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Spring 2016 Vol. 2
Pratt Journal of Art and Design History
Editors Catarina Flaksman Sarah Hamerman John B. Henry Adam Monohon Start-up Advisement Dorothea Dietrich Gayle Rodda Kurtz Jill Song Faculty Advisement Eva DĂaz Dorothea Dietrich Dorothy Shepard Faculty Editors Dorothea Dietrich Dorothy Shepard Published with the help of Pratt Institute Creative Services Pratt History of Art and Design Student Association Pratt Institute Student Government Association Alex Ullman, Assistant Director of Student Involvement Special thanks to Department of History of Art and Design Pratt Institute School of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Italian. Literally, “beautiful view�; first known use: 1593. Merriam-Webster, 2014.
Contents
5 FOREWORD 7
LETTER FROM THE EDITORS
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GUSTAVE CAILLEBOTTE'S PARIS: A CRITIQUE OF WALKING AS SYMBOLIC, POLITICAL, AND AESTHETIC PRACTICE Chantal Lee
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THE BOURN-VITA SLEEPING BEAKER: VERNACULAR DESIGN IN THE POSTWAR UNITED KINGDOM Vitoria Hadba
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THE KOONSIAN CONTRADICTION Nicola Householder
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THE RISE OF COMMERCE AND NEW YORK CITY’S EARLY SKYSCRAPERS: THE FLATIRON BUILDING BETWEEN TRADITION AND MODERNITY Catarina Flaksman
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SCIVIAS: A DOCTRINE OF FEMALE EMPOWERMENT Emma Kaye TRADITION AND ADAPTATION: USE OF CALLIGRAPHY AND SCRIPT IN CONTEMPORARY MIDDLE EASTERN GRAPHIC DESIGN Teresa Lundgren
ADIEU AU DADA: JEAN-LUC GODARD’S GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE, A DADAIST READING Sophie Bloomfield
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LIST OF FIGURES
60 BIBLIOGRAPHIES 65
EDITORS' BIOGRAPHIES
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Foreword
This issue of belvedere marks a step forward for Pratt’s History of Art and Design Student Association (HADSA). I commend them for their persistence in seeking out excellent papers to include and for their careful editing of each. Their collaboration with Pratt’s information technology and publications offices has made this issue an exemplary one. This volume covers an impressive variety of the topics and areas that are explored in the History of Art and Design program. These extend from a medieval manuscript to a 3-D film and from modern architecture to industrial design. Seeing how our students have been able to combine their own experience and intuition with high-quality research to produce both interesting and excellent articles makes me very proud. The student editors who supervised the complete process of producing this edition of belvedere have many qualities that contributed to its successful conclusion. They were confident, competent, and dedicated. This process has taught our Pratt students many different things and has given them valuable professional experience. Each author chose his or her best paper and polished it wherever necessary. Then each had to go through the submission and acceptance process. The selected authors worked closely with the editors to revise and proofread their papers. Then the editors arranged the articles logically and worked on the graphic design concept with Creative Services. Doing all this and keeping up with their current classes required a level of personal organization that will stand them in good stead throughout their careers. Congratulations are in order for these authors and for the editors of belvedere! Dorothy Shepard Adjunct professor, History of Art and Design
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Letter from the Editors
Dear Readers, During our first days as History of Art and Design students at Pratt, we were excited to learn that the previous class of students had founded belvedere, a much-needed platform for showcasing the work of Pratt History of Art and Design students. As we got involved with the publication, it was still in its very early stages. We experienced all the advantages and disadvantages of taking part in the decision-making process regarding a project that was so malleable and open to change, yet consequently needing definition. While it has been exciting to define the vision of a new publication, doing so has not been without its challenges. Over the past year, we learned the intricacies not only of selecting and editing pieces for publication, but also of working collaboratively with our peers, our department, and the Pratt administration at large. We discovered, too, that there is much more to producing a publication than merely putting words on a page: we worked to secure funding, create an appealing layout with designers, secure rights for images, and coordinate printing and distribution within the Pratt community and beyond. Throughout the editing process, we envisioned the journal itself as a space for dialogue, one where diverse approaches to art history could be expressed side by side. The essays published in this volume reflect the broad and varied interests of Pratt students, as well as their ability to research topics across different time periods, cultures, and media. While we are thrilled to get the second volume of belvedere into your hands, our ultimate goal expands beyond any individual volume. We hope to transform a fledgling project into a sustainable annual publication that will continue to offer Pratt students real-world writing and editing experiences as well as provide a space for them to exchange ideas and connect with their peers—within the department and beyond. With sincere thanks, Catarina Flaksman, Sarah Hamerman, John B. Henry, and Adam Monohon
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Gustave Caillebotte’s Paris: A Critique of Walking as Symbolic, Political, and Aesthetic Practice
CHANTAL LEE
This paper focuses on Gustave Caillebotte’s depiction of the pedestrian body and its dynamic relation to other walkers in the street. His paintings Le Pont de l’Europe (1876) and Paris Street; Rainy Day (1877) demonstrate the reorientation of bodily and psychological experience in a post-Haussmann Parisian environment. Caillebotte’s vision of the pedestrian imbues the performance and spectacle of walking with symbolic and political meanings that reinforce Impressionist motifs of the time.
This paper was written for Impressionism/PostImpressionism (HA509), taught by Marsha Morton in fall 2014.
Though Gustave Caillebotte was admired in his lifetime, his posthumous stature as an Impressionist painter has waned in the century following his death. Michael Fried attributes this diminished interest in Caillebotte to the painter himself, suggesting that Caillebotte shifted his attention from painting towards art collecting, gardening, sailboat racing, boat design, and acting as a patron to the arts. Consequently, Caillebotte’s fall into relative obscurity had taken place by the end of his own lifetime, continuing into the present day.1
1 Michael Fried, “Caillebotte’s Impressionism,” Representations, no. 66 (1999): 2.
Although contemporary audiences are more likely to recall the works of his peers when thinking about the Impressionist movement, Caillebotte’s oeuvre proves to be an important interpretative resource—relaying the reorientation of bodily and psychological self that occurred in Paris soon after the renovation of the city by Georges-Eugène Haussmann from the mid- to late nineteenth century. Indeed, the Impressionist themes of city streets and the components of ordinary life are strategically explored by Caillebotte through the varied pedestrians and anatomized walking
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2 Nancy Forgione, “Everyday Life in Motion: The Art of Walking in Late-NineteenthCentury Paris,” The Art Bulletin, 2005, 664. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., 672. 6 Rosanne H. Lightstone, “Gustave Caillebotte’s Oblique Perspective: A New Source for ‘Le Pont de l’Europe,’ ” The Burlington Magazine 136, no. 1100 (1994): 762. 7 Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (New York: Penguin Books, 2001), 205.
experiences depicted in his paintings. Like his brief career, however, walking and the nuanced way it suggests meaning can be easily overlooked by viewers in the present day.2 But Caillebotte’s remarkable focus on the pedestrian body in the street—its dynamic relation to other pedestrian bodies and architectural space—illustrates the dialogue that Parisians had with their new urban environment in the nineteenth century. Not only that, but Caillebotte’s vision of the pedestrian imbues the performance and spectacle of walking with symbolic and political meanings that reinforce Impressionist motifs of the time. Nancy Forgione, a historian of art and walking, states in her essay “Everyday Life in Motion: The Art of Walking in Late-Nineteenth-Century Paris” that though pedestrians and street scenes were common in Parisian visual culture by the end of the renovation period in the late nineteenth century (they were included in avant-garde and academic art, in illust ration, and in photography), “few of these images […] truly thematize walking—that is, attempt to incorporate the lived experience of walking into the pictorial structure.”3 She adds that the frequency with which walking appears in Parisian visual culture between the 1860s and 1870s communicates the impact of the city’s reinvention upon its citizens— prompting a response that fueled the Impressionist motivation to depict everyday life.4 She declares Caillebotte a rare example of someone who used walking to suggest both the interior life of the walker and his or her place in the much larger social fabric.5 Ultimately, it may have been Caillebotte’s unique position as the youngest among the core Impressionist group that distinguishes his approach to the pedestrian from that of the other painters—painters who, Forgione suggests, do not thematize walking. Having been born in 1848, Caillebotte grew up in the midst of Haussmann’s renovations of Paris and so would have shared little of the nostalgia or sense of upheaval that haunted the artists just one generation prior to him: “Caillebotte may have brought a more matter-of-fact approach to his view of [Paris’s] streets, or even an interest in the psychology of its spaces that the older artists experienced as foreign.”6 This uninvited foreignness encountered by the older painters can be found in Baudelaire’s poem “The Swan,” in which the poet explores one of Haussmann’s construction sites near the Louvre: Paris is changing! But nothing within my melancholy Has shifted! New palaces, scaffoldings, piles of stone Old neighborhoods—everything has become allegory for me and my dear memories are heavier than stone.7 In reading a few contemporary literary accounts about Haussmannization, it would seem that not only were the streets of the old city torn down, but the memories and spatial sources of phenomenological experience were uprooted as well. Brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt wrote in 1860:
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My Paris, the Paris in which I was born […] is vanishing, both materially and morally. […] I feel like a man merely passing through Paris, a traveller. I am foreign to that which is to come, to that which is, and a stranger to these new boulevards that go straight on, without meandering, without the adventures of perspective.8 The Pont de l’Europe, the bridge depicted in Caillebotte’s 1876 painting of the same name (Fig. 1), was built between 1865 and 1868 as part of Haussmann’s renovation under the rule of Napoleon III. By many accounts, the emperor desired to make Paris completely modern; he aimed to raise land value, provide new forms of entertainment (such as parks and racetracks), and bring visual order to the city and social order to its classes.9 Walter Benjamin writes that, less obviously, the renovation was also a project of self-defense. Benjamin suggests that Haussmann’s elimination of the medieval streets and his creation of the large boulevards was a tactic aimed at making the city more accessible to armies while discouraging citizens from uprising, by making it almost impossible to build barricades. This lesson was learned from the socialist revolts of the Paris Commune in 1871.10 Simultaneously, not only were the revolts and barricades done away with, but desires of capitalists were given every opportunity to flourish.11 Caillebotte’s general proximity to this political history naturally informs interpretations by contemporary art historians of his painting Le Pont de l’Europe, a painting that art historian Rosanne H. Lightstone identifies as “audaciously contemporary in appearance, a representation of the modern Paris of Haussmann and Napoleon III.”12 The looming presence of the bridge and the severity of the vanishing point in the overall composition show the flâneur striding, the woman taking her steps, as the blue-smock-clad middle-class worker rests to absorb the view. Through this, Caillebotte portrays the rapid modernization of the city and what that modernization means for its citizens. The types of walkers in Le Pont de l’Europe and the social classes they represent are more apparent because of how few in number the pedes trians in the image actually are. This unique take on the pedestrian setting contrasts with other depictions of pedestrians in urban environ ments, such as any of Pissarro’s balcony street scenes or Monet’s Boulevard des Capucines (1873), both of which abstract pedestrians into smoky specks of paint among a crowd. The inclination to visually depict pedestrians as crowds is matched by literary commentary from observers such as Henry James and Benjamin.13 , 14 Thus, by populating the scene with fewer people, whose bodies are compositionally absorbed by the viewer’s gaze, Caillebotte avoids the kind of crowd depicted by Benjamin in his essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”: “[The metropolitan masses] do not stand for classes or any sort of collective; rather they are nothing but the amorphous crowd of passers-by, the people in the street.”15 In other words, Caillebotte strips the bridge of the crowd in order for individuals to epitomize discrete symbols about class and hierarchies of
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8 Ibid. 9 Greg Thomas, “Women in Public: The Display of Femininity in the Parks of Paris,” The Invisible Flâneuse?: Gender, Public Space and Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris, eds. Aruna D’Souza and Tom McDonough (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 35. 10 Fried, “Caillebotte’s Impressionism,” 23. 11 Walter Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 159. 12 Lightstone, “Gustave Caillebotte’s Oblique Perspective,” 759. 13 Ibid. 14 Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 166. 15 Ibid., 165.
16 Forgione, “Everyday Life in Motion,” 673. 17 Ibid. 18 Thomas, The Invisible Flâneuse?, 32. 19 Fried, “Caillebotte’s Impressionism,” 21. 20 Ibid. See also: Julia Sagraves, “The Street,” Gustave Caillebotte: Urban Impressionist, ed. Anne Distel (New York: Abbeville Press, 1995), 87–140. 21 Ibid., 22–23. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid.
social structures. Additionally, though Caillebotte names his work after the famous new bridge, the structure functions in this painting more or less as a stage upon which various classes—described through individual walkers—display their status in relation to each other, as “[walking] is a spatial and behavioral practice that has an implicit cultural politics.”16 Although strong class differences are reinforced elsewhere in society, Forgione describes walking as inherently democratic, as it is available for anyone to practice. But within the democratic theater of walking, there are dimensions—place, time, and identity—that restrict the everyday practical experience of the walker.17 The sexual politics inherent in restrictions on walking are symbolized by the confident manner in which the flâneur lunges forward as compared to the gingerly steps of the woman beside him—reflecting Greg Thomas’s commentary on the bourgeois woman as having an “inverse experience of modernity” practiced through “constricted movement.”18 While sexual politics complicate the supposed democratic nature of shared space, Fried and Julia Sagraves complicate this message of the painting in another way. While Fried shares Forgione’s assertion that walking in general implies an image of democracy—in light of the visual pastiche of classes and types, with even the dog trotting towards the vanishing point—this “reconciliation of social classes”19 is only one aspect of what Caillebotte presents to the viewer. In Sagraves’s essay “The Street,” she describes the painting as depicting “the moderate republican agenda for the streets of Paris.”20 Sagraves sees the painting as an attempt to move on from the then-recent histories of revolutionary subjugation strongly associated with Parisian public life in the mid-nineteenth century. Fried adds that the political meaning of the painting is implied also in the shared gaze of the bourgeois flâneur and of the leaning worker, both cast beyond the range of the painting to an area inaccessible to the viewer. Fried believes that though there is a sense of social reconciliation, there is also an “unnegotiable difference between the two men and the social classes they exemplify,” with their likeness stemming primarily from a shared vision that remains removed and distant.21 The gaze of the woman between them is thrown in an opposite direction so as to alert the viewer to a common interest of the two men, which the viewer grasps through perception.22 In other words, while the piece is still seen as one with a republican agenda by virtue of the shared space of the varied pedestrian classes, Fried identifies the spiritual and physical distance between the walkers as the true conveyor of political meaning. The distance honors the city’s recent history of upheaval—violent repression of the Commune five years before the painting’s creation23— although Parisians did not achieve their apparently shared desire for a place that promoted social communion. Fried’s analysis of the walkers on the bridge brings to light the contradictions of modern experience in nineteenthcentury Paris. Haussmann’s renovation of the urban environment affected all lives, but the psychological distance between Caillebotte’s walkers emphasizes the separation of class that persisted after the transformations.
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Paris Street; Rainy Day (1877) [Fig. 2] is described by Fried and Forgione as being “absorptive”24 and “inward,”25 respectively. The dreamy ambiance of the scene partially relates to the balanced motif of paired walkers. Strangely, the pairs are equidistant from each other and from the individ ual, single walkers. As if to draw attention once more to the implicitly democratic nature of walking, the paired walkers exhibit the full spectrum of combinations between sexes, and are positioned symmetrically in relation to each other in the composition: man and man at left; woman and woman vanishing in the background; man and woman off-center; and in the foreground, woman and man. The single pedestrians are walk ing between the scattered pairs. The tranquility, ease, and truly “inward” quality with which the walkers move in the diffused crowd echo a passage from Benjamin’s essay “Baudelaire”: To move in this crowd was natural for a Parisian. No matter how great the distance which an individual cared to keep from it, he still was colored by it. […] As regards Baudelaire, the masses were anything but external to him; indeed, it is easy to trace in his works the defensive reaction to their attraction and allure.26 The “defensive reaction” that Benjamin refers to is precisely the dual sense of personal immersion and social distance that both Fried and Forgione cite as characteristic of the painting. Forgione describes the quiet mood of Caillebotte’s painting as the result of an unspoken understanding between walkers to maintain their distance.27 Fried describes Caillebotte as “thematizing a newly mobile mode of absorptive closure.”28 Both cite the use of umbrellas as a tactic to ward off contact or closer engagement with other pedestrians—as seen in the case of the individual walker in the right corner tipping his umbrella to move expertly past the couple in the foreground, and the couple not yet turning their attention to acknowledge the looming obstacle in their way. In reference to the modern subject’s attempt to ward off “shocks and collisions,”29 Benjamin quotes Freud in his description of the nature of the defensive reaction: Protection against stimuli is an almost more important function than the reception of stimuli; the protective shield is equipped with its own store of energy and must above all strive to preserve the special forms of conversion of energy operating in it against the effects of the excessive energies at work in the external world, effects which tend toward an equalization of potential and hence toward destruction.30 In other words, to avoid the trauma of a technologically driven and densely populated urban arena, the pedestrian’s consciousness must develop a cognitive filter against external stimuli, so the walker can continue on his path undisturbed by that which surrounds them.
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24 Ibid., 27. 25 Forgione, “Everyday Life in Motion,” 675. 26 Benjamin, Illuminations, 167. 27 Forgione, “Everyday Life in Motion,” 675. 28 Fried, “Caillebotte’s Impressionism,” 27. 29 Benjamin, Illuminations, 175. 30 Ibid., 161.
31 Danielle Wiley, “A Walk About Rome: Tactics for Mapping the Urban Periphery,” Architectural Theory Review 15, no. 1 (2010): 11. 32 Thomas, The Invisible Flâneuse?, 34. 33 Forgione, “Everyday Life in Motion,” 669.
Caillebotte’s focus on the inward and outward dimensions of walking in Paris Street; Rainy Day depicts the phenomenological experience of individuals in urban settings, one that partially defines the sometimes ambiguous persona of the flâneur: “a contradiction between immersion in the modern city and a distracted mental state.”31 Though Caillebotte’s walkers, in particular the bourgeois couple in the foreground, exhibit the disinterested curiosity that is associated with flâneurie, he radically, and uniquely for his time, democratizes the space by presenting the same kind of phenomenological activity in both the man and the woman, and through decidedly ensuring equal representation of types of couples and walkers. This is noteworthy only because Baudelaire’s flâneur is specifically defined to be a male artist with “a sexually charged vision.”32 Through the complicated and varied ways that Caillebotte presents the walkers of nineteenth-century Paris in these two paintings, he inadvertently affirms Forgione’s mission of describing the aesthetic and politics of walking that exists far beyond the scope of the flâneur. Of course, as she notes, discussions of walking and its mental states have been limited to the flâneur partially due to a revival of Benjamin’s text in the latter half of the twentieth century, and his own interest in Baudelaire.33 Caillebotte’s paintings, however, are a testament to the nuanced and layered way that walking can portray meaning, especially in a period in French history that was fraught with change and uncertainty.
Chantal Lee is a graduate student in Pratt Institute’s M.S. History of Art and Design/M.S. Library and Information Science dual-degree program. She is editor and co-curator of ECHO, a digital story archive that offers subjective walking tours through New York City neighborhoods. She is also co-founder of Ekphrazein, an interdisciplinary reading series held at the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism (ARAS).
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Fig. 1
Fig. 2
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The Bourn-vita Sleeping Beaker: Vernacular Design in the Postwar United Kingdom
VITORIA HADBA
This paper was written for History of Industrial Design (HD361), taught by Elizabeth St. George in fall 2014.
This paper analyzes aesthetic trends, consumerism, and industrial develop ments in the postwar United Kingdom through an analysis of the Bourn-vita Sleeping Beaker, a plastic promotional mug. Through investigation of these aspects, the emotional resonance of this vernacular design piece with consumers today can be better understood. Thus, this paper presents possible reasons why the Bourn-vita Sleeping Beaker, an intentionally disposable object, has earned an established place in the history of design and became a popular collectible. “Sleep sweeter—Bourn-vita.” This slogan, used in advertisements by Cadbury, describes the thought behind the design of the Bourn‑vita Sleeping Beaker from 1951 (Fig. 1 and 2). The mug was used by British multinational confectionary company Cadbury as a promotional object for its malted chocolate beverage, Bourn-vita. It was widely marketed as a drink to be consumed before sleep, and as part of this marketing strategy Cadbury commissioned a custom container for the drink, which was designed by A. H. Woodfull. Made from a new kind of plastic, this promotional object did not end up in landfills, like most other plasticwares. Rather, the Bourn-vita mug remains an exception among promotional objects, having earned a place in the hearts and minds of collectors and a generation of children. Through an analysis of this vernacular design piece, the historical context in which it was produced can be better understood. The materials and techniques used to produce this mug demonstrate the industrial developments of the first half of the twentieth century. Its design evokes
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midcentury aesthetic trends, in addition to underscoring the explosion of consumerism and the corollary new habits and practices of consumers. Using the Bourn-vita Sleeping Beaker as a starting point, this essay dissects and presents social, cultural, and aesthetic aspects of the postwar United Kingdom as well as examines the symbolic and emotional resonance of the design with consumers today. A. H. Woodfull was an important name at British Industrial Plastics (BIP), the oldest plastics company in the United Kingdom and one of the oldest in the world, founded in 1894.1 Woodfull was initially trained as a silversmith, later also graduating with a degree in industrial design from the Birmingham School of Art, now part of Birmingham City University, in the city that served as headquarters for Cadbury and BIP.2 As noted on the university’s website, Woodfull “was appointed to British Industrial Plastics (BIP) as a product designer [...] in 1934 to ‘bring art to an artless industry.’ His early work was largely in packaging, including the Art Decoinspired Ardath Cigarette Box of 1935, but he soon became focused on tableware, designing the classic Beetleware range in urea-formaldehyde in 1946.”3 Interestingly, when commenting on the process of creating the Bourn-vita mug, Sylvia Katz stated: “The Bourn-vita cocoa mug started as a two-dimensional image in an advertising campaign: the designer’s problem was how to capture the graphic idea in molding that would be cheap and simple to produce.”4 The advertisement cited by Sylvia Katz, which Woodfull used as a starting point for the design of the mug, dates from around 1933. A. H. Woodfull’s anthropomorphic mug for Cadbury has a semi-smiling Art Deco-inspired face in high relief, achieved with the use of molded plastic. The Art Deco influence is recognizable in the mug’s geometric handle and in the linear, schematic, and elongated lines in its facial features. As noted previously, Woodfull had already shown an interest in Art Deco in the early years of his career. This aesthetic became extremely popular after the 1925 Paris Exhibition, emphasizing glamour through a broad design vocabulary and a wide range of influences. The mug also shows the influence of streamlining in its design. Stream lined objects evoke aerodynamics and a sensation of speed. They are designed in a way that suggests that they would offer little resistance to air or water, having extremely smooth surfaces and often using a teardrop shape. This combination of aspects of streamlining and Art Deco is by no means random. According to scholar Bevis Hillier, “Art Deco of the thirties pushed the interest in new industrial materials, and in streamlines.”5 The use of streamline is evident in the angular drop of the nightcap and the slickness of its lines and surface; it is a sign of the times in which this mug was produced. Between the 1930s and 1950s, streamline was extremely common in products designed in the United States. After the end of World War II, as a side effect of the American policy in reconstructing Europe, the latter was flooded by American consumer products and went through
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1 Mike Butler, “Overview” (BIP [Oldbury] Limited), accessed February 22, 2015, http://www.bip.co.uk/ history‑overview.htm. 2 “A.H. ‘Woody’ Woodfull” (The Museum of Design in Plastics), accessed October 25, 2014, http://www.modip. ac.uk/exhibitions/spotlight-on/ designers/woodfull. 3 “Shaping the World, A Last ing Legacy: Albert Woodful [sic]” (Birmingham City University), accessed October 25, 2014, http://www.bcu.ac.uk/studentinfo/shaping-the-world-old/ lasting-legacy/albert-woodful. 4 Sylvia Katz, Plastics: Common Objects, Classic Designs; with a Collector’s Guide (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1984), 88. 5 Bevis Hillier, The World of Art Deco (New York: Dutton, 1971), 35.
6 Barbara Tilson, Made in Birmingham: Design & Industry 1889–1989 (Studley: Brewin, 1989), 28. 7 Jeffrey L. Meikle, American Plastic: A Cultural History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 77. 8 Penny Sparke, The Plastics Age: From Bakelite to Beanbags and Beyond (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1993), 45. 9 Meikle, American Plastic: A Cultural History, 76. 10 “By-Product Becomes Unbreakable Tableware,” Business Week, October 29, 1930, 15.
a process of cultural colonization. Thus, design in Europe was affected by American trends, as observed in the streamlined Bourn-vita beaker from England. Cadbury’s founder, Richard Cadbury, was personally interested in design, and he understood it as a key device for the formation of his brand. The importance that Cadbury attached to the role of design in promoting the company’s products was reflected in the early estab lishment of a design department at the company at the end of the nineteenth century.6 In 1934, predecessors of the Sleeping Beaker were already being made (Fig. 3). The preceding earthenware mug and saucer were designed by Oliver Watson and produced by Josiah Wedgwood and Sons, a company that pioneered the mass production of ceramics in Britain and developed a wide range of designs from the eighteenth century on. Characteristics of the 1934 mug and saucer, such as the light cream yellow color, the elongated form, and the saucer that doubles as a lid, were retained in the design of the 1951 mug. However, the 1951 Bourn‑vita Sleeping Beaker’s lid is not simply a plain saucer: it is shaped as a blue nightcap with a bauble of red cellulose acetate. Between the Wedgwood and Sons mug and saucer and the Woodfull plastic Sleeping Beaker, other ceramic mugs were developed, but they were without much cultural significance. Perhaps Cadbury’s long-term interest in promo tional design led the company to a higher awareness of the aesthetics of these products, naturally culminating in the iconic Sleeping Beaker. In the early days after plastic was invented, color was not really a concern, since it was a material solely intended for industrial use. Later, when plastic began showing up in people’s houses, Bakelite— the first truly synthetic plastic—was unable to meet consumers’ demand for a broader gamut of color.7 For chemical reasons, Bakelite lost its structural integrity when made in colors that were brighter and lighter than its usual browns, blacks, and grays. As a general rule, whites and extremely bold colors could not be reproduced in the first plastic materials, since to do so would sacrifice the objects’ strength.8 However, 1929 saw the invention of Beetleware, the material from which most parts of the Bourn‑vita beaker were made. As advertised in the 1930s, the new plastic came in all colors of the rainbow (Fig. 4).9 This first formaldehyde plastic made it possible to create objects in translucent pastel colors, such as the pale yellow of the Bourn-vita beaker. As noted in a 1930 issue of Business Week, Beetleware “looks and feels like fine English porcelain but, unlike it, is practically unbreakable.”10 Interestingly, this statement connects the material used in the design of the Bourn-vita Sleeping Beaker with its ceramic predecessor. The Bourn-vita Sleeping Beaker is an early example of the use of new molded plastic technologies in mass production, and its importance as a symbol of technological advances in the plastics industry was explicit. Production of the Sweet Dreams beaker was demonstrated at the Festival of Britain on London’s South Bank in 1951. BIP had an exhibition to showcase its new press-molding
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machine that would facilitate mass production of plastic products.11 Therefore, the Bourn-vita Sleeping Beaker is a consequence, as well as a symbol, of the industrial developments of the twentieth century.
11 “A. H. Woodfull,” The Times (London), June 28, 2011, sec. Obituaries, http://www.thetimes. co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/ article3076480.ece.
Between the 1930s and the 1950s, the plastics industry grew enormously because of the high demand for military products during World War II. After the end of the war, the production of plastic had to be redirected to the civilian consumer. The twentieth century also witnessed a great growth in awareness of the well-being of children and in marketing directed toward child consumers. Plastics were and still are often associated with this age group, since they are colorful, light, easy to clean, and almost unbreakable. It is therefore not unexpected that during the mid-twentieth century, promotional objects developed for youngsters, such as the Sleeping Beaker, were commonly made from plastic. Additionally, small‑scale production was not profitable for the plastics industry, since new tools often needed to be developed for each new object made, which also demanded a great number of employees.12 Promotional objects like the Bourn-vita beaker perfectly suited the need for mass production inherent to the plastic industries. Cheaply produced in plastic on a mass scale, the Bourn-vita beaker not only filled the needs of the target consumers—children—but also effectively promoted the Cadbury brand through its wide distribution. It represented a perfect marriage between the material used in an object and its purpose as a vehicle for advertising.
12 Michael Farr, Design in British Industry: A Mid-Century Survey (Cambridge: University Press, 1953), 234.
Furthermore, the history of formaldehyde plastic is intertwined with that of World War II. Since the British and American armies were using essential goods made from formaldehyde plastic, the civilian consumer was discouraged from buying products made from Beetleware. Unfortunately, it appears that records concerning production of objects using Beetleware during this period were either lost or unavailable to the general public. Quite possibly, products using this material were not even available, since England experienced extreme rationing of domestic goods. This can be clearly noted in the catalog of The Museum of Modern Art exhibition Useful Objects in Wartime from 1942, where it is written, “Don’t buy BEETLEWARE or BAKELITE—they are needed for war equipment.”13 Thus, it is no coincidence that the two most iconic promotional cups made from formaldehyde, Ovaltine’s Little Orphan Annie Shake-up mug from 1930 and the Bourn-vita Sleeping Beaker from 1951, were produced before and after the Second World War, respectively. The Sleeping Beaker was an element added later to the audacious Bournvita advertisement campaign, which, although it was not explicitly focused on the child as the consumer, did include printed material with imaginative and whimsical qualities. More than merely selling Cadbury’s malt and chocolate powder, the campaign intended to create a cultural habit of drinking beverages containing milk, malt, and chocolate before bed. The association of these beverages with bedtime was possibly triggered for two main reasons. First, in 1873, Horlicks—a company that
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13 Harvey A. Anderson and Alice M. Carson, “Useful Objects in Wartime: Fifth Annual Exhibition of Useful Objects under $10.00,” The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art 10, no. 2 (December 1942): 4. 14 Quentin Letts, “Beverage Report,” April 25, 2001, sec. Food and Drink, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ foodanddrink/4812916/ Beverage-report.html.
15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 Meredith Martin, “Dairy Cases,” Cabinet 40 (Winter 2010), 47–53. 18 Ibid. 19 Bryan Meccariello, Plastic Cup Collectibles: With Price Guide, A Schiffer Book for Collectors (Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing, Ltd., 1998), 2.
produced a product similar to Bourn-vita—advertised its beverage as a cure for night starvation.14 Secondly, as it was attested in a 2001 article in The Telegraph, “There is scientific backing for the idea that these drinks help you sleep: a substance found in milk called [tryptophan] is held to have soporific properties. But the main effect is probably psychosomatic. The Royal College of Psychiatrists accepts that a hot, milky drink before bed can assist sleep.”15 Cadbury was not the first to advertise its product as the perfect nighttime beverage; Ovaltine, a similar product, was already being advertised as a source of good sleep, though it was primarily promoted as a healthy beverage for kids. Cadbury took this idea further, labeling its product exclusively as a before-bed drink, an idea that translated into Bournvita’s printed ads featuring slogans such as “Promotes refreshing sleep,” or, as noted before, “Sleep sweeter—Bourn-vita” (Figs. 1 and 5). This marketing strategy could not have been made clearer than by the production of a mug with its eyes closed, wearing a nightcap. Today, more than half of malted drinks are consumed after 9 PM.16 For the loyal consumers of milky drinks, the Sleeping Beaker became an integral part of their nightly ritual. Cadbury’s audacious campaign worked. This link between the habit of drinking dairy beverages and the design of the ideal container is significantly older than the Bourn-vita beaker. Although this union was smartly appropriated by Cadbury, it can be traced all the way back to the court of Louis XV in eighteenth-century France, when it was still a novelty for adults to make a habit of drinking milk, often used as a treatment for women supposedly suffering from hysteria.17 For this reason, the French Milk Goblet has a recessed saucer to prevent anxious or feverish milk drinkers from knocking the cup over.18 Several similarities can be found between Louis XV’s court consumption of milk and the 1950s milky beverage consumption. In both epochs, drinking milky beverages was understood as being good for health and wellness. Also, regardless of proportion, the designs of containers for both eras were closely and carefully attached to their function, fulfilling a demand for a new drinking habit that both objects shared. Today, the Bourn-vita Sleeping Beaker is highly sought after by collectors. This phenomenon is possibly related to a sense of nostalgia and emotional attachment. For those who lived their childhood in the 1950s, this mug could surely relate to memories as sweet as the chocolate malted beverages that they drank from it. For newer generations, this mug’s seductive ness relates to its midcentury appearance. The 1950s are often associated with postwar optimism and consumption, aspects that are reflected in the charm of the mug’s design. Because it is an object related to sleeping, an extremely private activity, and to a domestic interior, it also conveys a sense of comfort and coziness. The Bourn-vita beaker is simultaneously an early plastic object and a promotional object, two qualities often related to amateurs’ collections. According to collector Bryan Meccariello,
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“Whether you realize it or not you are already a collector of plastic cups. Just look in your kitchen cabinets and you will find those plastic cups you didn’t realize you were even collecting.”19 In the specific case of the Bourn-vita beaker, there is still today a “hot” market. In both thrift stores and online marketplaces such as Etsy and eBay, this 1951 mug is still being bought and sold, which underscores its place in people’s hearts and collections. Perhaps the Bourn-vita Sleeping Beaker will never be part of a museum collection. Unlike many other midcentury pieces, this mug never received special attention as a design piece, and possibly will never be praised by design scholars. However, the Bourn-vita beaker was not forgotten, as were most promotional plastic objects, which are often seen as disposable. More than half a century later, this mug is still being bought, sold, collected, and loved by nostalgic consumers. The importance of the Bourn-vita Sleeping Beaker does not reside in the piece itself, but its value is given by how it symbolizes an epoch, a generation, its history, and its developments.
Vitoria Hadba is an undergraduate student in Pratt Institute’s B.A. History of Art and Design program. Hadba, who moved to New York in 2013 from her native Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, is passionate about researching design history and collecting pieces of vernacular design.
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The Koonsian Contradiction
NICOLA HOUSEHOLDER
This paper discusses the many paradoxes of Jeff Koons’s career, and how these contradictions give his work power. Koons’s art depicts extremes of consumerism, lust, vanity, low culture, and high culture, doing so in a manner that is both unsettling and highly relatable to the American public. The essay was written in response to the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2014 exhibition Jeff Koons: A Retrospective and focuses on his series Luxury and Degradation, Banality, Made in Heaven, and Celebration. With an artist whose oeuvre is as large as Jeff Koons’s, it can be difficult to describe the collective works in just one convenient phrase. Over the course of his career, spanning four decades, Koons has produced works dealing with themes of consumerism, morality, self-reflection, everyday life, childhood innocence, sexual expression, the bourgeois, liberation, and repression. His media have ranged from ready-made objects to photographic prints to blown glass to stainless steel to oil paint. Thus, as a response to the vast group of works presented at the 2014 exhibition Jeff Koons: A Retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and in response to Koons’s own often inconsistent and surprising dialogue about his works, I have concluded that Koons’s career is characterized by contradiction and extremes. He has the unique and provocative ability to present works that fluctuate between high-class and kitsch, digestible and repulsive, adorable and hideous. Several series that best exemplify these paradoxes are Luxury and Degradation, Banality, Made in Heaven, and Celebration. However, there is no need to choose sides: it is this Koonsian paradox that elevates him to the status
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This paper was written for Art Since the Sixties (HA327), taught by Ágnes Berecz in fall 2014.
1 Scott Rothkopf, Whitney Museum of American Art, Centre Georges Pompidou, and Museo Guggenheim Bilbao. Jeff Koons: A Retrospective, 2014, 7. 2 Ibid., 29. 3 Ibid., 30. 4 Michael Blackwood, Art in an Age of Mass Culture (Michael Blackwood Productions, 1991), http://search.alexanderstreet. com/view/work/1844899. 5 Anette Hüsch and Neue Nationalgalerie (Germany), Jeff Koons: Celebration (Ostifildern; Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag; Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, 2008), 91. 6 Ibid. 7 Fronia W. Simpson, ed., Jeff Koons (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1992), 65.
of art superstar. That is, as Whitney Museum curator Scott Rothkopf writes, “The strength and importance of Koons’s work relies on those contradictions.”1 Speaking most generally, Koons’s lack of involvement in the craft of his works—excluding his early readymades—stands in opposition to the exquisite detail that can be found in them. He has hired hundreds of artists over the years to help him construct his iconic pieces, creating a layer of separation between him and the actual products. Despite his lack of personal labor in the creation of his images and sculptures or the honing of a specific technique, “Koons has arguably pursued it more ruthlessly than any of our age.”2 He somehow is able to keep “as tight a grip on the process as if he were making something with his own hands.”3 This paradoxical involvement and separation does seem to echo Koons’s problematic claim that “the activity of art is absolutely useless.”4 It pushes the boundaries of art-making to a bizarre and questionable limit, which counterintuitively circles around to give Koons complete control and credibility. Koons’s creative process emphasizes the simultaneous contrast and connection between the individual and the group. He describes this relationship in terms of the initial idea and the construction by saying that “when you have an idea you’re always isolated.”5 This cognitive stage of the artistic process is personal and produces joy strictly for Koons himself. But he says that “to be able to implement the idea and be around people and already start this mechanism of hopefully making that idea more social, that is more communal.”6 Here Koons refers to the bringing of his work to the next step in its creation, where many people will be involved in fabricating and laboring over it. It is a specifically planned, almost factory-like division of labor, but of course Koons avoids this label for fear of its Warholian or impersonal implication. The most apparent thematic paradox that carries through the bulk of Koons’s many series is his abutting of high and low culture. For example, in Luxury and Degradation, Koons is interested keenly in these class differences, using alcohol-related products as a lens through which to view them. In terms of materials, Koons constructs what would typically be the crystal drinking ware of the wealthy out of stainless steel. Koons states that “stainless steel is the material of the Proletarian, it’s what pots and pans are made of. It’s a very hard material and it’s fake luxury.”7 In the material aspect, Koons is trying to subvert our understanding of what constitutes high and low class—is it surface appearance or is it the actual content? The contents of all of the decanters are alcohol, and the premise of all the advertisements is purely to sell alcohol. Thus the rich and poor are being fed the same corporate messages: consume more, be happier, become a more likable version of yourself. High and low culture are placed frighteningly close to one another in Banality, which champions tasteless trinkets at a scale the viewer usually
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associates with high-end statuary. For example, Amore (Fig. 1) from 1988 is a teddy-bear-like creature with the face of a Cabbage Patch doll, cast in porcelain, holding a jam jar and wearing a diaper. The figure holds a sticker proclaiming “i ♥ you” in its outstretched arm, and it wears a bib that spells out its name, “amore,” or love, in Cooper Black typeface. The cuteness factor of this piece is similar to that of an item on the shelf at a tacky gift store. But the white and gold rococo porcelain base brings in elements of high class that simultaneously contrast with and affirm the sense of kitsch. This mix of high and low class is alarming, which makes this piece captivating. Of course, Koons gives his typically baffling and dismissive commentary on it, saying, “I don’t believe in kitsch because I don’t believe in judgments.”8 The Banality series, in its exploration of kitsch, simultaneously comforts and disturbs the viewer. We feel a sense of comfort in the stupidity of and ingrained memories brought to mind by the knickknacks on display. But on the other hand, we are disturbed by their presentation. Art critic Fronia Simpson described it as initial joy followed by profound distur bance—“As we continue to walk among the works of the series, our amusement starts to freeze and our pleasure in familiarity to be replaced by anxiety.”9 Returning to Amore, we want to simultaneously cuddle with it and smash it to pieces. We imagine that this lovable doll is a little too close to becoming a possessed, head-spinning demon. We must grapple with the fact that when we are confronted with our dreams and, “larger than life, in three dimensions, they turn out to have something of the aspect of monsters, then that, perhaps, is what they were all along.”10 Continuing with Koons’s tendency to transmit friendly and menacing imagery, it helps to touch upon the Celebration series, particularly Balloon Dog (Yellow) (Fig. 2), constructed between 1994 and 2000, and Play-Doh (Fig. 3), which Koons worked on from 1994 to 2014. Balloon Dog (Yellow) has been described as “paradoxically, at once solicitous and tough.”11 It invites us to play with it, but also to confront the reality that the one-ton mass could crush us in an instant. The piece appears friendly and reminiscent of a birthday gift, but could contain something terrible, as in a Trojan horse or Pandora’s box. Koons commented on the piece, “Even though the outside could be joyous, the inside was a little dark. […] you could feel the presence of the inside.”12 This speaks to the paradox between candy-coated, cheerful, comforting outside and inner confusion that accompanies many of the works in Celebration. Play-Doh is a huge mound of polychrome molded aluminum in the center of the exhibition room. Though it shines in rainbow colors reminiscent of children’s modeling dough, the scale of the mound makes us wonder what monstrous child could handle such a big pile of dough. Koons has the unique ability to show us funny, familiar images from our childhood, which mask “an undercurrent of foreboding, as if a universe this purified and magical would have to hide untold risks and
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8 Hüsch, Jeff Koons, 88. 9 Simpson, Jeff Koons, 12. 10 Ibid., 13. 11 Rothkopf et al., Jeff Koons, 29. 12 Hüsch, Jeff Koons, 87.
13 Rothkopf et al., Jeff Koons, 242. 14 Mark Rosenthal et al., Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012), 197. 15 Rothkopf et al., Jeff Koons, 220. 16 Simpson, Jeff Koons, 13. 17 Rothkopf et al., Jeff Koons, 220. 18 Simpson, Jeff Koons, 14. 19 Rosenthal et al., Regarding Warhol, 195.
dangers.”13 Koons also mentions that the audience does not see how the elements constituting Play-Doh fit together inside of the work. It is a very dense piece. We think we know what it is about because we recognize the material, but Koons calls into question the assumption that we can judge the work solely on its surface. Koons also explores this sense of outer charm versus inner gloom in other works, such as Large Vase of Flowers (Fig. 4) from 1991, part of the Made in Heaven series. The obtrusively bright flowers, in full bloom, are “being attractive. But if you start to go in deeper, you are aware that the flowers in the vase are cut.”14 This again speaks to Koons’s interest in combining certainty and uncertainty, cheer and doom. Koons has said many times that he created Celebration as a tribute to his first son, Ludwig. The child-friendly materials and themes explored here stand in stark contrast to the pornographic material he presented just a few years earlier in Made in Heaven. It is this pairing of childlike innocence with unbridled sexuality that makes Koons’s retrospective hard to confront. When he made the series Made in Heaven in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Koons posed with porn star (and former wife) Cicciolina. The images in the series, with their swirling pink backdrops and tacky butterflies, are saccharine and dreamlike. At the same time, they depict the couple in an array of sexual positions. The audience seems to pretend to focus much more intensely on the garish flower arrangements and ugly dog sculptures around the room. It is exactly this shame of sexuality that Koons is exploring. Koons claims that this barrage of images of himself and his lover is not pornography. To the contrary, he asserts that he is “interested in the spiritual, to be able to show people that they can have impact, to achieve their desires.”15 The overprocessed, saccharine aesthetic of the portraits produces “the Walt Disney version of an erotic fantasy.”16 Despite Koons’s claims that he is “not involved in pornography,”17 many of the viewers appeared uncomfortable and cast their eyes away from others in the exhibition space. The confrontation of these larger-than-life pieces mirrors the confrontation with one’s own embarrassment, but it is hard to say that Koons has achieved his purported goal of making the audience feel spiritually awakened. Instead, we may feel “a sense of strain, of an uncomfortable tension that has nothing to do with sexual gratification.”18 It is hard to reconcile Koons’s Celebration and Made in Heaven series, but this opposition lends great power to his work. The contradiction of guilt and self-acceptance evoked by Koons’s oeuvre is problematic. In a way, he has rendered any criticism of his work moot with statements such as “I’m ushering in banality, and it doesn’t matter what people think.”19 And yet as viewers, we want the pieces to say something disparaging about kitsch and mass culture. This is what we expect fine art to do—to momentarily shatter the social norms we have grown sick of. When Koons assures us that our “own history is absolutely
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perfect,”20 it upsets our desire for high-minded cynicism. Koons even evinces a Christlike sentiment in saying that “I don’t like things that are cynical. For me cynicism represents having more knowledge than you share. I believe in generosity.”21 In brushing aside the audience’s inclinations toward cynicism, Koons sabotages our general expectation that fine art should provide stinging social commentary. But our skepticism toward Koons’s wholesome and demure claims remains. Some of the most intriguing and maddening aspects of Koons’s persona are his contradictory pontifications on his own art and life. We are unsure whether he is trying to exploit himself or extol himself. The truth may be that he is doing both. At one point, he says, “The moral aspect in my work has always been so important.”22 Yet in his playing to America’s perverted worship of Hollywood and celebrity, Koons admits, “If I become an art star, I should just add another star on my shoulder,”23 speaking here of his relations with Cicciolina. His way of describing fame is hardly innocent or moral; in fact it seems that he is abusing his celebrity status. And we do hear Koons uttering a rather troublesome statement concerning the morality of what he does as an artist—he says, “The only thing that the artist can do is to be able to exploit themselves to increase their own parameters of being in the moment. […] that is the most liberating thing one can do.”24 It is vexing how Koons jumps back and forth between statements that are saintly and those that are impish, but it echoes his artistic power to present contradictions for the audience to accept or reject. Koons’s retrospective at the Whitney Museum transfers onto his audience the agony of trying to figure out exactly who Koons is, or who he aims to be, both in his art and in his personal life. The apparent desire to reconcile polar opposites of taste and culture is what propels Koons’s career ever skyward. One cannot help but wonder if his whole life is an elaborately crafted joke on the public. At the same time, Koons leaves his audience anxious to see what he will do next. Love him or hate him—and the responses to his work are fittingly extreme—the viewer can do nothing more than anticipate his next series. Perhaps art critic Peter Schjeldahl summed up Koons’s work best when he said, “I love it, and pardon me while I throw up.”25
Nicola Householder is an undergraduate student in Pratt Institute’s B.F.A. Communications Design program, and will receive a minor in the History of Art and Design. Her art historical interests include Bauhaus, de Stijl, and Dada.
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20 Ibid., 196. 21 Hüsch, Jeff Koons, 91. 22 Thomas Kellein, ed., Jeff Koons: Pictures, 1980–2002 (New York: D.A.P., Distributed Art Publishers, 2002), 16. 23 Ibid., 26. 24 Blackwood, Art in an Age of Mass Culture. 25 Simpson, Jeff Koons, 7.
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The Rise of Commerce and New York City’s Early Skyscrapers: The Flatiron Building Between Tradition and Modernity
CATARINA FLAKSMAN
This paper explores the formation of America’s modern identity through architecture, focusing on the Flatiron Building, a commercial office building in New York City completed in 1902. Although early skyscrapers represented the incorporation of capitalism and technology into society, they were still attached to tradition, frequently adopting European architectural forms from the past. The Flatiron’s peculiar shape, however, pointed to the artistic potential of skyscrapers. The building inspired photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen, who saw the building as a symbol of America’s modernity. The Flatiron’s prominence in photographs and the media helped disseminate the form of the skyscraper, an important first step towards the creation of a modern architectural identity. The early twentieth century in America was marked by the growth of cities, technological innovations, and the search for a modern identity. While skyscrapers represented one of the first steps towards architecture’s independence from tradition, they still challenged society, and were seen as representing the conflicts between religion and business, tradition and modernity, the old world and a new world. Early skyscrapers arose during a period of transition from traditional European—especially religiouscentered—values to modern values, characterized by the incorporation of technology and capitalism into society. As architects searched for ways to represent America’s newly formed modern identity, they continued to rely on aesthetic references from Europe. New York City’s Flatiron Building, completed in 1902, represents this period of transition between tradition and modernity.
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This paper was written for History of Interior Design I (HD609), taught by Anca Lasc in fall 2014.
1 Sarah Bradford Landau and Carl W. Condit, Rise of the New York Skyscraper, 1865–1913 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 2. 2 Ibid., 5.
To better understand the factors that stimulated artistic production at the turn of the century, this paper contextualizes America—especially New York, the fastest-growing urban center in the country—in light of new developments such as the widespread adoption of technological innovations and the demands of a new, business-driven society. The changing city reflected a divided society characterized by both an embrace and a fear of new technologies, attitudes that deeply affected both Europeans and Americans at the turn of the century. Sharing the same concerns, architects and photographers were in search of new modern forms, directly influencing each other and contributing to the transformation of aesthetic values. Through an analysis of the Flatiron Building—especially its reception at the time it was built, as evidenced through newspaper articles—and its impact on photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen, this paper investigates the making of America’s modern identity through architecture, a complex and often contradictory process. New Technologies and the Vertical Growth of New York City Nineteenth-century America saw rapid development due to the Industrial Revolution. Increased productivity led to significant economic growth that prompted profound changes in society, including the shift from rural to urban life, the development of electrical and telecommunication systems, and the expansion of infrastructure, including roads, railroads, bridges, and canals. By 1850, New York City was the leading commercial urban area in the country, mainly because of the amount of trade going through its port. In the next decade, it also became the financial center of America with the installation of the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street. The city’s economic prosperity led to rapid population growth; by 1875, New York had more than a million inhabitants.1 The growing demand for goods stimulated industrial production further, leading to an increase in administrative accounts, inventories, and financial transactions requiring both personnel and office space. Office buildings emerged as a means to satisfy this demand.2 Combined with the limited geographical conditions of the island of Manhattan, these new demands quickly led to urban congestion and the increase of land value in the dense business district occupying the southern part of the city. Skyscrapers emerged in the late 1800s as a solution to this problem, allowing for vertical, rather than horizontal, growth of the city. Resulting from business demands, these buildings challenged tradition and met functional needs instead of perpetuating symbolic or aesthetic forms. The rise of skyscrapers would not have been possible without tech nological innovations aimed at increasing productivity and profit,
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themselves the result of industrialization and subsequent urban growth. Electricity led to the invention of the elevator—introduced by Otis Tufts in the 1850s—and the birth of power-operated construction equipment, both of which directly influenced the modernization of architecture.3 Metal structures—first of iron, then of steel—enabled greater spacing between columns and nonstructural walls, thus maximizing interior space as a response to the rise in land value.4 New technologies including wind bracing, anchoring, and fire protection also ensured the security of a building’s structure; others such as heating, ventilation, and plumbing enhanced the quality of interior spaces. Tradition Versus Modernity Although intense industrialization redefined America and established a growing capitalist economy driven by mass production and consumption, not all of the technological innovations that enabled the development of skyscrapers were immediately embraced by society. While New York quickly became the capital of business, industry, and commerce, reflecting the new capitalist model, its inhabitants—and their prevailing cultural values—did not follow at the same pace. Late-nineteenth-century Americans were largely conservative, especially in matters related to religion, in particular Christianity. The rise of skyscrapers symbolized the loss of power of religious institutions; until then, churches were both the dominant force in society and the most prominent buildings in the urban skyline. The Gothic Revival-style Trinity Church, the tallest building in New York from 1847 to 1890, suddenly lost its prominence in the city’s skyline, paralleling the conflicts between religion and capital, old and new, tradition and modernity.5 In addition to being concerned for the future of religion, nineteenthcentury Americans feared losing traditional aesthetic values. The greatest American artists and architects had studied in Europe to bring the highly developed expressions of the past to the new world. Buildings in American cities habitually showed a mix of styles, from classical Greek and Roman to Renaissance, Beaux-Arts, and Gothic. Architectural appropriation was seen as a means to assert credibility and to give power to a nation with little history that was nonetheless eager to replicate the achievements of Europe. The emergence of skyscrapers, then, challenged the formal references hitherto praised, eventually leading to the main problem faced by this new architectural type: its potential detachment from the past. In order to gain public support for their endeavors, modern architects faced the challenge of replicating aesthetic features characteristic of earlier European structures to prove that skyscrapers could also achieve a monumental character. They hid the complex engineering that made possible the construction of skyscrapers behind a superficial discussion about style and visibility. As engineering magazine The Brickbuilder stated in 1896:
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3 Ibid., 35–36. 4 It was only in the mid-1800s, with the need to maximize space in the cities, that the development of construction methods led to the use of iron and steel skeletons in multistory buildings. 5 Landau and Condit, Rise of the New York Skyscraper, 1865–1913, 110.
6 Clarence Blackall, “High Buildings,” The Brickbuilder 5 (1896): 29. 7 Marc A. Weiss, “Skyscraper Zoning: New York’s Pioneering Role,” Journal of the American Planning Association 58, no. 2 (1992): 207. 8 James R. Abbot, “Louis Sullivan, Architectural Modernism, and the Creation of Democratic Space,” The American Sociologist 31, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 66–67. 9 Ibid., 68.
We do not need to reduce the height of buildings, but rather, we want to reform the public tastes and the greed of capitalists, so that we will design our tall buildings as ornaments and not as mere money mills.6 Only by referring to past styles could skyscrapers, with their new function and form, be accepted by society. The appearance of these buildings, therefore, had to perpetuate dominant aesthetic values from Europe. Converting them into ornaments for the city, or monuments to a new world, architects made the new building type of the skyscraper acceptable by incorporating admired forms from the past. The Flatiron Building One of the buildings that most impacted society at the time of its construction was New York City’s Flatiron Building (1902). Extensively documented by the media, the building’s peculiar form inspired contemporary artists, and became a symbol of progress that ultimately contributed to the acceptance of skyscrapers in America. In the first years of the 1900s, while the southern tip of Manhattan was already congested with tall buildings, other parts of the city were still characterized by small, four- to five-story buildings. The Flatiron, completed in 1902, became the tallest building north of the Financial District. Located on a triangular plot between Broadway, Fifth Avenue, and Twenty-third Street, the building has a distinctive presence and imposing shape that attracted the attention of the public as few other buildings had before. Originally named the Fuller Building as a tribute to George A. Fuller, the founder of the building’s construction firm, it soon became known by its nickname, the Flatiron, which resulted from the unique shape of its lot. Designed by Chicago-based architect Daniel Burnham, the building reflected some principles—specifically, steel-frame construction and tripartite composition—of the Chicago School of Architecture, but came to represent New York’s lead over Chicago, an accomplishment due mainly to the 1893 Chicago law that limited the height of buildings in that city.7 As New York had no such law, architects were able to build ever higher. Chicago had seen the rise of the world’s first tall buildings when, after the 1871 fire, it faced the need for reconstruction. This, combined with a population boom and an increase in land value, stimulated architects to envision the possibility of an entirely new city.8 Architect and engineer William Le Baron Jenney was responsible for the first skyscraper with a steel frame, the Home Insurance Building (1884).9 He directly influenced a generation of architects, including Burnham himself, who would soon become a prominent figure in Chicago, designing the remarkable Rookery (1888) and Reliance (1895) buildings. Burnham’s renown as an architect and urban planner became evident in 1893, when he was responsible
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for the creation of the White City at the World’s Columbian Exposition.10 Burnham’s praise of classical styles countered the ideas propagated by other prominent figures from the Chicago School of Architecture, including Louis Sullivan, who envisioned an authentic style for skyscrapers, liberated from the past, in which “form followed function”— the motto of later modern architecture.11 While Sullivan was thought to be ahead of his time, Burnham’s adoption of the Beaux-Arts style fulfilled contemporary society’s demand for acceptable aesthetic references, thus empowering new architectural forms with admired styles from the past.12 The Chicago-based George A. Fuller Company, responsible for the Flatiron’s construction, promoted steel skeletons in the construction of skyscrapers. After working with Burnham in Chicago, the company expanded to several American cities, including New York, where it became responsible for the construction of the Flatiron, a commercial office building that would house the company’s offices. By inviting Burnham to design its first building in New York City, the Fuller Company intended to represent its power through the creation of an innovative skyscraper. The Flatiron—which also housed a retail space and a restaurant— comprised twenty-one stories reaching 307 feet high, thanks to its steel-frame construction.13 In order to create a sense of unity, Burnham opted for a tripartite composition characteristic of the Chicago School of Architecture. Inherited from the Beaux-Arts style, the tripartite scheme was based on the Greek column division into base, shaft, and capital. The Flatiron mirrors it through its five-story base, twelve-story shaft, and four-story capital, emphasizing horizontal lines between floors. Unity was achieved through the use of color—a gray limestone base with colored terra cotta and brick above the building’s facade—and texture— high- and low-relief ornaments as well as projecting windows. The Flatiron appeared frequently in local newspapers and magazines, which documented its construction process and people’s reactions to it. The New York Tribune announced that “New York has many impressive skyscrapers but none more remarkable than the Flatiron,” noting its “edge almost as sharp as the bow of a ship” and its capacity to “accommodate an ordinary village population.”14 The same article also mentioned that crowds of people gathered in the streets to stare at the building after the scaffolding was removed (Fig. 1). Surprise and admiration characterized most reactions, but complaints were also frequent due to strong winds in the area, which created concerns for those afraid of the building’s height.15 The building’s sudden popularity contrasted with the strong opinion of critics, who believed it to be, especially in terms of form, a “monstrosity.”16 At first, many were suspicious of the building’s safety, but its construction represented an engineering accomplishment that could not be denied. The slender structure and triangular shape added a poetic character to the
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10 Ibid., 73. 11 Ibid., 81. 12 The Beaux-Arts style was disseminated in the late 1800s by the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, which promoted Classicism through a return to Greek, Roman, and Renaissance architecture. 13 Landau and Condit, Rise of the New York Skyscraper, 1865–1913, 301. 14 “New York Has Many Impressive Skyscrapers But None More Remarkable Than the Flatiron,” New York Tribune, June 29, 1902, http:// chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/ lccn/sn83030214/1902-06-29/ ed-1/seq-33/. 15 “Fiercest Storm in This City Since August, 1889,” The Evening World, September 16, 1903, http://chroniclingamerica. loc.gov/lccn/sn83030193/190309-16/ed-1/seq-1/. 16 “Give Greater New York a Plan,” The New York Times, December 24, 1902, http:// query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract. html?res=9B06E3DC163AE733 A25757C2A9649D946397D6CF.
17 Photographs became more frequent in newspapers after 1890, when halftone reproductions soon replaced the engravings made by draftsmen. 18 Dorothy Norman, Alfred Stieglitz: An American Seer (New York: Random House, 1973), 45.
building, inspiring artists who, at the time, were attracted to the new urban life. The recent use of photography in illustrated newspapers contributed to the many depictions of the Flatiron in the media, playing an important role in its acceptance as a symbol of New York’s modernity.17 Photographer Alfred Stieglitz remarked: It appeared to be moving toward me like the bow of a monster ocean steamer—a picture of New America still in the making… The Flat Iron [sic] is to the United States what the Parthenon was to Greece.18 Stieglitz recognized the Flatiron as representative of a new American architectural form, relating it to both new technology and tradition, to the ocean steamer and Greek monumental architecture. Stieglitz’s statement reveals the influence that the Flatiron had in the creation of “New America” that artists and architects were striving to build. Stieglitz’s own battle focused on the recognition of photography as a fine art. Camera Work, the journal he edited and published from 1902 to 1917, as well as the gallery he opened in New York in 1905, known as 291, were both vehicles used to promote photography as an art form. Rather than emphasizing the technical role attributed to photography, Stieglitz saw the artistic potential of the medium. The modern city served as his subject, and the Flatiron, in particular, represented the very incarnation of America’s new architectural potential. Photographs of the Flatiron by Stieglitz and Edward Steichen (Figs. 2 and 3)—both were published in Camera Work, and the second was exhibited at 291 gallery—show not only the building’s influence on the imagination of artists but also their attempt to transform the aesthetic values of American society through the propagation of modern architectural forms. The modern America rendered in these photographs, however, still veils the technological city in formal references from the past, especially those inherited from Impressionism and American landscape painting. By representing nightscapes and the effects of light and weather, photographers created a mysterious, romanticized picture of the city, where nature’s beauty was still revered. Both show the Flatiron from a distance, in the background, with Madison Square’s trees in the foreground—a unity between nature and city. The Flatiron emerges in a misty atmosphere, marked by snow in Stieglitz’s photograph, and darkness in Steichen’s. Architects and photographers, therefore, experienced similar conflicts. While the Flatiron relied on historical styles to be accepted by society as a new architectural type, photographs emphasized past references to be recognized as an art form. In doing so, however, the latter pictured the modern city—controversial buildings included—in all its splendor. They made the new look old and carved for it a place in people’s hearts.
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Conclusion The Flatiron reveals the struggles of a society caught between tradition and modernity in the early 1900s. While it became a symbol of modern capitalist values through its emphasis on office and commercial space, the Flatiron relied on aesthetic values inherited from the past to gain an admiration comparable to that of European monuments, palaces, and churches. The rise and acceptance of a new modern function thus preceded the creation of an essentially modern form. Illustrated newspapers and magazines, through articles and photographs, further disseminated the image of the building, creating familiarity with this new architectural form. The next step towards the consolidation of a modern American arch itecture, independent from tradition, would be the creation of new, formal values. Thanks to photographs like Stieglitz’s, the Flatiron represented a first step in the making of this new architectural identity. The urban modernity of New York would soon be admired worldwide, influencing Europeans who saw it as the “city of the future” and the ultimate reference for the creation of a modern culture liberated from tradition.19 It was not least because of the city’s early skyscrapers, in particular the Flatiron, that this could happen. One might say that the Flatiron Building lies at the foundations of modern art.
Catarina Flaksman is an M.S. History of Art and Design candidate at Pratt Institute. She completed her undergraduate studies in Architecture and Urbanism in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
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19 Wanda M. Corn, The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915–1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 52.
Fig. 1
Fig. 2
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Scivias: A Doctrine of Female Empowerment
EMMA KAYE
This paper examines Scivias, a manuscript made by famous twelfth-century mystic Hildegard of Bingen. Created in a time when being a woman was considered as being inferior, Hildegard’s manuscript represents women in a way that was rare in medieval times, and reshapes the Christian doctrine in a way that privileges the feminine. The imagery in Scivias attests to this with its emphasis on female embodiment and sensuality. The manuscript has thus been seen as one of the earliest examples of a feminist text. At the age of 42, famous twelfth-century abbess, composer, writer, and mystic Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) was instructed by a voice from the heavens to record her mystical visions, which she had experienced since childhood. What resulted was her best‑known work, Scivias—its name derives from the Latin phrase Scito vias Domini, or “Know the ways of the Lord.” Scivias is a collection of dramatic writings that emphasize female aspects of the divine. The work, which uses Hildegard’s prophetic visions as its source material, is representative of her unique and transcendent cognitive processes. Relying heavily on a symbolic language of images, Scivias offers representations of empowered women rare in twelfth-century medieval art. Although Hildegard humbly stressed the weakness, frailty, and inferiority of her gender as causes of her divine empowerment, the illuminations and text in Scivias demonstrate the opposite. The first version of Scivias was made in 1165 at Rupertsberg, a monastery founded by Hildegard of Bingen in modern Germany. Prior to founding
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This paper was written for Gender and Medieval Art (HA551), taught by Dorothy Shepard in fall 2014.
1 Madeline Harrison Caviness, Art in the Medieval West and Its Audience (Aldershot; Burlington USA: Ashgate, 2001), 79. 2 Barbara Newman, Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 22.
the monastery, Hildegard became the head magistra, or female teacher, at the monastery of Disibodenberg, where she lived for many years and provided spiritual guidance to her fellow nuns. Scivias was born at the monastery she later established, Rupertsberg, where Hildegard lived in isolation with her nuns. The content of the manuscript was based on Hildegard’s mystical visions, which she and her monastic scribe, Volmar, worked to record. It has been suggested that Hildegard would sketch her visions onto a wax tablet, while Volmar or one of her other secretaries would sit beside her and record the words she spoke.1 Although historians debate the level of agency Hildegard had over the production of the manu script, most have concluded that she oversaw its making. However, in analyzing the manuscript, we must keep in mind the gap between the content of Scivias and Hildegard’s actual visions as well as the numerous levels of translation that her visions must have undergone, which were initially invisible to all but Hildegard. The visions traveled from Hildegard’s arm to her tablet—and the words she spoke were transmitted to Volmar’s ears, then to his hand and to his pen. From there, the text would be sent to the team of artists at Rupertsberg, who would develop the illuminations to accompany the text. Before the original was lost during World War II, the manuscript of Scivias became the responsibility of Josepha Knips of the Benedictine monastery at Eibingen. Knips’s color reproduction of the manuscript of Scivias, produced many centuries after the original, is the version we study today. The influence of the biases of all those involved with Scivias and the corrosive nature of time are inevitable, leaving Hildegard’s original intentions for the manuscript ambiguous. Thus my propositions in this essay are based on my own interpretations of texts and images, and they are intended to be speculative. Hildegard’s mystical visions acted as a point of departure from the earthly realm, and it is difficult for us to understand this process. Though we can assume that she was still conscious of the visible world, at least in part, she was overcome by transcendence and divine knowledge. These visions often take the form of sensually felt theological images. The texts that accompany the illuminations to Scivias are long, repetitive descriptions of her visions, emphasizing tactility and the physical body, merged with descriptions of theocentric images of creation, incarnation, and the Antichrist. It is as if, through her visions, Hildegard experienced the physical reality of Christian mythological imagery. The text in Scivias presents an interesting relationship between narrative and the visually descriptive, sensual parts of the visions. Hildegard spoke in unpolished Latin, in an “obscure and unusual style”2 for which Guibert of Gambleaux, her secretary following Volmar’s death, criticized her. Hildegard’s use of language is fascinating; given that her lack of polish was coupled with a limited vocabulary, Hildegard must have felt confronted with the limitations of written language as an agent for
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expression. Perhaps it was Hildegard’s language, grounded as it is in the sensually descriptive and the immediately found and seen, that feminized aspects of Scivias. While Hildegard frequently switches between first person and third person, she never refers to God in the second person. Thus the writing seems more like a proclamation than a commemorative prayer, employing a mode of expression that is more subjective in nature. The experience of reading her visions feels circumambulatory, as they omit the focus of a continuous logical narrative. Hildegard’s language thus seems both to enhance the expression of her visions and to limit that expression to the descriptive realm, yet it truly captures the essence of her distinct female subjectivity. Hildegard’s departures from common theological narratives were only described as a distinctively feminist method long after her time. This reading of Hildegard’s work adopts the feminist notion that patriarchal ideals are embedded not only in the narrative function, but also in language itself. Feminist scholar Hortense Spillers speaks to the phenomena of language in her 1987 essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” as it relates to her identity as a black American woman: [The] problem before us is therefore deceptively simple: the terms enclosed in quotation marks (“black woman”) in the preceding paragraph isolate over determined [sic] nominative properties. Embedded in this bizarre axiological ground, they demonstrate a type of telegraphic coding; they are markers so loaded with mythical pre-possession [sic] that there is no easy way for the agents buried beneath them to come clean.3 Spillers’ famous essay attempts to deconstruct the artifice of the “black woman” that, she argues, is so deeply fixed in the properties ascribed by the practice of naming. If we take the feminist approach as Spillers does and ascribe narrative to ideology or patriarchy, Hildegard’s deviation from linguistic finesse seems to privilege sensual feminine language. Although Hildegard did finally accept Guibert’s edits, she aimed for the preservation of the “true sense” of her visions. While the translation from her visions to the text of Scivias may not fully capture all of the extrasensory details of her experience, the text still emphasizes the visual and sensual expression of the visions. I find this especially evident in Hildegard’s third vision, “The Universe and its Symbolism,” which is accompanied by the illumination called Cosmic Egg (Fig. 1). In this vision, Hildegard describes the creation of the universe as an act of God through an account of the elements: And beneath that ether I saw watery air with a white zone beneath it, which diffused itself there and imparted moisture
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3 Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 64.
4 Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, trans. Columba Hart and Jane Bishop (New York: Paulist Press, 1990), 27. 5 Fiona Maddocks, Hildegard of Bingen: The Woman of Her Age (New York: Doubleday, 2001), 165. 6 Ibid., 168–169. 7 Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, 31.
to the whole instrument. And when it suddenly contracted it sent forth a sudden rain with great noise, and when it gently spread out it gave a pleasant and softly falling rain. But from it too came a blast with its whirlwinds, which spread itself throughout the aforementioned instrument.4 Hildegard’s description of God’s act of creation is intensely physical, as if she were describing a living organism; this descriptive part of the vision is highly sensual. The progression of images—“watery air […] imparted moisture to the whole instrument […] contracted […] rain with great noise…”—could potentially be read as erotic. While Hildegard remained a virgin, holding fast to her virtues, her know ledge of sexuality and intercourse was considerable.5 This could have been due to her interactions in the monastery clinic with widows, married women, prostitutes, and midwives. Her career as a physician and healer also informed her knowledge of human biology, which may have influenced her visions. She describes the sexual act in one of her medical texts, Causae et Curae: When the storm of lust surges in a man, it turns around in him like a mill. For his loins are like a forge which the marrow provides with fire […] the wind of pleasure comes forth from the female’s arrow […]. This wind spreads out in her abdomen because in this area around a woman’s navel the uterus has a wide and, as it were, open space. Consequently she will burn there more gently with pleasure, albeit more frequently because of her moisture.6 Hildegard’s graphic description of the sexual act employs the same vocabulary she used in Scivias to describe the creation of the universe— wind, fire, moisture; these metaphorical acts of conception, both earthly and sexual, hold an inextricable relation to the elements. The composition of Cosmic Egg seems overtly vaginal. Surrounded by the fire of God’s vengeance, the flames protect the universe from those outside of the true faith. Once again, fire is associated with the masculine. The moon, which sits above the portal to what looks like a terrestrial world, is the luminous globe situated just above the center of the universe. Visually, the moon resembles a clitoris in form and in its placement above the central portal. In it you see a globe of white fire and great magnitude, which is the true symbol of the unconquered church, which, as you can see, asserts in faith innocent brightness and great honor.7 Hildegard symbolically designates the moon as the unconquered Church, asserting its authority and honor. In the subsequent description, Hildegard
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designates two little torches as representing the Old Testament and the New, ensuring that the Church does not exceed the measure of its course and rush into new practices. While the symbolic character of Cosmic Egg might not necessarily be intentionally erotic, I believe it purposefully emanates the sacredness and power of the feminine. It is not only the vaginal form that radiates this, but also the interplay between the masculine and the feminine forces in the piece—God’s fire protects and emblazes the torches that guide the course of the moon, the radiant symbol of the feminine and the Church. While God is the universe’s ultimate container, the power resides in the moon, the symbolic clitoris. I do not intend this analysis of Cosmic Egg to reduce this complex work to a sexual symbol; rather, this reading of Cosmic Egg through the lens of sexuality high lights the feminine character evident in Hildegard’s representation of the universe-capsule. Hildegard indicates throughout Scivias that the acts of creation and Incarnation are the work of a female. Her focus on the Incarnation of Christ as the primary reason for creation focuses on the feminine divine, which Barbara Newman describes: “Incarnation is not primarily a historical event but an event beyond time and history in the sphere of the eternal, feminine divine.”8 This subsuming phenomenon of Incarnation, which is eternal and cyclical, required the mysterious birth of the world, destined to be continually renewed and extended. Christ and his mother are most commonly associated with the salvation of the world. However, another figure, Ecclesia, appears more explicitly in the New Testament as the bride of Christ.9 Ecclesia is thus central to Hildegard’s imagery and representative of the predestination of Christ and the essence of the Church. Representations of Ecclesia in medieval art were well established by the twelfth century. Her image was used in association with the Apocalypse, some by eighth-century monk Beatus of Liebana. Another prominent twelfth-century abbess, Herrad of Hohenberg, also discussed Ecclesia in her manuscripts. However, in a traditional manner quite different from Hildegard’s, Herrad portrays Ecclesia as a victim attacked by a dragon, representing a corrupt and evil force: the Antichrist. Hildegard’s vision of this in her book, known as The Last Days and the Fall of the Antichrist (Fig. 2), by contrast portrays Ecclesia herself as corrupt. It is the genital mask, described in the manuscript of Scivias and visually represented in Josepha Knips’s reproduction (but not visible in the original Rupertsberg image), that represents the Antichrist. Hildegard described the demon head in her vision: And from that place that denotes the female, she had various scaly blemishes, and in that latter place was a black and monstrous head. It had fiery eyes and ears like an ass,
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8 Newman, Sister of Wisdom, 46. 9 Ibid., 199.
10 Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, 427. 11 Richard Kenneth Emmerson, “The Representation of Antichrist in Hildegard of Bingen’s Scivias: Image, Word, Commentary, and Visionary Experience,” Gesta / International Center of Medieval Art 41, no. 2 (2002): 98. 12 Newman, Sister of Wisdom, 3.
and nostrils and mouth like a Lion: it opened wide its jowels [sic] and terribly clashed its horrible iron-colored teeth.10 In the lower register of the image, Ecclesia sports the genital mask. Beside her the demon sits atop a mountain, attempting to ascend to heaven in imitative parody of Christ. In the upper left register, each of the five beasts is related to a moral lesson; their evil powers travel through the ropes attached to the peaks of carnal desire. In the upper right sits the youth representing truth and justice, raised up by those who elected him, morally balancing the beast’s evil with his good.11 This interplay between the forces of good and evil is present throughout the composition. It is especially complex in the representation of Ecclesia, who is ultimately good—indicated by her milky white feet— but simultaneously possessed by the evil Antichrist. Richard Emmerson suggests that the Antichrist’s invasion of Ecclesia’s body represents Hildegard’s belief that evil was present within the church, referring particularly to the corruptive nature of simony. Emmerson thus considers “The Last Days” to be the most radical of the images in Scivias. Based on the symbolic use of imagery in Scivias, Emmerson’s interpretation of this work is convincing; however, we ought to take a step back in order to analyze the implications of Ecclesia’s imagery as another example of feminine privilege and agency. The representation of the genital mask on Ecclesia is quite disturbing in Knips’s reproduction. Her legs are covered in blood and her whole abdomen is overtaken by an evil head. The corruption of Ecclesia’s body, and thus her sexuality, becomes an agent for Hildegard’s protests against sacrilege. This differs quite drastically from the traditional image of Ecclesia as a helpless victim of the Antichrist. As an alternative, if we consider Ecclesia’s body symbolically as the Church, it personalizes the corruption. Using Ecclesia’s body, Hildegard empowers not only the Church, but also women and femininity. Because the demon’s head has been integrated into the body of Ecclesia, rather than harassing her from a distance, we are struck with the disturbing idea of the corruption of the female. The illumination symbolically reprioritizes Ecclesia’s femininity in a much bolder fashion than earlier, traditional representations. Ultimately, of course, the Antichrist, like the demon here, is to fall. The feminist nature of this work that protests the corruption of the Church discreetly reveals Hildegard’s view. Scivias thus seems to have been a platform that enabled her not only to communicate the voice of God, but also to express her own political opinions. From our contemporary perspective, Hildegard’s humility kept her from assuming the feminine authority in public that she seemed to assert in Scivias. While she outwardly accepted her culture’s notions of female inferiority, referring to herself as weak and frail, she simultaneously protested these conventions through her empowered images of females, which extend
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beyond those described here. Newman argues that these two strategies, while seemingly opposite, are paradoxically related, and central to Hildegard’s identity.12 Hildegard seems to have understood very clearly the implications of gender dynamics. Her works, grounded in Christian doctrine, nevertheless directly privilege the feminine. While maintaining relation and reference to the Christian narrative, her expression of her divine visions through image and text emphasizes the sensually and physically tactile. Hildegard’s imagery, operating on her lexicon of symbols, empowers the feminine. She credits femininity as a divine force, responsible for creation, and as the sacred essence of the Church that must be protected from evil and corruption.
Emma Kaye received her B.F.A. in History of Art and Design with a minor in Ceramics from Pratt Institute in fall 2014. With a propensity for cross-disciplinary studies, not limited to medieval art history, Kaye found herself making and writing about art from a feminist perspective during her time at Pratt.
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12 Newman, Sister of Wisdom, 3.
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Tradition and Adaptation: Use of Calligraphy and Script in Contemporary Middle Eastern Graphic Design
TERESA LUNDGREN
Much art and design in the Middle East has its origins in a deep religious tradition, in which calligraphy has long had an important role. However, today’s Middle Eastern art and design is rapidly integrating this heritage with international design and business sensibilities. This essay addresses the historical importance of calligraphy in Islamic design, the effects of globalization on language use in the Middle East, and the development of typography in contemporary Middle Eastern graphic design. Although much contemporary typography no longer carries a religious message, its calligraphic style demonstrates a reverence for a cultural past in an increasingly culturally homogeneous world.
This paper was written for Origins of Contemporary Communications Design (HD641), taught by Dara Kiese in fall 2014.
The Middle East has a deep religious and artistic history but it is quickly changing. The populations of Gulf Cooperation Council countries such as the United Arab Emirates and Qatar comprise over 75% expatriates.1 It is not unusual for locals to study in Western countries for higher education before moving back home to work. Globalization, capitalism, and transience in the region are affecting all areas of life, including design. For pragmatic reasons, designs are being adapted and contemporized in both form and function, applying a Modernist sensibility towards use of space and cropping, incorporating multilingualism, and shortening the length of words and phrases that are used. While modernization and Western influence on regional graphic design is evident, many religious motifs still persist in design today, including an intricate interaction of letters with each other, the clear use of geometry and classical scripts, and the artful transformation of words into shapes (calligrams). However,
1 The Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf was originally known as the Gulf Cooperation Council. Established in 1981, the GCC is a regional political and economic union of Arab states connected to the Arabian Gulf, including Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.
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2 Khaled Azzam, ed., Arts and Crafts of the Islamic Lands: Principles, Materials, Practice (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2013), 142.
the meanings and significance associated with these aesthetic choices are largely just a trace, retained for the sake of preserving cultural identity rather than for any strict religious purpose.
3 Yuri A. Petrosyan, Oleg F. Akimushkin, Anas B. Khalidov, and Efim A. Rezvan, Pages of Perfection: Islamic Paintings and Calligraphy from the Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg (Lugano: ARCH Foundation, 1995), 111.
Importance of the Written Word in Islam The Qur’an, the holy book of Islam, is believed to be the direct word of Allah, as it was given to the Prophet Muhammad through the angel Gabriel. Despite Muhammad’s own illiteracy, he stressed to his followers the need for having these words copied precisely so that all people could know the divine prophecy. It was not enough, however, that the prophecy be written; it had to be written beautifully.2 Writing as religious artwork became revered and used in Islam in a manner similar to icons in Catholicism, adorning niches and architectural spaces.3 While Islam is a religion that primarily rejects figurative artwork for fear of it becoming a graven image, the Qur’an is believed to be a direct connection to God and a source of inspiration rather than an object of worship unto itself. Along with the development of calligraphy as an art came the development of two other arts, geometry and Islimi.4 Ultimately all three of these were used together for the creation of intricate illuminated manuscripts and decorative elements in mosques.
4 Azzam, Arts and Crafts of the Islamic Lands: Principles, Materials, Practice, 128. Islimi is the technical name for the art of the arabesque, or the vegetal decorative motifs used to fill negative spaces when geometric patterns and shapes are not used. 5 Petrosyan, Pages of Perfection: Islamic Paintings and Calligraphy from the Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, 55. 6 Azzam, Arts and Crafts of the Islamic Lands: Principles, Materials, Practice, 146–7. The eight are Thuluth, Muhaqqaq, Naskh, Maghrebi Kufic, Nast’aliq, Diwani, Riq’a, and Squared Kufic. 7 Henceforth to be called Kufic for the sake of simplicity. 8 Petrosyan, Pages of Perfection: Islamic Paintings and Calligraphy from the Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, 55. 9 Azzam, Arts and Crafts of the Islamic Lands: Principles, Materials, Practice, 128.
Design Ideas in Islamic Calligraphy Over time a number of standardized styles of writing developed, falling into two main categories: monumental and cursive.5 The monumental is approached like drawing and is more geometric, using vertical space. It is typically used on objects and in architectural spaces. Cursive scripts, on the other hand, are thought of strictly as writing and are more fluid, moving horizontally. Cursive is used primarily for block texts and manuscripts. There are eight major scripts that are still commonly seen today in Islamic calligraphy,6 but for the sake of relevance, two different styles of calligraphy will be primarily addressed in this essay: Squared or Decorative Kufic7 and Naskh. Kufic is a monumental script. Although there are many variations of Kufic scripts, they are united through their diligent use of geometry and proportion.8 When used in manuscripts it is large format with an average of four lines per page; its lines are thick, angular, and drafted precisely according to the specified rules (Fig. 1). Due to its size and strict geometry, it is also the most common form of calligraphy used as a decorative element in religious architecture (Fig. 2). The text is generally a passage from the Qur’an, a prayer, or an invocation of Allah. Kufic script lends itself particularly well to filling large areas of rectangular space because its letters are similarly rectilinear. In these architectural spaces, there is an ornate accompanying decoration with geometric and vegetal motifs. This incessant patterning and horror vacui, or fear of empty space, lends itself to the idea of the infinite and the glory of God’s creation, and the Islimi, with its vegetal motif weaving itself around in an “eternal spiral,” represents the interdependence of all creation.9
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Naskh, in opposition to Kufic, is a cursive script. It was developed centuries later and is the most prominent script used in Qur’anic manuscripts in the Arab nations since the sixteenth century.10 Cursive scripts, including Naskh, are rarely if ever seen in architectural spaces, but often carry the same sense of horror vacui in the pages of illustrated manuscripts, which are rich in geometric detail and organic growth, symbols of abundance and perfection (Fig. 3). Naskh is much smaller in scale and daintier, with its fluid, organic strokes and moderate use of diacritics.11 Poetry, which is viewed as a religious pursuit, is also often written in this script.12 Cursive scripts are also what are used to create calligrams, images of recognizable objects composed from words that spell out or mean some thing symbolic of the image they create. Often appearing in the shapes of animals, Naskh, with its fluidity of line, is well-suited to this kind of organic manipulation of form, whereas the geometric lines of Kufic are not (Fig. 4). It is clear from the examples that each type of script holds its own importance in terms of both form and function, more suited to different spaces and different uses that have been adapted in some ways in contemporary design. Globalization and Its Effects on Language in the Middle East Decline in use and comprehension of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) has been occurring for well over a century, and frequent pleas for a restandardization of the language to make it less formal are nothing new.13 Both fear of and hope for major linguistic change are increasingly apparent. During the last twenty years the region has increasingly focused on conducting business internationally, and large populations have moved into the region to build and develop business and infra structure. Because of this, a greater importance is placed on learning English and many families are choosing to enroll their students at private schools with international curricula.14, 15 Parents regularly speak a second language at home to reinforce language acquisition, or often speak colloquial Arabic. Most households still place a traditionally higher value on speaking and social interaction as modes of inquiry rather than reading, thus leaving children often only semifluent in any language.16 On top of this are changes that come naturally with globalization and the rise of popular media and technology. There is an inherent bias programmed into digital technology for the use and display of the Latin alphabet. While websites themselves can be written and edited with a variety of alphabetic keyboards, things like URLs are still all written in the Latin character system. Additionally, until the advent of the smartphone, on which foreign keyboards could be programmed, texting had to be done using Latin characters. This forced either the use of another language or the transliteration of the original into a hybrid, a phenomenon that has made a major impact beyond the realm of technology.17
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10 Ibid., 146. Other scripts used by non-Arab Muslims were more popular at that time; Ottoman Turks preferred Diwani and Persians Nast’aliq for cursive scripts. 11 Diacritics are marks, similar to accents, used to indicate vowels and keep the meaning of words very clear. This is essential for interpretation because texts such as the Qur’an are taken to be the literal word of God. Common written Arabic generally does not include the diacritics because recognition of words is possible without them when text is read in context. 12 Poems are revered to this degree partly because of their often-spiritual content, but also because they carry on a linguistic tradition that celebrates the beauty of the Arabic language. 13 Mohammad Ali Yaghan, “ ‘Arabizi’: A Contemporary Style of Arabic Slang,” Design Issues 24, no. 2 (April 1, 2008): 41. MSA is often compared to Shakespearean English, whereas colloquial Arabic is comparable to Modern English. Official business and governmental meetings are run in and texts are written in MSA, which is a problem because MSA is out-of-date and only the elite are able to fully understand it. 14 Hesham Shawish and BBC News, “Campaign to Save the Arabic Language in Lebanon,” BBC News, June 24, 2010. 15 Farah Halime, “Classical Arabic Language Being Forgotten,” Financial Times, October 20, 2013. 16 Josephine O’Brien, “Developing Literacy in English and Arabic Among Young Learners,” accessed November 12, 2014. http://www.academia. edu/5125567/Developing_ literacy_in_English_and_Arabic_ among_young_learners. 17 Yaghan, “ ‘Arabizi’: A Contemporary Style of Arabic Slang,” 41. This hybrid in the Middle East is called “Arabizi,” a combination of Arabic and English, or Ingilizi. While I lived in Dubai, students of mine joked that “Arabizi” was “Arab-Easy,” commenting on its simplification of the language as a whole.
18 It is oversimplifying the issue to pin linguistic simplification on decreasing literacy. Another likely factor in this change is seen in modern graphic design, especially in logos, where cleaner, more simplified designs are simply easier for consumers to recall. Yet this is still an issue of globalization and mass media. 19 It is more than fair to say that this has played its own role in the downfall of Arabic literacy and hybrid cultural identity. 20 Asma Ould Aissa, “Graphic Design from the Middle East: Cutting Edge and CrossCultural,” Al.arte.magazine, December 19, 2012. http://www. alartemag.be/en/en-design/ graphic-design-from-themiddle-east-cutting-edge-andcross-cultural/. 21 Petrosyan, Pages of Perfection: Islamic Paintings and Calligraphy from the Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, 59.
Typography in Contemporary Middle Eastern Design Because of globalization many adaptations are taking place within the Islamic traditions of Arabic calligraphy, and these are seen most notably in the Middle East through the region’s graphic design. While changes in linguistics do not typically come to mind when one examines the aesthetics of graphic design in the Middle East today, the simplification of language is still visually clear. In some cases it just means shortening words and phrases used to communicate a much more complex idea,18 whereas in others it means the inclusion of, or hybridization with, another language to reach a larger audience. These sociolinguistic changes are seen concurrently with the continuing popularity and ubiquity of Western movies, television, products, and advertising.19 The transfor mation of preexisting Western logos and brand identities into new Arabic is known as “Arabization” and constitutes its own branch of graphic design in the Middle East (Fig. 5). These designs are seen every day on storefronts, billboards, and television, playing a major role in typographic development. While some of these newly created fonts bear some aesthetic resemblance to Kufic or Naskh scripts, there is no intentional reference to these. The only aim here is to mimic the style of the Western brand in order to keep the identity intact in its translation. On a broader scale, the use of modern and postmodern design sensi bilities—with a clear emphasis on using negative space, mixing media and styles, and playing with a variety of sizes and proportions of words—has certainly made its way into Middle Eastern design, as well as everywhere else in the world. However, what keeps Middle Eastern graphic design separate from graphic design in the West is its attachment to the artistic traditions of Islam in the region’s mosques and illuminated manuscripts. Initially hesitant to incorporate calligraphy into the medium of graphic design because of its status as the highest form of art, and a sacred one at that,20 graphic designers are appropriating it for design purposes. Historically, Islamic calligraphy was compared in poetry to “the beauty of one’s beloved, the shape and curves of her body, and her movements [were compared] to that of individual letters of the alphabet.”21 Although designers are no longer searching for the sacred, what can still be seen today is an almost religious devotion to finding beauty in the form. Contemporary design still uses the interweaving and close relationship of the letters with one another, the references to geometry and traditional letterforms, and the transformation of words into recognizable shapes. Here we see, in the work of three prominent designers from across the region, different ways in which traditional calligraphic forms are used to promote cultural identity. Mouneer El-Shaarani from Syria was originally trained as a calligrapher and later became a graphic designer. Known specifically for his use of traditionally styled but highly exaggerated Kufic scripts, he isolates his designs in the center of the composition, leaving ample negative space around them to emphasize the beauty of his craftsmanship. In “Stop the Killing in Syria” (Fig. 6), he takes a break
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from his more religiously inclined works to push a political message calling for peace. The text inside the Kufic square reads “Stop the Killing,” which is seen again in the smaller bottom copy that reads “Stop the Killing in Syria” in both English and Arabic. The use of English is not normally seen in his work, but with such a plea it seems that he is making an attempt to broaden his audience. Like El-Shaarani, Mehdi Saeedi, an Iranian designer living and working in the Netherlands, was initially trained as a calligrapher before turning to graphic design. Common to his works are the use of a handmade, brushed calligraphy with letters in varying sizes overlapping and inter twining in multiple languages in order to create a calligram of a human or animal form full of compositional movement. In his poster design for an exhibition of his own works (Fig. 7), the use of a pure white negative space and the small, but more legible words in the upper right corner speak to modern European traditions. However, at the same time his design expresses his cultural and personal identity through his typical fluid brushwork and horror vacui that leads off of the page, calling to mind ideas of the infinite and unknown. Saeedi uses the letters as cutouts, with his face appearing. The marriage between his portrait and calligraphy communicates his identity and relationship with words as a graphic designer but, specifically because of the use of calligraphy, he brings to mind his relationship to Allah as a creator. The third and last example is by Tarek Atrissi from Lebanon; it is an iconic Middle Eastern poster (Fig. 8). A woman is centered in this powerful black and white image wearing a black abaya with her head uncovered, arms spread out, and face looking peacefully upwards. Behind her is a plain white background. Across her torso is a large classical Naskh script, precisely removing parts of her body and pushing her back into the negative space. It is not necessary to be able to read the script to be able to understand the reference as likely a religious one. As her abaya falls to the bottom of the frame, the realism of the photograph falls apart further and is replaced with words fitting where her legs should be, finishing off as a poetic calligram written all in English. Atrissi, unlike the previous two designers, had no formal training in classical calligraphy, but rather started his career working with computers and doing digital graphic design after attending university in London. Here his European training is clear, and multiculturalism plays an important role in what he has created. Atrissi originally was well-known in the region for his posters and promotional designs, such as this one for musician Rajae El Mouhandiz; his current work revolves mostly around the development and promotion of new, varied, and visually expressive Arabic typefaces. Each of these designs has clear cultural references, but none is overtly religious in message. And while all three of these examples are using a good deal of written Arabic in their designs, it is not necessary to be able to read what is written in order to understand the content—partly because
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of the aesthetic choices that were made, but largely because of the inclusion of a second language to ensure that the work could be accepted by an international audience. Conclusion Despite obvious changes in the form and function of traditional Islamic calligraphy and the type used in contemporary Middle Eastern graphic design, there are still striking similarities. Graphic design today still heralds the beauty of writing and uses a Modernist grid in place of the more complex geometries of centuries past. In terms of function, it is also important to note that the religious word and a word used in a logo are indexical; one is the direct word of God and the other the name of the brand it represents. While there is a lack of religious meaning in Arabic design today, a clear reverence for it still exists, if not as an actual display of faith, at least as a demonstration of cultural heritage in an ever more culturally homogeneous world. If, as Marshall McLuhan suggested, the medium is the message, then the message here is that culture and identity still matter and will continue to for quite some time.
Teresa Lundgren is a graduate student in Pratt Institute’s M.S. History of Art and Design/M.F.A. Fine Arts dual-degree program. Prior to living in New York she taught Visual Art and Theory of Knowledge at a private secondary school in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
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Adieu au Dada: Jean-Luc Godard’s Goodbye to Language, a Dadaist Reading
SOPHIE BLOOMFIELD
In fall 2014, Jean-Luc Godard released his first 3-D film, Goodbye to Language. In the following essay, the film is analyzed as a Dada work in comparison to Anemic Cinema by Marcel Duchamp. The film’s narrative and cinematic styles strongly reflect tenets of Dada, such as using visual nonsense and political references to both enhance and convolute humanist stories. This essay also evaluates Godard’s use of 3-D technology as an artistic aspect, rather than an immersive visual effect. To begin to describe Jean-Luc Godard’s 2014 Goodbye to Language (Adieu au Langage) one would have to abandon the notion that films must have a structure, a narrative plot, or an arc resembling linear time. While Goodbye to Language was certainly not the first film to forgo a traditionally linear story, it has taken the nonlinear plot to such an extreme that the story is convoluted, buried beneath philosophical musings. The film is intercut with classic and New Wave films, visual static, news footage, off-center compositions, and the journey of a dog through the country. Despite the intentional chaos, it is possible to discern a few plot points: a woman’s infidelity, a couple planning to leave Europe, a jealous husband’s violent outbreak, and a death. However, it remains unclear how the characters (aside from the main couple, a woman with a scar above her lip and a man with a large nose) relate to each other, who is killed, or whether there was only one murder in the film. In Goodbye to Language, Godard obscures the plot almost to the point of irrelevance, incorporating philosophy and politics while playing with
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This paper was written for Dada & Surrealism (HA553), taught by Ágnes Berecz in spring 2015.
1 Tim O’Riley, “Duchampoptics,” Representing Illusions: Space, Narrative and the Spectator in Fine Art Practice (Milton Keynes, England: Open University, 1998), 57. 2 Bart Testa, “Screen Words: Early Film and Avant-Garde Film in the House of the World,” Symposium Das frühe Kino und die Avantgarde (Early Cinema and the Avant-Garde), (Vienna: March 8–13, 2002). 3 O’Riley, Marcel Duchamp quoted in “Duchampoptics,” 56. 4 Ibid., 56. 5 Ibid., 58. 6 Ibid., 62.
language and narrative. At the same time, he fetishizes the natural, infantile, and primitive, and offers the audience voyeuristic looks into a couple’s sexual infidelity. Godard creates a film that is incomplete without the audience’s participation, challenging their trust in vision. Through these cinematic tactics Godard has created what is essentially a modern interpretation of a Dada film à la Marcel Duchamp’s Anemic Cinema, but this time in three dimensions. In making Anemic Cinema, Duchamp “aimed to mix mathematical, scientific perspective with story and anecdote.”1 The film itself consists of alternating shots of rotating discs depicting either spirals or language. The spirals create the illusion of depth, while the texts create linguistic puns that allude to “a set of erotic scenarios.”2 Reading the texts, however, is a challenge for the audience, as each disc spins so that only one or two words at a time are upright and legible. The spiraling shapes and inverted texts require the audience to work to understand or garner any meaning from the film. This was Duchamp’s intention, as he believed that art should actively involve the viewer and that it could not be complete until it was witnessed by an audience. As he said, “The spectator makes the picture.”3 Duchamp’s creative act is therefore located not solely in the work itself but in the interaction between work and viewer, for it is through this exchange that the work becomes part of the world.4 Just as participation is necessary to “complete” the work of Duchamp, the audience of Godard’s film is essential to its completeness. Throughout the film, the use of 3-D technology not only disorients the viewers and displaces the story, but also actively engages the eyes of the audience. Words overlap each other but remain legible as one word projects off the screen toward the viewer while the other appears at a distance; a scene that could have been shot in the split-screen style is instead stacked on top of itself, with the right and left eyes’ images overlapping. During these scenes, if the viewer closes one eye, half of the image disappears, rendering it clearer and easier to see, but incomplete. As Tim O’Riley said of Anemic Cinema, “perspective [is] being used not just as a method for creating and manipulating pictorial space but as an expressive tool in itself.”5 Some critics might argue that Godard’s use of 3-D in this film is poor craftsmanship, but the effect engages the audience beyond just looking. “The picture is no longer only a ‘referential illusion’ implying an object or scene out there, but also a construction within the mind of the viewer,”6 not just light and color on a screen. This also calls into question the validity of the eye as an organ of truth. One’s first instinct about a 3-D film might be that it will appear more realistic, a more direct representation of the world. However, in Goodbye to Language the 3-D effect creates a more illusory world than the “real” one the viewer leaves while viewing the film; the use of stereoscopy creates a distorted image that cannot exist outside the viewer’s eye. Even while sitting in
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a dark theater, “one is constantly aware of the instability of the virtual image,”7 and “the relationship between viewpoint, binocular vision and desire.”8
7 Ibid., 65.
Desire—which seems to be the catalyst of the action in Goodbye to Language—is only half-realized throughout the film. One of the main characters is an unfaithful wife. Her interactions with men are joyless at best, and result in murder at the worst. In the beginning of the film, in a scene interspersed with conversations on philosophy and absurd wordplay between unnamed characters, as well as clips of Hitler pontificating and footage of helicopter crashes, she is confronted by her husband. This scene, along with many others, is repeated throughout the film, at different locations or from different perspectives. “The repetition of difference,”9 as well as Godard’s use of nontraditional framing, serves to confuse the viewer about the truth of what has happened: when was the confrontation, who was killed, and how many times has this happened?
10 Ibid., 57.
The woman’s interactions with her lover are no less frustrating or confusing. Nor are they less violent. When the woman attempts to discuss equality and the nature of their relationship, her lover deflects and turns the conversation scatological. He insists that in the act of defecation everyone is equal, a prospect both insightful and absurd. He avoids the subject at hand by focusing on one of the most primal bodily acts in a somewhat nihilistic way that dismisses the importance of the moment. Other interactions between the adulterous couple are equally unfulfilling. Most of the time, the two are framed so that only their legs and lower torsos are in the shot, their faces out of frame. Godard also composes scenes in an off-kilter way, either by rotating the camera while filming, or setting it at an angle for the entire shot, ungrounding the eye and emphasizing not only the subordination of the visual but also the disorder and dishonesty of the relationships on screen (Fig. 1).10 Frustration in Goodbye to Language also comes from the inability of the audience to discern a clear or concise plot. At least two couples’ stories are interwoven, but it is nearly impossible to discern whether their relationships overlap. It is also unclear if the actors play the same characters consistently throughout the film, as it seems that different stories are being told at different times, indicated only by their visual environment. In addition to the human stories, a tale of a dog is interjected into the film and is just as unclear and intellectually charged as the story or stories of the couples depicted on screen. The dog’s story seems to be one about a war general, and his accomplishments and failures as well as an existential urging toward suicide. His story only begins after the film has abandoned other stories of war and technology, ushered in by a shot of a helicopter crash in which a figure in the flames closely resembles the form of the dog. Because of the lack of any linear construction, we are unsure whether this is the end or beginning of the dog’s story; we only know that he is connected to the woman and
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8 Ibid., 64. 9 Ibid., 60.
11 Testa, “Screen Words.” 12 Jean-Luc Godard, interview by Cécile Mella, Goodbye to Language DVD extra, Canon Europe, Paris, March 2014.
her lover, and serves as a vehicle for the discussion of man, as well as the introduction of nature (Fig. 2). By using a nonlinear format in conjunction with his non-mimetic and 3-D dimensional visuals, Godard not only convolutes the plot to the point where it becomes unclear even who has died—the lover? the dog?—but also creates an opportunity to play with language in a way standard filmmaking does not allow. For instance, the title of the film never officially appears on the screen; however, text intrudes on the film throughout, most notably with the words AH/DIEUX and OH/LANGAGE (Fig. 3). “The separation, into opposition, of words and images”11 is not just done with typed text: the film starts with disembodied speech and removes conversations from context to the point that they almost lose meaning and move into absurdity. Even those snippets of conversation that are understandable to the audience seem to be encoded with heavy meaning that is left off-screen, but recalls some of the sexuality and nihilism of Dadaism. At first glance and because of the innovative use of 3-D technology, people may argue that Goodbye to Language is a thoroughly modern, entirely original film that stands apart even from Godard’s previous works. Deeper analysis of his visual and linguistic tricks, as well as his references to politics, philosophy, and frustrated sexuality, reveals the film to be deeply in touch with ideas founded by the Dada movement and realized clearly in films such as Anemic Cinema. Duchamp’s hypnotic and dizzying spirals are recalled in the visual noise of static and political turmoil that interrupt and frustrate a story of violence and sexual desire that would not be unfamiliar to the Dadaists. The main couple in Goodbye to Language exchange dialogue that could easily be swapped with the erotic and pseudophilosophical puns inscribed on the discs of Anemic Cinema (Fig. 4). Even Godard’s own words stating that the purpose of the film was “to escape from ideas, if possible, to create without too many ideas, or without preconceived ideas”12 suggest that he was influenced by the tenets of Dadaism as they were executed in the works of Marcel Duchamp.
Sophie Bloomfield is a graduate student in Pratt Institute’s M.S. History of Art and Design program. A resident of New York since 2008, she received her B.F.A. in Studio Arts from Long Island University, Brooklyn.
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List of Figures
GUSTAVE CAILLEBOTTE’S PARIS: A CRITIQUE OF WALKING AS SYMBOLIC, POLITICAL, AND AESTHETIC PRACTICE Chantal Lee Fig. 1. Gustave Caillebote, Le Pont de l'Europe, 1876, oil on canvas, 125 × 180 cm. Musée d'Art Moderne, Petit Palais, Geneva, Switzerland. © Erich Lessing / ART RESOURCE, N.Y. Reproduced from Artstor: www.artstor.org (accessed April 25, 2015). Fig. 2. Gustave Caillebote, Paris Street, Rainy Day, 1877, oil on canvas, 212.2 × 276.2 cm. Art Institute of Chicago. © Erich Lessing / ART RESOURCE, N.Y. Reproduced from Artstor: www.artstor.org (accessed April 25, 2015).
THE BOURN-VITA SLEEPING BEAKER: VERNACULAR DESIGN IN THE POSTWAR UNITED KINGDOM Vitoria Hadba Fig. 1. Bourn-vita Sleeping Beaker advertisement, 1951. Courtesy of The Advertising Archives.“A.H. ‘Woody’ Fig. 2. Bourn-vita Sleeping Beaker designed by Woodfulll, 1951. Photograph by Vitoria Hadba.
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Fig. 3. Mug and saucer designed by Oliver Watson, 1934. Produced by Josiah Wedgwood and Sons. Courtesy of Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Fig. 4. Beetleware advertisement, 1930s. Courtesy of the Advertising Archives. Fig. 5. Bourn-vita advertisement. Courtesy of Punch Limited.
THE KOONSIAN CONTRADICTION Nicola Householder Fig. 1. Jeff Koons, Amore, 1988, porcelain, 32 × 20 × 20 in. (81.3 × 50.8 × 50.8 cm). Lehmann-Art Ltd. © Jeff Koons. Reproduced from Whitney Museum of American Art: http://whitney.org (accessed May 12, 2015). Fig. 2. Jeff Koons, Balloon Dog (Yellow), 1994–2000, mirror-polished stainless steel with transparent color coating, 121 × 143 × 45 in. (307.3 × 363.2 × 114.3 cm). Private collection. © Jeff Koons. Reproduced from Whitney Museum of American Art: http://whitney.org (accessed May 12, 2015). Fig. 3. Jeff Koons, Play-Doh, 1994–2014, polychromed aluminum, 120 × 108 × 108 in. (304.8 × 274.3 × 274.3 cm). Bill Bell Collection. © Jeff Koons. Reproduced from Whitney Museum of American Art: http://whitney.org (accessed May 12, 2015).
Fig. 4. Jeff Koons, Large Vase of Flowers, 1991, polychromed wood, 52 × 43 × 43 in. (132.1 × 109.2 × 109.2 cm). © Jeff Koons. Reproduced from Whitney Museum of American Art: http://whitney.org (accessed May 12, 2015).
THE RISE OF COMMERCE AND NEW YORK CITY’S EARLY SKYSCRAPERS: THE FLATIRON BUILDING BETWEEN TRADITION AND MODERNITY Catarina Flaksman Fig. 1. New York Tribune, “New York Has Many Impressive Skyscrapers But None More Remarkable Than The Flatiron,” New York Tribune, June 29, 1902. Library of Congress. Reproduced from Library of Congress: www.loc.gov (accessed April 25, 2015). Fig. 2. Alfred Stieglitz, The Flatiron, 1903, printed 1903‑1910, photogravure, 32.8 × 15.7 cm. © 2015 Georgia O'Keeffe Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Reproduced from Artstor: www.artstor.org (accessed April 25, 2015). Fig. 3. Edward Steichen, The Flatiron, 1904, printed 1909, gum bichromate over platinum print, 47.8 × 38.4 cm. © 2015 The Estate of Edward Steichen / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Reproduced from Artstor: www.artstor.org (accessed April 25, 2015).
Fig. 2. Example of Decorative Kufic inscribed in the frieze of the Cairo Mosque. Interwoven vegetal motifs fill the background following precise spirals in a repeated mathematical pattern. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Reproduced from The Metropolitan Museum of Art: www.metmuseum.org (accessed July 29, 2015). Fig. 3. Illuminated Naskh manuscript from Kashmir, eighteenth century C.E. Reproduced from Wikimedia: http://commons.wikimedia.org (accessed July 29, 2015). Fig. 4. Lion-shaped calligrams, often used as a symbol of Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of Muhammad, the first caliph and founder of the Shi’ites. Reproduced from Wikimedia: http//commons.wikimedia.org (accessed July 29, 2015). Fig. 5. Arabization of logos. Design by Wissam Shawkat. © Wissam Shawkat Fig. 6. Design by Mouneer El-Shaarani. © Mouneer Al-Shaarani Fig. 7. Design by Mehdi Saeedi. © Mehdi Saeedi Fig. 8. Design By Tarek Atrissi, Tarek Atrissi Design, www.atrissi.com
SCIVIAS: A DOCTRINE OF FEMALE EMPOWERMENT Emma Kaye
ADIEU AU DADA: JEAN-LUC GODARD’S GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE, A DADAIST READING Sophie Bloomfield
Fig. 1. Cosmic Egg Illumination, from Scivias Vision 3: “The Universe and its Symbolism.” Reproduced from Hildegard of Bingen. Scivias. Translated by Columba Hart and Jane Bishop. New York: Paulist Press, 1990.
Fig. 1. Jean-Luc Godard. Goodbye to Language, 2014, still image from film.
Fig. 2. Illumination of Ecclesia and the Antichrist, from Scivias Vision 11: “The Last Days and the Fall of the Antichrist.” Reproduced from Hildegard of Bingen. Scivias. Translated by Columba Hart and Jane Bishop. New York: Paulist Press, 1990.
Fig. 3. Jean-Luc Godard. Goodbye to Language, 2014, still images from film.
Fig. 2. Jean-Luc Godard. Goodbye to Language, 2014, still image from film.
Fig.4. Marcel Duchamp. Anemic Cinema, 1926, still images from film.
TRADITION AND ADAPTATION: USE OF CALLIGRAPHY AND SCRIPT IN CONTEMPORARY MIDDLE EASTERN GRAPHIC DESIGN Teresa Lundgren Fig. 1. A page from a Qur’an using Kufic script, unknown calligrapher. Freer Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. Reproduced from Wikimedia: http//commons. wikimedia.org (accessed July 29, 2015). List of Figures
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GUSTAVE CAILLEBOTTE’S PARIS: A CRITIQUE OF WALKING AS SYMBOLIC, POLITICAL, AND AESTHETIC PRACTICE Chantal Lee Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Edited by Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 2007. ———. Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. Edited by Peter Demetz. New York: Schocken Books, 2007. Forgione, Nancy. “Everyday Life in Motion: The Art of Walking in Late-Nineteenth-Century Paris.” The Art Bulletin, 2005, 664–87. Fried, Michael. “Caillebotte’s Impressionism.” Representations, no. 66 (1999): 1–51. Lightstone, Rosanne H. “Gustave Caillebotte’s Oblique Perspective: A New Source for ‘Le Pont de l’Europe.’ ” The Burlington Magazine 136, no. 1100 (1994): 759–62. Sagraves, Julia. “The Street.” Gustave Caillebotte: Urban Impressionist. Edited by Anne Distel. New York: Abbeville Press, 1995: 87–140.
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Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. New York: Penguin Books, 2001. Thomas, Greg. “Women in Public: The Display of Femininity in the Parks of Paris,” The Invisible Flâneuse?: Gender, Public Space and Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris. Edited by Aruna D’Souza and Tom McDonough. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006: 32–47. Wiley, Danielle. “A Walk About Rome: Tactics for Mapping the Urban Periphery.” Architectural Theory Review 15, no. 1 (2010): 9–29.
THE BOURN-VITA SLEEPING BEAKER: VERNACULAR DESIGN IN THE POSTWAR UNITED KINGDOM Vitoria Hadba “A. H. Woodfull.” The Times (London). June 28, 2011, sec. Obituaries. http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/ obituaries/article3076480.ece. “A.H. ‘Woody’ Woodfull.” The Museum of Design in Plastics. Accessed October 25, 2014. http://www.modip. ac.uk/exhibitions/spotlight-on/designers/woodfull.
Anderson, Harvey A., and Alice M. Carson. “Useful Objects in Wartime: Fifth Annual Exhibition of Useful Objects under $10.00.” The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art 10, no. 2 (December 1942). Butler, Mike. “Overview.” BIP (Oldbury) Limited. Accessed February 22, 2015. http://www.bip.co.uk/ history-overview.htm. “By-Product Becomes Unbreakable Tableware.” Business Week, October 29, 1930. Farr, Michael. Design in British Industry: A Mid-Century Survey. Cambridge: University Press, 1953. Hillier, Bevis. The World of Art Deco. New York: Dutton, 1971. Katz, Sylvia. Plastics: Common Objects, Classic Designs; with a Collector’s Guide. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1984. Letts, Quentin. “Beverage Report,” April 25, 2001, sec. Food and Drink. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ foodanddrink/4812916/Beverage-report.html.
Hüsch, Anette, et al. Jeff Koons: Celebration. Ostifildern; Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag; Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, 2008. Kellein, Thomas, ed. Jeff Koons: Pictures, 1980–2002. New York: D.A.P., Distributed Art Publishers, 2002. Rosenthal, Mark, et al. Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012. Rothkopf, Scott, Whitney Museum of American Art, Centre Georges Pompidou, and Museo Guggenheim Bilbao. Jeff Koons: A Retrospective, 2014. Simpson, Fronia W., ed. Jeff Koons. San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1992.
THE RISE OF COMMERCE AND NEW YORK CITY’S EARLY SKYSCRAPERS: THE FLATIRON BUILDING BETWEEN TRADITION AND MODERNITY Catarina Flaksman
Martin, Meredith. “Dairy Cases.” Cabinet 40 (Winter 2010), 47–53.
Abbot, James R. “Louis Sullivan, Architectural Modernism, and the Creation of Democratic Space.” The American Sociologist 31, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 62–85.
Meccariello, Bryan. Plastic Cup Collectibles: With Price Guide. A Schiffer Book for Collectors. Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing, Ltd., 1998.
Blackall, Clarence. “High Buildings.” The Brickbuilder 5 (1896): 29.
Meikle, Jeffrey L. American Plastic: A Cultural History. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995.
Corn, Wanda M. The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915–1935. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
“Shaping the World, A Lasting Legacy: Albert Woodful [sic].” Birmingham City University. Accessed October 25, 2014. http://www.bcu.ac.uk/student-info/ shaping-the-world-old/lasting-legacy/albert-woodful. Sparke, Penny. The Plastics Age: From Bakelite to Beanbags and Beyond. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1993. Tilson, Barbara. Made in Birmingham: Design & Industry 1889–1989. Studley: Brewin, 1989.
THE KOONSIAN CONTRADICTION Nicola Householder Blackwood, Michael. Art in an Age of Mass Culture. Michael Blackwood Productions, 1991. http://search. alexanderstreet.com/view/work/1844899.
Bibliographies
“Fiercest Storm in This City Since August, 1889.” The Evening World. September 16, 1903. http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/ sn83030193/1903-09-16/ed-1/seq-1/. “Give Greater New York a Plan.” The New York Times. December 24, 1902. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/ abstract.html?res=9B06E3DC163AE733A25757C2A 9649D946397D6CF. Landau, Sarah Bradford, and Carl W. Condit. Rise of the New York Skyscraper, 1865–1913. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. “New York Has Many Impressive Skyscrapers But None More Remarkable Than the Flatiron.” New York Tribune. June 29, 1902. http://chroniclingamerica.loc. gov/lccn/sn83030214/1902-06-29/ed-1/seq-33/.
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Norman, Dorothy. Alfred Stieglitz: An American Seer. New York: Random House, 1973. Schleier, Merrill. The Skyscraper in American Art, 1890–1931. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1986. Stieglitz, Alfred, and Marianne Fulton Margolis. Camera Work: A Pictorial Guide, with Reproductions of All 559 Illustrations and Plates, Fully Indexed. New York: Dover Publications, 1978. “The Wicked Flatiron.” The Sun. February 15, 1903. http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/ sn83030272/1903-02-15/ed-1/seq-34/. Weiss, Marc A. “Skyscraper Zoning: New York’s Pioneering Role.” Journal of the American Planning Association 58, no. 2 (1992).
SCIVIAS: A DOCTRINE OF FEMALE EMPOWERMENT Emma Kaye Caviness, Madeline Harrison. Art in the Medieval West and Its Audience. Aldershot; Burlington USA: Ashgate, 2001. Emmerson, Richard Kenneth. “The Representation of Antichrist in Hildegard of Bingen’s Scivias: Image, Word, Commentary, and Visionary Experience.” Gesta / International Center of Medieval Art 41, no. 2 (2002): 95–110. Hildegard of Bingen. Scivias. Translated by Columba Hart and Jane Bishop. New York: Paulist Press, 1990.
TRADITION AND ADAPTATION: USE OF CALLIGRAPHY AND SCRIPT IN CONTEMPORARY MIDDLE EASTERN GRAPHIC DESIGN Teresa Lundgren Aissa, Asma Ould. “Graphic Design from the Middle East: Cutting Edge and Cross-Cultural.” Al.arte.magazine, December 19, 2012. Accessed November 5, 2015. http://www.alartemag.be/en/en-design/ graphic-design-from-the-middle-east-cutting-edgeand-cross-cultural/. Azzam, Khaled, ed. Arts and Crafts of the Islamic Lands: Principles, Materials, Practice. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2013. Halime, Farah. “Classical Arabic Language Being Forgotten.” Financial Times, October 20, 2013. http:// www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/83a634f2-1b9f-11e3-b67800144feab7de.html#axzz3wK8eKRvz. O’Brien, Josephine. “Developing Literacy in English and Arabic Among Young Learners.” Accessed November 12, 2014. http://www.academia.edu/5125567/ Developing_literacy_in_English_and_Arabic_among_ young_learners. Petrosyan, Yuri A., Oleg F. Akimushkin, Anas B. Khalidov, and Efim A. Rezvan. Pages of Perfection: Islamic Paintings and Calligraphy from the Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg. Lugano: ARCH Foundation, 1995.
Maddocks, Fiona. Hildegard of Bingen: The Woman of Her Age. New York: Doubleday, 2001.
Shawish, Hesham, and BBC News. “Campaign to Save the Arabic Language in Lebanon.” BBC News, June 24, 2010. Accessed November 5, 2014. http://www.bbc. com/news/10316914.
Newman, Barbara. Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.
Yaghan, Mohammad Ali. “ ‘Arabizi’: A Contemporary Style of Arabic Slang.” Design Issues 24, no. 2 (April 1, 2008): 39–52.
Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 65–81.
ADIEU AU DADA: JEAN-LUC GODARD’S GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE, A DADAIST READING Sophie Bloomfield Anemic Cinema. Directed by Marcel Duchamp. 1926. Godard, Jean-Luc. Interview by Cécile Mella. Goodbye to Language DVD extra. Canon Europe, Paris, March 2014.
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Goodbye to Language. Directed by Jean-Luc Godard. Paris, France: Wild Bunch, 2014. DVD. O’Riley, Tim. “Duchampoptics,” Representing Illusions: Space, Narrative and the Spectator in Fine Art Practice. Milton Keynes, England: Open University, 1998: 56–65. Accessed April 15, 2015. http://www.timoriley.net/ content/still/PhD/phd11_TOR_chapter6.pdf. Testa, Bart. “Screen Words: Early Film and Avant-Garde Film in the House of the World.” Paper presented at the symposium Das frühe Kino und die Avantgarde (Early Cinema and the Avant-Garde), Vienna, Austria, March 8–13, 2002. Accessed April 15, 2015. http://www. sixpackfilm.com/archive/veranstaltung/festivals/ earlycinema/symposion/symposion_testa.html.
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Editors' Biographies
Catarina Flaksman Catarina is an M.S. History of Art and Design candidate at Pratt Institute. She completed her undergraduate studies in Architecture and Urbanism in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Sarah Hamerman Sarah is a second-year M.S. History of Art and Design/M.S. Information and Library Science dual-degree candidate at Pratt Institute. She is the 2015–2016 Collection Development Fellow at MoMA Library. John B. Henry John is a second-year M.S. History of Art and Design/M.S. Information and Library Science candidate at Pratt Institute. He is currently a fellow at the Brooklyn Museum Archives. Adam Monohon Adam is a graduate student in the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London’s M.A. History of Art and Archaeology of East Asia program. Monohon graduated from Pratt Institute in May 2015 with a B.A. in History of Art and Design.
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belvedere  |  Pratt Journal of Art and Design History is an annual review showcasing work produced by students of the History of Art and Design Department at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York.