Wild Things

In my Guise of Clerk of the Knowledge Store, I worked to convince you that knowing more might mean enjoying more. I shared stories of Maurice Sendak's big noisy aunts and uncles, who came to visit his Brooklyn home for supper and screeched, pinching his cheeks, "YOU'RE SO CUTE I could just EAT YOU UP!" transforming magically into the Wild Things of the famous book; of Sendak reading Bruno Bettelheim's Uses of Enchantment to aid his understanding of how children needed to battle monsters (like the aunts, uncles and other grown ups all around us) in order to enter subjectivity, and I showed you how Freud had turned Greek mythical monsters like the sphinx on his desk into analysis of the human psyche, and Sendak turned that analysis back into Monsters.

The Sphinx and other monsters on Freud's desk

This week the monsters that haunt me all seem to work for the New York Times, and they seem to listen in on my classes and deal with the same subjects I grappled with in more succinct and coherent ways. David Brooks wrote about Where the Wild Things Are and child psychology, Dennis Dutton wrote about Art and Money, Sharks, Damien Hirst, Vacuum Cleaners, Jeff Koons, and selling out, and in an older article that I stumbled upon this week, Patricia Cohen wrote about Freud's prevalence in the contemporary university-- his prevalence everywhere, that is, except in the Psych classroom.

You might have to register to read these articles, but it's worth the time, as you might stumble upon the monsters that have followed you around all week.

We (All) Wear the Mask

Mask of Yuya, about 1390 bce, Egyptian
By the time of it's modern discovered in the early 1900's, robbers had apparently opened the tomb of Yuya and his wife Tjuyu but fled before they could take anything. Grave goods and the nearly intact mummies of the couple remained.

I confessed to two friends and two of my classes today that I have a hard time teaching Egyptian art. Some of the many reasons:
1) I find much Egyptian art visually depthless and lifeless, yet understanding any single work requires a seemingly endless depth of knowledge of symbols, a huge pantheon of gods and pharoahs, 3000 years of notably static visual history, and so on.
2) Art history has worked so hard to keep this rich repository of material inside western art, yet it fits equally well in Southern European, North African, and West Asian histories, so Egypt proves hard to locate geographically, layering confusion on confusion.
3) So much Egyptian art, architecture and artifact deals with death. Let's face it, ancient Egyptians obsessed over death and preservation to an colossal degree, meaning they preserved an overwhelming volume of work, making it yet harder to grasp the big picture because it is so crowded. Moreover, I admit it. I just don't like all that death. All those masked, flat, combined-profile slender people. (But I make light. Sorry, this is serious.)

Many disagree with me, and I admit readily that my dislike results most likely from ignorance. Long experience has taught me that the more I learn about a work or body of work, the more possibilities of falling in love exist. Frequently enough, I ride a cupid's arrow from sublime to beautiful-- from unfamiliarity to love; often enough, as I learn about a painting, culture, or period, I find more and more to like. And I keep trying with Egypt.

Canopic Box of Yuya, about 1390 bce

This year, I stumbled on Yuya. And his stony heart, preserved in a canopic jar for the last 2,399 years, might have just touched my own. I ran into Yuya at the Theban Mapping Project, which has slaved away for the last thirty-one years to document that same overwhelming plethora of material I carp about here. But back to my new love affair. Here he is, in a photograph by an unnamed photographer:

unidentified photographer at Theban Mapping Project, Mummy of Yuya, New Kingdom Egyptian Courtier, ~ 1390 bce

I know, I know, at twenty-three hundred and ninety-nine, Yuya may be a little old for me, and , yes, you're right, he's married and has lain next to his wife Thuya for the last 2300-odd years. And, I know, he has a lot of missing parts. Kidding aside, Yuya hailed me sonorously across the millennia in a way no other Egyptian objects had-- and he makes me ask confusing questions about what art is-- is this artistically crafted, beautiful thing art, human, compost, or what, exactly? and of course, what I fall in love with is not Yuya but his image in a photograph by an unknown photographer. Looking at Yuya, I saw a man depleted by time, but I also saw a marvelously familiar face, and the way his straight slender fingers touched his neck touched me somehow, too. Discovering this photograph (for it's the photo that operated on me, really, not the shell of a man it represents) I had to pause a while.

Pausing, I studied the image. Yuya is not handsome in a typical sense. His lips are too wide, his cheeks sunken, his hair white, and, admit it, his skin is a bit dry. I can't and don't want to imagine what lies beneath his eyelids. It's not really that kind of love. What happened when I looked at Yuya is that for the first time looking at a mummy felt like looking at a person I recognized. Strangely, I think I recognized him as a person at least in part due to his resemblance to another far-away, old, intense man whom I have known very well but only through pictures for a couple decades at least.

The first time I saw William Casby, he seemed to look right at me across time, and to show me that someone you've never known can still mean a lot.

Richard Avedon, William Casby, Born a Slave, 1963 ce, gelatin silver print.

When I look at Avedon's photo of Casby, which I know from Roland Barthes' book Camera Lucida (and I've been in love with being under the covers with Barthes for decades), I want to sit next to William Casby on an airplane and have proximity grant me the excuse to talk to him. I know it's all a mask-- Casby stands in for me as the face slavery, and that's just a mask... for all I know Casby never worked a day in his life and felt entirely free from the traumas of the subaltern. Barthes tells us the photograph is always about death. Just like egyptian art. Yet photography more than any other medium catches my heart and gives me that feeling of connection that I seldom find in Egyptian Art. Photography, Barthes says in a brazen oxymoron, gives a pure mask of meaning.

I haven't landed on my access to the egyptians, or my way to manage my discomfort with the appearance of an entire civilization of lives lived toward death, but masked by the technology of contemporary photography, Yuya's face seems to look at me from my own time and place, and makes me want to walk around his pyramid, read his hieroglyphic messages, learn what questions he would ask of me.


Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906)

We Wear the Mask

We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!

Birds in Our Hands: So, Speaking of Tiny Details

Selections from Helen Van Dyke Miniature Book Collection Exhibit

Yesterday I showed my classes two artists whose work exhibits such extraordinary attention to detail that attention to detail becomes the work. I woke up thinking about it this morning, and about the somewhat related conversation about the relationship between the paleolithic female figurines's small scale and how that size changes their meaning-- we think of them differently when we realize that they are not much bigger than a rabbit's foot than we do when slides and photos put them before us as larger than life.

Female Figure from Hohle-Fels, Germany, ~35,000 bce

and here again the Figure from Willendorf:

and here's a modern-day monument to the Woman from Willendorf at the site where archeologists found her in 1908:

With this post, I wanted to give you access to other pictures, and start you thinking about the practice of artmaking as connected to living in manifold ways, because it seems that until about 150 years ago (a blink in the timeline of human artmaking), people did not make art for art's sake; they made it as part of other practices-- worship, ritual, survival, everyday life, record keeping....

17th Century Mughal manuscript

17-19th century Miniature Qur'an

Many refer to yoga as moving meditation. Scribes in medieval monasteries hand wrote manuscripts and illustrated them with miniatures in minute detail as a type of prayer as well.
We don't talk much today about the relationship between art practice and spiritual practice, but I see the two together in works like these artists working with incredible patience, tedium, repetition, and the most extraordinary precision. And, seeing them together helps me see the strong connection between art making in 2009 CE and artmaking in 30,000 B.C.E.

Brian Dettmer uses books as the medium for his work very differently than the way monks around the world used books as the place to keep their artwork.... but the patience, precision, and play involved ties them together in my mind.

Brian Dettmer Book Autopsy from about 2008

Brian Dettmer Book Autopsy from about 2008

Brian Dettmer, Mound I, ~2008

You're Talkin' Crazy Talk

I like to know what happens in the end of a book or movie before I read or watch it. If I know Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy get together in the end, I can concentrate on the tiny details that made it happen. And with visual art, too, I like to see works again and again to find the details I've missed some years-- the murder weapon at the bottom of David's painting of Marat

Jacques-Louis David, Death of Marat, 1783. Learn more here.

or the way the lioness wraps her 'hand' so tenderly around the boy she holds in that disturbingly tender death embrace in the Assyrian carving.

sometimes I've missed the diamond that studs her inconspicuous diadem, too, only to be startled by it anew. More here.

Recently, I stumbled on the field of Ethnomycology. Obscure enough to trip up a spell-checker, and to make me roll my eyes: "what will they think of next." Theoretically, ethnomycology is not far out of the academic center; theoretically, it is just a subfield of ethnobotany, or the study of the historical use of plants by human cultures. Practically, though, ethnomycology inhabits a damp little forest pretty far off campus.

Theoretically, ethnomycologists study how societies have used mushrooms, all kinds of mushrooms and all kinds of purposes. In practice, most ethnomycologist study how people have used psychoactive mushrooms, and the results tend toward the psychedelic, spiritual, speculative and hence fairly controversial. I am being dismissive, darnit, and that's exactly what I sought to combat when I opened this post! I shouldn't be, as good evidence exists to suggest that prehistoric people performed rituals that very well may have included the use of psychoactive agents. And we should look at them. And when I take the matter seriously, it opens my mind (a different type of psycho- and intellectuo-activity).

Because when I looked at the articles by folks who said that paleolithic people made oddly shaped (to our eyes) female figurines because they were not making female figurines at all, but mushroom goddesses, it startled me, made me first laugh, then dismiss, then read more closely, and during that process I realized that when we look at artwork from 30-40, 000 years ago, we have to let go of as many thousand years of facts, hypotheses, misunderstandings and losses that barnacle the twenty-first century brain, that may handicap our ability to see those works for what they are. The mushroom theory explains the peculiar lozenge-shaped figures of paleolithic carvings of females as well as any other and make me open up to the possibility that that we may not have considered hundreds of possible explanations for the unexpected lozenge-shape of many if not most of the female figures found between 40,000 and 20,000 bce. I bring it up here not to tell you that prehistoric peoples made much of their work in homage to pychoactive mushrooms, as some scholars suggest, thought that may well be true, but because when I stumbled on ethnomycology, it made me ask this simple question: "How many interpretations of history can I not see because I am blinded by something I once learned?"

The case of the Woman of Willendorf.
I first learned about her in my own Art History 101 class, long, long ago but not in the paleolithic era. I learned that archeologists discovered this 4-3/8" female limestone figure carved at a paleolithic site in Willendorf, Austria, in 1908. My professor and my textbook agreed that someone had carved her about 25,000 years ago. They called the carver 'he' and called the figure 'Venus' of Willendorf, and said that she represented an ideal of femininity. I wrote that down in my notebook, and remembered it vaguely. The cave paintings made about the same time captured my attention so fully that I didn't take the time to sink my (figurative) teeth into her fleshy form.

She came up now and then in between, but the next time I studied her, most scholars had stopped calling her Venus and used Woman. Woman of Willendorf. They now seemed to agree she represented a fertility goddess, a potential aspect of womanhood, not an ideal of beauty, and said that calling her 'Venus' made assumptions that could not be proven (that is, she probably did not represent an ideal of beauty to paleolithic people, and that it's silly to name a carving from 25,000 bce after a goddess who came on the stage some 25,ooo years later.

Ben Heine, Marilyn of Willendorf

And then I found the Ethnomycologists, and to pay reparations for having treated them dismissively, I dug further into the subject in order to see what possibilities others had proposed-- crazy or not. Online I found chocolate 'goddess' of willendorfs, willendorf earrings, halloween costumes, and nude portraits of women idealizing their own round forms. And then I searched more academic sources, and stumbled on a theory by LeRoy McDermott, an Anthropologist, and found myself completely convinced by his theory that these paleolithic figurines were self-portraits of pregnant women from their own point of view (autogenic), possibly created as protective amulets. I'm still convinced, but I have not yet finished reading the counterargument I just found by a contemporary art historian I respect immensely, James Elkins, who thinks McDermott is talkin' crazy-- just like I thought of the ethnomycologists.

So. Though I love finding more and more in a work of art each time I see it, and though I like to know how it will end before I study it, with visual art at least I often wish I could forget everything I learned, to look at the world and its wonders "Apparell'd in celestial light, The glory and the freshness of a dream" as William Wordsworth said the child saw it, "The things which I have seen I now can see no more."

Figure from Hohle-Fels, Germany, 35-40,000 bce, Mammoth Ivory, 2.4"

And I am still mad at the journal Nature, and other journals I once considered legitimate, for calling the most lately-found female figure, the oldest at 35-40,000 years old, the 'Venus' of Hohle Fels. Haven't we learned anything in the last 100 years, since modern folks rediscovered Willendorf ? I guess not. When Picasso visited the recently re-discovered Lascaux cave in the 1940's, he reportedly said: "We Have discovered nothing."

Making History

art•i•san: crafts(wo)man-
a skilled worker who practices
some trade or handicraft

his•tor•y: the discipline that
records and interprets past
events involving human beings


have I just started noticing, or has the word artisan proliferated rabbit-like recently... I see it everywhere, most often in food-related contexts: Artisan Chocolateries in airports, Artisan Breads at chain groceries, Artisan Coffeeshops on smalltown streetcorners. Does the popularity mark a turning away from the mass-produced, the pre-packaged, the not-local? Or is it just a random trend? I use it here both seriously and in jest.

At this site, I seek ways to feed my (idealistic) goal to create opportunities for students of Art History to drink deeply of the visual culture of the past to find flavors to enrich their own artinsanal recipes. While most evident in the sampling and copycatting of the postmodern artist, across human history, makers of visual culture borrowed from the past to create anew. One can see the practice in fertility figures from 30,000 years ago, paintings of cave bears from 15,000 years ago, in 2,000-year-old Roman uses of the Etruscan arch--itself a borrowing from Asia, in the 300-year-fresh flirtatious jokes of rococo paintings of swinging women, and in the development 100 years ago by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque of Analytic Cubism (illustrated above), during which time the two made work so similar they sometimes couldn't tell who had touched brush to which canvas. In other words: Art Past has provided one of the richest resources for Art Present.

At left: Sherrie Levine, After Walker Evans, 1981, gelatin silver print

At Right, Walker Evans, Alabama Tenant Farmer's Wife, 1936, gelatin silver print
Walker Evans, Floyd Burrough's Shoes, 1936
René Magritte, The Red Model, 1934

Commonplace Books

Beineke Library MS 84, Girdle Book, 15th century

A definition, from a digital commonplace book:

"Silva rerum they were called, commonplace books that contained a 'forest of things'. Excerpts of exceptional thought were dutifully copied into these bound books for further reflection and digestion. Commonplace books were considered necessary tools for learning that commonplacing was taught in universities such as Oxford. Milton, Hardy, Emerson, and Thoreau all kept their own commonplace books.

Commonplacing wedded reading and writing as necessary ingredients, they were inseparable. Bits and pieces from one book joined with other excerpts from elsewhere. The way the ideas were assembled revealed the personality of the commonplacer…what topics interested him, what key arguments did he find cogent that he could build upon…what turns of phrases could he learn by heart so that he, too, could express himself with clarity and winsomeness." from Lightly Locked.

Beineke Library MS 454 image of a Horse

Log Book – Termite Grid Ronald King several great artist's books

A cute, rather playful commonplace:

And another, more straightforward and elegant, and featuring just the works, from my colleague Jonathan Milner, who teaches politics at UNCSA. Looking at this collection, I can start to draw conclusions about his aesthetic. I wonder what a commonplace by Kurt Cobain, D.J. Spooky, Christian Boltanski, Barak Obama, or I might look like.

You might find commonplaces by students from 2008-2009 interesting.
Brittni Moore, Ian McClerin, Daniel Satinoff, Jenny Ford... I will share some non-digital commonplaces in class.

Jonathan Edwards, early 1700's

How might you rethink the format of a book? Jonathan Edwards did so by dint of necessity: his style called for it. That happened to Marcel Proust, too, who edited so much his manuscripts became layered and pasted.

Marcel Proust, Manuscript page from In Search of Lost Time, around 1920

Beineke Library MS 327 - Merchants Commonplace Book - Venice - 1312

Your class notebooks will be a little bit different, as you will include, at least for the first term, your class notes, class writing assignments, your sketches, notes and identifications of each key work, as well as your own bits and pieces of inspiration.