concept of the soul as a principle of movement originates with Aristotle, On the Soul, bk. 1. See trans. in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: The Modern Library [orig. 1941], 2001), 535-54. For an overview of the history of the soul, see Simon Kemp, Medieval Psychology (New York, Westwood, CT, London: Greenwood Press, 1990), 11-29. 6 Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. with intro. and notes by John R. Spencer (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, revised edition, 1966), see, for example, pp. 74-8 and 89. The word soul does appear, but is used inconsistently in an abridged translation Alberti’s text in Creighton E. Gilbert, Italian Art 1400-1500: Sources and Documents [orig. 1980] (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, repub.1992), 51-75. 7 See Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. Cecil Grayson [orig. 1972], repub. with intro. and notes by Martin Kemp (London: Penguin Books, 1991), see, for example, pp. 75-8 and 87; and Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting: A New Translation and Critical Edition, ed. and trans. Rocco Sinisgalli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), see for example, pp. 59, 61-2, and 74-5. 8 According to Thomas Dixon (From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category, Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 2003, p.39): “The closest classical term to ‘emotion’ etymologically was the Latin motus, which

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just meant ‘movement’, but was sometimes used more specifically to refer to movements of the soul. In fact, later in his treatise Alberti (On Painting, 2.43) states that these “movements of the soul” are also called “affections.” 9 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, 1 a 2ae, q. 22-23, 2nd revised ed. trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (London: Burns Oats & Washbourne, 1920), repub. electronically for New Advent by Kevin Knight, 2008. http://www.newadvent.org/summa/ (from now on this will be cited as New Advent). 10 According to Thomas Dixon (From Passions to Emotions, 1-25), the word emotions is a nineteenth-century invention that in Anglophone writing came to encompass and replace the distinct historical concepts of “passions” and “affections.” Dixon (p.4-6) partially attributes this change to a “secularisation [sic] of psychology,” claiming that “[t]o speak of ‘passions and affections of the soul’ was to embed one’s thought in a network of more distinctly Christian concepts and categories. In contrast, the category ‘emotions’ was alien to Christian thought and was part of a newer and more secular network of words and ideas.” This might be compared to the similar nineteenth-century secularization of the Renaissance, its humanism, its artists, and art theorists, including Alberti. 11 See Katherine H. Tachau, "What Senses and Intellect Do: Argument and Judgment in Late Medieval Theories of Knowledge," in Argumentationstheorie: Scholastische Forshungen zu den logischen und semantischen Regeln korrekten Folgerns, ed. Klaus Jacobi (Leiden and New York: Brill, 1993), 651-66. 12 See Aristotle, Physics, bk. 8 and bk. 3.1-3 (trans. The Basic Works of Aristotle, 354-94 and 253-7) for Aristotle’s conception of motion as a continuous process. The only exception to this rule is the mover that causes the original movement, what Aristotle calls the “first mover” or the “unmoved mover.” For how Aristotle’s ideas about motion influenced medieval scholars, including: Avicenna, Averroes, Albert the Great, Aquinas, William of Ockham, and John Buridan. See sections on “Physics” in A Source Book in Medieval Science, ed. Edward Grant (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), especially “Motion,” 228-34, “Kinematics,” 234-53, “Dynamics,” 253-312 (esp. Aquinas on motion, pp. 265-71), and “Optics,” 376-441. See also Katherine H. Tachau, "Seeing as Action and Passion in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries," in The Mind's Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages, edited by Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Anne-Marie Bouché (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 336-59, at 337; and David Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious and Institutional Context, 600 B.C. to A.D. 1450 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 295-311. 13 Aristotle, On Heaven and Earth, 3.2.301b, trans. The Basic Works of Aristotle, 443-4. 14 See, for example, Roger Bacon, Opus maius, 5.1.5.1 (trans. Robert Belle Burke, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1928, 449): “The first requisite here considered is that vision needs the impression of a visible object, for without this there can be no vision. Accordingly Aristotle says in the second book On the Soul that in every case the sense receives the impressions of sensible things, so that there may be an act of sensation.... Wherefore vision must happen by means of an

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impression; but especially by means of the impression of [species of] light and color.” Here, Belle Burke translates species into impression; however, technically vision occurs from an impression of species. 15 Roger Bacon, Opus tertium, 26, quoted in John S. Brewer, Fr. Rogeri Bacon Opera quaedam hactenus inedita, 3 vols. (Nendeln: Kraus, 1965), v.1, 100-102. Latin reads: “Hae quidem species faciunt imnem mundi alterationem et corporum nostrorum et animarum.” See also discussions of species in Belle Burke’s introduction to Bacon’s Opus maius, 1.lxv-lxix; and in Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science, 287-8. Sensible species can also be found in Aquinas’ Summa, 1 q.77 art. 3. For a concise overview of visual species see: Tachau, "Seeing as Action and Passion," 336-359; or Michael Camille, "Before the Gaze: The Internal Senses and Late Medieval Practices of Seeing," in Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance, ed. Robert S. Nelson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 197-223, esp. 197-209. 16 Roger Bacon, Opus Maius, bk. 5 (Optics). For scholarly treatments of Bacon’s optical theory see: Belle Burke’s introduction to Bacon’s Opus maius, 1.lxv-lxix; Kemp, Medieval Psychology, 33-49; David C. Lindberg, "Lines of Influence in Thirteenth-Century Optics: Bacon, Witelo, and Pecham," Speculum 46.1 (1971): 66-83; David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 107-116; David C. Lindberg, "Roger Bacon on Light, Vision, and the Universal Emanation of Force," in Roger Bacon and the Sciences: Commemorative Essays, ed. Jeremiah Hackett (Leiden and New York: Brill, 1997), 243-75; David C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious and Institutional Context, 600 B.C. to A.D. 1450 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 31320; and Jeremiah Hackett, "Roger Bacon," in A Companion to Philosophy in the Middle Ages, ed. Jorge J.E. Gracia and Timothy B. Noone (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 616-625. 17 Much has been written about the optical principles found in Alberti’s On Painting and their relationship to the optical theories of Euclid, Alhacen, Bacon, the perspectivists, and possibly even Pelacani. See, for example: John White, The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 121-6; James S. Ackerman, “Alberti’s Light,” orig. 1978, repub. in Distance Points: Essays in Theory and Renaissance Art and Architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 59-96; Samuel Y. Edgerton, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective (New York: Basic Books, 1975), 50-90; Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler, 152; Martin Kemp, The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 21-4; David Summers, The Judgment of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), esp. 151-76; Jack M. Greenstein, “On Alberti’s ‘Sign’: Vision and Composition in Quattrocento Painting,” Art Bulletin 79 (1997):669-698; Samuel Y. Edgerton, The Mirror, the Window, and the Telescope: How Renaissance Linear Perspective Changed Our Vision of the Universe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 2143 and 117-32; Hans Belting, Florence and Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arabic

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Science, trans. Deborah Lucas Schneider (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2011); and Nader El-Bizri, "Classical Optics and the Perspectivae Traditions Leading to the Renaissance," in Renaissance Theories of Vision, ed. John S. Hendrix and Charles H. Carman (Farnham, Surrey, England and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 11-30. 18 In fact, Lindberg (Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler, 320) states: “When theories of light and vision appeared in fourteenth-century natural philosophy (as they frequently did, especially in epistemological discussions), they were almost always derived from the tradition of Alhacen and Bacon. When Johannes Kepler began to think about visual theory in the year 1600...he took up the problem where Bacon, Pecham, Witelo, and Alhacen had left it.” 19 For Toscanelli see Edgerton, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective, 60-3. 20 Pelacani redefined species as sensible “conditions” or extensions of matter, rather than abstracted impressions from it, so that what becomes impressed into matter are an object’s qualities (i.e., shape or position), not abstractions of these qualities. It has been suggested that this is the definition followed by Alberti. Scholars who have suggested Pelacani’s influence on Renaissance artists, including Alberti, are: Edgerton, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective, xv-xvii and 77; Ackerman, “Alberti’s Light,” 5 and 63-4; Graziella Federici Vescovini, “La Prospettiva del Brunelleschi, Alhazen e Biagio Pelacani a Firenze,” in Filippo Brunelleschi, la sua opera e il suo tempo (Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi Brunelleschiani, Firenze 16-22 ottobre 1977), (Florence: Centro Di, 1980), vol. 1, 333-48; Summers, The Judgment of Sense, 164-7; Greenstein, “On Alberti’s ‘Sign’,” 683-686; and Belting, Florence and Baghdad, 146-50. 21 For optical treatises in Cosimo de’Medici’s collection see Samuel Y. Edgerton, The Heritage of Giotto's Geometry: Art and Science on the Eve of the Scientific Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 97. 22 Alberti, On Painting, prologue to the Italian text. 23 For Alhacen’s (often misspelled Alhazen) influence on Renaissance artists see: A. Mark Smith, Alhacen’s Theory of Visual Perception: A Critical Edition, with English Translation and Commentary, of the First Three Books of Alhacen’s De aspectibus, the medieval Latin Version of Ibn al-Haytham’s Kitab al-Manazir, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2001), vol.1, civ-cxii; Edgerton, The Mirror, the Window, and the Telescope, 21-9; and El-Bizri, "Classical Optics and the Perspectivae Traditions Leading to the Renaissance," 1130; and Belting, Florence and Baghdad, 150-9. For Alhacen’s particular influence on Lorenzo Ghiberti see: White, The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space, 126-30; Graziella Federici Vescovini, "Contributo per la storia della fortuna di Alhazen in Italia. Il volgarizzamento del manoscritto Vaticano 4559 e il Commentario III di Lorenzo Ghiberti,” Rinascimento 15 (1964): 17-49; and Summers, Judgment of Sense, 167-70. 24 For an overview of Alhacen’s influence on perspectivist optical theory in general see: A. Mark Smith, "Getting the Big Picture in Perspectivist Optics," Isis 72.4

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(1981): 568-89. For Alhacen’s influence in particular on late medieval Western optics see: Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler, 321-341; Smith, Alhacen’s Theory of Visual Perception, lxxx-cxii; and Belting, Florence and Baghdad, 150-9. 25 According to Bacon (Opus maius 5.1.6.4, transl. Belle Burke, 462-5), these species have corporeal existence. The following synonyms for species (sensible force) appear in Bacon’s De multiplicatione specierum (book 3): imago, idolum, simulacrum, phantasma, forma, intentio, passio, impressio, and umbra. Bacon’s preference for the word species is indicated by the title of this treatise. 26 Bacon (Opus maius, 5.1.5.1, transl. Belle Burke, 449): “Wherefore vision must happen by means of an impression; but especially by means of the impression of [species of] light and color.” According to Aristotle (On Sense and Sensation, 3 and On the Soul, 2.4, esp. 418a26-418b4), light is necessary in order to see colored bodies, however, what appears visible to the eye is actually color, not light per se. See Katerine H. Tachau, “Words for Color: Naming, Signifying and Identifying Color in the Theologies of Roger Bacon and His Contemporaries,” 49-64, in The Word in Medieval Logic, Theology, and Psychology, ed. Tetsuro Shimizu and Charles Burnett (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009) 57. 27 For late medieval optical theory and its relevant moral and epistemological implications see Katherine H. Tachau, Vision and Certitude in the Age of Ockham: Optics, Epistemology, and the Foundations of Semantics 1250-1345 (Leiden and New York: Brill, 1988), esp.1-26. See also: Tachau, "Seeing as Action and Passion in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries,” 336-59; Camille, “Before the Gaze,” 197-223; Suzannah Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages (Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); and Dallas G. Denery II, Seeing and Being Seen in the Later Medieval World: Optics, Theology, and Religious Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 28 Alberti, On Painting, 1.5. In this passage Alberti refers to species by two of the synonyms also used by Bacon – simulacra in Latin and forma in Italian. The Latin reads (ed. Grayson, 1998, 26-7, italics mine): “Id quidem qua ratione fiat perscrutemur, extraordiamurque a philosophorum sententia, qui metieri superficies affirmant radiis quibusdam quasi visendi ministris, quos idcirco visivos nuncupant, quod per eos rerum simulacra sensui imprimantur.” The Italian reads (ed. Grayson, 1998, 4-5, italics mine): “Cerchiamo a queste sue ragione cominciando dalla sentenza de’ filosafi, i quali affermano misurarsi le superficie con alcuni razzi quasi ministri al vedere, chiamati per questo visivi, quali portino la forma delle cose vedute al senso.” 29 Alberti, On Painting, 1.6. 30 Bacon, Opus Maius, 5.1.1.2-5, trans. Belle Burke, 421-29. By the fifteenthcentury these internal senses were variously numbered and identified, which is perhaps why Alberti remains silent. For an overview of the history of the internal senses up to the Renaissance see Summers, Judgment of Sense. 31 This wax seal analogy can be found in Aristotle, On the Soul, 2.12 (trans. The Basic Works of Aristotle, 580): “By a ‘sense’ is meant what has the power of receiving into itself sensible forms of things without matter. This must be

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conceived of as taking place in the way in which a piece of wax takes on the impress of a signet-ring without the iron or gold...” Others who have made similar analogies include Plato, Augustine, and Aquinas. See: Camille, “Before the Gaze,” 208-9; and Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 15. Roger Bacon (Opus maius, 5.1.2, trans. Belle Burke, 422) also uses this analogy, which he attributes to Avicenna, but applies it specifically to the brain’s faculty of imagination. 32 Alberti, On Painting, 1.5. 33 Alberti, On Painting, 1.5-8. Quote from 1.5, trans. Grayson, ed. Kemp, 40. This appears to accord with Bacon’s (Opus maius, 5.1.9.1, trans. Belle Burke, 481-3) claim that species can only travel through mediums that are transparent and that a visual object must exceed the density of the air in order to be seen. 34 Alberti, On Painting, 1.7. 35 Alberti, On Painting, 1.6 (Latin only). See discussion of this passage in Greenstein “On Alberti’s ‘Sign,” 683-5. 36 Bacon, Opus maius, 5.1.2.2 (optic nerves), 5.1.2.3 (crystalline humor), trans. Belle Burke, 432-5; and Kemp, Medieval Psychology, 40-2 and fig. 1. Today, we consider vision to be completed at the back of the eye in the retina (discovered by Kepler in 1604), where light energy is converted by photo receptors into neural impulses, a process called biological transduction or immutation. 37 According to Bacon (Opus maius, 5.1.5.3, trans. Belle Burke, 452-3), this is not a “radical” change because vision is not completed in the crystalline lens. Here, Bacon mentions “others,” which presumably include Alhacen, who claim that ultimate perception happens in the common sense and imagination, or fantasy. However, the judgment of sight remains incomplete until the species impress upon the internal senses within the brain. 38 Bacon, Opus maius, 5.1.5.2-3 (optic nerve), trans. Belle Burke, 452-3. 39 Bacon (Opus maius, 5.1.1.2, transl. Belle Burke, 421-22) states: “For the judgment is not completed in regard to what is seen before the form [species] comes to the common sense, and the same is true in regard to what is heard and to the other senses.... This common sense forms a judgment concerning the difference of impressions on the senses.” Bacon credits Ptolemy’s first book of Optics, the second book of Alhacen’s Aspectibus (Optics), and Aristotle’s books On the Soul and Sense and the Sensible as his sources for the internal senses. For the common sense see also Kemp, Medieval Psychology 56; Nicholas H. Steneck, “Albert the Great on the Classification and Localization of the Internal Senses,” Isis 65 (1974): 193-211, at 204; and Summers, Judgment of Sense, esp. 151-66. 40 In fact, Bacon (following Avicenna) compares common sense impression to an impression made on water because it disappears once the impressing force is no longer physically present. Bacon, Opus maius, 5.1.1.2, transl. Belle Burke, 421-2. 41 Bacon, Opus maius, 5.1.1.2-3, trans. Belle Burke, 422-3. 42 See Kemp, Medieval Psychology, 54-6. 43 On the internal senses see S. Kemp, Medieval Psychology, 57-8 and 77-8 and Summers, Judgment of Sense. By the fifteenth century, these particular internal faculties of the mind were variously interpreted. For example, Aquinas (Summa, 1

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q.78, art.4) and Alberti’s Florentine contemporary St. Antoninus (Summa, 1.2.5. col. 87-8, after Aquinas) both combine estimation and imagination into a single faculty, making for four faculties altogether versus Avicenna and Bacon’s five. See Antonino Pierozzi (St. Antoninus), Summa theologica, orig. c. 1454 (Graz: Akademische Druk – U. Verlanganstalt, 1959). It is also significant to note that Antoninus’ description of these internal faculties in c. 1440-54, postdates Ockham’s reduction of them to consist of only the common sense and memory, suggesting that Ockham’s reduction was not universally accepted. For Ockham’s influence (or lack thereof) see Tachau, Vision and Certitude in the Age of Ockham; and Katherine Tachau, “The Response to Ockham’s and Aureol’s Epistemology,” in English Logic in Italy in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, ed. Alfonso Maierù (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1982), 185-217. 44 According to Aquinas (Summa theologica, 1a 2ae q. 40 art. 3), the will, which is part of the rational soul responsible for choice and the initiation of behavior, may be set in motion by a number of different faculties, by the mind, by the sensory appetite or emotions (passions), by itself, or by an external object presented to the senses. For the psychology of Aquinas here and in what follows I have relied upon: Kemp, Medieval Psychology, 82-3; Simo Knuuttila, Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 239-55; Robert Miner, Thomas Aquinas on the Passions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); and Nicholas E. Lombardo, "Emotions and Psychological Health in Aquinas," in Emotions and Health 1200-1700, ed. Elena Carrera (New York: Brill, 2013), 19-46. 45 Certain other qualities, which Bacon calls “apprehensions,” are perceived through “complexions or natures.” These cause instinctive (rather than rational) responses, such as fear, love, flight, or delay, and are judged by estimation (estimativa) which, according to Avicenna (in his On the Soul, bk. 1): “perceives the insensible forms connected with sensible matter.” For the cogitative and estimative faculties in Bacon, see Opus maius, 5.1.1.4, trans. Belle Burke, 424-7. 46 See S. Kemp, Medieval Psychology, 82-3; and Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory and Medieval Culture, 2nd, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 60-8. 47 This invention process is recalled in Alberti (2.27, trans. Grayson, ed. Kemp, 62) in a passage quoted from Trismegistus, “mankind portrays the gods in his own image from his memories of nature and his own origins.” 48 See Bacon, Opus maius, 5.1.1.4, trans. Belle Burke, 424-7; Kemp, Medieval Psychology, 82-3; and Summers, Judgment of Sense,154-6. Albertus Magnus called this “cogitative power.” See Steneck, “Albert the Great on the Classification and Localization of the Internal Senses,” 205-6. 49 This section summarizes Greenstein’s (“On Alberti’s ‘Sign’,” 686-93) analysis of Alberti’s three rules of painting (located in On Painting 2.30). A version of Alhacen’s three stages of comprehension also appears in Bacon’s Opus Maius (5.1. 10. 3, trans. Belle Burke, 497-500). See also Ackerman’s (“Alberti’s Light,” 5993) analysis of Alberti’s three rules for painting as they pertain to apprehension via the three types of rays in a visual pyramid.

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50 Alberti, On Painting, 2.30, trans. Greenstein, “On Alberti’s ‘Sign’,” 689: “For inasmuch as the painter studies to represent things seen, we note in what way things themselves come under aspect [sub aspectu veniat]. First, when we look at [aspicimus] something, we see [videmus] it to be something that occupies a place. The painter indeed circumscribes the space of this place and he will rightly name this rule the drawing of the edges [ducendae fimbriae]. Next, intuiting [intuentes] we come to recognize [dignoscimus] how the many forward facing surfaces fit together on the body [plurimae prospecti corporis superficies inter se conveniant]; and designating [designans] these conjunctions [coniunctiones] of the surfaces in their places, the artist will rightly name [this rule] composition. Finally, looking with greater discrimination we discern [aspicientes distinctius...discernimus] the colors of the surfaces; in painting the representation of this thing, which receives all differentiation [differentia] from light, will appropriately be called by us reception of light.” 51 Bacon, Opus maius, 5.1.1.4 and 5.2.3.8, trans. Belle Burke, 426-7 and 542-5. Much of my interpretation of Alberti’s notion of comprehension comes from Greenstein, “On Alberti’s ‘Sign’,” 686-93; and Summers, Judgment of Sense, 15170 and 198-277. 52 Alberti, On Painting, 1.2. 53 Alberti, On Painting, 1.2-3. 54 Alberti, On Painting, 1.4. 55 Color can also be affected by what is adjacent. See the example of the chameleon cited by both Alberti (On Painting, 1.8) and Bacon (Opus maius, 5.1.8.1). For color in Alberti’s treatise see Ackerman, “Alberti’s Light,” 59-93. 56 Bacon, Opus maius, 5.1.10.1, transl. Belle Burke, 493-5. Aristotle (On Sense and Sensation, 449a21; and On Heaven and Earth, 278a 10-12) was the first to claim that matter is sensed accidentally. According to Summers (Judgment of Sense, 152) the sensation of accidents (common sensibles) was considered a secondary sensation. 57 Alberti, On Painting, 1.18. See discussion of Alberti’s concept of composition in: Greenstein, “On Alberti’s ‘Sign,” 686-93; and Summers, Judgment of Sense, 157-61 (on common sensibles) and 170 (on Alberti’s comperatione). 58 See Greenstein, “On Alberti’s ‘Sign,’” 669-98. This is a reference to Alberti, On Painting, 2.35. 59 Alberti, On Painting, 1.18. This immediately precedes his discussion of the importance of proper proportional relationships and linear perspective. 60 For discussion of the virtus distinctiva see: Summers, Judgment of Sense,151-7; and Greenstein, “On Alberti’s ‘Sign,’” 689-93. 61 Alberti (On Painting, 2.25, trans. Grayson, ed. Kemp, 60) calls this the “truly divine power” of painting because “not only does it make the absent present (as they say of friendship), but it also represents the dead to the living many centuries later, so that they are recognized with pleasure and deep admiration for the artist.” 62 See Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 56-98.

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Following Aristotle (On the Soul, 2.5.418a, trans. The Basic Works of Aristotle, 566-7), the soul was thought to assimilate with its visual object to become “potentially like what the perceived object is actually.” 64 Alberti, On Painting, 2.41 (see also 2.42-3), trans. Greenstein, "Alberti on Historia," 290. 65 For mirror neurons and empathetic response to images see: David Freedberg and Vittorio Gallese, “Motion, Emotion and Empathy in Esthetic Experience,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11, n. 5 (2007): 197-203; and David Freedberg, “Empatia, movimento ed emozione / Empathy, Movement and Emotion,” in Sistemi Emotivi / Emotional Systems: Contemporary Art Between Emotion and Reason (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2007), 38-61. 66 Aristotle, Rhetoric, 2.1.1378a, trans. The Basic Works of Aristotle, 566: “Emotions [modern translation] are all those feelings [modern translation] that so change men as to affect their judgments and that are attended by pain or pleasure. Such are anger, pity, fear, and the like with their opposites.” 67 Here, I rely on Aquinas as the authority because, according to Kemp (Medieval Psychology, 77), “no other medieval writer seems to have approached the complexity of discussion that Aquinas achieved” in addressing emotion and will. For analyses of Aquinas on emotions (passions) see: Kemp, Medieval Psychology, 82-3; Miner, Thomas Aquinas on the Passions; and Lombardo, "Emotions and Psychological Health in Aquinas," 19-46; and Knuuttila, Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, 239-55. 68 This is how it is characterized in Knuuttila, Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, 221. 69 Aquinas, Summa, 1a 2ae q. 23 a.3. 70 Alberti, On Painting, 2.40, quoted at the beginning of this essay. 71 According to Aristotle, what is pleasant evokes desire and delight. Pain causes the opposite effects. See Aristotle, Rhetoric 1.11. 1369b-1372a, quote at 1369b1370a, trans. The Basic Works of Aristotle, 1362-6. For Aristotle on emotions see “Aristotle’s Compositional Theory of Emotions,” in Knuuttila, Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, 24-47. 72 According to Aristotle (Rhetoric 1.11.1370a-b, trans. The Basic Works of Aristotle, 1363), the experience of pleasure (or pain) involves perception and/or memory. He states: “anything pleasant is either present and perceived, past and remembered, or future and expected, since we perceive present pleasures, remember past ones, and expect future ones.” 73 See Mary Carruthers, "Rhetorical Ductus or Moving Through a Composition," in Acting on the Past: Historical Performance Across the Disciplines, edited by Mark Franko and Annette Richards (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), 99-117, at 105. For the “striking” nature of Passion imagery see: Peter W. Parshall, “The Art of Memory and the Passion,” Art Bulletin 81 (1999): 456-472; and Susan M. Arvay, “Private Passions: The Contemplation of Suffering in Medieval Affective Devotions,” Ph.D. diss. (Rutgers University, 2008), 29-35. For a contemporary Florentine example see Theresa Flanigan, “Art, Memory, and the

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Cultivation of Virtue: The Ethical Function of Images in Antoninus’s Opera a ben vivere,” Gesta 53.2 (2014): 175-95. 74 This work was attributed to Cicero in the Middle Ages, however, it actually originates from the 90s BCE. For the influence of the Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium on medieval memory practices see Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 153-94. 75 For an overview of medieval memory practices see the “General Introduction,” in The Craft of Memory: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures, ed. Mary Carruthers and Jan M. Ziolkowski (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 123; Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400-1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 116-42; and Carruthers, The Book of Memory. According to Aristotle (On Memory, 452a12), as long as one has a well-ordered memory, one can choose any image as a starting point for such a chain, for “whatever has some order, as things in mathematics do, is easily remembered. Other things are remembered badly and with difficulty.” 76 For this interpretation of ornament, which differs from the way ornament in Renaissance art is typically interpreted, I am indebted to Carruthers, "Rhetorical Ductus or Moving Through a Composition," 99-117. 77 Alberti, On Painting, 2.35, fully quoted at the beginning of this essay. 78 Alberti, On Painting, 2.40. 79 See Carruthers, The Craft of Thought, 116. 80 Alberti, On Painting, 2.42, trans. Grayson, ed. Kemp, 77-8. 81 A painted image’s ability to impress upon and physically transform its viewer was sometimes seen as quite literal, especially for more impressionable people with weaker intellects, such as women and children. See, for example, David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), esp. 4-5 (example from Giovanni Dominici); and Katharine Park, “Impressed Images, Reproducing Wonders,” in Picturing Science, Producing Art, ed. Caroline A. Jones, Peter Galison, and Amy E. Slaton (New York: Routledge, 1988), 257-71 (for the impressionability of a pregnant woman and her fetus). 82 Today, we consider neural impulses to be transmitted through the body’s nervous system. 83 Alberti (On Painting, 2.36-7) instructs the painter to study the natural movements of the bones and muscles of the body so as to be sure to compose these movements appropriately, “according to the action being performed,” before covering the body with skin and clothes. 84 Alberti (On Painting, 2.37-8) recommends that the members of the body correspond in color to their action. 85 Alberti, On Painting, 2.41, see also 2.42-3. 86 Alberti, On Painting, 2.43, trans. Greenstein, “Alberti on Historia,” 290. 87 The idea that the body’s appearance was influenced by the soul may ultimately derive from a text by Galen (129-ca.216) called That the Faculties of the Soul Follow the Mixtures of the Body, in which Galen claimed that the four fluids that condition the shape and appearance of the body also determine the soul, therefore,

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the soul’s character could be recognized in the body’s appearance. Aristotle’s On the Soul (book 1) and Prior Analytics (70b 7-38) also describe bodily movement as a sign of the internal state of the soul. See translations in The Basic Works of Aristotle. 88 Aristotle conceived of the “affections of the soul” as “enmattered formulable essences.” In On the Soul (1.403a.5-29, trans. The Basic Works of Aristotle, 536-7) he states: “there seems to be no case in which the soul can act or be acted upon without involving the body; e.g. anger, courage, appetite, and sensation generally.... Consequently, their definitions ought to correspond, e.g. anger should be defined as a certain mode of movement of such and such a body (or part or faculty of a body) by this or that cause and for this or that end.” St. Augustine (Letter to Nebridius, transl. Wilfred Parsons, The Fathers of the Church, A New Translation, New York: Fathers of the Church, 1951, vol. 1, 389, letter 9.) also states: “I am of the opinion that every movement of the soul [motis animi] produces some effect in the body, and that, however heavy and slow our senses may be, they feel this effect, in proportion to the intensity of the soul’s movement, as when we are angry or sad or joyful.” For Bacon’s later take on hylemorphics, influenced by both Aristotle and Augustine, see Theodore Crowley, Roger Bacon: The Problem of the Soul in His Philosophical Commentaries (Louvain: Editions de l’Institut Supérieur de Philosophie and Dublin: James Duffy & Co, 1950), 119-24. 89 Sometime after 1280, Bacon wrote a Latin commentary on the popular pseudoAristotelian Secretum secretorum (actually a tenth-century Arabic text called Sirr al-Asrar), which he describes as a text that “teaches the physiognomy of the human body, that is the technique of knowing the qualities of a person according to the exterior parts.” This included both physical features and “elements of motion” such as gesture and gait. For late medieval physiognomic science see: Steven J. Williams, “The Vernacular Tradition of the Pseudo-Aristotelian ‘Secret of Secrets’ in the Middle Ages: Translations, Manuscripts, Readers,” in Filosofia in volgare nel Medioevo, ed. Nadia Bray (Louvain-la-Neuve: Fé dération international des instituts d’ études médiévales, 2003), 451-82, at 478; and Joseph Ziegler, “Text and Context: On the Rise of Physiognomic Theory in the Later Middle Ages,” in De Sion exhibit lex et verbum domini de Hierusalem: Essays on Medieval Law, Liturgy, and Literature in Honor of Amnon Linder, ed. Yitzhak Hen (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001), 159-82. 90 According to Augustine (On Christian Doctrine 2.1.2): “Natural signs are those which, apart from any intention or desire of using them as signs, do yet lead to the knowledge of something else, as, for example, smoke when it indicates fire. For it is not from any intention of making it a sign that it is so, but through attention to experience we come to know that fire is beneath, even when nothing but smoke can be seen.... And the countenance of an angry or sorrowful man indicates the feeling in his mind [affectionem animi], independently of his will: and in the same way every other emotion of the mind [motus animmi] is betrayed by the tell-tale countenance, even though we do nothing with the intention of making it known.”

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See Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 2.1.2, trans. James Shaw, Nicene and PostNicene Fathers, 1st series, vol. 2, ed. Philip Schaff (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1887), revised, ed., and published electronically by Kevin Knight for New Advent http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/12022.htm 91 Bacon De Signis, 1.2, in K.M. Fredborg, Lauge Nielsen, and Jan Pinborg, “An Unedited Part of Roger Bacon’s ‘Opus Maius’: ‘De Signis’,”Traditio 34, 1978, 75136, at p. 82. Bacon cites the sources for his definition as Aristotle and Augustine. See analyses of Bacon’s treatise by: Jan Pinborg, “Roger Bacon on Signs: A Newly Recovered Part of the Opus Maius,” Miscellanea mediaevalia 13 (1981): 403-12; and Tachau, “Words for Color,” 49-64. 92 Bacon, De Signis, 1.1 (in Fredborg, et al, “An Unedited Part of Roger Bacon’s ‘Opus Maius’: ‘De Signis’,” 82). For the influence of Augustinian semiotics on Aquinas’s theory of the passions, see Lombardo, "Emotions and Psychological Health in Aquinas," 21 and 26-7. 93 See Greenstein, “On Alberti’s ‘Sign,’” 669-98. This particular point is made on pages 685-92. Here, I follow Greenstein’s interpretation. 94 Alberti, On Painting,1.2, trans. Greenstein, “On Alberti’s ‘Sign’,” 691. 95 Alberti, On Painting, 2.35, trans. Greenstein, “On Alberti’s ‘Sign,’” 669. Greenstein makes this particular point on p. 692. 96 The original intent of the Pseudo-Aristotelian Secret of Secrets was for the instruction of princes, who needed to be able to quickly judge the ethical nature of those around them in order to determine their immediate safety and the reliance of the council provided to them. 97 Denery, Seeing and Being Seen in the Later Medieval World, esp.19-38. For a contemporary Florentine example of a recommendation for this type of penitential analysis see Theresa Flanigan, “Disciplining the Tongue: Archbishop Antoninus, the Opera a ben vivere, and the Regulation of Women’s Speech in Renaissance Florence,” special thematic issue Touch Me, Touch Me Not: Re-evaluating the Senses, Gender, and Performativity in Early Modernity, eds. Erin Benay and Lisa Rafanelli, Open Arts Journal 4 (Winter 2015) http://openartsjournal.org 98 Albertus Magnus claims that one’s natural inclinations could be overcome through intellectual effort (studium). See Albertus Magnus, On Animals: A Medieval Summa Zoologica, trans. Irven Michael Resnick and Kenneth Kitchell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 26. 99 See, for example, St. Antoninus’ instructions to Dianora Tornabuoni to perform daily meditation on the body of Christ in his Opera a be vivere (c.1450), as analyzed in Flanigan, “Art, Memory, and the Cultivation of Virtue,” 175-95. 100 St. Antoninus (Summa theologica, 2.12.1.2, col. 1136, orig. c. 1454, pub. Graz: Akademische Druk – U. Verlanganstalt, 1959): “Imagines autem sanctorum siunt in ecclesia, non ad exhibendium eis cultum latriae; sed ad imprimendum efficacius excellentiam eorum mentibus hominum...” For Antoninus’s thoughts on the intellect and its relationship to the soul, see his Summa theologica, 1. 3. 1-11, cols.111-220, entitled “De potential intellectiva” (On Intellectual Power). See discussion of these passages by: Edgerton, The Mirror, the Window, and the

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Telescope, 32-33; and Flanigan, “Art, Memory, and the Cultivation of Virtue,” 187. 101 According to instruction manuals, such as Antoninus’ Opera a ben vivere (c. 1454), that describe the affective use of devotional images, repeated meditation on such moral bodies were thought to serve as didactic role models that were able to effect through vision a positive and involuntary transformation of the beholder’s mind and body. See Flanigan, “Art, Memory, and the Cultivation of Virtue,” 17595. 102 Alberti, On Painting, 2.42, trans. Greenstein, "Alberti on Historia,” 291 and trans. and discussed in Greenstein, “On Alberti’s ‘Sign’,” 696-7. 103 See interpretation in Greenstein, “On Alberti’s ‘Sign’,” 696-7. 104 For example, according to Bacon (De Signis, 1.1, in Fredborg, et. al, “An Unedited Part of Roger Bacon’s ‘Opus Maius’: ‘De Signis’,” 81), the significance of a sign is not fixed, but rather depends upon the one who beholds it. He states: “The sign is in the predicament of relation and is spoken of essentially in reference to the one for whom it signifies. For it posits that thing in act when the sign itself is in act and in potency when the sign itself is potency. But unless some were able to conceive by means of this sign, it would be void and vain. Indeed, it would not be a sign, but it would have remained a sign only according to the substance of a sign. But it would not be a definition of the sign, just as the substance of the father remains when the son is dead, but the relation of paternity is lost.” 105 See, for example, Kemp, The Science of Art, 21-4; or Georges Didi-Huberman, Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 34-44.

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Bibliography A Companion to Philosophy in the Middle Ages, edited by Jorge J.E. Gracia and Timothy B. Noone. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003. A Source Book in Medieval Science, edited by Edward Grant. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974. Ackerman, James S. “Alberti’s Light” [orig. 1978]. In Distance Points: Essays in Theory and Renaissance Art and Architecture. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991, 59-96. Alberti, Leon Battista. De Pictura di Leon Battista Alberti, edited by Cecil Grayson. Rome: Laterza, 1980. Republished electronically by Liber Liber in 1998, http://www.liberliber.it/mediateca/libri/a/alberti/de_pictura/html/. —. On Painting: A New Translation and Critical Edition, edited and translated by Rocco Sinisgalli. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. —. On Painting. Translated by Cecil Grayson [orig. 1972], republished with introduction and notes by Martin Kemp. London: Penguin Books, 1991. —. On Painting. Translated with introduction and notes by John R. Spencer. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, revised edition, 1966. Albertus Magnus. On Animals: A Medieval Summa Zoologica. Translated by Irven Michael Resnick and Kenneth Kitchell. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Aquinas, Thomas. Summa theologica, 2nd revised ed. Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. London: Burns Oats & Washbourne, 1920. Republished electronically for New Advent by Kevin Knight, 2008. http://www.newadvent.org/summa/ Arvay, Susan M. “Private Passions: The Contemplation of Suffering in Medieval Affective Devotions.” Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 2008. Augustine. Letters. Translated by Wilfred Parsons. In The Fathers of the Church, A New Translation. New York: Fathers of the Church, 1951. —. On Christian Doctrine. Translated by James Shaw, Nicene and PostNicene Fathers, 1st series, vol. 2, ed. Philip Schaff. Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1887. Revised and ed. Kevin Knight for New Advent http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/12022.htm Bacon, Roger. Opus maius. Translated by Robert Belle Burke. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1928. Biernoff, Suzannah. Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages. Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.

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Brewer, John S. Fr. Rogeri Bacon Opera quaedam hactenus inedita, 3 vols. Nendeln: Kraus, 1965. Camille, Michael. "Before the Gaze: The Internal Senses and Late Medieval Practices of Seeing," 197-223. In Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance, edited by Robert S. Nelson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Carruthers, Mary. "Rhetorical Ductus or Moving Through a Composition," 99-117. In Acting on the Past: Historical Performance Across the Disciplines, edited by Mark Franko and Annette Richards. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 2000. —. The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory and Medieval Culture, 2nd, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Carruthers, Mary. The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400-1200. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Carruthers, Mary and Jan M. Ziolkowski (eds). The Craft of Memory: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. Clark, Stuart. Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Crowley, Theodore. Roger Bacon: The Problem of the Soul in His Philosophical Commentaries. Louvain: Editions de l’Institut Supérieur de Philosophie and Dublin: James Duffy & Co, 1950. Dennery II, Dallas G. Seeing and Being Seen in the Later Medieval World: Optics, Theology, and Religious Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Didi-Huberman, Georges. Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration. Translated by Jane Marie Todd.Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Dixon, Thomas. From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category. Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 2003. Edgerton, Samuel Y. The Heritage of Giotto's Geometry: Art and Science on the Eve of the Scientific Revolution. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991. —. The Mirror, the Window, and the Telescope: How Renaissance Linear Perspective Changed Our Vision of the Universe. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009. —. The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective. New York: Basic Books, 1975. El-Bizri, Nader. "Classical Optics and the Perspectivae Traditions Leading to the Renaissance," 11-30. In Renaissance Theories of Vision, ed.

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John S. Hendrix and Charles H. Carman. Farnham, Surrey, England and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. Flanigan, Theresa. “Disciplining the Tongue: Archbishop Antoninus, the Opera a ben vivere, and the Regulation of Women’s Speech in Renaissance Florence.” In Touch Me, Touch Me Not: Re-evaluating the Senses, Gender, and Performativity in Early Modernity, edited by Erin Benay and Lisa Rafanelli. Special thematic issue of Open Arts Journal 4 (Winter 2015) http://openartsjournal.org —. “Art, Memory, and the Cultivation of Virtue: The Ethical Function of Images in Antoninus’s Opera a ben vivere.” Gesta 53.2 (2014): 17595. Fredborg, K.M., Lauge Nielsen, and Jan Pinborg. “An Unedited Part of Roger Bacon’s ‘Opus Maius’: ‘De Signis’.” Tradito 34 (1987): 75-136. Freedberg, David and Vittorio Gallese. “Motion, Emotion and Empathy in Esthetic Experience.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11, n. 5 (2007): 197-203. Freedberg, David. “Empatia, movimento ed emozione / Empathy, Movement and Emotion,” 38-61. In Sistemi Emotivi / Emotional Systems: Contemporary Art Between Emotion and Reason.Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2007. —. The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1989. Gilbert, Creighton E. Italian Art 1400-1500: Sources and Documents [orig. 1980]. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, repub.1992. Grafton, Anthony. "Historia and Istoria: Alberti's Terminology in Context." I Tatti Studies 8 (1999): 37-68. Greenstein, Jack M. “Alberti on Historia: A Renaissance View of the Structure of Significance in Narrative Painting.” Viator 21 (1990): 273-299. —. “On Alberti’s ‘Sign’: Vision and Composition in Quattrocento Painting.” Art Bulletin 79 (1997): 669-698. Kemp, Martin. The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. Kemp, Simon. Medieval Psychology. New York, Westwood, CT, London: Greenwood Press, 1990. Knuuttila, Simo. Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Lindberg, David C. "Lines of Influence in Thirteenth-Century Optics: Bacon, Witelo, and Pecham." Speculum 46.1 (1971): 66-83 —. “Roger Bacon on Light, Vision, and the Universal Emanation of Force,” 243-75. In Roger Bacon and the Sciences: Commemorative

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Essays, edited by Jeremiah Hackett. Leiden and New York: Brill, 1997. —. The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious and Institutional Context, 600 B.C. to A.D. 1450. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. —. Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. Lombardo Nicholas E. "Emotions and Psychological Health in Aquinas," 19-46. In Emotions and Health 1200-1700, edited by Elena Carrera. New York: Brill, 2013. Miner, Robert. Thomas Aquinas on the Passions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Park, Katharine. “Impressed Images, Reproducing Wonders,” 257-71. In Picturing Science, Producing Art, edited by Caroline A. Jones, Peter Galison, and Amy E. Slaton. New York: Routledge, 1988. Parshall, Peter W. “The Art of Memory and the Passion.” Art Bulletin 81 (1999): 456-472. Pierozzi, Antonino (St. Antoninus). Summa theologica, orig. c. 1454. Pub. Graz: Akademische Druk – U. Verlanganstalt, 1959. Pinborg, Jan. “Roger Bacon on Signs: A Newly Recovered Part of the Opus Maius.” Miscellanea mediaevalia 13 (1981): 403-12. Smith, A. Mark. "Getting the Big Picture in Perspectivist Optics." Isis 72.4 (1981): 568-89. Smith, A. Mark. Alhacen’s Theory of Visual Perception: A Critical Edition, with English Translation and Commentary, of the First Three Books of Alhacen’s De aspectibus, the medieval Latin Version of Ibn al-Haytham’s Kitab al-Manazir, 2 vols. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2001. Steneck, Nicholas H. “Albert the Great on the Classification and Localization of the Internal Senses.” Isis 65 (1974): 193-211. Summers, David. The Judgment of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Tachau, Katerine H. “Words for Color: Naming, Signifying and Identifying Color in the Theologies of Roger Bacon and His Contemporaries,” 49-64. In The Word in Medieval Logic, Theology, and Psychology, edited by Tetsuro Shimizu and Charles Burnett. Turnhout: Brepols, 2009. —. “Seeing as Action and Passion in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries,” 336-59. In The Mind's Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages, edited by Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Anne-Marie Bouché. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.

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—. “What Senses and Intellect Do: Argument and Judgment in Late Medieval Theories of Knowledge,” 651-66. In Argumentationstheorie: Scholastische Forshungen zu den logischen und semantischen Regeln korrekten Folgerns. edited by Klaus Jacobi, Leiden and New York, Brill, 1993. —. Vision and Certitude in the Age of Ockham: Optics, Epistemology, and the Foundations of Semantics 1250-1345. Leiden and New York: Brill, 1988. —. “The Response to Ockham’s and Aureol’s Epistemology,” 185-217. In English Logic in Italy in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, ed. Alfonso Maierù. Naples: Bibliopolis, 1982. The Basic Works of Aristotle, edited by Richard McKeon. New York: The Modern Library [orig. 1941], 2001. Vescovini, Graziella Federici. "Contributo per la storia della fortuna di Alhazen in Italia. Il volgarizzamento del manoscritto Vaticano 4559 e il Commentario III di Lorenzo Ghiberti.” Rinascimento 15 (1964): 1749. —. “La Prospettiva del Brunelleschi, Alhazen e Biagio Pelacani a Firenze,” vol. 1, 333-48. In Filippo Brunelleschi, la sua opera e il suo tempo (Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi Brunelleschiani, Firenze 16-22 ottobre 1977). Florence: Centro Di, 1980. White, John. The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space, 2nd ed. New York: Harper and Row, 1972. Williams, Steven J. “The Vernacular Tradition of the Pseudo-Aristotelian ‘Secret of Secrets’ in the Middle Ages: Translations, Manuscripts, Readers,” 451-82. In Filosofia in volgare nel Medioevo, edited by Nadia Bray. Louvain-la-Neuve: Fé dération international des instituts d’ études médiévales, 2003. Ziegler, Joseph. “Text and Context: On the Rise of Physiognomic Theory in the Later Middle Ages,”159-82. In De Sion exhibit lex et verbum domini de Hierusalem: Essays on Medieval Law, Liturgy, and Literature in Honor of Amnon Linder, edited by Yitzhak Hen. Turnhout: Brepols, 2001.

Acknowledgements I’d like to express my gratitude to the editors, Mark Ledbetter and Asbjørn Grønstad, for selecting my essay to be a part of this volume. Various parts of this essay were presented previously at the annual conferences of the Southern Humanities Council (2012) and the Renaissance Society of America (2013).

CHAPTER TEN PERFORMING PAINTING: ON THE TIME OF EMBODIED VISION ROBERT R. SHANE

Furthermore, nobody doubts that time, too, is a product of the imagination, and arises from the fact that we see some bodies move more slowly than others, or more quickly, or with equal speed. —Baruch Spinoza, The Ethics, Sch.Pr.44, II (1677)1 In fact things only appear in their full significance, only become wholly and evidently manifest to us, when they approach us as reflections of our own inner life. The plastic and visual arts are concerned with neither content nor form, but rather with the possibilities of configuration and phenomenal appearance. —Robert Vischer, “The Aesthetic Act and Pure Form” (1874)2

We think of the plastic arts as temporally static, as distinct from the performing arts or time-based media. Thomas Mann summed up this popular view when he wrote that “music and narration are alike, in that they can only present themselves as a flowing, as a succession in time, as one thing after another; and both differ from the plastic arts, which are complete in the present, and unrelated to time save as all bodies are, whereas narration—like music—even if it should try to be completely present at any given moment, would need time to do it.”3 This assumed temporal distinction was the basis of American critic Michael Fried’s now classic 1967 critique of Minimalism. He labeled Minimalist sculpture “theatrical” because it relied upon the viewer interacting with time and space in a way that did not differ significantly from our everyday, or what he called our “literal,” experience of objects. By contrast, he argued that modernist art, such as Abstract Expressionist painting, allowed the viewer an escape from the arrow of time by rapture into an eternal present. He closed his essay in a religious fervor with the words: “We are literalists most or all of our lives, presentness is grace.”4 However, I wish to call into

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question the centuries-old assumption of painting’s atemporality. When we view painting, we view it in time, not in a single moment. The contemplative viewing of painting awakens reactions in the body just as viewing, say, a dancer does. How is it that the viewer can feel the compositional movement in a painting or the movement of a dancer on stage simply by looking? How is time perceived in those experiences? In this essay, I will give an account of the temporality of the viewer’s body in aesthetic experience and argue that the experience of painting is closer in time to that of performance than we might first assume. In the first section of this essay, I begin by looking at painting through aesthetic theories of dance, in particular empathy theory. As an art form in which the moving (and non-moving) body itself is the medium, dance makes explicit the role of the lived body in all aesthetic experience. (The “lived body” is a term used in phenomenology to describe the body experiencing time, space, and movement.) The empathy theory of dance aesthetics offers a way of understanding our bodily and temporal response to movement and rhythm in a painted composition. The terms “movement” and “rhythm”, so often applied to the plastic arts, already imply the temporality of dance; to perceive movement or rhythm is to perceive a change in location over time or the repetition of a form over intervals of time. In the second section, I explore this question of movement further. Informed by phenomenology and evolutionary psychology, I show that we should not think of vision as an isolated sense but as embodied, that is, intertwined with the body’s motion in time. As both Spinoza (in the epigraph to this paper) and contemporary psychiatrist Silvie Tordjam assert, our physiological perception of time emerges from seeing other bodies move (and from feeling biological rhythms within our own bodies). Building on the theories of empathy and embodied vision from sections one and two, in the third section I give an account of the viewer’s experience of time in painting. It is in the ecology of the art experience, that is, the interaction between viewer and painted object, that painting happens. The viewer’s empathy with painted form evokes the sensation of moving in time. The motion of time experienced in painting simultaneously moves forward from the present and yet is contaminated by a swell of experiences of vision and movement from the past (both our experiences of art from the past and our bodies’ kinesthetic memories). Lastly, in the fourth section I consider the contrast between our everadvancing present experience of painting (one always already informed by the past) and the time of the painted object. The immutable object is effectively timeless with respect to our moving and changing existence. The ecstasy of painting, I conclude, happens in the crossing of (1) our

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temporal experience of painting’s form performing itself for us in time with (2) the timelessness of the immutable painted object.

I. Kinesthetic Empathy in Painting To see something is never a purely visual experience. What I encounter visually, I also feel in my body. I am employing here an older notion of Einfühlung, or empathy, once advanced by German aestheticians, for example Robert Vischer and Theodor Lipps, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These thinkers, who were developing a Stilpsychologie, a psychology of style, asked a simple but profound question: How is it that inanimate, non-human objects, like paintings, can be so meaningful to us and generate such deep emotional responses? Of course, subject matter, or what Robert Vischer called “objective content,” can evoke an emotional response, for example, a crucifixion scene may evoke horror and pathos; however, Vischer was more interested in art’s subjective content. Subjective content is what the viewer brings to the artwork, so that even “lifeless and inorganic forms…can be capable of arousing and directing our changes of mood and feeling.”5 Vischer’s concerns were once critical to art discourses in Europe in the twentieth-century, particularly in Germany, but as modern art migrated to the United States they were eclipsed by the rise, chronologically, of Greenberg’s formalism, then Pop art and Minimalism, and finally the conceptual cool and self-conscious market savvy of mainstream contemporary art. However, empathy theory has always had a home in the field of dance aesthetics and criticism. (Most recently in art historian Dee Reynolds’s interdisciplinary The Watching Dance Project, a collaboration among neuroscientists and scholars in the humanities from four major universities in the UK.)6 John Martin, the American dance critic, employed the concept of empathy, or “metakinesis,” as he championed the work of modern dancers, for example Martha Graham. Martin wrote, “The onlooker feels sympathetically in his own musculature the exertions he sees in somebody else’s musculature, the dancer is able to convey through movement the most intangible emotional experience.”7 For Martin, the emotional power of watching dance demonstrated that physical and psychical life were “merely two aspects of a single underlying reality.”8 Theodor Lipps made a similar observation even earlier in his 1903 magnum opus Ästhetik, a major contribution to Einfühlung (and the object of Wilhelm Worringer’s famous 1907 critique Abstraktion und Einfühling). Lipps described being able to vicariously feel the movement of an acrobat: “I feel myself in the

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optically perceived movement of the acrobat, so that in the acrobat as I perceive him, I feel myself striving and inwardly active.”9 Fig. 10-1. Bill T. Jones, choreographer, Story/Time, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. Alexander Kasser Theater, Montclair State University, New Jersey, January 2012. 70min. Photograph by Matt Rainey/The New York Times/ Redux.

More recently, dancer and philosopher Sondra Horton Fraleigh described this experience as coinciding with the dance: “As I view a dance, I know that I am not physically present in it—but when the dance finds its life in me and I find my life in it, I coincide with it.”10 Though often overlooked, this is perhaps the most vital aspect of an art experience: the dance I see on stage with only my eyes becomes meaningful because I re-imagine it and simultaneously feel it in my own body. I want to claim that we have this same kinesthetic experience when we view plastic form. By this I do not simply mean that he can follow traces of the painter’s hand in the mark-making, though doing so certainly does afford a vital kinesthetic response in the viewer as art critic Harold Rosenberg famously noted when we coined the term “action painting” to describe the painting of Jackson Pollock and the American Abstract Expressionists;11 rather we can have a kinesthetic response to even purely geometrical form, which Russian painter Kazimir Malevich argued “must

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be given life and the right to individual existence.”12 For example, looking at Malevich’s Suprematist Composition: White on White (1918, Museum of Modern Art, New York), Fig. 10-2. Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition: White on White, 1918, oil on canvas, 31¼ x 31¼" (79.4 x 79.4 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. 1935 Acquisition confirmed in 1999 by agreement with the Estate of Kazimir Malevich and made possible with funds from the Mrs. John Hay Whitney Bequest (by exchange). © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

I see a white square within a square canvas. There is more negative space below the square at the bottom of the composition than the top: I thus optically perceive and inwardly feel the square to be floating. Its orientation is such that I also optically perceive and inwardly feel that

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floating square’s dynamic upward movement to the right. This is not merely a poetic interpretation of the work, and I do not speak of movement metaphorically, rather, this visceral response emerges from the memory of movement my body has had in the world. The French existentialist and phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty described the body’s reaction to painted form thusly: “Quality, light, color, depth, which are there before us [in the world and in painting], are there only because they awaken an echo in our bodies and because the body welcomes them.”13 The empathy I have for the dancer’s movement on stage is not simply because I identify with another organic human body; rather, all visual experience is located in the body which has felt and remembers motion. Empathy theorists conceive art as doubly-creative, as Immanuel Kant argued in advance of the 19th century Stilpsychologie thinkers. There is the creative act of the artist, but there is also the equally creative act of the viewer reconstituting the optically perceived art object in the imagination.14 On Robert Vischer’s analysis, the viewer’s creative process of reconstituting the work consists of three functions. (1) As viewer, I have a purely sensitive-physiological relation to the object which results in a conflation of my feeling with the image of the artwork, e.g., to see an angry tempest or blissful blue ocean in a landscape painting.15 (2) I have a motor response to the object as my moving eyes trace the form of the artwork. Vischer writes: “The very course of the line described by the eye seems to waiver and to run with a life of its own. I identify with this process. I too rise and plunge along those…contours.”16 (3) I transpose my sensorial and intellectual self into the “inner being of the object” allowing myself to explore the object’s formal character from within. This final transposition still stimulates a motor response “even when it is concerned with lifeless and motionless forms;” this is to say, I can imagine myself or the form moving.17 This transposition brings about the feeling of motion I experience viewing Malevich’s square. As Fraleigh said of viewing dance, I coincide with the painted form.18 (Vischer also notes the way in which our associations between past visual experiences and the present art object affect the viewer’s response, but I will reserve a discussion of this theme for section III below.) Implicit in a theory of art’s double-creativity according to Kant or the Einfühlung thinkers is a definition of art as the result of an encounter between the viewing subject and the art object; art is not a mere object hanging on the wall but the viewer’s experience of it. This idea has been explored independently in the twentieth-century by philosopher John Dewey, existential phenomenologist Mikel Dufrenne, and art critic Ellen Handy. Similarly to the empathy theorists, these three

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each defined art as “an experience,” “event,” or “transaction,” respectively, that takes place between the viewer and art object.19 The experience, event, or transaction I have with an art object takes place over time. In that duration, painted form performs itself for me and finds its equivalent in my lived body. As I have demonstrated with the example of Malevich’s square, form finds this equivalent by the same mechanism of empathy through which the dancer awakens equivalent kinesthetic feelings in me. Fraleigh, paraphrasing Roman Ingarten, described the viewer’s experience of dance as the “inner performance of an aesthetic experience,”20 and while Fraleigh herself often describes dance in contrast to painting, I would like to refer to the temporal reconstitution of a painting in my imagination as a kind of inner performance as well. I now turn to the physiological basis and evolutionary origins of this empathetic relationship between vision, movement, and time, a relationship I am calling embodied vision.

II. Embodied Vision: The Intertwining of Vision and Movement My term “embodied vision” is admittedly redundant. Of course vision is embodied; where else could vision take place other than in the body? However, we often forget that we view art with our entire being and not just our eyes. Even though the high modernist dogma calling for mediumspecificity has been dethroned by contemporary and postmodern art practices, we still tend to think in isolated terms of sense-specificity in the arts: the visual arts, music, dance, the culinary arts; the College Art Association even hosted a session on olfactory art at its 2013 conference in New York. These categories cause us to forget that the same lived body is the site for all aesthetic experience. The phenomenon of Einfühling, or empathy, happens by virtue of an inherent bodily connection between the visual and the kinesthetic. In his 1964 phenomenological study of vision and painting titled “Eye and Mind,” Merleau-Ponty reminded us, quoting Paul Valéry, that “The painter takes his body with him.”21 To this reminder I add that “The viewer takes her body with her” as well. To understand the significance of the body in aesthetic experience we must consider its movement. As Merleau-Ponty insisted: “…we must go back to the working, actual body—not the body as a chunk of space or a bundle of functions but that body which is an intertwining of vision and movement.”22 To illustrate this intertwining, he described our ability to know how to act by merely looking at the world:

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Chapter Ten I have only to see something to know how to reach it and deal with it, even if I do not know how this happens in my nervous system. My moving body makes a difference in the visible world, being a part of it; that is why I can steer it through the visible. Moreover, it is also true that vision is attached to movement. We see only what we look at. What would vision be without eye movement?23

Merleau-Ponty’s two conclusions, arrived at through careful observation of his own experience, that (1) vision exists to help us move in the world, and (2) vision itself requires movement, have been supported more recently as evolutionary psychologists have been re-investigating issues of sensation and perception. Vision’s intimate connection to movement arose precisely because vision evolved to aid locomotion. In this section, I will argue firstly that the vision we bring to art likewise and by necessity is cross-modal, and secondly that our conception and perception of time emerge from bodily movement. Vision was not designed for the aesthetic contemplation of painting, though there has been much research on the evolutionary origins of beauty,24 nor does vision exist to provide knowledge of the world for its own sake; but rather, as Steven Gaulin and Donald McBurney have succinctly stated in their survey of evolutionary psychology, the main purpose of perception in general, and vision in particular, is “to guide action.”25 Psychologists J.M. Loomis, et al., in their 1992 study “Visual space perception and visually directed action” noted that humans are not necessarily good at judging distances (i.e., acquiring abstract, numerical knowledge through the senses), but they are very good at simply not bumping into things, that is, they can easily navigate the visible world as Merleau-Ponty pointed out.26 Vision, though metabolically expensive, provided distinct survival advantages for mobile creatures in lighted environments; it afforded a Pleistocene-era hominid the ability to spot a predator and move out of harm’s way, to see a brightly colored fruit so she could eat it, to observe cues for fitness and health in potential mates who could pass on her genes. While visual perception is modular (surrounding the visual cortex there are various areas which each specialize in color, identification of objects, movement, spatial location, etc,) my experience of those modes is fully integrated as one vision, and that vision is in turn integrated with my motor responses. Those Pleistocene-era bodies which could not integrate seeing and action, that is, vision and movement, became no one’s ancestors. We see the integration of vision and movement at work in our capacity for memory. We generally do not possess a great facility for memorizing evolutionary novel concepts, such as the digits of Pi, but rather, for

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remembering the spatial locations of objects. Could Pleistocene-era hunter-gathers see a tree a few months before it was ready to bear fruit and then find it again when the fruit had ripened? The genes of those who could are active in us today. The simple technique of the Memory Palace, credited to Simonides of Ancient Greece, capitalizes on this ability. I can memorize a list of random items, a grocery list for example, by visualizing each item in a specific location of a familiar building, say, my childhood home; to recall the items later, I simply walk through my childhood home in my mind’s eye seeing the dozen eggs I need to buy on the sofa or the stalk of celery sitting atop the television set like rabbit ears. Simonides’ Memory Palace works because we can innately visualize our bodies moving through the environment. In fact, competitive memory champions who can recall, for example, the first 60,000 decimal places of Pi, often do so by translating the digits into a series of memorable images, which they reconnect in a potent, spatial, and temporal narrative.27 Psychologist J.J. Gibson pointed out another crucial aspect of our vision in his book An Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, namely, the evolution of vision and locomotion for terrestrial creatures developed with respect to gravity.28 Like more recent evolutionary psychologists, he noted that vision provides the dominant level of control over movement, or what he called “visual kinesthesis.”29 Furthermore, we register motion with respect to an immobile earth perpendicular to the force of gravity; the feeling of one’s own posture and orientation with respect to the horizontal plane of the earth depends upon the visual sense as much, and perhaps even more so, than the muscles and inner ears.30 (This fact is most evident to me every time I get motion sickness while sitting completely still on an immobile couch and watching the shaky camerawork of a friend’s or family member’s home videos on the television screen.) Our innate visual orientation to gravity has a direct effect on our perception of painting. Not only do we commonly analyze symmetry and compositional balance with respect to an imaginary, vertical line drawn down the center of a canvas, but also vision’s orientation to gravity makes possible my perception of the rising square in Malevich’s White on White. The white square appears to float relative to my experience of objects on a terrestrial surface. A large object like Malevich’s square should normally sit flush with the horizontal surface of the ground, or, in this case, the bottom edge of the canvas. Since it does not, it appears to float. Not only does vision guide the movement of our bodies in the terrestrial environment, but also vision itself is movement. The eyes are never completely still. Even when I seem to fixate on an object, for example when I focus on one corner of Malevich’s square, my eyes

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perform micro-saccadic movement; they quiver and move slightly as my brain tries to constantly assess my body’s spatial relationship to the object.31 For this reason, Gibson prefers to speak of vision as an active “perceptual system” rather than a mere passive “sense.”32 This perceptual system is nested: the eyes move within the head, the head moves on the neck, the neck moves on the body, the body moves in the environment.33 Thus vision is both always in motion and embodied in a mobile body.34 Nested vision or embodied vision means I view the world in general, and painting in particular, with my whole body within an environment (a claim made by John Dewey in his 1936 Art as Experience).35 Up close, a Monet will look like a maelstrom of brushwork, a Seurat like a series of tiny points; but when I move my body backward, the artists’ representational scenes become clearer. The anamorphic skull in the foreground of Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533, National Gallery of Art, London) becomes visible only when I move my body, squatting low and looking up from the lower left. These cases of dramatically altered perceptions resulting from moving my body during my encounter with a Monet, Seurat, or Holbein are not novel; rather, they simply make explicit the active role my moving body plays in reconstituting any work of art in my imagination. Thus far in this section I have looked to the work of phenomenologists and evolutionary psychologists to lend support to the claim that vision and movement are thoroughly intertwined: vision evolved to guide action and vision itself cannot happen without the moving eye and moving body. I perceive Malevich’s square as a moving form with my imagination whose structure has been determined a priori for me—through the course of my ancestors’ evolution—to interpret the world with respect to my body’s movement within spatiotemporal categories. However, my primary question concerns not motion for its own sake in art, but the experiences of my moving eye and body in time while viewing art. I must therefore address the relationship I am assuming exists between movement and time, a historically contested relationship in philosophy. On the one hand, on an intuitive level our understanding of time seems to be intimately bound to movement, that is, the changing locations of things—the sun, other animals, my own body—over a duration seem to indicate to us the flow of time. As Spinoza argued in the epigraph to this essay, time is a product of the imagination and emerges from the experience of seeing bodies moving or at rest with respect to one another. On the other hand, other philosophers, most famously St. Augustine, have pointed out that time is precisely that against which we measure motion and rest, and therefore, to speak of time as motion is a circular argument.36 However,

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psychiatrist Sylvie Tordjman offers a way out of this philosophical impasse by distinguishing chronometric time from physiological time; regardless of whether or not time is an independent entity, when speaking of the human perception of time (physiological time) the motion of our bodies and time are inseparable: We can distinguish between the temporal dimension of chronometric time, paced by the movement of our watch mechanics (watches that count the hours, minutes and seconds) and that of physiological time, paced by our internal biological rhythms (e.g., our genetically hardwired cellular aging processes or the circadian rhythms of melatonin and cortisol secretion…).37

Through her own research and her review of recent studies on the neuroscience and physiology of time, Tordjman lends support for the legitimacy of physiological time. She observes that despite the different ways in which time is and has been measured in different cultures around the globe and in different periods, there are some fundamental measures of time shared by the entire human species and which are ultimately rooted in the body. All conceptions of time “include the notion of movements repeated in a stable rhythmic pattern,” and the sense of time “is based on the perception and representation of periodic and rhythmic movement involving the recurrence of the same interval of time.”38 While these regular intervals can be artificial, such as the seven-day week or the swinging pendulum of the modern clock, the drive to measure time with regularity has its precedent in the body: continuous flow punctuated by the regular discontinuity of the heart-beat and breathing.39 Tordjman hypothesizes that this physiological basis for time perception can account for the strange but universal experience reported among humans: children perceive time as progressing slowly and adults perceive time as moving faster as they age. Why? In a given clock hour, for instance, a child takes more breaths and her heart beats more times than an adult in that time span. If time is indeed intuitively measured by the pulse and movement of the body as Tordjman claims, then for any given span of a mechanical clock, the child’s body will have measured more ticks on her biological clock than an adult. I believe Tordjman’s concept of physiological time warrants the connection between time and motion with respect to art: if perception of time is rooted in the body, not only as all senses are, but in such a way that our notions of time are derived from the body, then we can talk about the experience of time when the viewer brings her body with her to a painting. I do not view a painting informed by the watch on my wrist, rather, as I intuitively feel whether forms move fast or slow and

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arrange my experiences with them in a sequence. (Sequencing is a concept to which I will return in the section below.)

III. The Temporal Experience of Painting In section one, I introduced the concept of empathy—whereby I feel plastic form in my body—by way of dance aesthetics; and I did so because I believe dance, an art form in which the moving (and non-moving) body is the medium, simply makes explicit the embodied and kinesthetic nature of all aesthetic experience. In section 1, I showed that the intertwining of vision and movement was necessitated by Pleistocene-era needs that gave visual-mobile creatures a fitness advantage in their environment; I believe this movement-based visual system is necessarily operative in our experience of painting today. “Movement” and “rhythm” are ways of talking about composition that are familiar to the painter, and significantly these imply a temporal dimension to our perception of the medium. Movement implies a change in location over time; rhythm implies a temporal separation of elements. (More precisely, following Tordjman, I have argued that our experience of time is inseparable from the rhythmic movements experienced by and within our bodies.) I do not take in a painting all at once; rather, painting unfolds for me over time as its disparate elements affect my gaze at each new moment. I look, for example, first at the vertical yellow rectangle in Hans Hofmann’s Magnum Opus (1962, Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, California);

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Fig. 10-3. Hans Hofmann, Magnum Opus, 1962, oil on canvas, 84 x 78 inches (214 x 198 cm), University of California, University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, gift of the artist.

it appears to oscillate spatially: Do its razor-sharp edges define an opening, a window in the amorphous red field leading to a yellow background, or is this a yellow monolith hovering in front of the red ground? But then, moving my eyes and head, I look across the expanse of red and see the vertical blue rectangle. It is surrounded by dull red and green rectangles whose boundaries dissolve as if the forms are in a state of becoming. As my gaze returns to the yellow rectangle I now see it differently after having seen the blue rectangle than I did when I first saw it as simply surrounded by a field of red. A new relationship has emerged, one of

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similar form and contrasting color. The geometric precision of the rectangles echo one another especially in contrast to the gestural marks within and surrounding them. At the same time, their blue and yellow colors contrast with each other and with the red field. My eyes and head keep panning back-and-forth to re-examine each rectangle (when I stand even closer I have to move not only my eyes and head but my entire body), and with each pass new visual relationships emerge. While I can return my gaze to the yellow rectangle, where my narrative of this visual experience began, I can never return to the moment in my personal history in which it did not yet have a relationship to the blue rectangle; this is to say, I cannot cause myself to forget the effects of the other elements of the painting once I have experienced them.40 While the painted object may not change, my experience of the painting has advanced in time, and the yellow rectangle will forever have new visual relationships. Similarly, over time the other passages of the painting accumulate and hang in my memory, as when I listen to the notes of a melody which, though separated in time, still affect one another. In making the comparison to music, I am recounting philosopher Henri Bergson’s description of music in Duration and Simultaneity (1922). Bergson’s contribution to philosophy of time is his notion of time as a continuous swell or la durée (translated as ‘duration’). In his Creative Evolution (1907), Bergson wrote that duration is “not merely one instant replacing another; if it were, there would never be anything but the present… Duration is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances.”41 Duration is irreversible, which is why, while all the elements of a painting are continually there in the object, my experience of those elements is akin to that of a performance: I see them sequentially and retain the memory of each one. Consciousness, Bergson claims, never goes through the same state twice: “The circumstances may still be the same, but they will act no longer on the same person, since they find him at a new moment of his history.”42 Each time I look at a painting again, my experience of it is changing because I am at a new location in time. Relationships emerge for me not only between the forms in Hofmann’s painting but between Hofmann’s painting and other paintings I have viewed in the past. My lived, temporal body, which I bring to the work— and which I have been arguing is the locus for all aesthetic experience— holds memory. Vischer, in describing the motor processes of empathy, noted that the present experience of a work of art is connected by association to “other images, thoughts, and vital feelings which are not strictly present as such and which initially have nothing whatsoever to do

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with the immediate effect of form itself.”43 The aesthetic memory my body brings to Hofmann’s painting includes my experience of other paintings; for me, the geometric shapes and triadic color recall my earlier encounters with Mondrian’s red, yellow, and blue rectangles. Aesthetic memory has even older, archaic roots. Psychiatrist Gilbert J. Rose explains the effect of bodily memory on the psychical present through his concept of “affective resonances” operative in our experience of art. Formulated in the early experiences of interplay between infant and caretaker, affective resonances can consist, for example, of “patterns of tension and release occurring in sequences of timing.”44 Rose writes: The interplay between infant and caretaker is characterized by corresponding patterns of tension and release—a formal congruence that signals their mutuality. Tension and release being at the heart of affect, we may postulate that it is the subjective experience of such congruence that gives rise to affective resonances.45

Affect arises when there is a formal congruence in these patterns between two people or between a person and an art object. Rose argues that these affective resonances are, in fact, built into the form of a work of art. They are part of what make art, especially pure abstract art without “objective content,” emotionally compelling, and, I would add, they form the psychical-somatical structure upon which aesthetic empathy operates: When an artist builds virtual tension and release into an aesthetic structure, he or she is not necessarily communicating his or her own feelings. Nor is a viewer, responding with actual tension and release, necessarily “reading” the artist’s own emotions...rather,...art invites an interplay based on the congruence of homologous structures...the virtual tension and release patterns in the art object and one’s own actual patterns becomes intensified….46

When viewing the Malevich or the Hofmann, the formal tension of, say, the precariously balanced white square or the explosive splatters of red contrasted with the inhuman geometry of the rectangles awaken in me an affective tension. Rose’s concept of affective resonances offers a theory for explaining the intersection between the formal and psychical dimensions of aesthetic experience. More germane to my discussion of time, since Rose proposes that the origin of aesthetic tension lies in the early bodily experiences between infant and caretaker, thus his theory implies that our experience of art takes place in an ambivalent temporality. Aesthetic experience is the result of a present encounter which is always already built upon an experience from the past. In section II, I argued that

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Tordjman’s work showed how rhythms of the body are fundamental in our perception of time.47 Rose’s theory of affective resonances reveals the complexities of that embodied time. Both Bergson’s and Rose’s accounts of time share a fundamental similarity. In each case, my experience of the painting in the present is always already contaminated by experiences from the past. The past gnaws into the present as painting performs itself before me. New aesthetic experiences become meaningful because of their intersection with past ones, and the resonance of new experiences with early patterns of tension and release make them so emotionally powerful.

IV. The Freudian Zeitlos in Painting Bergson gave an account of time in which the past overflows into and shapes the present. This raises an interesting aesthetic question: When I look at art and I am affected by my experience of a form I glanced at a moment ago, affected also by all my accumulated experience of looking at other art, can I be said to experience the artwork, or anything for that matter, in the present? By describing the performative aspect of painting in my own narrative describing the works of Malevich and Hofmann, I was inscribing my experience into a kind of linear time; but the linear clarity of the present is always already contaminated by Bergson’s unremitting “swell.” 48 And there is still a remainder, which I have not yet properly rendered: 49 that which is not performative and is particular to the domain of painting, namely, the immutable painted object. It is tempting to ascribe an eternal “presentness” to painting that we do not ascribe to the transient movement of the dancer because this object does not change—even as my experience of it continuously does. The most effective model to help untangle, or perhaps further entangle, this temporal paradox is a psychoanalytic reading of time. Freud argued that there is no time in the unconscious: “The processes of the system Ucs. [unconscious] are timeless; i.e. they are not ordered temporally, are not altered by the passage of time; they have no reference to time at all.”50 The sense of time he argued, by contrast, belongs to conscious mind. As psychoanalyst Peter Hartocollis writes, “Above all, the idea of timelessness refers to the fact that the contents of the unconscious and of the dream have their origin in the remote past, representing childhood wishes and conflicts that, in spite of the passage of time, have lost none of their appeal or intensity.”51 To understand this timelessness or Zeitlos, think of the temporal confusion in a dream in which past and present figures and places are conflated. Think also of one of Freud’s great

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contributions, which was to show how childhood experiences affect our present interpretation of the world by the mechanism of transference. As psychiatrist Howard Levine writes, through transference, psychoanalysis allows for “the emergence and recognition of the past as living present.”52 Despite all the ways in which Freud may be disavowed by many in the field of psychology today, transference is still regarded, if sometimes by a different name, in almost every type of clinical practice. Cognitive and schema therapists, for example, still inquire about their clients’ family histories, and they try to get their patients to become consciously aware when they are not acting in the present moment with other people but are instead unconsciously reacting as if those people are figures from their past. Perhaps Freud’s most significant contribution to the history of thought was the discovery that human experience stands at the intersection of these two times: the time of consciousness and the timelessness of the unconscious. I act with respect to both whether I am aware of them or not. While I did not use the term Zeitlos in the previous section, I was suggesting its power through Bergson’s concept of “swell” and Rose’s affective resonances. In this concluding section, I would like to use the model of time and timelessness as an analogy for the relationship between the temporal experience of painting (which unfolds in time) and the immutable painted object itself (which is effectively timelessness). For Levine, psychoanalysis is a double process of (1) representing the timeless past, usually through language, and (2) inscribing it into the subject’s timeline, history, and life story.53 Trauma interferes with the ability to sequence and historicize events in which case the past remains an intense force in the present, as described above by Hartocollis.54 To describe the timeless state of the psyche, psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva uses the word ‘scandal’ considering its Latin root scandalum: detainment, obstacle, stumbling block, impediment.55 The scandal blocks or impedes the flow of conscious time in the present by unconsciously sculpting the present in the image of the past. This scandal is what Levine calls the “frozen, atemporal stasis of ‘essential depression’.”56 Kristeva points out that we encounter “the scandal of the timeless” when trauma or the demands of the drives interrupt the linear time of consciousness. Healing, for both Levine and Kristeva, occurs through transforming the trauma which unceasingly haunts the patient and upon which he or she is psychically and temporally stuck. The transformation takes place through the process of re-inscribing the trauma into the narrative, linear, and therapeutic time of analysis.57 Considering the psychoanalytic model of time and timelessness as an analogy for the experience of painting, I want to suggest that the scandal of the Zeitlos is the result of the intersection of

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the painted object’s brute immutability and our experience of its changing performance in time. This scandal can, in fact, be pleasurable in aesthetic experience. That is, it follows the temporal structure of trauma, but can yield a different affect. As Levine notes, there are two poles to timelessness, one thanatos-determined (for example, the aforementioned frozen, atemporal stasis of depression) and the other eros-determined, the ever-renewable source of life, love, energy.58 Aesthetic experience can be either traumatic or life-affirming depending on the nature of the art object.59 If painting is timeless, it is not in Michael Fried’s sense of an eternal present or presentness, that is, a grace that temporarily immunizes us from the unrelenting forward march of time. As I reconstitute what I see before me in my imagination, the forms of painting perform and re-perform themselves before me. As this happens, the linear, yet Bergsonian swell of my experience is faced with a scandal. In analysis, trauma has an eternal “nowness” until it is represented and inscribed into a temporally linear narrative.60 The painted object is the analog to the timeless unconscious, thus doubling the Zeitlos of everyday experience in aesthetic experience. The painted object’s unchanging physical state is analogous to the psychical timelessness of the unconscious, and it is as alien to our conscious sense of our temporally lived bodies as the timelessness of the unconscious is to our conscious minds. What is its time, this object in which I have invested so much psychically? Unchanging and immutable, of another temporal mode of being, what is the nature of time as I identify with this lifeless inanimate form, projecting myself into the form and feeling it from within? The painter’s hand moved and my eye moves analogously following her gesture, as Vischer already pointed out; but the painted object, in defiance of both the time of the artist and viewer, does not move. The painted object is a Zeitlos independent of time’s arrow, and yet like the psychical Zeitlos, it acts upon my conscious life in the present. My cognition of the object’s immutability is at odds with my psychical and motor experience of it. This irreconcilable difference is the source of a pleasurable event that has the temporal structure of a trauma. By the mechanism of empathy, I feel myself in the form of the painting as if its forms perform themselves for me. The ecstasy of painting happens when I am thrown into and become conscious of this temporally ambivalent state, as if lucidly dreaming. Painting performs itself before us in time, and at the same time, the immutable painted object performs an endless, that is to say, atemporal and scandalous interruption of its own temporal performance.

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Notes 1

Baruch Spinoza, The Ethics, Sch.Pr.44, II (1677) in The Ethics, Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, Selected Letters, trans., Samuel Shirley, Seymour Feldman, ed. (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1992), Kindle edition, location 2286. 2 Robert Vischer, “The Aesthetic Act and Pure Form” (1874), trans. Nicholas Walker, in Harrison and Wood, eds., Art in Theory 1815-1900 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 693. 3 Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain (1924), trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Knopf, 1947), p. 541. Quoted in Peter Hartocolis, Time and Timelessness, or, The Varieties of Temporal Experience (A Psychoanalytic Inquiry) (Madison, Connecticut: International Universities Press), 4. 4 Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Art Forum (Summer 1967), reprinted in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds., Art in Theory 1900-2000, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 845. 5 Vischer, “The Aesthetic Act and Pure Form,” 691. 6 See: Dee Reynolds, et al., The Watching Dance Project (University of Manchester), last accessed April 1, 2014, www.watchingdance.org; and Matthew Reason and Dee Reynolds, eds., Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices (Bristol, UK and Chicago: Intellect, 2012). 7 John Martin, “Dance as a Means of Communication,” The Dance (1946) in Selma Jeanne Cohen, ed., What Is Dance? (Oxford: Oxford University, 1983), 22. 8 Martin, “Metakinesis,” The Modern Dance (1933) in Cohen, What Is Dance?, 23. 9 Theodor Lipps Ästhetik, vol. 1, (Hamburg and Leipzig: Leopold Voss, 1903), 120, 123; translated by and quoted in Dee Reynolds, Symbolist Aesthetics and Early Abstract Art: Sites of Imaginary Space (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 21. 10 Sondra Horton Fraleigh, Dance and the Lived Body: A Descriptive Aesthetics (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987), 66. 11 See: Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” The Tradition of the New (New York: Da Capo, 1960), 23-39. In an essay in which he coined the term “action painting,” critic Harold Rosenberg argued we should become connoisseurs of gesture rather than of relations of form. Robert Vischer also drew an analogy between the painter moving his brush and the viewer moving his eye (Vischer, 692). While the viewer has a kinesthetic relation to painted gestures that trace the actual movement of the artist, in this paper I am trying to emphasize a more fundamental kinesthetic relation to form that can include non-human and inorganic form. 12 Kasimir Malevich, From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Realism in Painting (1916) in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory: 1900-2000, 175. 13 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind” (1964) in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, trans. Michael B. Smith, Galen Johnson, ed. (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 125.

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14 See also: Eleftherios Ikonomou and Harry Francis Mallgrave, “Introduction,” Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873-1893 (Santa Monica: The Getty Center, 1994), 6. 15 Vischer, “The Aesthetic Act and Pure Form,” 691. 16 Ibid., 691-692. 17 Ibid., 692. 18 While I use Fraleigh’s dance aesthetics as a model for understanding plastic form, I must acknowledge that she herself argues for a clear distinction between the aesthetics of painting and dance in the same vein as Mann and Fried discussed in my introductory paragraph. 19 See: John Dewey, Art as Experience (1934) (New York: Perigree, 2005); Mikel Dufrenne The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience (1953), trans. Edward S. Casey (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1989); and Ellen Handy, “Notes on Criticism: Art and Transactionalism,” Arts Magazine 61 (October 1986): 48-52. 20 Fraleigh, 63. 21 Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 123. 22 Ibid., 124. 23 Ibid. 24 See, for example: Anjan Chatterjee, The Aesthetic Brain: How We Evolved to Desire Beauty and Enjoy Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Denis Dutton The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Emotion (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009, 2010); David Rothenberg, Survival of the Beautiful: Art, Science, and Evolution (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011); and Robert L. Solso, The Psychology of Art and the Evolution of the Conscious Brain (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2003). 25 Steven Gaulin and Donald McBurney, Evolutionary Psychology, 2nd edition (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson, 2004), 81. 26 J.M. Loomis, J.A. Da Silva, N. Fujita, and S.S. Fukusima, “Visual space perception and visually directed action,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 18 (1992): 906-921. 27 See: Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering (New York: Penguin, 2011). Silvie Tordjman (cited below) points out that a moving environment can stimulate thinking and that there is a relation between kinesthesia and cognition (140). 28 James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (New York: Psychology Press, 1986), 33, 125-126, 223, 186. 29 Gibson, 183. Perception of the environment is always coupled with coperception of the self (Gibson 125, 190). For instance, the nose and moving limbs are parts of our visual field and help us to perceive our motion relative to the environment. John Dewey (cited above) called the viewer of a work of art “a live creature” in order to emphasize how the experience of a work of art is part of an environmental situation inhabited by the viewer. My claim is that since the need to guide action in the environment is met primarily by vision, this action- impulse remains part of the environmental or ecological situation of viewing art. This

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perception for Gibson, since it is movement-driven, is necessarily part of an animal-environment system (Gibson, 245). 30 Gibson, 226, and 236. 31 Gibson, 197, 211-213. See: Gibson, 211-213 for a discussion of the varieties of eye movement. 32 Gibson, 245. 33 Gibson, 222, 205. 34 Gibson, 196, 205. Thus, according to Gibson, vision is the act of registering information from a constant visual flow; it is not a series of still snapshots somehow animated in the brain, nor can it be understood in artificial situations, for example, in an experiment in which subjects sit motionless with one eye closed, for example. 35 See: Dewey “The Live Creature,” Art as Experience, 1-19. 36 See: St. Augustine, Confessions Book IX, Chapter XXIV cited in Sylvie Tordjman, “Time and Its Representations: At the Crossroads between Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience,” Journal of Physiology – Paris 105 (2011): 139. It is worth noting, however, as Tordjman observes, that St. Augustine still describes eternity as motionless despite his resistance to equating motion with time. 37 Tordjman, “Time and Its Representations: At the Crossroads between Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience,” 139. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. Our body also engages in internal rhythms, which though not kinesthetic, also contribute to the rhythms of corporeal temporality: body temperature cycles daily and melatonin and cortisol levels have an inverse relationship, the former peaking at night, the latter in the day (Tordjman, 142). Biologist John D. Palmer in his book The Living Clock gives further detailed accounts of the body’s internal clocks, such as postpranial dips— sleepiness after lunchtime felt whether or not one has actually eaten lunch, a biological justification for siesta—and the daily inverse cycle of tPA (tissue plasminogen activator) and PAI-1 (plasminogen activator inhibitor type 1) responsible for thinning and clotting the blood. Palmer also demonstrates exactly what happens when, say, the circadian rhythm is out of sync with another rhythm, say, the temperature cycles which are independent of sleeping, eating, or daylight exposure. Such asynchronicity occurs most notably in jet lag. See John D. Palmer, “Chapter 2: Human Rhythms: Basic Processes,” and “Chapter 4: Jet Lag Can Be a Drag,” The Living Clock: The Orchestrator of Biological Rhythms (Oxford Univ: Oxford, 2002), 11-36 and 45-68. 40 The Broadway musical composer Stephen Sondheim pointed out that the same song can have a different meaning when it is performed at different points in a show. Fiction writer Jeffery Deaver discusses this in the foreword to his novel The October List (New York: Grand Central, 2013), a story in which the events of the plot are presented to the reader in reverse chronological order. 41 Henri Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity (1922) in Henri Bergson: Key Writings, Keith Ansell Pearson and John Mullarkey, eds. (New York and London: Continuum, 2002), 205.

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Bergson, Creative Evolution (1907) in Henri Bergson: Key Writings, 173. Vischer, 692. Incidentally, David Hume argued the critic develops taste only through study of numerous works of art. 44 Gilbert J. Rose Necessary Illusion: Art as Witness. (Madison, Connecticut: International Universities Press, Inc., 1996),70. 45 Rose, 70. 46 Rose, p. 83. 47 Tordjman makes an even more explicit the connection between this type of interplay and our perception of time. Following D.W. Winnicott who noted that the infant progressively internalizes the rhythmic structures of feeding (Winnicott, Collected Papers: Through Pediatrics to Psychoanalysis (London: Tavistock, 1958) summarized in Tordjman, 143), Tordjman goes on to hypothesize that this internalization happens even earlier: in the womb. The fetus hears and feels mother’s heartbeat and breath (auditory and vibratory stimuli), including daily cyclical changes in her heart rate corresponding to cycles of sleeping and waking; the fetus is so affected by the mother’s bodily cycles that she notes that the infant’s circadian rhythm, signaled by inverse secretion of melatonin and cortisol, follows the mother until three months of age (Tordjman, 143-145). (Tordjman cites D.A. Price, et al., “Age of Appearance of Circadian Rhythm in Salivary Cortisol Values in Infancy,” Arch. Dis. Child. 58(1983): 454-456.) 48 Cf. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, trans. David Allison (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University, 1973). 49 Cf. Derrida, “Passe-partout,” The Truth in Painting [1978], trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod. (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1987), 1-13. 50 Sigmund Freud, The Unconscious (1915) in Standard Edition, vol. 14 (London: Hogarth Press: 1957), 187 quoted in Hartocollis, p. 6. 51 Hartocollis, 152. 52 Howard B. Levine, “Time and Timelessness : Inscription and Representation,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 57, no. 2 (2009): 340. 53 Levine, 333-355. Or, as Gibson says concerning time in his ecological study of visual perception, we have an innate ability not to perceive time flowing but to sequence events before, after, or nested within one another. Gibson argues, and he is not alone, that we do not perceive the flow of time; there are no sense organs for time, per se. What we perceive are events which we sequence (Gibson, 221). Some events are primary, other events are secondary and thus nested within the primary ones (Gibson 100-101). Thus, biologically and psychically we do not measure time with a clock, but rather, we consider the time of events relative to one another. 54 Levine, 336 and Levine, 337, summarizing R. Lombardi, “Knowledge and Experience of Time in Primitive Mental States,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 84 (2003): 1531-1550; and I. Matte-Blanco, Unconscious as Infinite Sets (London: Duckworth, 1975). Think also, for example, of Kurt Vonnegut’s character Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse Five. Traumatized by his experience in World War II, American soldier Billy Pilgrim becomes “unstuck” in time. Past, present, and even future events come to Pilgrim out sequence. 43

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55 Julia Kristeva, Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis (1997), trans. Jeanine Herman (New York: Columbia University, 2002) 31. 56 Levine, 336. Silvie Tordjman emphasizes the physiological changes in time perception in depression and mania (Tordjman, 143). 57 Kristeva, “The Scandal of the Timeless,” Intimate Revolt, 25-42. It is worth noting that the cultural scandal (in the colloquial sense of the word) of Freudian psychoanalysis, Kristeva argues, is a result of this temporal scandal (in Kriteva’s etymological use of the word). Even more than the outcry at Freud’s acknowledgement of taboo aspects of eros (i.e. childhood sexuality, Oedipal complex), the popular resistance to psychoanalysis is a result of its breach in our biological and conscious understanding of time (Kristeva, 33). I think this is most evident when for example, I do not want to deal with trauma that affects me in the present and I dismiss it by saying “That’s all in the past,” which is a way of claiming (or rather, denying) that there is no need to bring that up. 58 Levine, 336. 59 Or there can be a release of tension in viewing traumatic art, as Aristotle argued with respect to the catharsis one feels watching tragedy. 60 Levine, 337-338

CHAPTER ELEVEN THE ‘ART OF SEEING’ IN BRUEGEL’S PAINTINGS JEAN-LOUIS CLARET

Paintings help us see what is otherwise too directly accessible to be noticed. As a matter of fact, to see the world it is necessary to turn away from things and to consider them in the distant mirror of art. Blaise Pascal’s suggestion that vain pictures “excite admiration by their resemblance to things of which we do not admire the originals”1 may sound disquietingly true. But Peter Bruegel’s paintings seem to go further than just to help observers admire the world around them. Abraham Ortelius, a Flemish cartographer, even said in his 1570 Tribute to his friend, “He painted many things that cannot be painted, as Pliny said of Apelles. In all his works, more is always to be understood than he actually painted, as the same writer said of Timanthes.”2 This statement suggests that the Flemish painter whose talent rivalled that of his famous Greek predecessors transcended the limits of visibility by arousing other senses, providing an insight into the subtle mechanisms of sight and seeing. Peter Brueghel the Elder was indeed “a unique phenomenon in the history of painting,”3 a penetrating observer of observation. It may therefore seem legitimate to suggest that if his paintings show things that looking does not always make it possible to see, his works must paradoxically manage to hide some of the things they show. Accordingly, they may be considered as a laboratory of eyesight where sight – what is shown – does not always correspond to what is seen. One may wonder what the onlookers should do to see what is at the same time revealed and concealed by the image. How the painter succeeded – technically - in showing things and hiding them at the same time is another fascinating crux. This game of hide-and-seek can be identified in some of Brueghel’s greatest paintings and this study proposes to present it briefly. The first phase in this presentation will be concerned with the development of visual subjectivity in Flemish pictorial works. Then a few paintings will be briefly analysed to reveal the

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recurrence of some visual strategies and to probe the subtle mechanisms of sight and seeing. A closer analysis of The Triumph of Death will eventually provide a concrete example of such devices and reveal things that the transparent veil of art has kept unseen so far. Before we start considering the relationships between early modern Flemish paintings and their observers, it is necessary to recall that the Netherlands was the birthplace of visual subjectivity. Renaissance paintings in Italy tended to depict absolute mental visions to be considered from an unbridgeable distance – the world seen through the eyes of God, as it were. Objects were represented as they were in their essence, not as they could be seen. The overall image was perfectly balanced and strictly contained by its frame that de-limited a vision whose orderliness was often enhanced by the use of linear perspective. Erwin Panofsky explained, this when he said “in turning the psycho-physiological space into a mathematical space, in other words, making the subjective objective.”4 In Italy, this technique – these techniques rather, since Leonardo da Vinci said there existed three perspectives - made it possible to organise the image into an ideal vision, turning art into a science that could be mathematised. The underlying paradox lies in the fact that perspective was usually subservient to the representation of imagined divine scenes that were out of reach of the eyes. In Flanders, perspective was more down-to-earth as it moved away from such abstract constructions. Interestingly, Northern art focused on individual perception, that is the world – not a vision of it - seen through the eyes of a person. The Italian religious image could have been conjured up in the minds of the faithful after they had closed their eyes. The Northern image could be compared to a window through which someone – anyone – could look at the world in which he or she operated. Interestingly, Tzvetan Todorov noticed that no one before Jan van Eyck had ever represented objects cut by the edge of a picture.5 This device caused the individual to be integrated in the image and even to be the starting point of its conception. The space the Flemish image represented was no longer divine: it became the crystallisation of an individual’s perception of the world, thus participating in the development of humanism and of the introspective mood that Protestantism would nurture one century later.6 It made the objective subjective. The presupposition of active and individualised observers is a major innovation of Northern Renaissance art. Like the spectators in an Elizabethan playhouse, the viewers feel they are included in the image that sometimes contains a convex mirror indicating the presence of the larger hosting world they inhabit. Like the Murder of Gonzago in Hamlet, the reflection provides an unfaithful7 - sometimes revelatory - image of the

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major historia.8 This parallel with drama is intended to emphasize the theatrical dimension of Northern art. A painting by Peter Brueghel is a teatrum - the place that shows, etymology indicates – that springs to life when it catches the eyes of the observers who, like theatregoers, must “mobilize their projective activities in order to compensate for the limitations of the medium.”9 The machinery of Bruegel’s compositio10 gets hold of the viewers who get included in the image through a series of silent exchanges, as the following chapters will demonstrate. Peter Brueghel the Elder was excellent at manipulating the observers. Like the famous early twentieth century conjuror, Harry Houdini, the Flemish painter could deviate their looks and cause them not to see things that he put in precise places in the composition. The technique of diversion used by the modern Apelles can be seen at work, for example, in The Mill and the Cross (1564), in Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (around 1560) or in The Triumph of Death (around 1569). In The Mill and the Cross: Peter Bruegel’s Way to Calvary, Michael Gibson11 explained that the observer of the first painting, that contains more than five hundred characters, is inevitably made to look at the white horse with a white rider that stands out against the teeming crowd. Fig. 11-1. The Mill and the Cross (1564) Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum.

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As the character has turned to the right and looks upset, the observers inevitably follow his example and look towards the left part of the painting for the cause of his dismay. Some people are fighting, and a woman – a white apron partly covering her green and red skirt - is bending backward to pull her husband, Simon of Cyrene, away from the brawl. She has dropped her milk jug and he has put down the white lamb he was carrying. A group of passers-by – sixteen people, two children and a cat - have gathered to attend the scene. Michael Gibson demonstrated that the white elements cause our looks to play ducks and drakes at the surface of the picture and to move to the left until it is stopped by the white horse of the last constable. The point was to get the central character - Jesus Christ, collapsing at the very centre of the image under the weight of the cross, just above the character on horseback - to go unnoticed. And the painter was successful since, as Perez Zagorin acknowledges, “we must search to find him.”12 A close scrutiny of the painting also reveals the presence of a diminutive character – the miller standing at the foot of the mill – who’s looking at the scene but cannot be seen. As for the praying woman wearing a white scarf – just above Mary Magdalene’s head in the foreground – she is staring at the absent cross. Faith makes her see invisible things. In Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, a similar process is at work. Fig. 11-2. Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (around 1560). Brussels, David and Alice van Buuren Museum.

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The observers cannot fail to look at the ploughman whose bright red sleeves stand out in the foreground. Inevitably, they catch sight of the horse plodding its way down the slope on the left. Then, looking up, they are attracted to the open space and to the setting sun where the vanishing lines converge. Then the observers turn to the right side of the picture and look at the swollen sail of the ship sailing away. The red cap worn by the angler in the bottom right angle of the composition is sure to attract their attention and, that is the point, to keep the pair of legs jutting out halfway between the boat and the man unnoticed. Like Jesus Christ in the previous image, Icarus appears as a minor character, a mere detail in the whole composition. Daniel Arasse13 asserted that the viewer’s enjoyment of the picture is partly due to this game of hide-and-seek: there is obviously some pleasure at being made to lose one’s way in such a manner. The painter, also known as “Pierre le Droll” that is Peter the farcical, fully deserved his nickname. Though it may not seem particularly humorous at first sight, The Triumph of Death contains funny details and the skeletons themselves prove to be quite impish. The fact that these dead characters are using shields as protections is ludicrous per se. Fig. 11-3. The Triumph of Death (around 1569) Madrid, Prado Museum. © Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado.

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Here again Houdini’s technique is in full swing since it is used several times. The first thing the viewer notices is the black chariot in the middle of the image, at the intersection of the large X pattern. The massive dark vehicle keeps the observer from seeing the reddish horse that half hides its front door and mounted by a skinny reaper. The animal is important since it may be a lexical clue to the whole scene: it is a night/mare. A similar process is at work in the bottom right hand corner of the picture: a white cloth on a table grips our attention and outlines very clearly a terrified gentleman wearing flashy red clothes. One may fail to notice, on either side of the character, a jester in the act of crawling under the white cloth, a skeleton dressed as an antique actor tilting a gold tub, and a couple of musicians trying to sing themselves calm. The people around the courageous fool carry important messages that will be considered later in this study. These three paintings make it clear that the Flemish painter knew how to grip the attention of the observers from the moment they first looked at the paintings. The manipulation of the onlooker was a major requirement for the painter who conceived his work as an irresistible cobweb. As Bassanio says in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice (III, 2, 121-3) “The painter plays the spider, and hath woven / A golden mesh t’entrap the hearts of men / Faster than gnats in cobwebs.” Of course, the “eyes” of men are caught in the web first and their hearts follow naturally. To see or not to see could be the Flemish painter’s motto as a close analysis of some further scenes from his works may suggest. Seeing is at the core of some paintings whose beauty and density have often kept the observers from considering the larger message the image conveys. Children’s Games (1560) demonstrates that the way one looks at a painting determines one’s capacity to see.14

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Fig. 11-4. Children’s Games (1560) Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum.

After having let their eyes roam at the surface of the image shifting from one group of children to the other, the viewers realise that they have to choose whether they look at the right side of the image or at the left side of it: they cannot view the upper part of the picture as a whole and they catch themselves focusing their eyes on the central building that provides some sort of ocular relief. The children are everywhere to be seen, gripping the observers’ attention and taking it away from the full image. The main argument of the picture goes unnoticed: the viewers do not realize immediately that looking at the image does not make it possible to see it. An effort is necessary. Turning away from the deceitful little characters, the attentive viewers look up and notice that the landscape on the left is an open space stretching toward a receding horizon line. A line of three trees partly screens the clear sky in the far distance, doubling the trajectory of the straight street on the other side of the house. On the right hand side of the image, linear perspective indicates that the viewers are probably viewing the scene from a window whose frame may correspond to the edges of the picture. They could find, in the masked character in the left-hand side, a playful alter ego. The geometrical street leading to a bluish church steeple

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is irresistibly attractive. What is fascinating in this painting is the double vanishing line, which runs contrary to what Renaissance paintings conventionally depict. Perspective is indeed conceived on the assumption that the viewer has closed one eye. Brunelleschi’s famous Tavoletta experiment makes that requirement absolutely clear. Children’s Game was conceived, as it were, for viewers equipped with two independent eyes. Brueghel’s Children’s Game cannot be looked at. Trying to apprehend the full picture is a destabilising experiment that is bound to fail unless the observers close one eye then the other. Only then does the image spring to life. It’s a child’s game. The two loops children are trundling in the foreground may be clues: they may stand for a pair of giant spectacles, that is the object necessary to adjust one’s eyes to specific sights. Peter the Droll was having fun.15 What the Flemish painter demonstrates in Hunters in the Snow (1565) is also closely connected with the mechanisms of eyesight. Fig. 11-5. Hunters in the Snow (1565) Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum.

The beautiful wintery landscape is sure to grip the attention of the observers who cast a glance at the hunters on the left before they plunge delightfully - thus following the impulse given by the central line of receding trees and the gliding bird - across the icy space that reaches up to

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the snowy mountains in the background. This movement is irresistible, and as usual with Peter Bruegel, misleading. Caught by the deceitful beauty of the scene, the viewers overlook the moral message of the picture. They focus on the wrong thing, like the three hunters who look down and are about to fall headlong into a precipice with their inattentive dogs. The lesson the image teaches has to do with the fire that an unlikely gust of wind is causing to get out of hand. The tavern on the left will probably soon be burnt to ashes unless the inhabitants grapple with the situation and, like the diminutive characters in the distance – almost vertically from the gliding bird – do what is necessary to extinguish the fire. The unseeing hunters are about to meet a stupid death and the careless peasants on the left are likely to set fire to the inn. Like them, the observers of the picture are deceived in that they fail to look at the things that matter. Sight – what is given to see - and seeing – the attitude of the observer are central matters in Bruegel’s paintings. Some painted characters may even be regarded as representations of this prominent concern. Carnival and Lent (1559) contains a strange couple that stands out, walking away, against a yellowish area, right in the middle of the city square. Fig. 11-6. Carnival and Lent (1559) Boston, Museum of Fine Arts.

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The man on the left is wearing a broad-rimmed hat that covers the nape of his head. As for the woman he seems to be pushing along gently with his right arm, she has surprisingly pulled her hat down over her face. They represent some sort of inversion. The shape of the man’s coat and his two daggers pointing backward seem to suggest that he is walking in the wrong direction. Interestingly, the lady’s lantern is on her back. As for the jester they may be following, he is wearing a strange costume – one side is plain red, the other consists of green and yellow stripes – and is led by what may be interpreted as an Erasmian light of wise folly. Unsurprisingly, this group of characters prevents us from looking at the woman who is watching the reflection of her face in the water she has just pulled up from the nearby well. Like a face and its mirror image, the two antagonistic worlds this picture represents at large are part and parcel of the same world. Focusing their attention on the blind characters was, for the painter, the means to blind the observers. The Triumph of Death is probably the most astounding example of Brueghel’s capacity to manipulate the responses of the observers, since its current interpretation is in total contradiction with what a close scrutiny may indicate. The general situation is quite clear: an army of skeletons is assaulting the living they are herding towards a mysterious corridor to the sound of drums. Charles de Tolnay16 identified the two traditions that combined in this painting: the Northern Danses macabres in the foreground and the Italian apocalyptic vision in the background. After briefly considering the teeming crowd around the chariot and the open trap door, the observers are likely to be attracted to the white tablecloth mentioned earlier and the frenzied gentleman in the bottom right corner. Then the scenes that are taking place horizontally in the foreground can be looked at, probably from right to left. Each character – a jester in motley, a few armed gentlemen, a clergyman and a king - is conventionally flanked by its frightening double.17 It is difficult to determine how exactly the painter wanted this blood-curdling scene to be interpreted but no doubt the overall impression of impending and inevitable death was intended to overcome the viewers’ minds. The strange circle around the warrior standing in the foreground – consisting of the white gown of a scything skeleton, the neck of a brown horse, the body of a man with a white shirt and the long white sheet hanging on either side of the left arm of a skeleton – may reinforce this claustrophobic effect. The observers’ eyes can now move toward the left of the image, across the coffin scene, where two - out of the three - Graces and the paired characters are represented. The terrifying scenes telescope each other, forcing the viewers to shift from one to the other and preventing them from considering the overall

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composition. The colours contribute to increasing the sickening feelings the scenes in the foreground – the skeleton slitting the throat of a dead pilgrim or the skinny dog preying on a baby – have already raised. Now the observers can roam about the distant land and the harrowing scenes it contains. The Triumph of Death is a memento mori, a reminder that death spares no one and that no way out is available: fighting, hiding or running away is pointless. The lesson to be drawn may be found on either side of the table: one may, like the peaceful singer and the lute player, make the most of the last seconds of one’s life. This epicurean choice is echoed by the Greek actor nearby: one of the jugs he is tilting lets out its contents into the golden tub whereas the water pouring out of he other jug is lost for ever. The presence of conventional moral lesson – though cryptic for the modern viewer - is palpable. The huddle of bodies in the centre of the image, the amusing detachment of some skeletons that contrasts with the scurrying people, the monstrous details placed in the foreground, cause the observers to lose their way and to be at a loss to look at the scene in a coherent orderly manner. Yet one detail may strike the attentive onlookers and help them deal with this image. Lying prone on the ground near the coffin is an armoured soldier. His outfit may indicate that he knew the army of death was arriving. His face cannot be seen, but his position is puzzling. He seems to be drawing an invisible bow or rather to be pointing at something. What he is inviting us to look at is close by: a candle burning between the foot of the coffin and a sheaf of hay that was placed under the head of a legless corpse. This strange detail may be a message that only the initiates could see: the coffin, the incomplete body and the hay sheaf represent a huge letter, an H, pulled by two fake monks whose dark gowns represent a huge letter too, an M. The latter is the symbol of male sulphur or the first letter of Mercury. As for the H, the first letter of Hermes, it stands for the alchemic spirit when it carries a circle – the candle - in one of its halves.18 Only those who knew could see the signs. After considering the various details this harrowing sight teems with, the observers may wonder if a more specific message could be made out. Historians tend to be assertive: Peter Thon declares, for example, that it is “Brueghel’s undisguised vision of his land under Spanish tyranny.”19 Accordingly, the skeletons would stand for the Spanish troops attacking the Protestant Netherlands. This statement, that all critics seem to agree on, evinces the critics’ incapacity to see what the image shows. Scholars tend to see what they know, rather than what they actually see. As a matter

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of fact, not only does the invaded territory contain at least fourteen crosses, but also the skeletons are brandishing huge torches to which they bound pious images. Seven out of the nine images – those attached to the shorter staffs - are already on fire. The invaders are obviously iconoclasts: accordingly, they cannot represent the Catholic Spanish army. This important detail has gone unnoticed because the ends of the shorter staffs line up with the edge of a darker area into which the smoke from the burning pictures merges. As for the two longer staffs, they are confused with the vertical poles. Moreover, the second image – farther right – is partly hidden by the beam that helps open the trap door. The Triumph of Death combines secret images (the H and the M) that can be seen only by those who know. Others (the burning icons) are almost hidden by the larger image that reveals their presence and may go unseen by those who know. Observing paintings by Peter Brueghel is definitely an experience. Rather than “political works,” as Baudelaire20 suggested, his paintings may be viewed as passageways that lead to revelations about the power of sight over seeing. If Perez Zagorin21 was right to assert that many of Peter Brueghel’s paintings “seem to be animated by some idea,” the analysis of their compositio tends to demonstrate that these ideas had much to do with the interplay between sight and seeing. The onlookers are not just made to face a scene represented on oak panels: they enter worlds that contribute to shaping their minds. These visits are lessons that sensitise the viewers to the dynamic quality of observation. They are led into the paintings by a series of techniques based on a precise knowledge of the human mind. Peter Brueghel did not draw the line at presenting scenes or visions: he turned his images into crystallisations of the observers’ fears and expectations and managed to combine teaching with delighting. The present study does not pretend to reveal any secret about the works it presents. As Margaret Sullivan remarks, “since the perception of the work of art changes even though the work of art remains a stable entity, a single, universally valid interpretation for a work of art is impossible, and interpretations accepted as ‘proven’ are, in reality, a consensus regarding probabilities.”22 The point is rather to put into relief a series of techniques used by the painter to turn his works into playful enigmas that provide the observers with an opportunity to consider the limits of the human eye. Like anamorphoses,23 Pieter Bruegel’s paintings enabled the viewers to become aware of their own capacity to see. Université d’Aix-Marseille Member of the LERMA (EA. 853)

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Notes  ͳBlaise Pascal, Pensées, Part I, article 31. 2

Multa pinxit, hic Brugelius, quae pingi non possunt. Intellegitur plus semper quam pingitur. 3 Donald B. Burness, « Pieter Bruegel: Painter for Poets » in Art Journal, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Winter, 1972-3), pp. 157-162, p. 157. 4 Erwin Panofsky, La perspective comme forme symbolique, Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1975, p. 159. (my translation) 5 Tzvetan Todorov, Devoirs et délices : une vie de passeur, Paris: Seuil Essais, 2002, p. 270. The critic also developed this point in Éloge de l'individu : essai sur la peinture flamande de la Renaissance, Paris: Société Nouvelle Adam Biro, 2000, p. 221. 6 Alan Sinfield suggests that, in the literary field, Protestantism may be viewed as “an instrument for the creation of self-consciousness, of interiority.” Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading,” Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992, p. 159. See especially chapter 7, Protestantism: Questions of Subjectivity and Control. 7 A Mirror image always inverts right and left. In the play-within-the-play, Hamlet’s part is played by Lucianus, « nephew to the king » instead of « brother to the king. 8 The word historia was used by Alberti in his de pictura to refer to the subject of a picture. 9 E.H. Gombrich, The Image and the Eye: Further studies in the psychology of pictorial representation, London: Phaidon, 1982, p. 100. 10 Compositio as defined by Alberti, that is to say the four levels that give each element its role within the general effect produced by the painting. 11 This text was first published in French under the title Michael Gibson, Portement de croix, Paris: Noêsis, 1996. 12 Perez Zagorin, « Looking For Peter Bruegel » in Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 64. No. 1 (Jan. 2003), pp. 73-96, p. 95. 13 Daniel Arasse, Le détail : pour une histoire rapprochée de la peinture, Paris: Champs Flammarion, 1996. 14 In an article entitled « Pieter Bruegel’s Children’s Games », Sandra Hindman presents a survey of the interpretations of this painting up to the early 1980’s. The Art Bulletin, Vol. 63, No. 3 (Sept. 1981), pp. 447-475, p. 448. 15 The four hats – three black hats for the eyes and the nose and a red one for the mouth - tossed on the grass near the right edge of the image may represent the face of a teddy bear, thus illustrating the painter’s capacity to deceive and entertain the observers. 16 Charles de Tolnay, Pierre Bruegel l’Ancien, Brussels: Nouvelle Société d’Éditions, 1935, p. 31. 17 For a more precise description of these scenes see my analysis that was published by the Interdisciplinarynet. Available from: https://www.interdisciplinarypress.net/online-store-3

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18 Jacques van Lennep, Alchimie : contribution à l'histoire de l'art alchimique, Bruxelles: Diffusion Dervy-Livres, Crédit Communal de Belgique, 1985, p. 294. 19 Peter Thon, “The Triumph of Death Reconsidered”, Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 21, N°3 (Autumn 1968), p. 295. “The active participation of the skeletons in these bloody actions, and their massive attack on the helpless living throughout the picture reveal their true significance: the skeleton armies of death represent the Spanish soldiers and executioners. Their regime in the Netherlands is the Triumph of Death.” 20 Charles Baudelaire’s article « On the Essence of Laughter » was published in Le portefeuille in 1855. 21 Op. cit. p. 73. 22 Margaret Sullivan, « Bruegel’s Proverbs : Art and Audience in the Northern Renaissance » in The Art Bulletin, Vol. 73, No. 3 (Sept. 1991), pp. 413-466, p. 431-2. 23 Yves Peyré, La Voix des mythes dans la tragédie élisabéthaine, Paris: CNRS Editions, 1996, p. 12.

CHAPTER TWELVE SEEING RED: BERGMAN’S CRIES AND WHISPERS BRIGITTE PEUCKER

All of my films can be thought of in black and white, except Cries and Whispers. Ingmar Bergman (Bergman 2011, 90).

This essay examines Cries and Whispers’ intermediality from several perspectives, stressing its painterly qualities against the backdrop of a more obvious theatricality, and noting in passing its evocation of the photograph and the tactile qualities of objects. From a thematic perspective the film emphasizes the inter-subjectivity so often the topic of Bergman’s films, the blurring of boundaries among characters as well as the crossing of gender boundaries stressed by Paul Coates (Coates 2010, 79). Supplementing an interest in the breakdown of distinctions among the film’s personae and the arts that the film cites is its multi-sensory approach, its deliberate appeal to several senses: Agnes savors the fragrance of the white rose she links to her mother, Karin smacks her lips at the taste of her own blood, and a cello playing Bach stands in for a conversation the film mutes. And touch is everywhere privileged in the film: one sister’s painful memory of the mother’s all too infrequent touch (Agnes) serves as a gloss on the condition of the sister who cannot stand to be touched (Karin), and lends the embraces of sisterly reconciliation an intense awkwardness (Karin and Maria). It is touch that supplements looking in the mirror scene between Maria and the doctor, a scene that reinforces the mutual permeability of self and other. In short, there is an acknowledgement that the body is present in the act of seeing, and that vision has a tactile aspect. Oscillating with the film’s inter-subjective gestures and its multi-sensory – even synaesthetic – stance is its intermedial character, the blurring of genres and arts from which Cries and Whispers derives its strength and resonance. In the context of the film’s

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intermediality, this essay takes up the several attitudes towards painting and color that Bergman’s film sets up, referring to the modernist attitude towards color as well as to the gendering that haunts European art theory in debates that pit painting against writing and color against line. These debates are more than a fitting vehicle for the film’s problematic; they are as integral to Bergman’s film as the familial drama and loss of identity played out within its frames.

Modernism, Realism, and Color Bergman’s first film that is fully in color and one of his particular favorites, Cries and Whispers is an experiment with the relation of actor and décor to color, especially in its use of red, moving between strategies such as Hitchcock’s repeated linkage of color, blood, and paint (especially in Marnie, 1964) and Godard’s modernist attitude. In response to critics who condemned Pierrot le Fou (1965) for its bloody violence, Godard notably claimed that his film does not contain blood, not even paint, but only the color “red” (Godard 1972: 217) as is well known, for Gilles Deleuze Godard’s response constitutes the central trope of colorism in film (Deleuze 1986: 118). Like many of Hitchcock’s films, Cries and Whispers (1972) moves between realist and modernist paradigms, promoting and upholding ambiguity concerning the color red as blood, paint, or merely as nonreferential “red:” Bergman’s film participates in modernism’s interest in the non-referential image. Teetering between realism and modernism, for instance, a shot of the pastor speaking over Agnes’s corpse is important in this regard: on the one hand, his head and shoulders stand out in relief against a crimson background the spectator understands to be the room’s wall color. In the absence of architectural and spatial markers in the frame, however, this predominance of red is unsettling – pure color, spatially unanchored, suspending the pastor’s head in a different kind of space. In this scene and others – notably headshots of Karin and Maria – the undifferentiated red backdrop behind such shots promotes the impression of abstraction. A similar moment occurs when the doctor is reading in an armchair, a rectangle of red behind him. And then there are the more obviously modernist moments when the red suffusions or color washes become fully opaque and linger on the screen, covering its surface completely. At such moments color is simply that, functioning, as so often in Hitchcock, to underscore the screen as the material support of the image. Taking a physiological approach to the color red, Bruce Kawin’s reading of the over-determination of red in Bergman’s film anchors it in the real of the body, suggesting that the red we see in the film frame is

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meant to mark these images as retinal images (Kawin 1978, 17).1 Elaborating on Kawin’s interpretation, Coates goes so far as to suggest that Cries and Whispers offers an inversion of Godard’s claim concerning red (Coates 2010, 81). While I have read the crimson suffusions that permeate Jeff’s reverse shots in Rear Window from a similar perspective (Peucker 2007, 96-97), I find no compelling evidence for Kawin’s explanation for the pervasiveness of red in the visual field of Cries and Whispers. Coates understands Kawin’s remark to refer to the brightness that produces the retinal image as that of a summer’s day (relegated to the past by the film’s diegesis), and further reads it as “an internal experience of the female Other as an overpowering light shone in the eyes of an unseen viewer, who thus has to keep them closed (and so open to a dream world) in order not to be blinded” (Coates 2010, 278). Taking up the implications of Kawin’s reading, Coates somewhat surprisingly posits the presence of a spectator who is un-imaged but internal to the film, a suggestion that recalls Richard Wollheim’s readings of un-imaged internal spectators in painting (Wollheim 1987). As for the imaged spectators in Cries and Whispers, unlike those of Marnie or Rear Window, there is nothing to suggest that they see red at all. Nor do the film’s characters usually close their eyes during the red frames of the film, as Coates suggests. Indeed, it is precisely during these passages that they look out of the frame and at the film’s external spectator, suggesting that the film’s “color bleed” signals a melding of two registers and spaces – of the space of the film with the space of its audience, in the manner of Hitchcock – or of Dutch group portraits, to cite only one of many such moments in painting. Indeed, in Cries and Whispers the presence of red is not necessarily connected with the characters at all: that is clear from its first occurrence on the screen, when red gradually begins to cover the screen, then becomes opaque. The resulting red frame separates the last image in the montage of static shots with which the film opens from it second montage, the montage of clocks.

Tactile Images Film is both a temporal and a spatial art, but often it (figuratively) attempts to suppress one dimension in favor of the other. Such is the case at the beginning of Cries and Whispers, where a pronounced withholding of filmic movement emphasizes spatiality. The opening montage has five static shots with the look of photographs; there is no camera movement, and no movement other than the slight blowing of fog through some of the frames. Rays of sunlight penetrate these outdoor scenes of blue and green, while the sounds of

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intermittent chiming and distant birdsong reinforce our awareness that they are filmic. All five views are in medium long shot or long shot, and they constitute deliberately arbitrary views of the house and grounds – they frame objects and organize space in a way that undermines central perspective. Awkwardly framed, these images seem to elude the camera’s control despite their capture in largely static shots, and the abrupt cuts between them point to their separateness. The first shot presents only a partial view of a female statue from behind (one of the Muses, holding a lyre), while in another an off-center tree nearly bisects the frame. The fifth shot combines trees with statuary and a corner of the house: it is the first shot of the film that is gradually covered with red, but the color is not yet opaque and the rough outline of the tree remains visible in the frame. Finally, the screen is filled with opaque red color that – in a modernist gesture – covers it completely. These non-narrative – or barely narrative shots, if we take the wisps of fog and the birdsong into account – announce this film’s relation to static forms of representation – to statuary, to photographs, and – when the screen is fully the support of color – to painting. At this point, pure color signals a transition to another kind of montage entirely, but one equally invested in spatiality: the now markedly moving camera pans up and down and across baroque clocks with heavy ornamentation, shot in extreme close-ups that never reveal the whole of an object. The clocks’ decoration includes sculptural figures, human and angelic and the camera movements that reveal them are very deliberate here. The camera’s marked panning up and down and across the sculptural surfaces of the clock’s gilded ornamentation suggests a touch, a caress. In this montage there are no abrupt cuts, as in the landscape shots: rather, one shot is superimposed upon another, creating a layering effect. The layering of images by superimposition signals the film’s struggle against narrative time, and it could be argued that the intimated palimpsest of images gestures towards what we will call an image object. Time is suppressed, rather remarkably and paradoxically, by a series of extreme close-ups of clocks, then, those objects that on the surface most obviously signify temporality. The use of superimposition as a formal technique has repeatedly been linked to fascist cinema, where the suppression of time is also the suppression of history, but that is not what is at play here. A more likely explanation is that the film’s strategy of spatialization is yet another modernist gesture, emphasizing its link to the interest in spatial form that informs the modernist novel. Since the ticking sound of each clock (a sound ubiquitous in Bergman films) is unique, the aural dimension of this montage takes on a musical quality that diverts attention from the significance of the ticking as marker of the passage of time. From this point of view, both visual and aural strategies – the layering of images and

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the musicality of the sounds – signal a struggle against time that is narratively motivated by the film’s focus on the painful death of its central character, as if attempting to delay her end and halt the film’s narrative devolution at one and the same time. By way of its two opening montages, then, Cries and Whispers stages a formal battle with temporality, and, more fundamentally, against the narrative flow of film itself by using formal devices that also link it to the spatial, static visual arts – to photography, sculpture and, finally, painting. As is well known, the battle of images with stories, of space against time, was theorized by G.E. Lessing in his Laocoon: An Essay upon the Limits of Poetry and Painting (1766), although Lessing was not the first to make these connections. In Lessing’s essay, poetry (writing, narrative) – the forward-moving, temporal art he connects with cerebration and the masculine principle – is pitted against painting, the spatial art tied to bodies and coded as female: as W.J.T. Mitchell has pointed out, “the most fundamental ideological basis for Lessing’s laws of genre [are] the laws of gender” (Mitchell 1986, 109). Importantly for Bergman’s film – whose generic hybridity argues against this dictum – Lessing believes that the arts should be kept distinctly separate, that there should be no illicit boundary crossings from one genre into another. He would have been very much put out by Bergman’s intermingling of arts and genres and its implications. As Dusan Makavejev provocatively suggests, “Ingmar Bergman is the first major contemporary filmmaker who publicly raised the essential question: ‘Am I, perhaps, a woman?’” (Makavejev & Duda 1981, 192). Could it be that this purported identification with the female as well as Bergman’s interest in gender crossing as read by Coates underpins Bergman’s formal and imagistic emphasis on the spatial arts in Cries and Whispers? The crossing of gender boundaries finds its generic counterpart and formal principle in the opening montages of Cries and Whispers: from its beginning, the film experiments with arresting the image through the discontinuous series of nearly static shots in the first montage and suggests its (female) objecthood as photograph and as image object through the accumulation and overlapping of images effected by superimposition. When, as a mode of transition between these two forms of spatialization, red color operates both to separate and to bind these montages into a film body, painting – the female art – enters the mix. We have said that human touch is central to the narrative of Cries and Whispers and that the film camera participates in this touching. Clock faces, baroque ornamentation, gilded figures: the film camera glides over these textured surfaces and our eyes follow its motion, caressing these

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surfaces with our look. Although The Movement-Image makes only a passing reference to this particular Bergman film (Deleuze 1986, 105), Deleuze’s insight concerning the faciality of objects, especially clock faces (but actually all objects shot in close-up, an insight borrowed from Béla Balàzs) could have had its source in Cries and Whispers. After the camera passes over the last of the clock faces and the sequence is punctuated by the red frame, it moves directly to the face of a woman, also in close-up, cementing the connection of cinema, face, and close-up that Deleuze sees as fundamental to Bergman’s work. Importantly, too, the cut from clock to face connects the tactility implied by the textured images of the clock to the flesh of the face. Not only does the camera’s tactile looking carry over to the rest of the film, but it is underscored by the repeated caress of the face, a signature gesture for Cries and Whispers, practiced by nearly all of the film’s characters. One scene of looking in particular brings this concern to our view: in a sequence that calls to mind Lacan’s mirror stage, the doctor reads Maria’s face – displayed to the spectator in a frontal shot – claiming to find indifference, indolence, impatience, and ennui in its wrinkles and contours. When questioned about his physiognomic character reading, the doctor confesses that he does not see these emotions in Maria’s face, but rather feels them when she kisses him. With this recourse to touch, Bergman undermines both the classical scene of looking (the mirror stage that confers identity does not do so here)2 – and the physiognomic tradition of reading the face. If Deleuze’s disquisition on reading the face and its passions has its origins in Descartes and Le Brun, in “the great conceptions of the passions which run through both philosophy and painting” (Deleuze 1986, 88), with respect to the cinema he concurs with other film theorists that the close-up is central to the intensification of affect. Face and close-up are reducible to one another, referent and technique are equivalents, claims Deleuze: “the affection-image is the close-up, and the close-up is the face” (Deleuze 1986, 87). And since the close-up tends to de-spatialize and to “suspend individuation” (Deleuze 1986, 87) by blurring the coordinates of the image, it is a technique that promotes tactile space.3 Of course touching the image is central to Persona (1966): when in this earlier film a boy places his hand upon the famous composite image of two female faces, an image he takes to be the face of his mother. His gesture is rendered hopelessly remote by virtue of the photograph’s nature as an image projected on a screen, but, poignant and distanced as touch is here, the sequence establishes the paradigm of tactile looking. As Linda Rugg has noted, at one point the boy reaches out towards the spectator, touching the

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screen as though to touch us (Rugg 2008, 111). No doubt this modernist gesture disconcerted contemporary audiences.

Décor: Blood and Paint The saturated red that permeates the décor of the country house where the sisters spent their childhood and the film’s action takes place is clearly connected with female blood: in some sense the mother’s house is always the body of the mother. (We recall Bergman’s oft-quoted claim that “ever since my childhood I have pictured the inside of the soul as a moist membrane in shades of red” (Coates 2008, 14). In Bergman’s materialist reading the soul resembles a mouth or a vagina. The color red is linked to the blood of wounds as well as to the suffusion of flesh by blood, as in blushing. The blood of would-be suicide Joakim is spilled, too, of course, but more telling is the self-inflicted vaginal wound by which Karin tortures herself and her husband. (In contrast, we never see the blood of the dying and dead Agnes, who grows increasingly pale, drained of blood, one explanation for the episode in Anna’s dream sequence in which she vampiristically attaches herself to Maria’s throat).4 Dipping her hand in her bleeding vagina, Karin smears blood on her face as though it were rouge – or war paint: by way of this stunning gesture, the film establishes an analogy between blood and paint. Red sofas, red wallpaper, red rugs, red curtains and, for Maria, red clothing: the over-whelming presence of red in the décor of the film contributes to its intense affect for the spectator.5 The film’s palette includes black and white as well, and Pauline Kael has suggested that the colors connected with the three sisters – red, black and white – may have their origin in Edvard Munch’s Dance of Life (Kael 1976, 91), but another painterly reference may be closer to hand: according to Erwin Panofsky, Titian maintained that a good painter requires only three colors: white, black, and red (Panofsky 1969, 17). Titian was notoriously thought to have a “bloody” palette. Performances in the film are subdued, often simply played out across the face, but the film’s overwhelming redness suggests that the actors’ bodies cannot contain the affect they feel, an affect that spills out across the mise-en-scène in the manner of melodrama– to the effect that “in theater the drama proceeds from the actor, but in the cinema it goes from the décor to the man” (Bazin 1967, 102) – which is problematized in Cries and Whispers by virtue of the film’s hybrid generic identity. It is a chamber film, a film with a theatrical mise-en-scène, but it has a painterly disposition. In Cries and Whispers, the lines of force connecting actor and decor run in both directions.

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In this regard one sequence in particular stands out: when Karin and Maria face one another over the vast expanse of a dining table, the editing adheres to the classical shot reverse-shot paradigm, but here the strictness of their alternation suggests an either/or – two alternatives. In another key, this sequence repeats the two contra-narrative techniques set up by the film’s opening montages: Karin is seated before an intricately carved, black wooden cupboard that frames her erect body while, across the table, Maria positioned in front of a painted screen. If the marked relief of the cupboard’s carved surface speaks to the tactile viewing elicited by Bergman’s film, the straight-on, frontal shots of Maria render her red hair part of the screen’s pictorial surface and suggest once more the film’s connection to painting. A second ambiguity structures the shots of Maria, making the convergence of pictorial design and body difficult to read: on the one hand, the presence of the screen behind her flattens Maria’s image by subsuming her body within its two-dimensional, pictorial space; on the other hand, her contoured human face lends the screen’s floral design an impression of three-dimensionality. Is it Maria’s wisps of red hair that render her appearance diabolical, or the screen’s wispy, flame or tonguelike florals? In this sequence the color red creates a perceptual hesitation between figure and ground. With its several velleities, red is decidedly unstable in Bergman’s film. Stressing the film’s link with painting in the context of its representational strategies, the repeated red coloration of the frame does not simply suggest red’s corporeal origin, its link to blood. In the context of visual arts practices, it suggests a color wash – a filmic equivalent of painting,6 a layering of color over the filmic image. If the color wash most often takes place during close-ups of the female face, this connection of the female face and color is in keeping with an earlier moment in art theory. The link of the feminine, color, and affect in Bergman’s film takes up a central debate dating back to Roger de Piles’s Dialogue sur le coloris (1673). As Jacqueline Lichtenstein reminds us, in Dialogue sur le coloris, Roger de Piles defended colorist painters such as Rubens and Titian by asserting the importance of color over line – in a direct contradiction of traditional art theory for which line and design implicitly took precedence because they were considered susceptible to analysis (Lichtenstein 1993). Writings on the topic of color traditionally relegated it to the domain of affects and emotions: considered the “feminine” aspect of painting, it was linked to artifice, deception – and makeup, an idea that Baudelaire would take up in The Painter of Modern Life (1864). Only color allows the painter to render human flesh. In the debate on color, Poussin – who

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intended his painting to be read and who based his human figures on classical statuary – is pitted against Rubens, famous for the sensuousness of his flesh tones, and Titian, artist of the “bloody palette.” In his defense of the centrality of the senses – the passions, the affects – in the making and beholding of painting, de Piles’s project is an undermining of Platonic distinctions: he rejects images that “paint in stone” as paintings that wish to satisfy our intellect rather than please our eyes. Through a series of complex maneuvers, de Piles allies line and drawing to sculpture by virtue of what he terms their tactility, thus disrupting their connection to vision, a move that allows de Piles to read color as the specifically visual aspect of painting. It is because it evokes affect, de Piles suggests, that color – not line – is the aspect of painting that is truly “eloquent.” It speaks to us by moving us (Lichtenstein 1993, 161). The mode of painting de Piles supports is colorist painting that solicits a manner of looking described by Lichtenstein as “a caressing way of touching the object without touching it, an analogical touch without contact, requiring great delicacy, infinite tact, and finesse – a non-tactile perception possible only when the gaze is really affected by what it sees” (Lichtenstein 1993, 165). It is this kind of tactile viewing that Cries and Whispers promotes. And there is yet another aspect of the debate concerning color that is pertinent to our reading of Bergman’s film. If the defenders of line and design – of drawing and perspective – fear the effects of colorist paintings, this is because they feel that such paintings, as Lichtenstein puts it, “block the possible synthesis of representations in which the subject is finally able to comprehend and recognize himself” since “in the sensuous pleasures of color, line, design, and identities are blurred” (Lichtenstein 1993, 191; 165). As critics have repeatedly pointed out, fluid identities and a pronounced intersubjectivity are central to Cries and Whispers. In this film with its modernist breaking of the fourth wall, character look extends to embrace the film’s spectator as well, drawing us into its affective bath. It should be noted that intersubjectivity is not primarily promoted by the film’s narrative – which stresses the disjunctive identities of the sisters, but – rather interestingly – by its formal procedures. The female face, the close-up, the look out of the frame, and color: their conjunction in Cries and Whispers is over-determined.

Intermedia, Intersubjectivity Clearly Deleuze’s suggestion that Beckett’s minimal modernism is reflected in Bergman’s work does not hold for Cries and Whispers.

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Perhaps that is because the film alludes so strongly to an earlier phase of modernism in the theater, to Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879), more especially to Strindberg’s A Dream Play (1901) and The Ghost Sonata (1907; staged four times by Bergman), and even to Chekov’s The Three Sisters (1900). Cries and Whispers’ engagement of writing (an additional key to the presence of black and white in the film’s color scheme) along with painting is marked at the narrative level by Agnes, a maker of images and texts and a stand-in for Bergman. The watercolor of white roses she executes has a telling genealogy in the senses in keeping with the aesthetics that govern the film: the white roses she smells and touches evoke a memory of the mother, which in turn precipitates her water color. As someone who keeps a diary, Agnes practices the autobiographical writing characteristic of this director; tellingly, Agnes’s diary is bound in red leather, while Bergman’s white bookend credits devolve against a red background. In the film’s credit sequences, writing is white, evoking the monstrous, cruel white familiar from more recent black and white films: Fassbinder’s Veronika Voss (1982) springs to mind and, more recently, Haneke’s The White Ribbon (2009). Writing in the credits is not written in the black ink of Agnes’ diary. Nor are the credits red, written in blood, as occurs so often in Haneke. The credits suggest that affect is finally decorporealized, if not cleansed, by its transposition into the written or filmic text. Perhaps it is merely frozen. The central confirmation of the film’s intermedial disposition lies in the tableau vivant embodiment of the pietà enacted by Agnes and Anna.7 While it plays out the Christian narrative of sacrifice that surrounds Agnes (agnus dei, the lamb of God, petitioned to intercede with God on behalf of the living, hence the artist as martyr figure), it also underlines the tableaulike composition and stasis of other moments in the film, particularly those that take place in the drawing room. As I have written elsewhere, as nodal points that focus painting, theater, and sculpture, tableau vivant moments in film are telling indicators of a film’s inter-arts ambitions. In such compositions, theatrical scenes – narratives – tend towards stasis and are briefly arrested. From a formal perspective, such moments are posited on the simultaneous presence of several arts in the image; at such moments their distinctions break down to create what Lessing would surely have called a monstrous conjunction. Tableau moments meld the arts, reinforcing from a formal perspective the melding of subjectivities that is at the thematic crux of Bergman’s film. The blurring of subjectivities takes several forms, including that of substitution. The most obvious example of this strategy occurs in the use of the same actor for different roles: Liv Ullman plays both Maria and her

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mother, and the mother’s portrait on Maria’s bedroom wall has Ullman’s features. Editing procedures have a role to play as well: when towards the end of the film Karin asks to be forgiven, Anna begins to approach her, but a cut reveals that Karin is actually addressing Maria. Dream sequences are another area in which identity confusion can reign: at the beginning of a dream that starts as Anna’s, both Maria and Karin are portrayed as catatonic figures. During its course, Anna twice disappears from view and on these occasions Karin and Maria in turn are figured as actor and dreamer. Sound is similarly used: at the end of the film Anna begins to read from Agnes’ diary, but soon the dead woman’s voice takes over. Close-ups also function in this manner: often half obscured by shadow, the female faces in close-up seem to complement or even to complete one another. But it is the red color of these portrait shots that reinforces the fluidity of female identities most centrally, regardless of whether paint, blood, or color is at issue. As Brian Price points out concerning color’s deterritorializing effects, the blurring of contours promoted by color is one of its greatest threats (Price 2006, 79). Given the Cries and Whispers’ subject matter, for this film the de-territorializing effect of color may be one of its greatest assets. Again Deleuze springs to mind, namely by way of his claim that the true color image can constitute a mode of “any-space-whatever,” a “space of virtual conjunction, grasped as pure locus of the possible” (Deleuze 1986, 109). Like the effect promoted by the face in close-up, color promotes a space no longer contained within boundaries, a disconnected, emptied, or abstract space. The correspondence between color and affect – red and anger, for example – is not at issue for Deleuze. Rather, color is the affect itself, “the virtual conjunction of all the objects it picks up” and the point of it is the absorption of all characters into the “mysterious” space that corresponds to colors, which have an “almost carnivorous, devouring, destructive, absorbent function” (Deleuze 1986, 118; 119). Is there a suggestion of a utopian space here or is Deleuze’s formulation simply a contemporary form of the color phobia of those 17th century art theorists who preferred the line? In Deleuze’s reading of Antonioni, the connection between abstraction and color is clear, but it is lingering here already in his disquisition on color’s absorbent function. At this point it may be useful to describe the mediatic trope defined by William Egginton as “bleeding.” For Egginton this term describes an “obsessive concern” of spectacle from the time that it was “organized in such a way as to presuppose an ontological distinction between the space of the viewer and the space of the character” (Egginton 2001, 208). The collapse of spectator space and diegetic space, as in the breaking of the

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fourth wall, results in what he calls a “reality bleed,” a term Egginton takes from Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999), where it refers to the phenomenon in virtual reality games wherein the “real world” enters the world of the game. Egginton describes “bleeding” as a collapse of the distinctions between two levels of reality, usually a sudden collapse that catches the spectator off guard. As his example, Egginton mentions Pleasantville (1998), where the bleeding of one fictional world into another is produced “quite literally as a color bleed” (Egginton 2001, 215). Images in Cries and Whispers invade spectatorial space in the modernist moments of the direct look out, as well as by way of the “color bleed” (an especially fitting term given its links both to corporeality and to colored inks in the printing process), moments when the affect suggested by the color red infiltrates our space. But spectators are brought up short at moments when color promotes the abstraction of the image and reinforces the flatness of the screen. This is what happens in shots where heads appear as cutouts against a surface of pure color – the above-mentioned shots of the pastor and, more than once, of Karin and Maria against a red surface without architectural markers. Shots such as these create a space without boundaries, an “any-space-whatever.” But the color wash of red over close-ups of female faces also promotes abstraction: while it begins as an application of color that is nearly translucent, more and more color is applied until the red is finally opaque. The figured three dimensionality of the body – the face that looks out of the screen – is covered over in red. There are no contours at all; all movement disappears. Only red remains: the power of pure color. The film frame is the screen, the screen a canvas. At such moments “any-space-whatever” is not a space of “pure conjunction” –it is no space at all.

Notes 1

Peter Cowie has also written that, “red lingers on the retina like an after-image” (Cowie 1982, 280). 2 One point of this sequence is to suggest that the doctor and Maria, whose images co-exist in the mirror, share the same subjectivity. 3 Ibid., 109. 4 The artist as vampire is a motif Bergman found in Strindberg. 5 It also brings to mind The Red Room (1879), title of the novel that first established Strindberg’s international reputation. 6 There is never an actual brushstroke shot in the film, it should be noted. 7 Marilyn Blackwell has pointed out the use of beds as stages in Bergman, making this composition double connected to painting and theater (Blackwell 2008, 65).

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Bibliography Bazin, André. 1967. “Theater and Cinema.” What is Cinema? Volume 1. ed. & trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press. 76124. Bergman, Ingmar. 2011. Images: My Life in Film. trans. Marianne Ruuth. New York: Arcade Publishing. Blackwell, Marilyn Johns. 2008. “Platforms and Beds: The Sexualisation of Space in Ingmar Bergman’s Theatre and Film.” In Ingmar Bergman Revisited: Performance, Cinema, and the Arts. Ed. Maaret Koskinen. London: Wallflower Press, 64-85. Coates, Paul. 2010. Cinema and Colour: The Saturated Image. London: Palgrave MacMillan. —. “On the Dialectics of Filmic Colors (in general) and Red (in particular): Three Colors: Red, Red Desert, Cries and Whispers, and The Double Life of Véronique.” Film Criticism (Spring 2008): 2-23. Cowie, Peter. 1982. Ingmar Bergman: A Critical Biography. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Deleuze, Gilles. 1986. Cinema I: The Movement-Image. trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Egginton, William. 2001. “Reality is Bleeding: A Brief History of Film from the Sixteenth Century.” Configurations 9. 2: 207-229. Godard, Jean-Luc. 1972. “Let’s talk about Pierrot.” In Godard on Godard. ed. & trans. Tom Milne. New York: Da Capo Press, 215-234. Kael, Pauline. 1976. “Flesh.” In Reeling. Boston: Little, Brown, and Co. Kawin, Bruce. 1978. Mindscreen: Bergman, Godard, and First-Person Film. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. 1969. Laocoon: An Essay upon the Limits of Poetry and Painting [1766]. trans. Ellen Frothingham. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Lichtenstein, Jacqueline. 1993. The Eloquence of Color: Rhetoric and Painting in the French Classical Age. trans. Emily MacVarish. Berkeley: University of California Press. Makavejev, Dusan and M. Duda. 1981. “Bergman’s Non-Verbal Sequences: Source of a Dream Film Experiment.” In Film and Dreams: An Approach to Bergman. ed. Vlada Petric. South Salem, NY: Redgrave Publishing Co., 187-195. Mitchell, W.J.T. 1986. “Space and Time: Lessing’s Laocoon and the Politics of Genre.” In Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 95-115.

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Panofsky, Erwin. 1969. Problems in Titian: Mostly Iconographic. New York: New York University Press. Peucker, Brigitte. 2007. The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Price, Brian. 2006. “Color, the Formless and Cinematic Eros.” In Color: The Film Reader. ed. Angela Dalle Vacche and Brian Price. New York: Routledge, 76-87. Rugg, Linda Haverty. 2008. “Self-Projection and Still Photography in the Work of Ingmar Bergman.” In Ingmar Bergman Revisited: Performance, Cinema, and the Arts. ed. Maaret Koskinen. London: Wallflower Press, 107-119. Wollheim, Richard. 1987. Painting as an Art. London: Thames and Hudson.

CONTRIBUTORS

JEAN AMATO received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Oregon. Jean has also studied and conducted graduate research in Mainland China and Taiwan for over six years. Working in Chinese and English, her research centers on theories of nationalism, gender and the ancestral home and homeland in Twentieth Century Chinese, Diasporic and Chinese American Literature and Film. Jean is an Associate Professor in the English and Communications Department and coordinator of the Asian Minor at the Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York (SUNY) in New York City. LUCY BOWDITCH is a Professor of Art History at the College of Saint Rose where she has taught since 1995. She focuses on the history of photography, modern, and contemporary art. Her articles have appeared in numerous publications including Afterimage, Exposure, Art Express, and Notes in Art History. Her most recent project addresses Symbolist American Photography. JEAN-LOUIS CLARET is a senior lecturer at the University of Aix-Marseille, France, and a member of the LERMA (Laboratoire d'Études et de Recherches sur le Monde Anglophone). His main areas of research are Shakespearean studies and Renaissance painting. He is particularly interested in the visual and its modalities. SUSAN G. CUMINGS teaches Writing and Critical Inquiry at the University at Albany, State University of New York. She earned her Ph.D. in Women’s Gender & Sexuality Studies from Emory University, and her primary areas of research include representations of the hybrid body in transgender autobiographies; dis/ability theory and visual aesthetics; and creative non-fiction as a medium for critical theory and discursive activism. Other recent publications include “Homing” (Dos Passos Review), and “On Writing in a Collaborative Spirit: Nancy Mairs’s Ethic of Community” (Mintz & Johnson, Eds., On the Literary Nonfiction of Nancy Mairs: A Critical Anthology, Palgrave 2011). She lives with her family in Delmar, NY.

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THERESA FLANIGAN is Associate Professor of Art History at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York and a specialist in Italian late Medieval and Renaissance art, architecture, and urban history. Dr. Flanigan received her Ph.D. and M.A. in Art History from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, a M.A. in Renaissance Art History from Syracuse University’s Florence Program, and a B. Arch. in architectural design from Syracuse University. She also spent a year as a foreign fellow at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa and has taught extensively in Italy. Dr. Flanigan’s current research explores the scientific and moral interpretations of the senses, intellect, and emotions (or passions) in the early Renaissance and their impact the design, reception, and interpretation of late Medieval and Renaissance art and architecture. ASBJØRN GRØNSTAD is professor of visual culture in the Department of information science and media studies, University of Bergen, where he is also founding director of Nomadikon: The Bergen Center for Visual Culture. He is also a founding editor of the peer-reviewed journal Ekphrasis: Nordic Journal of Visual Culture and the author and editor of numerous articles and books in film and visual culture studies. His latest book is Cinema and Agamben: Ethics, Biopolitics and the Moving Image (ed. with Henrik Gustafsson, Bloomsbury, 2014). MARK LEDBETTER is Associate Professor of Religion and Ethics at the College of Saint Rose, Executive Director of the Southern Humanities Council, and Co-director of the Center for the Ethics of Seeing. Mark has a Ph.D. from Emory University. He has published extensively in the areas of art, literature, and the aesthetic of meaning making; his most recent book is Doing Violence to the Body: An Ethic of Reading and Writing (Macmillan/Palgrave). He is currently working on a book titled, Embodied Seeing, and has recently completed a memoir titled, Ledbetter’s Quarters. BRIGITTE PEUCKER is the Elias Leavenworth Professor of German and a Professor of Film and Media Studies at Yale University. She works on problems of intermediality in film, with a focus on film’s relation to painting and theatricality. Recent books include The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film and Blackwell’s Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder, which she edited. Her current book project is Aesthetic Spaces: The Place of Art in Film. NATALIA SAMUTINA is the Head of the Research Centre for Contemporary Culture at the National Research University Higher School of Economics,

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Contributors

Moscow. During the last few years her research interests have been concentrated on urban popular culture and new media: on fan fiction and online communities, graffiti and street art, popular music, etc.; as well as on the cultural transformations of Post-Soviet city spaces. She is the author of numerous articles and the editor of two books in Russian: Sciencefiction Cinema. Episode One. M.: New Literary Observer, 2006; Tsaritsyno: Attractions with History. M.: New Literary Observer, 2014 (with Boris Stepanov). ROBERT R. SHANE received his Ph.D. in Art History and Criticism from Stony Brook University. He is Assistant Professor of Art History at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY and the former Managing Editor of the journal Art Criticism. He has authored several articles and essays on contemporary art and theory and regularly contributes texts on contemporary art and dance for books published by Phaidon Press, London. Dr. Shane's current book project, When Is Art?: Time and Body in Aesthetic Experience, is an interdisciplinary study of contemporary art, dance, and philosophy of time. JILLIAN SANDELL is Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies at San Francisco University, where she teaches classes on feminist media and cultural studies, and on feminist theories and methods in a transnational frame. SYNNØVE MARIE VIK is currently completing a PhD thesis at Nomadikon: The Bergen Center of Visual Culture, the Department of Information Science and Media Studies, the University of Bergen. The thesis explores the relationship between nature and technology in contemporary visual culture and its media ecologies, with case studies ranging from the work of artists Gustav Metzger and Olafur Eliasson to TV-series Treme and PR photography from the oil company Statoil. She is a curator and critic, and a former Fulbright scholar at the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University (2012/13). DARBY WALTERS is a doctoral student in English Literature at University of Southern California. She specializes in the Victorian novel and is particularly interested in the intersection of gender and disability in nineteenth-century narratives. Previously, she has received a bachelor's degree in English and Molecular Biology at Pomona College and a master's degree in English Literature at University of Virginia.