SECTION 1 - via - School of Visual Arts

SECTION 1: Keynote Address
Undoing Forgetfulness: Re-membering Media’s Past
Barbara Maria Stafford
SECTION 2: Memory and Remembrance
Cross Disciplinary Strategies to Recreate and Remember: One Painter’s Look at How Memories
Can Be Captured and Play a Central Role in Studio Practice
Judith Brassard Brown
Translations of Memory: Personal Essays and the Study of Art
Lucretia Anne Flammang
Face Value: Portraits and Memory
David Dodge Lewis
The Art of the Name of the Name of the Art: “Christ and St. John the Evangelist” or “Jesus
and the Beloved Disciple?”
George Matejka
The Role of Memory in Culture
Raphael Montanez Ortiz
Boxes of Remembrance: The Jewish Ritual of Tefillin as a Symbolic Evocation of the Israelite
Tabernacle
Maurice Schmidt
Reconstructing Memories Through the Arts
Lauren S. Seifert
Their Faces Brief as Photos
Bozenna Wisniewska
Inscriptions
Weronika Wisniewska
SECTION 3: Science
Sewing Plants: The Intertwined History of Botany and Needlework
Maura C. Flannery
Remembering our Mortality: Artists and Doctors in the Gross Anatomy Lab
Deanna Leamon
SECTION 4: History and Documentation
September 11 and After: Virtual Case Book
Barbara Abrash
Exhibiting 9-11: A Historicography
Leslie K. Brown

Photography Through Documentation and Intention
Anna Heineman
SECTION 5: The Art of Persuasion
Meritorious or Meretricious
Jacqueline Belfort-Chalat
SECTION 6: The Educated Artist
Shared Spaces, Unexpected Sources
Bowdoin Davis, Jr
Remembering Rabindranath Tagore
Mark W. McGinnis
SECTION 7: Public Memorials
Monuments in Minimalism: Safely Universal
David Evenhuis
Brancusi at Tirgu-Jiu
Maureen Korp
SECTION 8: The Holocaust
Mourning, Absence, and Trauma: Representations of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and
Architecture
Milton S. Katz
SECTION 9: Curriculum
With a Pen as His Word and Me as His Witness
Michael Fink
From Idealism to Totalitarianism: The History of History Painting
Robert Hendrick
Inhumane Humanities: Colleges of Education in Retreat From the Human Experience
James E. Nowlin
Teaching Art Education in a Studio Oriented Art Department
Shari S. Stoddard
Vers Collage: The Remembrance Work of Poetry
Beverly Schneller

THE SCHOOL OF VISUAL ARTS NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON LIBERAL ARTS
AND THE EDUCATION OF ARTISTS: ART REMEMBERS
Guest Speaker: Barbara Maria Stafford, University of Chicago
Dr. Hendricks: This afternoon I have the pleasure to introduce our keynote speaker, Barbara
Maria Stafford, the William B. Ogden distinguished service professor at the University of
Chicago. Dr. Stafford specializes in art and imaging theory from the late 17th century to the
Romantics and her focus has been on the intersection between the arts and the sciences in
early modern and modern periods. Her two recent works, Visual Analogy and Devices of
Wonder, help reconcile the diverse elements of the history of western art through the concept
of visual analogy. Dr. Stafford emphasizes the connections—“proliferations” is the term she
uses—and not the chain of cause and effect. Dr. Stafford’s books include, Symbol and Myth,
Voyage into Substance, Body Criticism, Artful Science, Good-looking, Visual Analogy and, with
Francis Turpac, Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on Screen. Will you
please welcome Dr. Stafford.
Dr. Stafford: Thank you. It’s a great honor for me to be here in this worthwhile endeavor and I
hope to contribute to the proceeding. I’m going to be using material from the Devices of
Wonder exhibition to reflect on some major themes that I hope that it will intercept rather
nicely with the topics of the conference. Rudolph Arnheim, in an essay that has really been
forgotten from the 1960’s, a plea for perceptual thinking. In it he suggests that optical
technology can become a thoughtful medium. I’m going to suggest that it is not yet become
that. We’re still waiting for that to happen and I’m going to try and demonstrate in my
presentation that contemporary media needs memory.
Contemporary medium needs to recall that vast and sophisticated repertoire of earlier medium,
medium that we’ve just thrown on the junk heap of history to fulfill the potential that Arnheim
saw. Arnheim’s summons in the 60’s in turn was a re-remembering. He is in a way re-casting
some of the prior writings of Abby Warburg writing in the 20s and in the 30s. Now Abby
Warburg, that profound historian of visual culture, proposed that visual images—those
imaginative spatial forms ranging from high art to popular emergent media—roused the eyes at
action, that lovely phrase of his. But these fleeting shapes and mutable figures also excite our
memory, consciousness and desire by their ability to intensify and so alter reality.
Not surprisingly then such vivid apparitions spun merely from light, shadow, and color engaged
the total person at the sensory, psychological and social levels. And again I’d like to say it’s
important that what people like Warburg, like Arnheim, like Kepes, for that matter, were
talking about was not immersive media but rather the ability of media to create personal
coherence at very deep level. I’m going to try to suggest ways in which these older media do
that and what we have not yet achieved today. I’m going to show you some images rather
quickly and then I’m going to ponder them and bring in other ones as we go on.
[The first two slides; both please.] When optical devices such as mirrors and lenses actually
appear, I’m going to be showing you because of the other thing that we’ve forgotten is the
complexity of mirroring; just simply think of mirrors as flat. This is not the case. When mirrors,
lenses here in a zograscope [the next two slides please], magic lanterns, peep show boxes or
1

computer screens for that matter are placed between our eyes in the world, those natural
images that Arnheim or Warburg spoke about become ramped up into high fidelity. I show you
here a crank magic lantern slide from the 19th century and a mondo nuovo if you could see it
in one of John [sounds like “DeMangochapello’s”] famous frescos. These just give you a sense
of range of devices.
Perception amplifying technology is going to be my theme of the next two images. I’m going to
show you how they entangle with quests for other worldly revelation. Here, a late 18th century
print shows a phantom - actually ghost projecting technologies and on the right, from the
middle of the 19th century, the media that re-mediates other medias. So these are stereo cards
but you notice that the stereo cards, which belong in one kind of technology, are reproducing
another in this case a polyorama panoptique so again just to get multiple levels of complexity
before your minds. So perception amplifying technology is entangled with quests for other
worldly revelation, for a kind of escapist entertainment. [Next on the right please], and of
course also worldly pursuits of knowledge. This is a wonderful French mid 18th century
microscope. It was thought to have belonged to the abbé Nollet who was the tutor to Louis
XV’s children but now we know it isn’t but you notice this teeters between scientific equipment
and sculpture but the perception amplifying technology embracing all of these domains. It lures
us with the prospect of boundlessness, immediacy and connectedness. Viewers are swiftly
displaced from their normal surroundings and effortlessly thrust into a synthetic or better than
ordinary hyper-realm.
[Both slides please] We tried to show, there have been many many exhibitions devoted to
technology and the arts in one fashion or another since the bit-stream show at San Francisco,
MoMA had Zero One Zero One Zero One. Barbicon just closed a show on video games. This is
all the rage. Most of these exhibitions are busy in one fashion or another tracing the function of
modern scientific equipment in art from futurist and constructivist movements and their
enthrallment with machines to kinetic sculpture onto cave environments. Now we had some
pieces like that and I will show you two but, hopefully, in an unexpected way. This is Jesuit,
17th century, the invention of pantographic machines to make reproducing drawings and other
materials easier and this is a very early Alexander Calder pantograph so yes, we had some of
these things but our interest was more in recuperating something more complex. This haunted
view of eye machines old and new other aspects of these complex technologies. These are both
personal reality enhancers.
Material [next two slides please] more like this. Here is a transparent screen from the
Metropolitan and on the right, a Feliciano Béjar cluster of Magiscopios from the middle of the
1960s but themselves remembering the great Jesuit catoptrical experiments about which I’m
going to speak a little bit late. So in interest and through which I think speaks more to the
memory aspect of this convention about the enhancement of one’s personal reality and how it
impinges on all aspects of the human psyche. Part of what it means to be human has
increasingly involved the instrumentalization of the biological self. We routinely construct our
emotional and cognitive states not just from the inside out, from the outside in with gadgetized
additives. We’re quite accustomed to that but it’s really a very, very old practice. Already since
the 16th century, mind-bending apparatus has been busy altering solid bodies into more
vibrant virtual events.
2

[Both please.] There’s another paradox that I want to suggest from this perspective of memory;
with all the emphasis on now-ness, the emergent aspect of technologies—what tends to get
forgotten—is that what persists often in the cultural imaginary is the obsolete artifact most
remote from the future-obsessed present. Even the most dead-seeming media hint at an
undercurrent of unsatisfied desires still alive but submerged in the new medium world. Here
again from the 17th century, a split level print all showing the private and the public
conducting a Jesuit machine for capturing and tracing solar spots. This was the age of
wunderkammern, the age of the little ice age where there was an enormous amount of sun spot
activity and this—in this dark chamber and up above the private—the public conducting of
science as in, as the obverse of this private investigation. I want to link that to desires that
never get satisfied and that thrive in a kind of undercurrent. These—this is a series of
photomontages by Michael Light taken from NASA shots of the moon—it seems to me that
there is a profound connection between these two if we unearth them and that is on one level
the attempt to seize the remote and the elusive and bring that down to earth. The potency of
sense-extending instruments links today’s motorized joysticks, mobile mouses, touch pads and
cosmic architecture to the optical contrivances of the prior curiosity ridden age. Here from the
London Royal Science Museum these are multiplying spectacles and I’m juxtaposing it with the
brilliant Lucas Samaras’ Infinity Box, that Leibnizian box at the Albright-Knox which could not
have been conceived without Jesuit experiments.
I also want to draw your attention to something else—the ability to see like another. I mean
quite clearly in the 17th century, the days of Hooke, Micrographia and the Royal Society,
people realized that human beings don’t see like this and you have to ask what did they think
when they looked through spectacles like this and saw a totally different other—like an insect. It
was a way of imagining another, a totally alien way of looking just as obversely if I can turn
around Samaras and suggest that it’s interesting to look at Samaras’ box and I write about that
this way in Visual Analogy that Leibniz actually found his entire monadology on the idea that
you multiply almost digital because they are digital panes of glass to infinity and what you get
just like with the monads is not sameness, you get difference. So we can turn in both cases, we
can reverse the system.
So another aspect of this [both please], if these things got talked about at all, I suggest that
whether they get thrown into one of these mass exhibitions that are marching the arts and
sciences forward, or they’re hauled in as a bit of legacy, or they are shown, considered or
remembered at all, they are employed as stages on the road to cinema or to photography, the
animated image. This is the other place they appear. Even the few items that I have shown you,
how can they be reduced to such a monalogical trajectory? For example these are magnetic
paintings. They had concealed magnets in them and they spin, they twirl. You can see that they
are immensely interesting from the point of view of complex surfaces. Simply by rotating
yourself or them, different information is given to you. They are ciphered and decipherable at
the same time so that these ingenious complex artifacts can’t be marched down narrow
trajectories.
Optical technology then is a vast and diverse region. It contains multitudes and I want to help
recuperate, as we did in the Devices of Wonder show, some glimmers of its multiple functions
and multiple realities, its polyopticalities that have been forgotten. We talk about multi-media
but it’s really a multi-medium. Everything compresses into narrower, narrower platforms, which
look the same. Here it’s the polyopticality that’s important and to demonstrate some of the
3

vicissitudes of these wonder inducing, spiritual and supernatural and knowledge producing
technologies all these different ranges that help to give the early moderns a kind of coherence
which our media have yet to give us.
[Sorry I’m going to skip; both please] The folks at Microsoft, DreamWorks, and Electronic Arts,
may indeed be at the leading edge of breaking the boundaries of the monitor but this tendency
that I’ve suggested to you with these personal reality enhancers of fictional experience bleeding
into real life and for real life to emancipate itself through sublime magictry started much
earlier. From Rococo automata—here I show you a playbill and we actually had the stage
reconstructed at the show—up there you can see there are two automata. There is the type of
dancer and the Turk—the twisting Turk from Rococo automata that are rouged, powdered, and
bewigged to Steven Spielberg’s and Stanley Kubrick’s A.I. with its winsome robot child, biology
has been steadily leaking into cybernetics. Both early modern and post-human engineered
organisms resonate with this symbolism of domesticated technology, it’s also technology that is
being brought into the home.
[Both please.] Where do we consider [sounds like “beaucoups sans”?] refined eating, digesting
and defecating or van Oeckelen’s romantic, virtuoso over-life size Android Clarinetist or with
the mephistophelean title of Antonio Diabolo designed by - engineered by - Robert Houdini,
the same Robert Houdini who was a magician and one of the founders of cinema. Or
Spielberg’s industrial prototype, we could consider him as well, David waiting to be persuaded
by his programming that he exists in the flesh. All these artificial life forms [both please], we
need to recall that the early moderns were also aware that they inhabited a familiar if
ambiguous information universe and these types of images are very useful as a reminder how
old the realization is that robotics teeters between covert and overt operations, that technology
is very much alive with slight of hand. I show you a vase of cups and balls and a wonderful
blow book used by the fairground charlatan where, just by skill, with a series of blank pages in
between, they could be rotated and shifted because they were also notched on the side. This
aspect of technology has always been fraught with ambiguity but, again, realized quite early on.
[The next two please.] I want now to take the core piece of our exhibition, the one that gave
the title The World in a Box which we saw also as the root of that universal toolbox, the
computer and use it as a way to explore some of these things that I have said rather rapidly in
more detail. Perhaps only contemporary viewers can fully appreciate that the early modern
cabinet of wonder—and I show you a rather small one here—is no mere period piece. It’s not
something just to be dismissed and thrown on the scrap heap of history. It’s a global project to
order actual complex world of information coming from many different fields and standpoints is
a project that still beckons and vexes us. The mysterious gatherings concealed inside this
wunderschränke are hinted at by an encyclopedic map, new creations and marvels crowning the
top. Now what you have to understand is these sorts of boxes have been written about as
theaters of the world, as bringing the macrocosm of the universe into a small confines, as the
ancestor of the museum but what it hasn’t been written about is a cabinet/instrument, which I
do in the catalog. That is, these are also quasi-automata. They belong to a class of furniture,
smart furniture we would say today that the French called “mobile a secret”- secret furniture.
Furniture with secrets, why? Because they rotate, they fold out, they have springs, they have
concealed drawers. When you first approach, you notice here it swung open, I’ll show you that
all four sides open and the doors themselves open. It telescopes out and I use the instrumental
analogy quite on purpose. When you first approach it, it’s cloaked in dark ebony wood and
4

actually this mountain on top is an encyclopedic compendant that gives you a hint of the
secrets that you will find when you open it. There are of course ranges of much larger ones, the
famous one in [sounds like “Oupsella”?] which is almost room size; it takes by the way four
rooms to empty all the contents out that are in there but what I want to draw your attention to
is that if you walk around the one in [sounds like “Oupsella”?] there are water splashes on the
back because of you could also wash your face; there’s a basin in there so that not only did- so
it’s the all purpose toolbox. I want you to think of it in that mechanical term, a way in which
one can also make the analogy to the Internet.
One final point because I don’t want to get- lose my time is these are also haptic. There are
drawers that pull out, a panel that pulls out so that you could lay contents, you could speak
with people that you show. Some of the larger ones actually have musical instruments, spinets,
claviers, and there were both artificial and natural clocks concealed in the shelves and so on.
So that we can say that the way in which you experience these devices is a totally sensory
involving way. It’s not merely optical and so a kind of divination is technological ritual in the
way you would explore it. I show you here just the remainder of the gallery space.
[The next on the right please.] I’m now going to show a series of six installation shots, just
simply to show them, so that you can see the kinds of juxtapositions coming actually out of my
analogy book—a news kind of organization where the pattern itself is informative. Where the
past is not that beautiful quote, the White Queen quote by Maryhelen of that the past is not
separated from the present, the past is the future. There’s Suzanne Anker’s lovely piece so that
we have the Michael Light and Suzanne Anker; we have the microcosm, macrocosm of the
body and the Michael Light and looking straight through because there’s a tunnel in the
middle so that not only do you have all the drawers but you have crisscrossing. Very nice in
terms of analogical structure just showing you some of the details. It floats on top as you saw it,
this podium which has glass so that you’re not constantly having the obtrusiveness of vitrines,
documentation and art materials at the same level not separated. Looking through here, a
wonderful rare Jeff Wall, A Ventriloquist at a Birthday Party in October 1947, and facing, the
Lucas Samaras box which almost killed Fran and me; we argued for a complex exhibition,
getting away from linear constructions to a non-linear layout.
I’m totally leaving behind Plato’s cave as primeval cabaret. This is just to show you something
of the foldout potential, as in cladistics or phylogenetics which try to show how species both
extent and extinct are related. The potency of all these objects and their workings out in the
wundertrunk derive less from sheer number that from their complex branching surprise
groupings and multitude-ness interactions with the changing environment and the shifting
perceiver or the shifting beholder so that you’re constantly moving in and out and this
arrangement, this pattern is an intelligent pattern, an associational pattern in that sense. It’s not
a free for all.
[Both slides please.] Both a crafty container housing a microcosm of natural and artificial
prodigies and an absolute instrument drawing into itself no less than everything, the
wundertrunk and its progeny invite the user to join the distributive singularities into a network
or correspondences so you get away from this notion of a passing viewer. The need to handle or
perform the objects—this theatrical performative dimension—has to do with an active notion of
knowledge, an active theory of education if you will. Collections of rarities, now I want to show
you how quickly they’re remediated so you don’t think that this is just one kind of object.
5

These objects became remediated in many, many ways and I want to show you two possible
ends of this remediation. Collections of rarities, shells, gems, coins, sculpture, painting,
watches, and automata were material expressions of the turn towards the empirical first
emerging in the 16th and 17th centuries.
[Both of them please; focus please]. Here on one end you see that it expands into rooms upon
rooms. This is Levinus Vincent’s famous collection in Amsterdam and print from 1715 where
you have rooms and rooms going on but I want to draw your attention to the interactive mode,
the conversational mode, of knowing but here something that fits in the palm of my hand at the
other end of the spectrum for five pence even, the infant’s cabinet of shells. There was also an
infant’s cabinet of flowers and so on that is a learning tool, a high art object but also a private
object. Here you have a more public aspect but here you have kind of private educational
aspect and you also have a whole economic range in between so these media get re-mediated.
I’m proposing then that the wundertrunk or the cabinet is an inter-sensual for personal
realization and transformation as the little child would be if it handled those little blocks and as
the adult is on my example in the left. Such assemblages, however—and this has to do with the
panel this evening—also constituted a cultural inventory and artismo archive exposing the
collective heritage of nature and humanities greatest handiwork. But the French have been
great in recent years—everything is [UI] this and [UI] that you know, this is our national
patrimony. Nobody has ever pointed out what is in these wonder cabinets is, in a way, God, the
great unusual singularities produced by God but also the singularities proved and produced by
human skill, by ingenuity, by the power of the imagination of the artist and that the items in
there are kind of cultural inventory. A cultural archive of empirical skill, of skills, of skills of
the hand. Another aspect of this material that has not been pointed out is that it also points
elsewhere, the beyondness of this technology and that we’re familiar with in the contemporary
world but I want to try and show it to you much earlier. This technology broadened horizons by
exposing an intangible domain, lying beyond the boundary of the unaided senses and
accessible only through optical devices.
[Both please.] I want to propose to you that cabinets and instruments also share certain formal
properties. Here again, in a bulging bulbous mirror a convex mirror and a wonderful joke one
of Joseph Cornell’s crystal cages, a continuation of that wundertrunk tradition. The practice of
confining and isolating rarities in a compressed space is not just western; you find it in Japan,
in China, in India. No matter what else you do to it, compression intensifies the aura and
strangeness of those objects.
[Next on the right please.] Like the wooden cabinet with its swirl away oddities, optical devices
similarly capture and frame transitory phenomena. This is a terrific globe, a mid-19th century
globe on a Chinese vase from the Smithsonian, quartz and that is not some weird mutant
floating inside. That is literally optically captured from the collection, the Smithsonian
collection, which occurs back in the room but that almost automatic snatching of things and
making them present, making them there, giving them to you in all of their reality but at the
same time making them hyper-real. It’s that double function that I want to stress. Just as the
wundertrunk [right please] compartmentalizes the scattered bounty of the cosmos in niches
and drawers to accentuate them so apparatus boxes of universe of disembodied images. This is
the slide drawer to the microscope that I showed you earlier. The rush of space and time [right
please] is halted for an instant in a flat and curved mirror or stalked temporarily inside the lens
and slides of microscopes and telescopes letting us observe miniscule objects, right, in grand
6

detail. This is from a digital high-definition microscopic camera invented by the Japanese two
years ago and you notice what happens. The sharpened and concentrated visions appear doubly
real and hallucinatory at the same time just as they do when you pull them into our cabinet.
[Left please.] I want now to move through different kinds of instruments and to demonstrate
this issue of polyopticality and what has been lost by our not remembering these functions.
This is a sorcière mirror. I know you’ve never heard of it, wonderful strange mirror, part of that
excess which drove the entire Baroque machinery of transcendence. In order to show you the
ways in which, totally forgotten, these were glassy metaphysical devices. The Jesuit words for
mirrors were “crystalline machines,” crystal machines, and they were meant to put us, for an
ecstatic moment, in the presence of God. It gives a sense of an other world totally forgotten. We
think that [sounds like “Greg Kirkwild”?] invented the age of the spiritual machine. Well, he
did not but fantasy, religious anguish in a parade of extravagant metamorphic devices blurred
the lines between the natural and the supernatural, and I should tell you we do have still an
online active website which one a Weby Award. We won it in the weird category. I feel this is
the acme of my career that I finally got recognized for what I ultimately am basically weird
[laughter]. The Weby—actually there will be Oscars in the Internet and I can say all of this
because I didn’t design it. I had a lot to do with what went into it like Vicky Porter did it and I
will give you the URLs for it because all of these things—I’m sorry, not all of these things a
number of things that we can reproduce on the web. [Please make it dark.] A number of things
that we can reproduce on the web are interactive and the sorcière mirror is frankly one of them.
So, remind me and I’ll give that to you.
Now instead, we were in this baroque atmosphere of access where instead of providing a
smooth repetition of outward appearance, both please, cylindrical and parametal mirrors
exaggerated and tortured shapes, they thinned and thickened, fragmented and overturned
regular forms, warping them beyond recognition into irregular hybrid creatures only to
miraculously rescue to them again, by the deformations and monstrous transformation
shimmered in the glaze catoptrics of the Jesuits of which as I said, Samarus is a wonderful
example. Among the hundreds of hermetic mechanisms from the hydraulic to the magnetic
devised by that natural magician Athanasius Kircher the Jesuit museum in the Collegio
Romano, many were perception altering crystalline boxes. These glassy metaphysical
instruments [on the right please] manipulated in ocular demonstrations ingeniously probed the
hidden workings of creation and anamorphic apparatus and it goes into the realm of painting.
This is a so called big [UI] lent to us by none other then Umberto Eco, I feel this is very
appropriate. [UI] encrypted and decrypted information you know, this is where it used to. This
is from the web but this is information. These surfaces are so dense and complex that they are
literally encrypted and you need a key, a clavis to un-key it so that turning makes a difference
here, whether you see it as a landscape or as a portrait. So, it’s teaching us something about
the transposability of the human into the non-human and back again just as I suggested those
multiple on spectacles did.
This switching of the biological into the geological also occurred in the symbolic level with
mirrors. Mirrors are inverting and converting machines. They rectify and perspective. How do
you teach those of us who are Protestants and Catholics, who inhabit the fallen world, how do
you teach the fact that all our sight is skewed? You teach it through anamorphosis but then
how do you know that anybody else has an un-skewed point of view? You rectify it and
suddenly one is given this vision of clarity and you are able to make an analogy to how perhaps
7

God might see but we see only through a glass darkening. We see only in a distorted fashion.
These mirrors are not just amusements, they teach these deep, deep principals in quite
extraordinary ways.
[Both please]. There is, of course also a whole industry and engineering component here. The
ascent of glass in secular surroundings becomes really evident in wealthy residents proliferating
throughout pre-revolutionary Europe and I want to make a distinction. These are from the
Huntington Library late 18 th century but this witty, totally artificial person is a courtier—this is
by Larmessin who did prints of the trades and this is a spectacle—obviously the spectacle and
mirror maker but what I want to point out to you is that he is dressed in, but I want to point out
how small the glass is. It’s only in the late 17 th and beginning in the 18 th century we can begin
as the advertisements said to get glass as smooth and level as a pool of water because there’s a
new kind of engineering and what happens? When you get glass like that then suddenly the
flesh and blood occupants of Parisian salons and London drawing rooms begin to generate airy
companions, of doubles, artificial persons that came and went according to the [sounds like
“Bour’s”?] movements and position. [Next on the left, please.] And here is an example. This is
the origin of the rear view mirror. This is a very large and very unusual claw glass that came in
many different formats. This one is probably the salon and unusual because you see them from
behind and the tinting also gives a kind of unification to that view. So, again in my plea for the
complexity of mirrors; people say, “oh, mirrors are so boring,” you know this is repeating and
think of all the theoretical drivel dismissing my [sounds like “niches”?] as simple mirroring—as
if that were a simple concept. But anyway I want to point out that mirrors are not just a
replicating technology. That’s what they get dismissed as but they’re taught coordinating
system. They coordinate the space and you don’t necessarily just need mirrors.
[Both, please.] They’re smart, we have smart furniture. If I could please—I had a whole wall, a
whole wall with this kind of stuff and actually paintings by Zoffany, by Chardin that all showed
the uses of reflecting everything from a Georgian dessert service which shows you both convex
and concave mirrors to a bulbous chocolate urn, to [next on the right], a faceted crystal bowl
where furniture—it’s kind of being big versus little science. This is kind of the little science and
I’m not making this up. Until the end of the 19 th century there were wonderful books written on
the [sounds like “Ouzen Metier”?] Museum in Paris, the Museum of Arts and Technology and
they pointed out that they had exhibits of coffee pots where people could look at them and like
in a fun house mirror, can look at yourself in a spoon and that would teach you principals of
science without fancy equipment. So, again a very, very old way of using simple objects to teach
rather complex topics.
I want to switch again both please], take us from the realm of light into the obverse, the whole
world of shadow and shade equally complex. Shadow arises from the expanding and
contracting effects of light swiftly traveling over a surface and shades and it’s this connotation
that we need also and certain artists Tony Oursler to certain length has gone back in the
contemporary world shades are phantasms. In myth they are directly associated with death and
resurrection and I have a whole section in the catalogue called, “Techniques of Epiphany”
where I show really that there’s a whole other theory of the origin of the art. You know you all
know the Corinthian potter, the shadow cast on the wall like this, these Montmatre ballet of the
hands which themselves link back the cave painting and recent periods of the perception but
there’s a whole other theory of the origin of art that’s put forward interpreting the black and
red figure vases of people like Sir William Hamilton as showing you the mysteries of Eleusis
8

that those religious mysteries which brought back the dead, which put the initiate into a
narcotic state. Of course in the full presence of the gods that red figure were transparencies or
what Sir William Hamilton called, “Transparent shows” and black figure were “Shadow shows”
and the bat was of the origin of art. So, this deep sense you have it here, that’s late 19 th . It’s
Hooggstraten from his famous treatise on painting where he has his students, his apprentices in
the studio very simply just by casting, using a low position lantern creating this sort of primeval,
hirsute satyr-like group that captures this shadow world. We have forgotten these complex
connotations, this ominous spatial system beyond our control, which always lurks within
shadows. [Both please.] So, I’m suggesting that all of modern projection technologies, including
video, are the spectral descendants of this ancient shadow show that cast mobile silhouettes
first on natural walk faces and later on muslin sheets and translucent screens. In the case of
Indonesia, the Balinese puppets, a distinction has to be made. These were activated, by the way
by priests. It incurred an illuminated threshold and we have them exhibited that way in an
apartment that was divided. The men sat facing the front, that is facing the buffalo, of hide
figures that were gilt and painted. The women sat on the opposite side of the apartment and
saw the gods and the heroes of legend only in shadows.
[Both please.] This continued—I mean the power, if we can get the power work like Kara
Walker, for example, linking up to old machine, Au Chinoise. I’m showing you a satirical print
by [sounds like “Gombil”?] instead of Au Chinoise, it’s “Oeuvre Françoise” where appropriately
the Chinese are sitting in the audience looking at the French disporting themselves rather than
the other way around but I want to say that even in the satirical works of [sounds like
“Lucissa”?] Kara Walker and her mordant caricature the use of cut-out, the use of shadow in
its unnerving retains something about unnerving property that I think artists instinctively have
seized about this medium that is in the history of that medium. It’s both in the future medium
and in the past of it.
[Both please.] I want to move this issue forward and suggest that David Hockney is quite right
to see various 16 th and 17 th century lenses as having developed in part from mirrors and he’s
talking particularly about the concave mirror that I showed you here, Archimedes burning
mirror because these mirrors have the special, the wondrous property of projecting images as
well as reflecting them. Do you remember that phantasmagoria I showed you earlier? Here you
see how it actually is done with smoke and a very special kind of mirror. This amazing
painterly ability to thrust the three dimensional and even extra dimensional world on to a two
dimensional surface lurks behind a state of mechanized projections creating ghostly entities
separate from our bodies as Tony Oursler did, I think last Halloween in and about Central
Park. So, again reverting to an earlier technology and implicitly seizing some of its properties
that tend to become overlooked. [Both please.] In the world of the magic lantern first referred
to by the physicist, Christiaan van Huygens, was primarily used to amaze and edify in the 17 th
century where figures were painted on mica or glass slides and cast from a light emitting box so
as to make and I quote Huygens “to make strange things appear.”
[Next on the left.] Like the wundertrunk, these popular demonstrations in here, by the way
other meta-media this is very unusual. It’s quite large glass slide by the French 19 th century
painter [sounds like “Juanee”?] and you’ll notice it’s a glass slide that shows a magic lantern
demonstration with a demonstrator. So, it falls in this where media thinks about itself in this
meta way. These magic lanterns also opened up spaces of excess, of extravagant worldly and
unworldly powers. In Japan, they were called devil machines. The Japanese were quite
9

fascinated with them and you can see because of the iconography, the original iconography was
raised a conjuring up of scenes of hell in the atmosphere of the Reformation and the Counter-
Reformation. [Both, please.} They displayed exotic flora and fauna for the stay at home, use of
distant lands. This is from Harvard. It was probably used in teaching the triunal microscope
and I show you here a scene that would have been shown in it. These are—this is the bizarre in
Kabul, Afghanistan—so that it moves out from the transcendent world to the world at large
bringing home sights.
[Both please.] The magic lantern however, like all of these technologies never loses traces of its
ancestry and here this demonic potential that is existing in projective technologies. Look at the
kind of iconography you have in a print on the left and I don’t have to remind you that Goya in
his House [UI] the strange demonic grotesques. We know that after dinner, they were painted
in his dining room he would take a magic lantern with no slides and simply shoot the beam,
cast the beams and activate the scenes and Goya, of course was an enlightener; it fits within the
iconography of the enlightenment as well. That is also revealing and deconstructing. It’s easy to
laugh at things like the phantasmagoria. This is Tony Oursler who redid it for New York, a
phantasmagoria. What is really important is that these were séances, musical. They hum a
strange—a mount monium was used. About 40 people were locked into a black velvet draped
room and demons and phantoms and the dead would be brought back. They would come like
that apparition on smoke that I showed you earlier. Bear in mind this is just before and after
the French Revolution when so many émigrés had gone to England, so many people had lost
loved ones and desired to bring them back. This is exactly the same impulse that moved the
original Madame Tussaud—and if you haven’t gone to the London Madame Tussaud you
should particularly to the chambers of horrors with the death masks of Maha but where again,
an attempt to bring back to life events that are almost unthinkable. So, these technologies have
to be thought of in that light as a thaumaturgy and instruments for resurrection.
[Both please.] This craze for boxing light as de-materialized colors, tones and shifting sites was
fed by succession of room size and portable dark chambers, camera obscuras. I show you an
unusual one. We have three in our show. This is a book and interestingly on the spine it says,
“Theatre de l’univere,” Fear of the Universe. You just simply flip it open, you put it under your
arm, a little clock pops up, you could put your head in and you have a portable camera
obscuras. We had one that was again, smart piece of furniture. Salon camera obscura and we
had a tent so the whole range of things. This is the thing that I would call Hockney on. He
talks about it as if it’s only one kind of instrument but the camera obscura has been made so
much that I only introduce it to you now because it has to be situated against all of these other
[sounds like “bouls”?] and boxes with their varying environments. This is truly a cabinet meant
to be seen in the dark and, if you want to make a pre-cinema analogy, here is the place to do it
because in the case of the camera obscura what happens is that the world moves in color, not
in black and white. The effect is dreamy. You get hovering phantoms, a sort of natural
automata because it pops up on your sheet or screen with no effort. The effect is at once filmy
and lucid at the same time.
I want to revert again to my September 11 memory because these have been talked about by
like people like Jonathan Crarey. Everything was reduced to the camera obscura and I write
very much against his position. I want to take the case—this is one of the seven extent
Hoogstraten boxes, this one is in Detroit—and suggest to you that what you see normally is just
an anamorphic distortion and only when you look in the peephole does the world suddenly
10

scream into clarity and the effect is not to control you but to reward you with that rarest of
visions in the fallen world, a perfect spaciously coherent artificial universe wrested from what
we know to be an all too perfect world. And if I want to be an optimistic, it’s rather [sounds like
“Crustian”?] because the minute you move away from the whole inside of the box, everything
collapses. It has the fragility of the Madeleine, yet it is not an overall total illusion.
[Both please.] These—this whole theatrical dimension—develop and I want to show you a few
printed. By the way, I want to see waste paper archived in a way that we use of other media.
These are waste papers and it’s interesting to read sometimes what these boxes are printed on.
A pleated paper fears to be viewed with or without a box, here you can see as many as seven of
them. [Both please.] You can see everything. The world is now literally brought into a box, this
is a Lisbon earthquake and this is [sounds like “Algamoria”?] of the Four Seasons that these
boxes, which continue they have wonderful descendence. The entire Victorian Toy Theatre
Thomas Mann writes about it in Budddenbrooks that has a wonderful after life of these shapes
that have.
[Next on the left, please.] This is a Lisbon earthquake scene and you can see how they’re
arranged in the complexity of their construction. Now, to accomplish this prints older media,
yet re-purposed, they have to be totally re-purposed on their fine art categories in a broader
cultural applications by becoming [sounds like “nu dotique”?]. The [sounds like
“Goukasken”?] which wandered in the middle class parlor from open air fairs and markets on
the backs of peddlers utilized, pricked, hand colore [next on the right, please] varnished and
oil etchings by the likes of [sounds like “Pernierz”?], torturing them into transparency. All
these high art artists, their etchings, their engravings were taken and they were embroidered by
women and children usually in kind of cotton industry; they were oiled. They were, as you can
see, pricked to a folderol. This is the Royal Place in Beijing. If you flipped open the top you got
the daylight scene, which I showed you a moment ago and if you had shown in the light from
the back you got this kind of effect just as postcards were altered in the 19 th century for
photographic albums.
[Both please.] I want to show you two other categories and then I will lead into my conclusion.
These commodious and episodic loosely linked collections of glowing images had no overall
plot that rolled them into a single unified picture. Like camcorders, high resolution TV and
video games these customized but still circumscribed do it yourself kits, prefigure the
impending privatization and internalization of mass media. This is a portable diorama, the large
duck air’s panorama of [sounds like “Durin Down”?] in Paris but this is again, the remediation
of it. You will be interested to know that it came with pre-fabricated scenery but you were also
given blank sheets to paint your own so that you can put in the customization of media. They
forecast this sort of imagery, forecast the ascent of the in-house electronic sanctuary. That is
more and more things brought and that became sequestered within the intimacy of your home.
Like ubiquitous computing with its exaltation of the aware user and the emergence of
experience design in designing history, designing practice and theory, there was almost a
promise of divine direct interactivity at the interface.
[Both please.] By contrasting gulfing panorama looked ahead to the rise of streamlined
industrial design. Jeff Wall’s Restoration here. This is the Bourbaki Panorama in Lucerne,
which opened up again about a year and a half ago. It was quite extraordinary to see. Here
instead of the private view you have the all view, the kind of beginning of the 19 th century wrap
11

around view. By the way, here you’ll say to me, well this isn’t a wrap around view this is a very
large, yes, long water color by [sounds like “Mussieri”?] which Sir William Hamilton had on
the top floor of his villa in Naples but in a bow window with the window behind so that the
window completed the circle. So, one medium completing another to create wrap around.
[Both please.] And just to show you the range of it and also to suggest that it is weirdly related
to other kinds of instruments like something you’ve never heard of. This is the zograscope that
I showed you earlier which had a similar high platform, from which you looked down, giving
cleaned up urban spaces, battlefields and even a child’s version. Here rolling out where you’ve
had a little journey from Hamburg to its outskirts but ranges again, media with its ranges.
These immersive ensembles drown the spectator in self-contained and pre-programmed
ambient media insulated from the polluting, crowded physical geography of the actual
manufacturing cities in which the viewers lived. Now at first blush, the relentless quest after
augmenting digital technologies that insulate us from physical realities while walking us into
the hyper-real must appear remote from the creaking wooden boxes, crude cardboard devices
and overt apparatus of the pre-modern era. Yet a number of older and younger techno-artists
are tapping into this rich repertory to escape this fate of rapidly warping computer graphics,
spinning endless simulations of terrifying life like creatures are caught in violent, vivid mortal
combat.
[Both please.] James Turrell and we have—as part of his ongoing Arizona Crater
project—produced a dream like series of three-dimensional sky scrapes that demand leisure
viewing. One of the things I didn’t say is the time spent viewing, the amount of attention paid
which was very gratifying also in viewers who went back and forth and through the exhibition.
It’s perfect too because you notice it literally boxes blue sky so the box analogy is reminiscent
of monumental coalfield paintings like those of Ellsworth Kelly. Diana Thater’s [next on the
right, please] video of spotty clouds, which we put opposite the magic lanterns, from which it is
a descendant evokes the meteorology of cyber space, either blank or shifting with the
mounding nebulosities of electronic information and these will be my last two slides.
[Next two, please.] Tiffany Holmes and I can only show you the simple game of breakout at the
end but in a way in which old media can be remembered within the very fabric of the new, she
created a wonderful censor based work called a_maze@getty.edu which relied on live ware. She
had spy cameras which she placed in things like the book Camera Obscura and so on and she
moved from the scene of Robert Irwin’s panoramic maze lying outside of the Getty which was
on the screen and as you approached, it would become fractured which is what you see
happening here and then the feeds reported live from people actually looking at or through
some of these devices and they were captured on a plasma screen on the outside. So, that you
constantly had the sense that the old was fed through the new and the new was fed through the
old and they were interrelated; the viewer is always a part of the medium. There is no such
thing as passive viewing and the process—she’s brilliant in it—she made us acutely aware how
visual technology structures perception and how we structure visual technology,
I now want to go to my conclusion. [Turn the machines off, please.] Recently, William Gibson
declared in a film—this is Mark Neil’s film of No Max For These Territories—“That the long
mediated world has become a country from which we cannot find our way back to and he goes
on.” I’m quoting him. I don’t think it’s possible to know what we’ve lost but there’s a pervasive
sense of loss and a sense of Christmas morning at the same time. It seems to me he captures in
12

a nutshell our conflicted attitude towards the artificial domains we have made. It is one of elegy
and marvel, estrangement and beauty rolled into one but is it accurate history and I return to
Maryhelen’s opening remark. Was there ever a past free of optical technology given the fact
that the eye was the first tool extending humans beyond the outer edge of their body? What I’ve
tried to do this afternoon is to undo our forgetfulness by recognizing that visual technologies
are both discreet implements thriving with a specific historical context and interrelated events
that become layered and superimposed with time and I want to give Arnheim and Wogart the
last word. Instead of extravagant fictions breaking out of the monitor to merge symbiotically
with reality, which is what has always held before us the VR experience as the nonplusultra of
simulacra simulation, so called older legacy applications, all this stuff I’ve been showing you,
which one wants to simply to shove in the legacy category, possessed modest gifts of
compression and intensification that were as limited, impermanent and mysterious as life
reformulating Abby Warberg’s insight that I quoted at the beginning of this paper. I’d like to
suggest that those older technologies enhanced the total person at the sensory, memory,
imaginative and cognitive levels. Something we desperately need today. Thank you.
Dr. Hendricks: Are there any questions for Dr. Stafford or are we prepared for the other room?
None? Yes, there must be.
Question: A very small question. That scroll of the long . . .
Dr. Stafford: The Hamburg?
Question: Yeah, how big is that?
Dr. Stafford: That is a very good question and I would have to look at the catalogue. In the
installation shot, there was the Jeff Wall Restoration, there was a long, long vitrine which did
not enroll it fully. It probably goes on for about a mile. It’s just enormous, and on the other
side—given by the London Daily News with your subscription—an unfurling, hand panorama of
the Great Exposition, which is brilliant. It’s a chromolithograph and you have the little viewers
up on top, the wonderful Crystal Palace and then all of the installations, all of the exhibitions
rolled by you, labeled. Then there’s this great cartographical orientation thing too so that—but
that one is about this high whereas the [sounds like “Chilo’s”?] one from Hamburg which just
shows the day trip from Hamburg to its outskirts. Hamburg, of course, is a sailor’s town, you go
by four brothels and then you go past a . . .
Question: Those are labeled?
Dr. Stafford: Those are labeled, yes, and then you go and there’s a little panorama building.
There’s a diorama of the building so all of the—again this media incorporating other media so
it’s really quite, quite wonderful and very detailed. [sounds like “Franter Ech”?] who does
short essays, I do the big long introductory one when Fran does beautiful short essays, does one
specifically on that and tells you all the scenes and their [sounds like “abrobouts”?] and all
sorts of fairs and so on. So, yes they’re quite . . .
Question: Another short question having to do with that, how were they meant to be read?
Dr. Stafford: How do you mean? How do you mean “reading”?
13

Question: I mean, if I were the user would I enroll it and—what was involved with memory of
the image before and then where you’re getting to?
Dr. Stafford: You would never unroll the whole thing all at once. I mean it’s useful actually and
do we cite many examples say from [sounds like “Norvels”?] or from the period where you get
a sense of how they’re used but you would never unfold them. You would probably unfold
them about this much. In other words and you’d get a scene and then you would just keep on
going. There are other things. You see I had to throw so much out that go along with it,
puzzles, wonderful puzzles at the same time where you get, for example metamorphic. I left out
the whole metamorphic section, landscapes where you would create your own quite literally
that you get a box of pieces the horizon line is the same but you could put them together in a
way. So, that this whole notion of new ability and what we think of choosing you know but I
mean choosing of course within parameters obviously under a certain limit that’s there but
that’s connected in a way to your question. The medium has stretched but it suggests to you
how far you unfurl it. In other words, you can unfurl it, people look at all of your four brothels
you know and go on. But I mean it’s very human in its dimension and also that’s a child’s so
that the level of detail is quite different or the stretch if I could put it, is different from if you
just walked around the corner, not around the corner, around the edge and looked at the Great
Exposition one which was meant for adults. So you know that kind of tailoring. Just like the
little infant’s cabinet is literally meant for a child’s hand.
Question: I was wondering if that journey to Hamburg could be used in a Zoetrope or
something? You know a spinning toy and have more of a sense of a journey. Is that where that
question is going?
Dr. Stafford: I don’t know. That’s a different medium. You see that’s a different—one could say
that’s a different technology. No, because in Zoetrope it’s repetitive. You see what’s interesting
about these, these don’t repeat the scenes, they’re quite different. In other words, in the sense
that it is a journey, you’re going from Hamburg to Altoona. In the universal exposition it’s a
little bit different, and the thing that’s amazing is that you can enter it anywhere. We arbitrarily
opened it in the middle; we could have unrolled it at the end just so you would see the amount
of roll that was left on the left and the right, here that we couldn’t unroll. Otherwise we’d need
you know to wrap it around the museum but the Zoetrope that’s rather different because there
are certain images there that are repeated. What it’s closer to—do you remember the blow book
that I showed you where certain images were repeated? I’m sorry, I really compressed so much,
but in the blow book there are sets of images. There are nuns, there are different kinds of
images then there are blank sheets of paper, then you get them again and of course, what the
charlatan does is amazing; he makes them disappear i.e., the blank pages and then suddenly
down the pike he makes them reappear again. So, that’s a little bit closer to the Zoetrophic
experience.
Question: I guess I was thinking that Jeff Wall in a way—it’s sort of like that trip to Hamburg.
You put it in a large enough spinning theatre and you have kind of a resistance, resistance of
vision and screen in between, that might be a sort of moving picture as well and it pre-figured
the movies.
14

Dr. Stafford: Well, I’m trying really hard. I see where you’re going with this but no, I mean it’s
an interesting thing what you’re saying but I’m trying to point out some differences here. This
has to do with the polyopticality. I don’t want to go, I’m resisting this pre-figure although of
course what did I say with camera obscura, that, of course, certain things in certain ways prefigure
but they do so much more than pre-figuration. They are about so much more.
Question: Did you look at all the finding connections with sound processing technologies? I
mean I’m vaguely aware of sort of free electric music and stuff.
Dr. Stafford: You know, [sounds like “Atanasus Cuhrer”?] I mean again that I threw out
because I was really trying to hit the mirror business but you know he invented—he was quite
amazing. He invented all sort of crucible instruments. Actually there’s a guy in Germany now
who has tried to put some of his music, these strange sounds of the universe. I have a disc, I
should have brought it along and played it to you. Cuhrer also invented a device for over
hearing secret conversations, very baroque, very contemporary, but the musical dimension is an
interesting thing. It’s clear in the phantasmagoria, everybody writes about the weird wail of the
harmonica. That is in everything so sort of coordinate those and there are other examples as
well. I have not myself personally gotten so deeply into that but surely that is a very good
question because these are really sensory scenarios and you’re quite right. Smells you know,
smells were unleashed you know like the smoke. We have descriptions of that plus all the
people fainting, hallucinating, screaming all sorts of things like that going on. So, it’s quite a
process but thank you for raising your question.
Question: You gave us this wonderful background on the entertainment, artistic and scientific
uses. Were these early optical devices used for surveillance as well?
Dr. Stafford: For surveillance—well I just gave the example of Cuhrer.
[Overlapping Voices]
Dr. Stafford: For spying you mean for spying? Yes, yes.
Question: Or for in terms of control like observing prisoners or students.
Dr. Stafford: No but . . .
[Overlapping Voices]
Dr. Stafford: Actually in my Artful Science when I first got involved in all this; it’s a long, long
love affair. Your question reminds me of something. You have to understand that particularly
as time went on—let’s say by the time you hit the 18 th century—there are also all of these books
that appear and I’m thinking of one book now to answer your question [sounds like “Ed
Mackioltz”?] eight volumes, well it depends whether it’s in court or [Indecipherable] but
anyway make your own and there are sections in there that say, if you want to spy on your lover
like you can imagine some of these myriad things. Those are great. Yes, they’re quite witty and
funny and excruciatingly comely. I’ve been thinking how in the hell would I make this thing?
But it tells you, first you do this, then you find the closet, then you do that, but be sure to drill
the hole here and then there has to be—so, there is that, there is that dimension. Now, whether
it was used—now we know, for example anamorphic the thing that’s interesting—see nobody’s
really studied—iconography as well that’s what I think is really important as well even if you go
back to anamorphic images from the 16 th century keeping things whole bind. Of course, the
15

eligious dimension here is quite clear but there were prints that were made at the same time
that inlayed in the landscape the portraits of [sounds like “Francois Premiere”?] for example so
the political. Already the notion that you have to hide, which means that you have to reveal,
which then suggests that maybe some of these instruments, not just parametal mirrors and so
on would have been used that way but I don’t have any evidence other than this later stuff. It’s
a good question. That’s a good question. I guess—a little bit what you want.
Question: Hi, I have one question. With regard to David Hockney’s secret knowledge and your
exhibition, a recent symposium at NYU on Kircher.
Dr. Stafford: On what?
Question: On Kircher, which was fabulous.
Dr. Stafford: I bet! Yes, we had it. I was in Stamford but that’s a dog and pony show. I was in
the Stamford one. Right, I couldn’t go to NYU. Thanks.
Question: The question that was raised was whether all of this interest in the pre-modern right
now is an antidote to post-modernism. So, can you just comment about secret knowledge as
being a way to change the conversation?
Dr. Stafford: You know in one way David Hockney is absolutely right about the camera
obscura. Let me just say that up front. On the other hand, I think his argument is narrow just as
what I read and I was not here for all the big hoop-la report in the New York Times. When was
it, about a year ago? You know, Suzanne Sontag saying that—I’ll never forget this—if Vermeer
had used the camera obscura it would have been like all the great lovers of history using
Viagra. I remember that statement. I thought that was low—unless the New York Times skewed
it somehow—I thought both parties missed the relevance of this and I’m not saying that I’m a
great holder of truth but it seems to me these technologies I am interested in. I’m interested in
them because, as a teacher who studies the past, I also deal with very contemporary media: how
can I make the past speak to the present? This is not about nostalgia for me, so I have to
explain that. To me it’s part of a larger project about rethinking the past. Okay, now your point.
I don’t think we can just reduce it to that. I can only say why I am really interested in
recuperating this and enriching our technological landscape. I put it that way and I have been
for a long, long time. I mean I’ve been doing this since Body Criticism where I was talking
about MRI and cat scans. David Hockney has a—I don’t know—I think he has a separate agenda
but I think he’s right but I don’t think he’s necessarily right. He kind of throws it up when they
attacked him and he said, oh well you know, these are much more than artists’ aids. I think
that’s my bottom line. These are much more than artists’ aids. The best thing about our
contemporary technology is that they’re much more than just about simulation. There’s a lot
more going on and that’s what I meant at the beginning. We have to get at the level of desire.
What’s a desire that doesn’t get satisfied? It kind of goes on and on and I think something
religious. Thank you. It’s a very rich and difficult question.
Dr. Hendricks: I think that’s it. Thank you very much.
[Applause]
16

CROSS DISCIPLINARY STRATEGIES TO RECREATE AND REMEMBER: ONE
PAINTER’S LOOK AT HOW MEMORIES CAN BE CAPTURED AND PLAY A
CENTRAL ROLE IN STUDIO PRACTICE
Judith Brassard Brown
Montserrat College of Art
With the advent of photography, practitioners in the arts and sciences were quick to use the
medium in their particular fields. Visual artists had a new art form. Additionally, painters
quickly recognized the potential of photography as a sketching tool, as an active way to explore
composition, light and color, or to collect information to bring to the studio.
The computer and digital technologies continue to facilitate dramatic revolution in studio
practice. With the appropriate equipment, we can now access visual information from personal
memorabilia, film, video, the web, and archival sources across time and cultures; as artists we
are not “bound” to our specific time or location and can relate to art forms, movements and/or
historical events in any way our work demands.
The “decontextualized” image is a recurring element in every discipline of contemporary art:
in paintings, prints, drawings, installation, sculpture, photography, and mixed media. The
ability to access, investigate and generate this kind of information plays a key role in the
generation of new art works; the taking of images from one context and reconfiguring them in
another is key to how artists are using the new technology. Artists can access museum and
gallery collections from their computers, use family photographs, video, still images off DVD’s,
scan from books or newspapers. Clearly, the collective body of work growing out of the process
and activity of using these new technologies to access images and as art-making tools, is in its’
infancy.
Excited by the possibilities, my own work has taken a reinvigorated turn back into a realm of
imagery dominated by memory. Through combining paint with personal, cultural, geographical
and/or political images, I create subjective “realities,” based on personal memories that,
hopefully, speak to our common concerns. For me, assembling the (initially) unrelated elements
of a collage, is akin to connecting to the disparate elements in dreams. Identifying and
assembling the visual elements becomes the first step in a long process of bringing order out of
chaos, in developing images that respond with a full range of emotions to my experience in the
world.
My earlier work prepared me for my current studio work; I feel I’ve been “in training” for
working across disciplines since I entered art school though it was not encouraged or supported
by the curriculum. As a young artist, I often felt constrained to fit into one neat category or
another. Though a painting major, I spent a great deal of my time working with other media,
first in sculpture and then in printmaking. I loved the logic and rigor of working in clay with
bas-relief. Later, I brought that experience to working in intaglio. Having many “states” of the
same work informed my direction in both form and content; using the physical layers of the
metal in tandem with viscosity printing and multiple plates, played a key role in my
understanding of color as I returned to painting.
1

Though I never worked formally in photography, I maintained an active involvement with the
medium through informal study and practice. Years ago, I read John Berger and Jean Mohr’s
Another Way of Telling. Berger wrote, “Among the ancient Greeks, memory was the mother of
all the muses and perhaps most closely associated with the practice of poetry.” In all my work, I
have sought the poetic and worked to avoid the narrative; I have sought to honor memory by
using it as shape and texture along with other shapes and textures. I see “memory” as inspiring
the making of art as well as playing a significant role in informing the development of each
piece in particular; it is the subtext and story that underlies the formal orchestration of each
work.
Berger went on to write in the same essay, “Both the photograph and the remembered depend
upon and equally oppose the passing of time. Both propose their own form of simultaneity, in
which all their images can coexist. Both stimulate, and are stimulated by, the interconnectedness
of events.” I remember thinking this latter statement expressed my intentions as an artist,
as an artist/painter. As an artist manually orchestrating compositions, I wanted my work to both
“depend upon and equally oppose the passing of time.” I worked to assemble the formal
elements, to connect the seemingly disparate parts in such a way that “timelessness” was
achieved. Though guided by this ambition as a young artist, I felt my work most often fell short
of this goal.
Certainly, as I drew upon my personal experiences, it was difficult to assemble the parts of my
life into any kind of coherence or to use and somehow transform that experience in my
artwork. I grew up in the fifties and sixties in the shadow World War II, of the Holocaust and
the direct effects on our close and extended family. Dramas were sensed not articulated,
anxieties acted out, yet unrelated to the events at hand. Life on the surface was placid and
unrelentingly cheery, jarringly at odds with the currents felt running below. In adolescence, the
war in Vietnam was dominant, and as a young adult I chose to marry my high school
sweetheart. In my early to mid-twenties, I found myself living with his mental illness and,
ultimately, his suicide at the age of twenty-six. The paintings, prints and drawings in “Hysterical
Fugues,” my first solo exhibition at the Bromfield Gallery in Boston, spoke to these
experiences, to my desire to bring order out of chaos, to honor memory, to make meaning
through making art. The subjective, dream-state images of those paintings, prints and
drawings, of the mixed media work of the period, concerned the orchestration of dissonant
elements, of abstracted figures and landscapes that spoke to these personal experiences.
The upheaval in my twenties was followed by a period of productivity and relative calm in my
thirties. I remarried, had children, taught full-time and worked in my studio. I began taking art
students to Italy each summer, and in 1986, established a small non-profit organization
dedicated to visual arts study abroad. During the next ten years, I served as the Director of our
Summer Intensive Studio programs in Trieste and Viterbo, Italy. One summer there, in Viterbo
in 1991, I broke my leg hiking around my favorite Etruscan site. Perhaps, because of this event
and my inability to “run around” in my usual manner, I abruptly, found myself confronted by
the Italian landscape and quite fascinated by the formal and expressive possibilities of working
directly on site. Throughout that summer and in succeeding years, I found myself moving away
from the earlier subjective imagery to a disciplined observation of the Italian countryside.
Engaging in this new “actual” rather than “emotional” landscape became an overriding
passion. Though much of the subtext of the earlier work is present in the landscape, these
paintings catalyzed a relearning of color, media and composition. Instead of the complex
2

layering of dissonant imagery of the earlier work, I engaged with paring the imagery to its’ most
essential forms and colors.
The Italian and more local landscapes continue to be a vital part of my studio work. It has also
proven to be the training ground for the subjective imagery of the mixed media collages; these
collages exist in the context of landscape space and are informed by the discoveries I have
made there.
Memory and “subtext” are coordinating elements in both the landscape and the collages. When
involved with the landscape, I am an explorer investigating potential picture ideas. As I work on
a particular motif, I come to live in the space through the painting. I am most often drawn to
hillsides, barns, farmlands, roadways, and water; I search out locations where man’s hand is
evident, yet are solitary, meditative. I’ll return to a particular site at different times of day, hike
to different eye levels and vantage points. Once there, I’ll take photographs and sketch with
watercolor, pen or pencil. Once back in the studio, preliminary studies and photos provide
much of the necessary “mechanical” information such as the specifics of the terrain, the spatial
relationships that exist between one area and another. Sketches and photographs help me to
analyze and simplify the various parts that make up to the composition. Once work is
progressing in the studio, memory and invention, along with subtext, return to play the
dominant role in orchestrating color, stroke, shape, air and temperature—in creating the
physical sensation of being in a specific time and space.
When working on the collages or the landscapes, I often think of the book, Painting: Some
Basic Principles, by Frederick Gore. It is a brilliant little book that I have returned to often
through the years and read to my students. Gore wrote, “The forms in painting cannot be
copied from nature, but must be equivalents to nature, plastic signs and images built up from
simple formal ingredients which both separately and together have intrinsic meaning—that is
the meaning of red or black, curve or straight, smooth or tough, of swift movement or slow,
dark or light—and which, while they indicate events, are also composed musically.” Whether
building the composition from paint alone or using collage elements as shape, texture and color
along with paint, it is the “musical” or “poetic” orchestration of a composition that, in its
arrangement, creates an experience far different than an acknowledgement of its’ discreet parts.
Gore writes, “But whatever we paint, we are committed to an abstract activity. It is then the
total of interacting lines and shape and colors, of planes and rhythms, of plain and patterned
areas, of mass and weight and movement, of space and solid, which make manifest at one and
same time the visible drama and the thoughts and emotions which lie behind—the overriding
idea which gives coherence.” In the collages, captured memories provide the shapes, colors as
well as key figural elements in my quest to honor memory. These elements come from family
and tourist photographs or are appropriated memories from friends; there are also old passports
and caches of material (letters, documents, photos) of people who have lived in our house,
photographs and memorabilia bought at antique shops, art invitations, newspapers, magazines,
images printed off the web or DVD’s. These materials are contrasted with and activated by
paint—so different in its nature—from a photograph or receipt or cut shape.
As I coordinate the collage elements on a canvas or board, I work intuitively. Some images are
used whole, others in part as some material provides shape or color or rhythm. Often, a number
of collages are assembling at the same time in a rather unpredictable way until I believe the
3

elements are ready to be secured. Once the collage elements are secured and protected, the
images continue to be painted and re-worked until their elemental “rightness” is assured. The
subtext of the collage—in various turns—includes loss, mourning, childhood, love, coming of
age, rage, frustration and my response to the political and social realities around me.
It is ironic that as I pursue my studio work, it once again has difficulty fitting into one neat
category or another. Recently, the mixed media collages have been included in photography
shows and the more traditional landscapes have continued to be shown in galleries devoted to
painting. Though I can understand why particular galleries have been reluctant to show the
work together, I see both bodies of work as cut from the same cloth and I hope to exhibit them
together in the near future.
Once again, I am reminded that there is no ‘pure’ art and the distinctions between media arise
out of custom and convenience. Gore wrote, “In every age new techniques have been invented,
old forms forgotten, still older ones revived, new and old combined. Art forms are continually
changing. There is nothing absolute about their nature.” Digital technologies presented me
with new ways to make art and the new tools prompted me to think in new ways about images I
want to make. Artists use whatever tools are available and quickly learn to think in that
medium—and advance the many ways the medium can be used—as they gain experience with it.
As excited as I am about the development of my own work, I look forward to seeing how other
artists will push the boundaries of form, content, and expression in the coming years.
There is no narrative that accompanies the slides. Rather, as I show the slides, I think it is
important to note the specifics of the collage elements are less important that their abstract
orchestration. I believe that a work of art is the creation of both the artist and the viewer. If a
work is effective in its formal orchestration, the viewer enters the composition and relates to the
work with and from their personal experience, culture, ideas, emotions and latent imagery.
Discussion of the particulars as I show the slides—of the “parts” and my associations and/or
subtext would only muddy this process. I am, however, happy to address any questions you
might ask about form, content or process.
For those of you interested in seeing the collages and the landscape paintings, you can visit the
following sites:
http://www.studiosoto.org/home92.htm
http://www.fine-arts-unlimited.com/jb1.htm
http://www.studiosoto.org/2001.htm
http://www.ardengallery.com/Brown/Judith_Brassard_Brown.htm
You can also email me directly at jbbrown@montserrat.edu and I’ll be happy to send you
additional examples of the work or respond to any inquiry.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Berger, John and Mohr, Jean. Another Way of Telling, Publisher: Pantheon Books; Reissue
edition February 1995.
Gore, Frederick. Painting: Some Basic Principles, Publisher: Studio Vista Limited, London
England, 1965.
4

TRANSLATIONS OF MEMORY: PERSONAL ESSAYS AND THE STUDY OF ART
Lucretia Anne Flammang
U. S. Coast Guard Academy
5
“The story of memory is the story of seeing.”
—Paul Auster
“But what do you want us to write about? What do you want in this essay?” they implored. A
roomful of seniors and juniors sat glowering at me, their desks encircled like a defensive wagon
train in a 1950s B-Western.
“I want a good essay,” I replied placidly, waiting for the groans.
It was March 2001, and I was standing before my students in a course I'd just designed,
Literature and the Other Arts. We were examining Modernism, and the students—most of whom
were political science majors, with a few engineers, marine scientists, and management majors
thrown into the mix—no doubt felt they'd already been challenged enough by T. S. Eliot,
Virginia Woolf, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso. They didn't need me ambushing them as
well.
I had asked them to write a personal essay in which they reflected upon their response to a
work of art they viewed outside of class. The parameters of the assignment I had provided in
the course syllabus, but I'd not specified a minimum page requirement, and the deadline was a
little fuzzy. Used to assignments with explicit requirements, the students were anxious about
their ability to complete such an unstructured assignment successfully. Clearly, as I stood
before them, they resented me for making them grapple with ambiguity.
What did I want from them? I wanted a well-written essay, a well-written personal essay, or the
“Fourth Genre” as Robert Root and Michael Steinberg have termed it. Not exactly expository,
analytical, argumentative, or narrative, the personal essay combines all these modes of writing
to examine its subject—the ruminations of the writer. Montaigne created the form, collecting his
prose lyrics in a book that covers a range of topics no less encompassing than the canopy of
human life itself. Voice, or authorial stance, in the personal essay is unlike that of other writing.
Rather than consciously creating a persona, the essayist does his or her best to present the self.
Montaigne described this feature of his writing by describing his book as “consubstantial with
its author, concerned with [his] own self, an integral part of [his] life” (II: 504). In this way, the
personal essay feels conversational. In fact, for Montaigne, writing served as an imperfect
substitute for the conversations he had shared with his dear friend, Etienne de La Boétie,
whose death had prompted Montaigne to express his thoughts on paper (Frame v).
I didn't have time in the semester to teach my students how to write a personal essay, however.
Our topic was Modernist literature and art, so, though it was not my intent, I forced them to
discover the form for themselves, as Montaigne had done. We went through a series of drafts.
Their first drafts focused almost exclusively on the works of art that they'd viewed: line, color,
pattern, balance. I told them repeatedly, “The subject of the essay is not the work of art. You

are the subject of the essay. The work of art serves as the catalyst, if you will, for your
reflections about your own life.” They rewrote their essays and brought their revisions to me.
We sat in my office while I read their essays aloud, a torturous experience for most of my
students. “Okay. You aren't saying enough about yourself yet.” Then I'd repeat the dictum of
Carl Klaus, one of the first theorists of the personal essay, “There need to be two stories: 'the
story of the event and the story of the mind.’ You are narrating the story of the event—that is,
seeing the work of art. You aren't yet telling me the story of the mind. What did the art make
you think and feel? And what, in turn, did those thoughts make you think and feel? What did
this work of art teach you about yourself and others?”
In other words, what does the art make you remember?
Writing a personal essay engages memory. When Montaigne wrote, he spoke to the memory of
his friend. When we write, we typically speak to an invented reader who inhabits the memories
animating our personal histories: events, people, places, snatches of images that burn through
the fog of our past like flickering film projected onto a wavering screen. Wordsworth called
such a moment a “spot of time,” a memory “recollected in tranquility” (608). This is what I
wanted my students to do. They weren't art history majors or fine arts students. They were
cadets at the U. S. Coast Guard Academy, one of the five federal service academies, like West
Point or Annapolis. What meaning would art have for them if I'd limited their thinking about it
to its elements of design or Modernist features? These considerations are fundamental, of
course, and class discussion built on them. But when my students were back in their own
rooms, facing their computer screens, I wanted them to engage the art in a less objective
manner. I wanted them to take what they had seen and connect it to memories about their life,
in the hope that through this process of reflection they would learn something about life and
the role of art in teaching us those life lessons.
In The Invention of Solitude, Paul Auster connects the three acts I wanted my students to
perform—seeing, remembering, and writing—showing inextricable links among them. His
analysis suggests that personal writing should inhabit a fundamental place in the study of art.
Auster recounts visiting the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam as an adult. As he stood seeing
the canvases, he remembered an April day when he was sixteen and had skipped school to go
with his girlfriend to a Van Gogh exhibit in New York City. Seeing the art with her had inspired
him to write his first poems, each titled after one of the paintings. The memory had been
lost—indeed, the poems were lost—until he stood in front of the paintings again in Amsterdam
(141-42).
Auster's story testifies to the fleeting nature of memory, perhaps, but it also links memory with
vision. He remembered as he saw the paintings. If he had only glanced at the paintings when
he was sixteen, if he had not seen the paintings, he would not have remembered them as an
adult. The entire memory of the day with his girlfriend, his first poems, and what had inspired
them would have been irretrievable. Seeing had to come first, and this act requires, as Auster
says, forgetting oneself in order to observe one's surroundings: “from that forgetfulness arises
the power of memory” (138). For Auster, then, there is no difference between “the work of
writing and the work of seeing” (138). Writers must be able to see—their writing translates
images into language. But if what one writes reflects what one has seen, then writing is also
intimately connected to the act of memory. Writing does not merely translate images into
language: writing translates memory into language (136).
6

When I asked my students to write personal essays about art, I wanted them first to see the
art—to engage with the artist in that unique dialogue that occurs in the space between viewer
and object. That silent conversation is at the heart of the assignment, for it requires the
students to engage with the other in an open-ended and inherently ambiguous situation. As
they looked, they also talked, and as they talked, they remembered—but because their
memories arose in the context of this relationship with the art object, they recalled more than
their own personal histories. “Memory,” Auster says, “[is] not simply [. . .] the resurrection of
one's private past, but an immersion in the past of others, which is to say: history—which one
both participates in and is a witness to, is a part of and apart from” (139). While I was not
surprised that the students were drawn to works of art that spoke to something urgent in their
lives, I pushed them to think about history they both participated in and were witnesses to. For
many students, this history was familial, but for some students this history also encompassed
observations and ruminations about the culture in which they live, which is where I gently tried
to push all of them.
Despite their grumbling about the assignment, my students wrote wonderful, moving essays. I
have time now to talk about only one of them. I hope that as I describe the essay, you'll get a
better sense of how writing, seeing, and memory connect in a meaningful way in a personal
essay. John Kousch was a senior when he took my class. He struck me as a student not fully
invested in his major, Government, and as a young man uninterested in writing as a pastime.
John's sister was living in North Adams, Massachusetts at that time, so one weekend when he
went up to visit her, he also visited MASS MoCA. There he saw Slumber (1994) by Janine
Antoni, a sculpture/performance work comprised of a loom, bed, nightgown, yarn, EEG
machine, and Antoni's REM reading. Antoni slept in the bed, having connected the EEG
machine to herself. In the morning, she took the REM reading of her sleep, and using thread
from her nightgown, wove the REM pattern into the yarn of the blanket.
John saw the work as the translation of a dream. But his essay ultimately explored the
relationship between his mother and his grandmother, as he perceived it. John had grown up in
a small town in Massachusetts, where from his living room, he could see his “grandparents' ivycovered
porch down the street” (15). I think many of the stereotypes we attribute to small
towns come into play here; as John observes in an understated way, “my mother took sound
advice from Grandma on many things, especially childrearing” (15). John's grandmother was a
part of a generation of women who broke rules and defied convention—a peer of Betty Friedan.
Not only a wife or mother, she graduated from Brown University with a Master's in
mathematics. She played the organ and tuned Woody Guthrie's piano. She sounds as though
she was a bit of a character—and a very strong personality. John's mother is also an artist: she's
a quilter. In his essay, he describes the quilt she made for him, noting the colors, the pattern,
and even the stitching. At night, when he crawls under it, he tells us, “The quilt opens up as if
I were turning pages of a book, each fold revealing a more intricate emotion of love from my
mother” (15).
John's grandmother now has Alzheimer's. When he wrote his essay, she had lost the power of
speech, and she was beginning to forget how to move her body. What I love about his essay,
though, is the way in which he seamlessly shifts from enumerating the symptoms of his
grandmother's disease to a reverie of his mother weaving his grandmother a blanket, using the
thread from his grandmother's nightgown. The thread becomes a metaphor for his
7

grandmother's life, and his mother's art—her weaving—a metaphor for the impossible desire, or
dream, of children to keep their parents alive. As his mother weaves, she translates her love for
her mother into the blanket, but the more she weaves, the shorter the nightgown becomes.
John transcribed into his essay the zig-zag lines of an EEG reading. The words dart down the
page, one per line, creating the visual image of his grandmother's sleeping dream, a dream that
his mother concentrates on keeping alive. The essay ends in blue, literally, a vertical blue line
of text representing the inevitable: a
peaceful,
blue,
straight
line.
The
Slumber
has
run
its
course. (15)
Paul Auster says, “The story of memory is the story of seeing” (154). When we ask our students
to see art, we are also asking them to remember what they see. But we don't want those
memories to hang loose from the fabric of their personal histories. When we require our
students to write about their experience with art, we invite them to weave that experience into
the full tapestry of their lives, where the experience—the memory of seeing—will become an
indelible part of who they are, and perhaps a small part of how they see their world. It is in this
way, through the use of the personal essay, that we can engage in an art that remembers
through our memories translated into writing.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Auster, Paul. The Invention of Solitude. New York: Hudson, 1982.
Frame, Donald M. “Introduction.” The Complete Essays of Montaigne. Trans. Donald M.
Frame. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1943. v-xiv.
Klaus, Carl. Class lecture. September 1991.
Kousch, John. “A Lifeline of Dreams.” The Bulletin: The Magazine of the United States Coast
Guard Academy Alumni Association, Inc. Aug. 2001: 14-15.
Montaigne, Michel de. The Complete Essays of Montaigne. Trans. Donald M. Frame. Stanford:
Stanford UP, 1943.
Wordsworth, William. “Preface to Lyrical Ballads.” 1802. Romantic Poetry and Prose. Ed.
Harold Bloom and Lionel Trilling. New York: Oxford UP, 1982. 594-611.
8

FACE VALUE: PORTRAITS AND MEMORY
David Dodge Lewis
Hamden-Sydney College
“There are two ways of disliking art... One is to dislike it. The other
is to like it rationally.”
9
—Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist
Since there may be nothing quite so irrational in the arts as opera, I am going to begin my
presentation with a couple of brief interdisciplinary excerpts, one from Puccini and one from
Mozart, each having to do with portraiture.
Puccini_s opera “Tosca” opens in a church with Cavaradossi, a painter, working on a portrait of
Mary Magdalene. The model is a blonde and blue-eyed penitent who is so devout in her prayers
that she is unaware she is being painted. Unfortunately, Cavaradossi is executed by firing squad
later in the opera, another example of how portrait painters get no respect.
By contrast, in this aria from act one of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” handsome Prince Tamino
has been given a portrait of Princess Pamina, daughter of the Queen of the Night. He instantly
falls in love, for the bewitching portrait is a close likeness of the beautiful princess. Thus begins
the dramatic action, as Tamino tries to rescue his heart-throb from the demon who has
kidnapped her.
These two musical examples represent two different traditions in the history of portraiture: the
first involves creating a portrait type, often symbolic, with little regard for what the person
depicted actually looked like; the second is the observance of verisimilitude, a search to capture
an actual likeness and to immortalize an individual.
For the classical Greeks, the abstract concept was more important than the concrete reality.
They tended to sculpt their portraits of heroes, often long after their deaths, as part of
encouraging public virtue, and these instructive (as opposed to descriptive) portraits were
consequently designed for public places. As Richter said in his extensive analysis, The
Portraits of the Greeks,
The heroizing element remained inherent in Greek portraiture throughout its history. Even in
the realistic portrait of the Hellenistic age the feeling for the type as against the individual often
remained. 1
By contrast, Roman portraits were usually to be found in the home and were part of a more
private ritual of ancestral veneration borrowed from the Etruscans. In an essay on Graeco-
Roman portraiture, Kurt Gschwantler cites Polybius, a Greek historian, who described the
Roman funerary ritual:
This image consists of a mask, which is fashioned with extraordinary
fidelity both in its modeling and its complexion to represent the features

of the dead man. . . . And when any distinguished member of the family dies,
the masks are taken to the funeral, and are worn by men who are considered to
bear the closest resemblance to the original, both in height and in their
general appearance and bearing. 2
These visages were likely of wax, pulled from death masks. Their fragility led eventually to the
practice of copying the features in marble.
In the Renaissance, these two traditions were married as both the philosophical Greeks and
empirical Romans were resurrected. Because painting had replaced sculpture as the dominant
medium for portraiture, artists could both capture a likeness and put the figure in an
environment with symbolic references to the subject’s character, profession, or lineage.
Portraits from this period often create an affecting sense in the viewer of being in the presence
of a particular sitter, while less immediate clues which identify that individual may be coded in
the painter_s iconography or may simply be bound up in a curious but long dead fashion (wigs,
for instance). These elusive clues often require the sleuth-work of the art historian, but the
forthright commemoration of an individual is why we care about the depiction in the first place.
The relative dominance of these two qualities wax and wane inversely to one another: The
romantic nineteenth century felt strongly that an individual was immortalized in a portrait and
“spoke” directly and universally to posterity. The more skeptical late twentieth century had
doubts that any image speaks directly, and that posterity could only understand the message of
the sitter by understanding the artistic conventions and social customs of the sitter_s time. As
an extreme and current example, Marcia Pointon in Hanging the Head /Portraiture and Social
Formation in Eighteenth-Century England, writes, “’Likeness’ is that which enables the viewer
to match a representation with a given human subject. But this is never an isolated activity;
such processes of reading are culturally determined.” 3 For this late twentieth century author,
not even a likeness is something a viewer can glean directly from a portrait. I shall return to
this.
To understand one reason why the pendulum has swung so far in the direction of the
theoretical Greeks and away from the pragmatic Romans requires delving into the modern
discipline of psychology. For most of the twentieth century, the field of psychology was
dominated by behaviorists. In fact, “dominated” may be too kind a word. According to
psychologist Erika Rosenberg, those such as herself who studied the human face for direct
insights into emotional states “risked expulsion from the behavioristic mainstream. Conducting
research on internal states was not only looked down on during the early part of this [20th]
century, it was a career-ending decision.” 4
Why such hostility? As Paul Ekman confessed early in The Face of Man, “I began to study
facial expressions of emotion in 1966. Trained in traditional American Psychology, my bias was
that anything important about social behavior was entirely the product of environment, not
heredity.
Facial expressions of emotion would be the product of learning, not evolution, and therefore
would differ across cultures.” 5 Ekman_s trip to New Guinea changed his mind, however, and he
went on to become the foremost authority and proponent of the universal nature of basic
10

emotional expression in the human face. In spite of his well documented research, Ekman ran
into a great deal of resistance from established social scientists who believed human behavior
was culturally determined, and that each culture developed along its own line; for them, there
could be no such thing as universal human facial expressions. In his “Afterword” to a recent
reprinting of Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Paul
Ekman describes the one-sided embrace of cultural relativism by one of his critics, the
prominent anthropologist Margaret Mead, as “a backlash against Social Darwinism, eugenics
and the threat of Nazism. Looking back on her life in 1972, Mead explained how she and other
anthropologists explicitly decided not to consider the biological aspects of behavior because of
the political problems it would cause.” 6
The well-intentioned avoidance of biology as a source of behavior in preference for a culturally
determined source of behavior seems to have permeated the social sciences in the first half of
the twentieth century, reinforced by the politics of World War Two: The choices for many in
Europe at the time of the war were between Fascism (and what would become its experiments
in eugenics) and Communism (and its associated belief in the power of culture to change
human behavior). Hitler made it easy for those in the arts to choose sides: His rabid
persecution of modernism practically assured modernism_s embrace by the Allied nations.
Repelled by the far right, the academic side of art slowly began its move to the overtly leftist
_new_ art history, with its focus upon social dynamics, insiders, outsiders, the _other,_ and the
cultural aspirations of patrons.
The Introduction of Joanna Woods-Marsden’s Renaissance Self-Portraiture begins, “[This]
book explores a series of visual constructions in Renaissance Italy as these can be said to relate
to a given social construction. . . . One of the primary functions of these works was to record, or
rather construct, the appearance of their makers.” 7 The author fains a slip in order to correct
herself instructively, pointing out that artists did not “record” their own images, since that
would imply a relatively objective translation of the reflections found in their studio mirrors;
instead, they “constructed” images, in the context of their equally constructed society. Her
thesis is that painters at this time were redefining the role of the artist from manual laborer to
thinker, “constructing” their self-portraits toward this end—but what good would such a
metamorphosis be if the subject of the painting (especially shorn of such clues as palette and
brushes) was not identifiable as the artist? Cultural constructions aside, the person in the
painting had to be recognizable.
In “The Meaning of Likeness: Portrait Painting in an Eighteenth-Century Consumer Society,”
T. H. Breen suggests, “speculate here, for example, that for provincial Americans the central
element in these [portrait] paintings may have been the sitters clothes, the character
and quality of the fabric, and not—as we have sometimes been led to believe—the posture of the
body or the details of the face.” 8 Breen continues,
The eye is drawn in these mid-century portraits not to the faces, but to the
garments the people wore. However poorly a painter handled a sitter’s physical
features, he almost always managed to capture the brilliance and luster of the
clothes ...And none seems to have succeeded better than John Wollaston. This
itinerant artist painted at least three hundred portraits in the colonies. Modern
critics who have viewed this scattered work have expressed considerable
11

ambivalence about Wollaston_s artistic achievement. Though the faces of his
sitters possess a dull sameness, their garments are painted brilliantly. 9
Of course the thesis that colonial patrons cared not a fig for the face, but as ardent capitalists
were solely engaged by the attendant splendor of the outfit, begs the question: “What social
advantage could a sitter enjoy from his sumptuously-clad portrait if viewers could not tell who
was depicted?”
While art academics were thus caught up in identifying modes of production and the signifying
practices, changes were afoot elsewhere: In psychology, Ekman and his followers won the day,
and as a result of their careful and extensive research, the universal nature of basic human
expressions is now the status quo; Ekman has pointed out, perhaps to reassure those who
wrongly associated any biological basis for behavior with racial supremacy movements that his
research indicates just the opposite, that the universal nature of human expression suggests we
are all essentially the same.
More broadly than that, and of special significance for portraitists, there is substantial evidence
that the temporal cortex of the brain contains neurones which are evolved specifically to
respond to facial patterns, and that this sensitivity extends to non-human primates, in which
such cells have been found. Further, the sensitivity of these neurones is sufficient to extend to
the recognition of faces in line drawings, even among monkeys. 10
In biology, the big news has been the human genome project, wherein various behaviors are
now being associated with various genes. The pendulum has swung again, and the primacy of
the cultural behaviorists has begun to erode.
What does this swing portend for art? For one thing, it suggests that writers like Jean Alazard
from half a century ago, struck a better balance than many of today’s writers. In The Florentine
Portrait, Alazard pointed out that there is more misattribution in portraiture than in any other
domain of art:
In an imaginative work or in a genre painting, the personality of the painter
shows up more . . . a portrait is not so much of a revelation; even in the
romantic portrait. . . . there is a struggle between the artist and the model...in
any case the personality of the painter is limited to a certain extent by the very
existence of the model whose essential features at least must be rendered. 11
Perhaps we can bring a reconciliation between the academic over-reliance upon the
intellectualism of cultural relativity, and the profession portrait artist_s reluctance to engage
academically at all: Symptomatic of the division, both these books are about portraiture—This
one, The Art of the Portrait, by Norbet Schneider, outlines the history of portrait painting
between the late Middle Ages and the seventeenth century and tells the stories behind several
dozen works from that period without ever mentioning anything about how a portrait painting
is made; this one, Portraits from Life in 29 Steps, by John Howard Sanden (a prominent New
York portrait painter), describes Sander_s method of painting in great detail without ever
getting into the history or theory of portraiture. What we need is a synthesis which
acknowledges the fundamental and universal realities of creating a likeness while pointing out
the importance of cultural influences, past and present, upon portraiture. .
12

A first step might be a rejection in the academic community of the bogus notion that culture
determines likeness. That error is the residue of cultural relativism’s excesses, of hard-core
behavioralists who believe that visual perception has no universality beyond the fundamental
physiology of the eye. If likeness was culturally dependent, as they suppose, then the
computerized facial recognition systems set up in airports to detect terrorists could not
function; yet “Face It” technology, by Visionics, is advertised as having an error rate of less
than 1% under optimal conditions. Further, as Jan B. Deregowski noted in “Illusion and
Culture,” “an analysis of pictures suggests that there exists an optimum way of depicting an
object, which can be arrived at by consideration of purely physical principles of propogation of
light.” The author goes on to point out how systems such as traditional perspective are not
merely cultural conventions, but approximate reality as the eye sees it. 12 Depictions which
approximate the universal retinal display of the eye, are culturally independent, which is why
trompe l’oeil images can “fool the eye,” anyone’s eye, from any culture.
That said, although capturing a likeness by hand is a demanding craft, it is not sufficient for art.
In the judgment of John Pope-Hennessay, Gentile Bellini, for example did not come up to
snuff: “The limitation of his portraits is that they are destitute of the pictorial ideas which effect
the mysterious act of transubstantiation from history to art. . . . [The] portrait of Caterona
Cornaro at Budapest reveals, in its deadly evenness of emphasis, the mind of a cartographer.” 13
Life is short and art is long, and the accuracy of the great Renaissance portraits is generally now
beyond verification. These images continue to move viewers for reasons beyond verisimilitude,
or their careful mapping of features. Further, while some old masters seem to have been
merciless in their veracity, others found discretion to be the better part of valor: Richard
Wendorf, in his fascinating study of Sir Joshua Reynolds as a society painter, indicates Reynolds
_made the tall short and the short tall as the wishes of the sitter wavered. 14
Aspiring portrait painters should be welcomed into the university, where they could learn a
great deal about their art from the liberal arts: In psychology class, they could study not only
the universal nature of fundamental human facial expression, but also the basics of human
visual perception. Sociology classes can help with culturally significant gestures and the wide
range of behaviors (including fashions) which identify individuals as being part of a particular
group. Biology can assist with cephalic anatomy. And, of course, art academics have a wealth of
knowledge about iconography, composition, thematic unity, significant gestures, and visual
traditions in general that today_s portrait artists sorely need.
In exchange, perhaps those art academics who have wrapped themselves in constructs, period
modes of production, and signifying practices, can strip off their cultural strait-jackest, stare
into the face of some marvelous portrait from the past, and rediscover what it means to be a
human being.
NOTES
1. p. 16, The Portraits of the Greeks, by G.M.A.Richter, abridged and revised by R.R. Smith;
Cornell University Press; Ithaca, NY, 1984.
2. p. 20, Ancient Faces /Mummy Portraits from Roman Egypt, essay “Graeco-Roman
Portraiture,” by Kurt Gschwantler.
13

3. p. 81, Hanging the Head /Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century
England,, Marcia Pointon; Yale University Press, New Haven, 1993 (second printing
1997).
4. p. 9, Erika L Rosenberg, “The Study of Spontaneous Facial Expressions in Psychology,”
in What the Face Reveals, edited by Paul Ekman and Erika Rosenberg; Oxford University
Press, New York, 1997.
5. p. 3, Paul Ekman, The Face of Man /Expressions of Universal Emotions in a New Guinea
Village; Garland STPM Press, New York & London, 1980.
6. p. 368, Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, third
edition, with an Introduction, Afterword and Commentaries by Pail Ekman; Oxford
University Press, NY, 1998.
7. p. I, Renaissance Self-Portraiture/ The Visual Construction of Identity and the Social
Status of the Artist, by Jonna Woods-Marsden, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1998.
8. p. 39, Ibid.
9. p. 49, Ibid
10. When line drawings of monkey faces depicting particular emotions (anger, fear, etc.) were
shown to the macaque monkeys, the monkeys showed the same kind of behavior as they
did to pictures of real faces. p. 106, “When is a face not a face?” David Perrett, P.J.
Benson, J.K. Hietanen, M.W. Oram, and W.H. Dittrich, The Artful Eye, ed. by Richard
Gregory, John Harris, Priscilla Heard, and David Rose, Oxford University Press, Oxford,
1995.
11. pp. 17 & 18, The Florentine Portrait, Jean Alazard, Schocken Books, NY, 1968 (first
published, 1948).
12. pp. 161&162, Illusion in Nature and Art, edited by R. L. Gregory and E. H. Gombrich,
Charles Scribner_s Sons, New York, 1973.
13. pp. 50 & 51, The Portrait in the Renaissance, by John Pope-Hennessy (The A. W. Mellon
Lectures in the Fine Arts—1963; The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.)
Pantheon Books.
14. p. 61, Sir Joshua Reynolds/The painter in Society, Richard Wendorf, Harvard University
Press, Cambridge, 1996.
14

THE ART OF THE NAME OR THE NAME OF THE ART: “CHRIST AND ST. JOHN THE
EVANGELIST” OR “JESUS AND THE BELOVED DISCIPLE”?
George Matejka
Ursuline College
Significant discoveries are often the result of painstaking research performed by a specialist
within a scholarly discipline. Specificity allows for depth of understanding within an academic
discipline. While each academic discipline has its specialists, all too often there is little crossdisciplinary
conversation among specialists. Within the world of art, the work of art historians
may be enhanced by conversations with scholars in other disciplines. This paper has a modest
goal. It will take a concrete work of art with its traditional understanding by the discipline of art
history and offer supplementary interpretive perspectives from current biblical research and
interpretation theory.
The Medieval Gallery of the Cleveland Museum of Art contains a fourteenth-century
woodcarving entitled “Christ and St. John the Evangelist.” This woodcarving, and a recently
published article on it serve as the catalyst for my reflections 1 The traditional title for this
woodcarving has been accepted by the scholarly community without question. However, recent
research in the study of the Gospel of John, as well as in the field of interpretation theory,
invite a review of the traditional approach to the issue of the title of this work. This review will
not impact the aesthetic understanding of the piece, but will impinge on the didactic dimension
of the work.
This essay argues generally that the didactic dimension of a work of art may be a sufficient
reason to consider changing the traditional name or title of that work. The argument proceeds
by way of a concrete example: the woodcarving traditionally entitled “Christ and St. John the
Evangelist” might more adequately be named today “Jesus and the Beloved Disciple.” I will
present the case for rethinking the title and offer reasons why such a change would be
important.
A. BIBLICAL EXEGETICAL CONSIDERATIONS
“Exegesis” (a Greek word taken over into English) literally means “to read out of.” Its opposite
is “eisegesis” or “reading into.” Students of the biblical text make every effort to allow the text
to disclose itself through its vocabulary, syntax, metaphors and any other grammatical or
literary clues that may be present within the text itself. “Exegetes” try not to allow later
historical interpretations or their own subjective viewpoint to influence their reading of the text.
In general, there is a keen effort in exegesis to allow the text to speak for itself rather than to
read one’s subjective predispositions into the text (i.e., “eisegesis”).
“CHRIST” OR “JESUS”?
Why change the name of “Christ” to “Jesus”? Biblical and theological research over the past
several decades has drawn a helpful distinction between two titles: the “Jesus of history” and
15

the “Christ of faith.” 2 This distinction articulates two very different moments in both history
and Christian faith: (a) the historical period of time when the person Jesus of Nazareth lived his
human life and during which he may have been believed to be the messiah (Christ) in only an
implicit or incipient way; and, (b) the period of time after Jesus’ historical life on earth when he
was more explicitly believed to be the Christ by his followers. 3 While the event of Jesus’ death
and resurrection involved a transition from the Jesus of history to the Christ of faith, “[t]his
relationship is one of personal continuity. The person referred to in the concrete historical life
of Jesus is exactly the same as the person contained in the living reality of the risen Christ of
faith.” 4
The upshot of the distinction between the “Jesus of history” and the “Christ of faith” is that
many scholars suggest employing the name “Jesus” for references to his historical
existence—what is typically called his “public ministry.” The stories in the Gospels generally
refer to “Jesus.” By contrast, the word “Christ,” a title attributed to Jesus by the early Church,
would be used when referring to the time following his resurrection. “Christ” is a title ascribed
to Jesus by those believing in his resurrection. This title, then, would be reserved for the
discussion of the post-resurrection period and the faith that emerges from the primordial belief
by Christians in the resurrection from the dead of Jesus of Nazareth.
There is a good deal of debate within the biblical field as to whether the title “Christ” was given
to Jesus during his public ministry, or whether it was a title attributed to him by the early
Church following his resurrection. The four Gospels were not composed until some thirty to
sixty years after Jesus’ death. 5 It is therefore unclear whether the use of the title “Christ” in the
public ministry section of the Gospel (e.g., Mark 8:29: “You are the Christ”) is a historically
accurate reference to Jesus’ lifetime, or is rather a proleptic bestowal of a post-resurrection title
onto the Jesus of history.
This debate is further complicated by a shift in the scholarly understanding of the literary genre
of the four Gospels. Traditionally, the Gospels were thought to be historically accurate
biographies of Jesus’ life. 6 Twentieth-century critical biblical scholarship, however, has shown
convincingly that the Gospels are primarily theological statements composed by various writers
and communities in the early Church to express their faith in the person of Jesus Christ.
Given the complexities described above, what can we learn from the Cleveland woodcarving?
What does it disclose to us? Jirousek’s careful research shows that this piece does not derive
from the Last Supper narrative in John 13. 7 If the artist’s inspiration for the piece springs from
another point in the historical (pre-resurrection) life of Jesus of Nazareth, then the name
“Jesus” would be more biblically and theologically appropriate for the piece. On the other
hand, if some evidence indicates that this piece describes a post-resurrection moment, then the
title “Christ” would be the more adequate appellation.
There is a significant piece of evidence portrayed in the woodcarving itself: the figure of Jesus
does not exhibit the stigmata, or wounds of the crucifixion, typically found in works of art
depicting his post-resurrection period. Neither the hands nor the feet show the nail-marks of a
crucified body. It is reasonable to assume that the artist intended to portray a moment during
the public ministry of Jesus. With this evidence as support, the more appropriate name to use is
“Jesus.”
16

“ST. JOHN THE EVANGELIST,” OR “THE BELOVED DISCIPLE”?
The general approach to the study of the second figure in the work of art parallels our
examination of the figure of “Christ” or “Jesus.” In the medieval period in which the Cleveland
piece was produced, there was a common understanding concerning the identity of the second
figure. It was undoubtedly St. John the Apostle-Evangelist. The hyphenated term indicates the
general assumption of medieval Christians that it was indeed the very same John, son of
Zebedee, who was called by Jesus to be one of his Twelve Apostles, and who also wrote the
Gospel known as the Gospel of John. This general assumption has roots that date back to
perhaps the second century.
Like all scholarly disciplines, the field of biblical research continues to progress in our day.
Some of this research has ‘trickled down’ into popular understanding; much has not. The past
forty years have witnessed great strides in research on the Gospel of John. In particular, the
work of Raymond E. Brown has been instrumental in shaping many current scholarly debates
concerning the Gospel of John. 8 It is Brown’s approach to John’s Gospel that I bring to bear on
the discussion of “Christ and St. John the Evangelist.”
Early in his career as a scholar of the Johannine Gospel, Brown affirms the traditional position
“associating the Fourth Gospel with John son of Zebedee…” 9 However, some years later Brown
presents evidence that leads him to change his mind and conclude that the writer of the Gospel
of John should probably not be identified with the apostle John, son of Zebedee. 10 There is no
evidence internal to the Gospel of John to suggest this identification. The traditional
interpretation that “the disciple whom Jesus loved” (John 13:23) was the apostle John cannot
be textually substantiated. 11 This identification is the result of an inference made quite early in
the history of the Church. The interpretive inference involves 2 steps. First, an inference is
made that the unnamed disciple of John 13:23 is John, son of Zebedee, the apostle himself.
The argument is that the author modestly speaks of himself without overtly naming himself and
without employing the first person pronoun: instead of writing “I leaned over…” the author
more humbly refers to himself in the third person “he leaned over…” (John 13:25). The
grammatical referent of “he” is “the disciple whom Jesus loved” (John 13:23)
A second step in this association of “the disciple whom Jesus loved” with John the Apostle
arises from the text of John 21:20-25. Verse 24 of this text states: “It is this disciple who
testifies to these things and has written them, and we know that his testimony is true.” There is
an apparent identification of “the disciple whom Jesus loved” with the writer of the gospel.
While this association appears clear, it does not follow that “the disciple whom Jesus loved” is
the same person as the apostle John, son of Zebedee.
It must be pointed out that this inference identifying the writer of the Gospel of John with the
apostle John cannot conclusively be proven to be false. However, Brown’s study of the
Johannine text as a whole, as well as the text’s place within the broader context of the history
and literature of the entire New Testament, point to a different conclusion. Brown argues that
the community of Christians that traced its lineage back to the “Beloved Disciple” was different
in many respects from the other early Christian communities that linked their existence to one
or other of the “twelve apostles.” 12
17

One difference emerges in the very vocabulary used in John’s Gospel. It is instructive to realize
that unlike the other three Gospels, the Gospel of John never uses the word “apostle.” Instead,
the author of this Gospel employs the word “disciple” exclusively. 13 Given this textual reality,
we return once again to the question of fidelity to the intention of the original artist: here,
however, the artist is not the woodcarver, but the writer of the gospel text. Why did the author
not use the word “apostle” as the other three already-existing Gospels had?
According to Brown’s analysis, the Gospel of John was composed near the end of the first
century. By this time the early Christian communities, most of whom traced their origins back
to one or other of the “twelve apostles,” had evolved into structured communities with
authority invested in “bishops.” 14 Brown sees the community that gave birth to the Gospel of
John as quite different in its thinking: there appears to be no human authority that structures
this community. Rather, there is but one Lord and Master, the exalted Savior, Jesus Christ; all
others are equally dignified as “disciples.” There is no hierarchy of priests and bishops that
stratifies (or gives order to) the Johannine community. Brown argues that this community
differs from the many other early Christian communities because it traces its origins back not to
one of the Twelve, but rather to a member of Jesus’ wider circle of friends and
acquaintances—to a person the gospel identifies only as “the Beloved Disciple.” 15 How does
Brown make his case?
Brown explores the passages in the Johannine gospel that refer to the character that he names
the “Beloved Disciple” (BD). This phrase is found in five texts, all of which are located in the
second major part of the gospel. Brown calls this second ‘half’ of the text (John 13-21) the
“Book of Glory,” in contrast to the “Book of Signs” which designates John 1-12. 16 Further, in
each of the five scenes, the BD is not alone with Jesus; Peter is also present, or obvious by his
absence. Brown effectively argues that the theme of intimacy with Jesus is of vital importance
in the composition of these passages. In each of the five, the BD is always in closer
proximity—either physically or spiritually—to Jesus than is Peter. In the Last Supper scene
(John 13:23-26) it is Peter (evidently at some distance from Jesus) who indicates for the BD
(right next to Jesus) to inquire about the betrayer’s identity. What follows is the well-known
verse stating that the BD leaned over onto the breast of Jesus to ask “Master, who is it?”
This pattern repeats itself in the other four texts in which the BD is found. In the trial scene,
the BD is inside the building—closer to Jesus—while Peter is outside in the courtyard (John
18:15-16). (17) At the crucifixion, the BD is at the foot of the cross; Peter is nowhere to be
found (John 19:26-27). The resurrection scene (John 20:1-10) finds the BD and Peter running
to the tomb together. The BD arrives first, but waits for and allows Peter to enter the tomb first
(perhaps an early indication of deference to Peter or to the Twelve in general). Interestingly,
the Gospel of John then reports that Peter went in and “saw” that the tomb was empty. The
BD, by contrast, both “saw and believed” (John 20:6-8, italics mine). The BD already evidences
a faith in the resurrection that is not yet present in Peter. Finally, John 21:1-14 tells the postresurrection
story of some of the disciples fishing. A shadowy figure appears on the beach. It is
the BD who first recognizes this figure: “It is the Lord.” Only after this does Peter swim toward
the shore.
The five scenes in which the BD (and Peter) are found all manifest a similar pattern:
the BD is always closer to Jesus while Peter is always more distant. This locational pattern is
suggestive of a relational, or even spiritual, pattern: the BD has a closer, more intimate,
18

elationship with Jesus than does Peter. Brown argues that this textual data leads to the
conclusion that the BD referred to by John’s gospel is more probably not one of the Twelve, but
rather an otherwise scripturally unknown, unnamed, intimate friend of Jesus. It is this BD who
stands at the origin of the tradition and community that gave to the Christian Church the
Gospel that we now refer to as the Gospel of John .18
This exegetical evidence has several implications not only for our understanding of Scripture,
but also for our assumptions concerning our interpretation of art. Given the results of Brown’s
research, it may be more appropriate to refer to the second figure in Cleveland’s “Christ and St.
John the Evangelist” as the “Beloved Disciple.” And, given our earlier study of the first figure
in the work, a more theologically and biblically appropriate title for the work as a whole would
be “Jesus and the Beloved Disciple.” However, at this point we encounter another critical
question that engages both art historians as well as scholarly biblical interpreters. This question
is one of hermeneutics, interpretation theory.
B. HERMENEUTICAL CONSIDERATIONS
To be clear, my interest in “Christ and St. John the Evangelist” does not concern aesthetics. I
am not concerned with the criteria by which the woodcarving would be considered beautiful or
ugly. Rather, I envision the moment of encounter when an individual viewer walking through
the Cleveland Museum of Art stops in front of this piece and beholds the work. After this
aesthetic moment, I imagine such a viewer approaching the label-card to read its message. It is
this moment that attracts my attention. What happens at this moment when the viewer reads
the label-card?
Broadly speaking, this moment involves the didactic dimension of artwork. This didactic aspect
complements art’s aesthetic reality. This educational dimension of art is multifaceted. An
aspiring woodcarver can ponder the work and learn about the techniques of the process. An
inquisitive religious person might view the work as an object of piety and religious devotion.
An art historian will want to learn this piece’s place in the chronological development of
woodcarving. There are many ways that art can educate.
The educational perspective I wish to pursue is more general. A citizen walking through an art
gallery encountering works of art: to what is this experience comparable? Perhaps it is like
paging through a dictionary seeking the definition of a word. The label-card which states the
work’s title is like the definition of a word found in a dictionary. This dictionary definition is
laden with authority because of its context: there is an implied social submission to “Webster’s”
definition as authoritative. This same sort of authority is present in the museum label. A typical
viewer reads the label and takes its content as authoritative and factually true because of that
same social submission to the museum and its agents.
My question, then, involves the authority of the museum curator with respect to the content of
the label. The words placed on the label-card establish a link among artist, work of art, and
viewer. This link is most significant to the viewer in that the label-card informs her verbally
about the artwork. This verbal information supplements her aesthetic experience of the piece.
The information on the label-card “names” the viewer’s aesthetic experience.
19

This “naming” is educational. Accurate information is crucial to good education. Classrooms
today must have globes that portray the current geopolitical realities of our world. Using “cold
war” era globes to teach geography today would be confusing and inaccurate. Granted, one
would need to use a “cold war” era globe to teach the history of the cold war period. So my
question returns: how are we to describe the moment of the viewer encountering the label-card
next to the Cleveland woodcarving? What sort of educational moment is this?
This question becomes, I believe, a question of authority. Where does authority lie with respect
to the issue of “naming” something? For example, did the artist who sculpted the Statue of
Liberty name it such? Did the author even name the work at all? If the artist didn’t name it,
who did? On what/who’s authority? Who was the “naming authority?”
Historical circumstances will sometimes move authorities to change the names of things. Only
following the presidency of Ronald Reagan was National Airport renamed Reagan International
Airport. Appropriate authority has the power to change the names of streets, buildings, the way
dates are identified: streets and buildings are renamed after important public figures; the status
of calendar dates is changed to reflect altered historical realities such as the addition of M. L.
King, Jr. Day as a national holiday. Names emerge out of the historical situation; re-naming is
historically based.
Why do we re-name things? There is an educational dimension here. Names can teach:
Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Armistice Day. But does this apply to a work of
art? Can a work of art be re-named? If not, why not? If so, under what circumstances?
The biblical tradition provides an interesting example which may illuminate our question. The
text of the book of Exodus reflects a long period of development in its composition. It probably
reaches its final, fixed (i.e., as we have it today) during the fifth century BCE. 19 Exodus speaks
of “plagues” afflicting the Egyptians due to Pharaoh’s refusal to allow the Hebrews to leave
Egypt. 20 Some three-to-four hundred years later, the author of the book of Wisdom (found in
Bibles in the Catholic tradition, though not in Hebrew or most Protestant Bibles) re-reads
Exodus. 21 The author of Wisdom re-names the plagues “signs.” 22 In fact, Wisdom re-interprets
the 10 plagues into a 6+1 formula based on the creation story in Genesis 1.
Commentators on the text of Wisdom speculate that the word “signs” brings a stronger
emphasis on the present into the traditional story of the exodus from Egypt. I believe this
interpretation basically argues that the author of Wisdom re-interpreted Exodus for didactic
reasons: how can our reflection on the past help us to better understand the present? The
plagues are ancient history, but signs are all around us now!
The author of Wisdom did not confine himself to simply restating the traditional word
“plague,” even though that was the word used by the artists who composed the text of Exodus.
There is, within the biblical tradition itself, a sense of an organic, developmental character. Is
this not like our situation with the Cleveland woodcarving? If indeed the common
understanding of the past would have been to name the figures Christ and St. John the
Evangelist, would it not be reasonable to re-name them given the information of current
biblical scholarship?
20

There are several different philosophical theories concerning the interpretation of a work of art.
Traditional interpretation theory has argued that the intention of the artist is of utmost
importance in the appreciation of that work. If an artist has explicitly given a title to her work,
then the case is closed. This does not seem to be the case with respect to the Cleveland
woodcarving. We have no evidence that the artist explicitly gave the title “Christ and St. John
the Evangelist” to his work. Nonetheless, we do have evidence from the 13 th century that
connects St. John the Evangelist with “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” 23 It is reasonable to
suppose that at the time when the artist of “Christ and St. John the Evangelist” produced the
work, the words “Christ” and “Jesus” were used interchangeably and without distinction, and
that there was an identification of the “disciple whom Jesus loved” with the apostle John, son
of Zebedee, who was also thought to be the evangelist of the Gospel of John.
The evidence is clear that for centuries John the Evangelist was thought to be the “disciple
whom Jesus loved” spoken of in the later chapters of John’s Gospel. However, just because an
interpretation is an old interpretation does not mean or guarantee that it is an adequate
interpretation for today. For centuries humans held the idea of a geocentric universe. Galileo’s
heliocentric reinterpretation was not initially well-received. In fact, it was only a few years ago
that the Church formally removed Galileo’s name from the restricted list. Yet even today
vestiges of geocentric thinking survive: our weather forecasters do not speak in the more
appropriate heliocentric terminology of “earthrise” and “earthset,” but continue to use the
geocentric “sunrise” and “sunset.” We know that it is not the sun that is moving (rising or
setting), but the earth. Yet, we remain quite comfortable in retaining the traditional language.
Given the information of recent critical biblical scholarship on the Gospel of John, it appears
reasonable to move beyond the medieval interpretive universe which identified the BD with
John the Evangelist.
In contrast to the traditional artist-centered theory of interpretation, there is today a strong
school of thought that argues for a heavier emphasis on the role of the perceiver of the work.
The work of Umberto Eco manifests an approach to the interpretation of literary works that can
be applied effectively to other art forms as well. 24 This approach reasons that while the role of
the artist is crucial in the composition or creation of the work, once it is completed and
released by the artist into the public realm, the artist’s own particular interpretation of that
work becomes simply one of the potentially many and diverse interpretations of that work given
to it by its viewers. The artist has little, if any, control over how the work will be interpreted by
those who will perceive it.
History is replete with examples of interpretations of works of art that differed from the
intention of the artist. The bronze statue of Marcus Aurelius on horseback found on the
Capitoline Hill in Rome was thought by later generations of Christians to be a figure of the
Emperor Constantine. This social (mis-)interpretation is the likely reason why the statue
survived destruction: it was thought to be Christian rather than pagan art. Christian perceivers,
though in this case ignorant of the intentions of the artist, gave the bronze a new name.
Today similar experiences occur in the authentication of works of art. Just recently a chalk and
wash drawing was found and authenticated as being from the hand of Michelangelo .25 The
authentication resulted in a change in the titling of a work. The sketch was formerly labeled
“Italian, circa 1530-1540.” However, today’s Italian Renaissance scholars are convinced it is a
Michelangelo. Their authority is sufficient to change the label of this work. 26
21

Is it important to change the label of this sketch based on today’s knowledge? I doubt that
anyone would oppose the changing of the label based on the criteria used by scholars in the
field. Similarly, it would seem important to do the same with the Cleveland woodcarving based
on today’s knowledge of the Bible. Accuracy is important in any discipline. Perhaps the more
cogent question is: who would be the authority to authenticate a change in the label of the
Cleveland woodcarving? And, what process would be followed to move toward such a change?
If we simply continue to name the Cleveland piece “Christ and St. John the Evangelist,” will we
ever be able to integrate modern biblical scholarship into the continuing education of the artviewing
public? I fear that we will be losing an opportunity to do just that.
When we consider the issue of modern biblical research and its relationship to the history of
art, how are we to integrate the two appropriately and adequately? Raymond E. Brown puts the
(biblical) issue this way: how are we to deal with the “popular communication of modern
critical views”? 27 This manner of formulating the question has merit for our inquiry into a work
of art and its interpretation today.
On one level, the results of modern biblical criticism need to be shared with art historians in a
scholarly, systematic, and collegial way. Like all people, art historians bring their assumptions
to their interpretation of works of art. An example of this is a statement such as “St. John
referred to himself a number of times in his Gospel as ‘the disciple whom Christ loved,’….” 28
The traditional theory of the authorship of the Gospel of John is apparent here. The inference
made is that “the disciple whom Jesus loved” is in fact the same person as the apostle St. John,
and indeed is the same person as the evangelist. Given the results of modern critical research,
is this still an appropriate inference to make? Or, does it perhaps need to be seen in the light of
contemporary theories of authorship? A second example of an assumption that may no longer
be critically accepted is the simple statement that refers to “[t]he young apostle.” 29 If the
Gospel of John never uses the word “apostle,” is it appropriate for us to use it in a scholarly,
critical context?
On a second level, the results of modern biblical research need to be shared with the general
art-viewing public. Certainly the traditional name given to a work must be taken seriously in
the dialogue concerning the naming of works of art today. However, the results of current
scholarship must also be brought into this dialogue. This conversation between two different
voices ought to be not so much a competition in which one voice conquers and silences the
other, as much as an interplay of the two voices such that the values of each are preserved and
integrated into a new whole.
Amy Tucker puts the issue this way: “The challenge for art communities … is to maintain the
institution of art history as an open forum, rather than an impregnable palace or tomb, while
still respecting the original sacred or private meanings of art objects.” 30 With respect to the
Cleveland woodcarving, we might wish to indicate its traditional title off to the side of the label,
as we give the history of ownership of the work.
If one assumes the perspective of the history of art, then it will be quite clear that the work of
art ought to be titled according to the author’s intention. In situations where the work is
explicitly titled by the artist, this is a moot point. However, what is to be said when the work
22

has not been explicitly named by the artist? Two possible approaches can be distinguished: in
the first approach, the title of the work would be derived from the general cultural (in this case
biblical) understanding of the time when the work was created; or, one could appeal to the
earliest known titling of the work to appear in the history of the work. In our present case, such
an approach would argue that the Cleveland piece ought to remain named as it has been
traditionally titled: “Christ and St. John the Evangelist.”
On the other hand, if one assumes a stance toward interpretation that integrates the findings of
current (in this case, biblical) research as well as the contemporary valuing of the role of the
perceiver in the appreciation of a work of art, then one will argue for a change in the title of the
piece to: “Jesus and the Beloved Disciple.”
NOTES
1. Carolyn S. Jirousek, “Christ and St. John the Evangelist as a Model of Medieval
Mysticism,” Cleveland Studies in the History of Art 6(2001), 6-27.
2. See, for example, Dermot A. Lane, The Reality of Jesus. New York: Paulist Press, 1975,
pp. 153-162.
3. The Hebrew “messiah” is translated into Greek as “christos,” from which comes the
English “christ.” The term means “anointed one.”
4. Lane, 154.
5. Among others, Keith Nickle, The Synoptic Gospels, An Introduction. Atlanta: John Knox
Press, 1980. Nickle dates the composition of Mark in the late 60s and both Matthew and
Luke in the late 80s. Pheme Perkins, “The Gospel According to John,” in The New
Jerome Biblical Commentary 61:18, 949, dates the writing of John’s Gospel in the 90s.
6. Tatian the Syrian (fl. ca. 160-175) produced the Diatessaron (literally, “through the four”)
in which he blends the accounts of the four canonical gospels into one continuous
biographical narrative of the life of Jesus. See Joseph. F. Kelly, Why Is There a New
Testament? Wilmington: Michael Glazier, 1986, 86.
7. Jirousek, 16-18.
8. See Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John, The Anchor Bible, Vols. 29 &
29A. New York: Doubleday, 1966; The Community of the Beloved Disciple. New York:
Paulist, 1979; The Gospel and Epistles of John. Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 1988;
An Introduction to the New Testament. The Anchor Bible Reference Library. New York:
Doubleday, 1997.
9. Brown, The Gospel According to John I-XII, Vol. 29, xcviii.
10. Brown, The Community of the Beloved Disciple, 33-34.
11. None of the other three canonical gospels makes any reference to a “disciple whom Jesus
loved.” This is peculiar to John’s Gospel.
12. See Brown, The Community of the Beloved Disciple, 81-91.
13. The English “apostle” derives from the Greek “apostellos,” literally “one who is sent,”
while the English “disciple” comes from the Greek “mathetes” and means “one who
follows.”
14. “Episcopoi” in Greek is rendered literally as “overseers.”
15. Brown, The Gospel and Epistles of John, 73.
16. Brown, The Gospel According to John, Vol. 29, cxxxviii-cxliv; and, Vol. 29A, 545-547.
17. For the argument that the “other disciple” of John 18:15-16 ought to be identified as the
Beloved Disciple, see F. Neirynck, ETL 51 (1975) 115-51.
23

18. In his 1979 Community of the Beloved Disciple, Brown puts it this way: “I am inclined to
change my mind (as R. Schnackenburg has also done) from the position that I took in the
first volume of my AB commentary identifying the Beloved Disciple as one of the Twelve,
viz., John son of Zebedee. I insisted there on the combination of external evidence and
internal evidence which made this the strongest hypothesis. I now recognize that the
external and internal evidence are probably not to be harmonized.” 33-34
Brown’s most mature statement on the issue comes from his Introduction to the New
Testament (1997) in which he states: “still other scholars (with whom I agree)
theorize that the Beloved Disciple was a minor figure during the ministry of Jesus,
too unimportant to be remembered in the more official tradition of the Synoptics.
But since this figure became important in Johannine community history (perhaps the
founder of the community), he became the ideal in its Gospel picture, capable of
being contrasted with Peter as closer to Jesus in love.” 369
19. See Lawrence Boadt, Reading the Old Testament. New York: Paulist Press, 1986.
19. The narrative of the plagues is found in Exodus 7-12.
20. The English “re-reads” follows the French “relecture” used by Maurice Gilbert in his
work on the Book of Wisdom.
21. The Greek word for “signs” is “semeia.” Interestingly, the writer of John’s Gospel employs
this term for the deeds of Jesus rather than the word “dunamis” (literally, “powerful
deeds”) used by all three of the Synoptic writers!
22. Pseudo-Bonaventura, Meditations on the Life of Christ; Isa Ragusa and Rosalie B. Green,
eds., Isa Ragusa, trans. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton U.P., 1961, 84-85.
23. Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader. Bloomington: Indiana U.P., 1979.
24. The drawing was discovered in a box of designs of light fixtures at the Cooper-Hewitt
National Design Museum in New York City.
25. From the article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, 7/10/02, A-12.
26. Raymond E. Brown and Sandra M. Schneiders, “Hermeneutics,” in The New Jerome
Biblical Commentary, R.E. Brown, J.A. Fitzmyer, R.E. Murphy, eds. Englewood Cliffs:
Prentice Hall, 1990, 1164-1165.
27. Jirousek, 21.
28. Jirousek, 6.
29. Amy Tucker, Visual Literacy: Writing about Art. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002, 101.
24

THE ROLE OF MEMORY IN CULTURE
Raphael Montanez Ortiz
Rutgers University
I begin this writing inspired by an esthetic insight from my study of divination, from ancient
Tibetan palmistry and Chinese face reading, that I have for many years now applied to art: That
my art works like the palms of my hand are a kind of memory that speaks of my “Nature” and
“Nurture,” even revealing the alchemy of my genetic potential, revealing who I am, my
thoughts, my feelings and history as a human being. It is an esthetic that bridges my emotional,
bodyfelt and abstract cognition in memory, an esthetic within which the marks, bridges, creases
and scars of my palms like all the drawing marks, color and textures of my art work similarly
contain embedded memory of my imperfections and contradictions, memory of my hopes,
successes and failures, memory of feelings that so often contradict my memory of fact. Of
course this esthetic has always posed complicated question, such as if my art is embeddedmemory
is my memory an embedded art, and if so does the process of one reveal the process of
the other.
It is out of a desire to answer the endless questions that lie buried in this esthetic, to
understand its meaning in cognition that I search cognitive science itself and share the research
with you. Thinking it would be simple, it was not, each answer led me to yet other questions.
Such as what are the origins of memory and art? What was the relation in kind and process, to
memory and art, of the bio-brain system-developments and resulting cognition, within the
various stages of our evolution as a species? What is the relation of remembering and the
documenting of remembrance in each of those stages of our evolution as a species? How does
memory and therefore art assert itself beyond an individuals remembering to others? How did
our species come to distinguish between the real and the imagined, between the self and the
other, in memory, cognition and art? What is their relation to each other? What role does
memory and therefore art play in the construction and de-construction of ones personal, and
ones larger social culture and tradition? And the question the answer to which for me as an
artist and artist-educator is of special importance: How does memory, its kind and process in
cognition and therefore process of embedded meaning, the art inherent to all processing of
information, contribute to or inhibit realization and expression of the memory and cognition
inherent to each of our species stages of bio-brain system evolution?
Endel Tulvil in The New Cognitive Neuroscience states that memory is the capacity of nervous
systems to benefit from experience, which reaches its culmination in human beings. He states
that it is a vast domain with a vast diversity. There are kinds of memory, tasks, kinds of memory
process and memory systems. Memory he states is best understood as we understand observable
behavior and reportable experience, as we understand the relation between brain and behavior,
between brain and mind.
Its important to remember that memory is cognition and that the various kinds of cognition
produce various kinds of memory, each with their own degree of veracity. We must also not
forget to remember that the various kinds of memory each within there various degrees of
veracity serve the potential in cognition of a bio-brain system, or suppress its potential in
cognition. Further we must not forget to remember that within evolution, our species various
25

stages in bio-brain system evolution over some 6 million years, has resulted in an ever evolving
inherent potential in cognition and memory. Unfortunately for us our species micro and macro
culture has over these millions of years insisted in remembering and asserting its limbic past in
cognition out of the less prefrontally evolved bio-brain system times.
Memory has a history of memory that in its memory of somaticness, out of a bio-brain and or
cultural limbic-dominance in cognition, has somatically, hormonally insisted, and we conceding
have cooperated, creating limbic dominant and limbic led cultures for its expression and
continued dominance in memory. Even with our Sapiens Sapiens 6 times more prefrontal
development than our ancient relative the Chimpanzee, our memory like a prophet of old
insists on voicing the limbic-truth of our ancient times in cognition, undermining our
prefrontal-destiny in truth, a “truth” in cognition overdue by some 100,000 years.
I argue that this archetypal, ancient memory that has inserted itself in culture process since the
beginning, is still suppressing and inhibiting our species inherent potential in cognition, in
abstraction, and free-will in intellect.
2 million years ago “Nature” introduced in the experiment our species is, an ability to create
syntactic speech. As Howard Bloom put it in the book he authored, Global Brain, in chapter 6,
entitled “Threading A New Tapestry”:
knitting nodes of humans was long-distance trade, which first pulled together
the campsites where Homo habilis made deals for rare and workable stone—a
crucial aid was added to the give and take of craft and raw materials, a
transmitter capable of threading whole new kinds of intricacy from one mind to
another. More than wrrs and chatters of monkeys—Syntactic speech: noises
linked in structured strings of verbs, adjectives, and nouns—One bit of evidence
stands out with clarity—a 2-million-year-old skull from Koobi Fora Africa
indicates that Homo habilis possessed a patch of brain unknown till then in any
family tree. This new cerebral curio was Broca’s area—an apparatus vital to
fluid, nuanced speech, language, trade, migration, and the imitative of men and
women, birds, and pasture beasts—Earths new ways of dreaming and scheming
had begun.
The original reference is Phillip Tobias. The Brain of Homo Habilis: A New Level of
Organization in Cerebral Evolution. Journal of Human Evolution 16 (1987): 741-761
But lets not get carried away, syntactic speech still is organized by the cognitive mode that
dominates cognition and memory, and there is no question that Homo habilis was limbic
dominant in bio-brain system and therefore limbic-dominant in cognitive-mode and memory in
cognition.
Despite H. habilis potential they were not much more conscious of being conscious than the
Chimpanzee. I would argue that the wall between reality and fantasy was paper tissue thin, that
their sleep dreams however more complex were still as much a reality to them as their
reality was an awake dream.
26

Dreaming without lucidity of any kind, without the bio-brain system potential in memory and
cognition for awareness that one has dreamt, no less is dreaming, not distinguishing between
reality and the dream, these are the primitivisms of memory and cognition, operating in and
dominating the psyches of our species earlier stages in bio-brain system evolution. Certainly
this was the case prior to 400,000 years ago.
We can assume that the evolving language in abstraction of Archaic H. sapiens, with the
increased prefrontal-lobe development serving Broca’s area, and less limbic dominance in biobrain
system architecture, that the dream and for that matter all imagining would begin to be
remembered as something separate from the materiality of awake reality.
I argue that despite our post-H. habilis progress in bio-brain system evolution, even with our
species beginning to distinguish our dream and other imagining from reality, that the same
limbic primitivisms in memory and cognition that dominated the less bio-brain system evolved
branches of our family tree, also dominated more or less all succeeding branches through
acculturation.
Research leads me to conclude that acculturation in limbic traditions in cognition, in imitativememe
memory, out of earlier times of minimal prefrontal bio-brain system evolution, from
times before our species H. habilis development of Broca’s area, through some 3 million plus
250,000 years after, from generation to generation, from branch to branch of our species family
tree, has subverted our species progress in abstraction in memory and cognition.
Educational experiments asserting the further potential in abstraction of the chimpanzee,
teaching the chimpanzee to sign confirms this.
The history of our species stasis in fulfillment of the potential in cognition and memory
inherent to each of our stages in bio-brain system evolution bears out the role of culture and
acculturation as the subverting factor. The fact is that through the millions of years of
evolving prefrontalness and potential in abstraction our species has preferred to remain limbic
dominant in memory and cognition, inhibiting development of the inherent potential in
memory and cognition in abstraction of each of our species stages in evolving bio-brain system
hardware.
It is this millions of years of culture and acculturation that today in their continued limbic
dominance, obstructs development of memory and cognition in abstraction and in turn free-will
in intellect.
By placing our species cognition and memory within a larger historic perspective, we can more
clearly separate out the complexity of layers that comprise the limitations and biases in memory
and cognition we continue to impose on ourselves and each other, through the culture and art
we create and experience.
We should remind ourselves daily that our memory and cognition has had this up hill battle
within all our species bio-brain system stages in evolution, since our beginning some 6 million
years ago. It was then that we first took the fork in the road away from our Chimpanzee cousin,
bringing with us in traditions of cognition their memory with all its cultural dead ends.
27

Steven Mithen in The Prehistory Of The Mind, breaks it down into (4 Acts). Mithen outlines the
fossil evidence, beginning 6 to 4.5 million years ago with his list of a variety of actors in the
drama of our species evolution, with names like A. ramidus, A. afarensis, A. africanus, and H.
habilis, the list goes on through H. erectus to the 100,000 years ago (act 4) appearance on the
scene of all of us, the Sapiens Sapiens, the 15th and present character on the scene. The first
character is called the missing-link and is not listed. So, there are at least 16 characters to the
drama of our evolution to Sapiens Sapiens.
By understanding our species bio-brain systems inherent potential in cognition and memory
and the role of acculturation in the process, we can better understand the context within which
our species awake dream, our art, and our asleep art, our dream evolved and operate today. We
can then better understand the kind of cognition and memory that the awake time art, and the
asleep time art, flow from, that it is the cognitive mode within which they each operate that
directs, that determines their influence in meaning as they process as opaque or
transparent in meaning-relationships.
I reference the research of Deacon, Dawkins, Fiorito and Scotto, Caporael, Ekman, Brunner,
Hood, and colleagues and Galef and colleagues as serving this understanding. Terrance W.
Deacon’s explanation in his work entitled The Symbolic Species, of the distinction between
different forms of referential and meaningful relationships, is of special importance. Deacon
discusses two sets of elements of signifier, one comprised of signs, words and pictures and the
other of signified objects which are associated by a semantics, by a conceptual relationship.
What comprises this semantic relationship or semantics is critical, since it maps the individual
elements of one set of signifiers of signs, words and pictures with another, as well as those of
the signified object. Deacon discusses transparent and opaque as the two semantic or meaning
relationships, in cognition that link signifiers and signifieds.
A transparent relationship or linkage occurs to the extent that no additional knowledge is
necessary to associate one through an experiencing of the other. An opaque relationship occurs
when the processes of cognition, applying abstraction are led by a seeming arbitrary coding or
mapping. I use the term seeming because an applying of abstract-cognition deciphers the code
that forms the semantic linkage. A transparent signifier within this framework is an icon; while
the opaque signifier is a symbol.
Physical or mechanical relationships with other objects irrespective of semantics, have been
designated signals. An example of this would be the red light on an automobiles dash board
signaling that the engine oil levels are low: being electronically linked to an oil pressure sensor.
Richard Dawkins book, The Selfish Gene, published by Oxford University Press in 1976,
outlines his theory of “memes”, what he refers to as a cultural analog to a gene: A response to
constraints imposed by a common adoptive context, which may or may not still exist. But
existing in limbic memory, in the nervous system circuitry serves as a platform, a foundation for
a similar contextualizing of other signifiers, and signified objects.
The role of culture and acculturation within the history of our species inhibition of inherent
potential in a higher order of semantic in memory and cognition is understood as we join the
distinctions Deacons makes between the different forms of referential and meaningful
relationships with Dawkins theory of memes and Fiorito and Scotto’s research in
28

imitative learning.
Grazio Fiorito and Pietro Scotto’s work published in Science, April 24, 1992: pp. 545-547,
titled Observational Learning in Octopus Volgari, centers on an experiment wherein octopus
(A), observes from a separate tank, octopus (B) retreat from a teddy bear responding to the
teddy bear as dangerous. Octopus (A) has no knowledge that octopus (B) has previously been
conditioned to the teddy bear as a dangerous thing, through electric shock into the tank water
containing octopus (B). The procedure involved the teddy bear being placed in front of the tank
of octopus (B) as each burst of electric current surged through its water to shock it. Observing
the retreat of octopus (B), octopus (A) in a separate tank from octopus (B) throughout the
experiment, and not having in any way observed the electric shock conditioning procedure of
octopus (B), or in any way itself exposed to electric shock, having been permitted only to
observe octopus (B) repeatedly retreat from the teddy bear placed in the proximity of octopus
(B)’s tank, octopus (A) similarly retreats from the teddy bear as a danger to it, when ever the
teddy bear was placed on the glass wall of its tank.
This speaks clearly to the existence of a limbic-memory, of a cognition of pure imitation, a
reflex-conditioning that in process conforms to an unconditioned-reflex. This conforms to the
limbic-bio-brain system architecture of the octopus, that like the chimpanzee and pre-H.
habilis members of our species family tree, absent the necessary degree of prefrontal bio-brain
system development and linkage in cognition with which to separate objective-truth from
subjective- truth.
There is not the prefrontal-bio-brain system development through which to separate the
unconditioned-reflex, from the conditioned-reflex, to have the self reflective capacity to
separate the memory and cognition the drives impulse, from the memory and cognition with
which to control impulse. Limited in evolution and culture the necessary separation of a
biased response, from an unbiased response, a transparent signifier, from one that is opaque is
not possible.
In other words free-will in memory and cognition was not possible in evolutions earlier biobrain-system
architectures with their minimally prefrontally evolved, limbic-dominant bio-brain
systems, dominated and driven as they were by limbic reflex, meme and imitative memory and
cognition. Keep in mind that it is the degree of free-will in memory and cognition that
determines the degree of ones veracity in truth.
It is a chain of causation within which free-will in cognition and memory demands free-will in
intellect, which in turn demands a development of abstract-cognition and a semantic process
led by a memory and cognition in abstraction free of limbic dominance.
The point I wish to make here, is that not only is the degree of free-will, but its very existence,
dependent on its veracity in intellect. Now veracity in intellect in turn depends on the truth in
objectivity, of the facts and theories of the research through which one determines the truth.
Free-will, which only makes sense within the context of intellect, is a mobius-strip of sorts,
since without truth in intellect, there is no free-will, and without “will” free of bias, there is no
truth in “will” or intellect. It is easy to see how conditional-will and will-in-bias evolves, how its
29

oots in intellect, in cognition and memory in abstraction dominated by limbic process
imprisons even the most intellectual of “will”.
Free-Will is then dependent on a science that is itself free and freeing in “will”. A science that
is itself freed in cognition and memory of all limbic dominance, that makes a priority of freeing
us all through an ever evolving abstraction and objectivity in memory and cognition, in
research and theory. Such a science gives us the objective tools through which to deconstruct
all dominance of limbic paleo-logic, all dominance of meme and imitative memory.
In combining these ideas I give special importance to linkage, to the transparent or opaque
kinds of cognition, semantics and conceptual relationships within which linkage can occur.
I argue that however expedient or better-safe-than-sorry the linkage limbic-cognition is, it is in
its transparency in process, stored as it is in the nervous system circuitry, able to contain little if
any opaqueness and therefore abstraction in cognition. As such it is open to all kinds of error
within the narrow corridor of truth in cognition the limbic is. There is no distinguishing of fact
from fiction, as the octopus certainly could not distinguish within the teddy bear experiment.
A free-will in intellect would have deciphered the danger as the laboratory technician and not
the teddy bear.
The point here is that we Sapiens Sapiens with all our bio-brain-system evolution in
prefontalness, with all our potential in cognition, in linkage that is abstract-cognitive dominant,
we despite that potential create cultures within which we are acculturated to cognize as if our
potential in cognition did not exceed that of the octopus.
The problem with our acquiring large stores of memory out of limbic-linkage, is that so much
of it organizes itself around the dis-information and error inherent to the bias of its retributive
logic in emotional-bodyfeltness. Especially when such bias in logic seeks to manipulate, control
and exploit. Keep in mind that limbic-memory is conditioned in many subtle and cruel-abusive
ways within the amygdala, hippocampus, hypothalamus, somatics of meaning-relationships
dominated by memory in retributive-bias.
The foundation of this process is of course cultural, and is driven by an acculturation that
begins in the environment of the womb which speaks to the quality of life experienced and biochemically-
remembered by the mother. It is these bio-chemical memories as they are tainted
by pollutants and trauma, that Lipton in his theory of the Biology of Consciousness, outlines as
negatively effecting the mitochondria and therefore chromosomes and genes as they organize
the forming fetus.
Similar conclusions are voiced by Matt Ridely in Genome, and in Our Stolen Future , by Colbrn,
Dumanoski and Meyers. In a review of Our Stolen Future Pat Cody writes:
Harmonally active synthetic chemicals are thugs on the biological information
highway that sabotage vital communication. They mug the messengers or
impersonate them. They jam signals. They scramble messages. They sow
disinformation. They wreak all of havoc. Because hormone messages
orchestrate many critical aspects of development, from sexual differentiation to
30

ain organization, hormone-disrupting chemicals pose a particular hazard
before birth and early in life.
It is by analogy that a societal culture in limbic dominance, similarly pollutes and sabotages all
development of memory and cognition with limbic-logics inherent retributive-phobic notions of
survival.
These chemical and psychological hormonal disruptions of cognition and memory that begin in
our fetal stage, find their way into our infancy and early childhood. They are reinforced through
adolescence and young adulthood, by all matter of yet more pervasive interpersonal and
societal mental, physical and spiritual abuse, abusing, disfranchisement and disfranchising, as
limbic-driven notions of survival assert themselves in the world of those we limbicallyretributively
love and hate.
The psychopathic-retributive entertainment, the video games, the movies, the novels, their
messages orchestrate our imagination from childhood to adulthood. All their sadistic,
masochistic, abusive retributive content inspiring our Id guiding all our potential in
abstraction and intellect, to limbic solutions. All are thugs on our information processing
highway mugging us in memory and cognition to phobic helplessness and counter-phobic
domination.
Like the octopus in the tank, the limbic dominant culture traps us in its retributive tank
conditioning our memory, our identity and reality to error in adaptation and survival. It is easy
to see especially in our limbic-dominant, linkage in cognition of infancy, how we in our most
nervous system circuitry imitativeness in memory and learning like the octopus can get it all
wrong.
Instead of the laboratory technician we have the parent, the family, the society. We have the
culture of each to shock us into error. Linnda R. Caporael points out how we Sapiens Sapiens
when less than a week old begin imitating others, imitating our mothers facial expressions.
Hood and colleagues observed how infants will turn around to look at what the parent is
looking at, and that a baby chimpanzee will do the very same.
Paul Ekman’s research shows how the facial expressions we make out of our limbic memory of
imitation of faces made at us by parents and others recasts our moods, resets our nervous
system, filling us with the emotion the facial expression in fact represents. This research is
published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological
Sciences, January 29, 1992: pp.63-69.
Just as the teddy-bear, electric shock experience of the octopus in meaning-relationships
reveals the extremes in cruelty with which meme and imitative, limbic-conditioning in reflex
can be understood to occur from our most somatic limbic-driven developmental stage of
infancy. So to can we understand the meaning-relationships of the facial expressions
of the mother as a key to many other subtle conditioners in limbic-reflex, that in transparentlinkage
forms the infants visceral-vision of identity and reality.
It seems to me that our Sapiens Sapiens memory as it is today, is the result of an acculturation
that to this day remains dominated by our ancient bio-brain system in limbic-memory with its
31

penchant for error and cruelty. How could it be otherwise, this ancient-memory in error and
cruelty is affirmed through infancy and childhood, through adolescence and adulthood, within
various kinds of disfranchisement, and retributive-notions of enfranchisement, organizing in
error and retributive bias all our inherent potential in abstraction in cognition.
Is it any wonder that it is impossible for the disfranchised of abstraction in their antintellectualism
in memory and cognition to be stuck in limbic-will with little if any intellect,
with no intellect in free-will. Is it any wonder that it is near impossible even for the
enfranchised limbic-led intellectuals to evolve intellect free of retributiveness, intellect free in
“will” in objective-research.
We are as free of our limbic systems penchant to assert limbic-will with its retributive fallout,
to the extent that we deconstruct in objectivity our culturally, limbically-conditioned memory
and cognition. Then we are free of our penchant for retributiveness, then we are finally free of
the limited, ego-centric retributive circumscribing of
our and others lives.
By now its clear that memory is much more than recalling where you left those keys, or your
glasses, memory is a code specific process occurring in layers of kinds of memory, out of kinds
of cognition that represent like tree rings our history in cognitive development. Our infant
earliest layers are comprised of the most transparent, isolated linkage of our most cognitively
immature, dominance in limbic-cognition, with meme and imitation memory dominating. The
later layers are of multiple and even contradictory transparent-linkages, or what might be
viewed as cognitively contradictory opaque-semantics, that in their complexity of linkage of
layers organize the kinds of narratives that the psychologist of the mid-sixties, R.D. Lange, in
his book, entitled Knots dubbed knots.
In Knots, Lange describes it as an internal multi-layered convoluted, contradictory narrative
process. For instance: I know you think I think I know that you know I know your secret; what
you do not know is that I will never let you know that I think you know I know you know I
think I know your secret, because that my secret, and I know you do not know my secret, and I
will never tell you.
Lange makes clear that the semantics of intention is designed and driven in communication by
our will in cognition. By a will that is either limbically-bound in a maze of illiteracy, of subpredicate-coded
layers of paleo-logic, or a will in memory and cognition that is freed from
limbic-will through abstraction, and through abstraction in literacy to objectivity and free-will
in intellect.
It is our acculturated will in memory and cognition, as it serves to realize or inhibit our biobrain
potential, in each of our various stages in bio-brain system development, from infancy to
earlier and later childhood, to early and later adolescence, to early and later adulthood and oldage
that determines what mode of cognition and therefore linkage, dominates each of our
developmental-stages from infancy to old-age.
We are like a digital nonlinear 16 track recording, comprised of layer upon layer of data, of
realities and identities each with a process in linkage driven by its own will in cognition and
memory. Sometimes many of the tracks, many of the wills in memory and cognition play at
32

once, but most of the time it is a selective number of tracks that play. Each track or layer with a
cognitive mode linkage and coding that is specific to it. Each track or layer in more or less
transparency or opaqueness, in more or less will-in-intellect, bound more or less in limbic-will
in bias, and retributive error, or in will free in abstraction, free in will in intellect in objectiveresearch.
The dominances in cognitive-mode, in memory and process in linkage of the earliest
developmental stages being most influential, even dominating the cognitive function thereby
organizing the cognitive will of all other developmental stages to the extent that they through
acculturation are favored. In this way our most primal meme-imitative memory in cognition
serves to parent and co-parent all the will in linkage that follows.
In behavior, the final outcome is as predictable as the will in memory and cognition that has
been in acculturation embedded and compressed as cues and the dominances in will of the
various layers triggered by the cues. The cues and layers organize creating critical-masses,
focuses of dominances in memory in cognitive-mode, in narrative and perceptual mode. The
clustering of layers behave like cliques each layer triggering a memory in dance through all the
layers that resonates at its shared frequency in will, creating a network of linkage of cognitivewill,
of layers of identities and realities in memory in cognition that then in conflict and
cooperation represent us in behavior. The reference here for “cliques” is outlined in the
footnote of p.122, of Global Brain authored by Howard Bloom. Bloom writes:
In 1998 Kelly K. Kissing, whose research focuses on a common North
American genus of spider, Dolomedes, completed a study of the fishing spider
Dolmedes triton and reported a resolute tendency to create differences between
cliques among these eight legged subjects. Groups with the same ancestry tend
to harrumph themselves into difference by embracing incompatible mating
rituals. Though the aquatic arachnids may continue to live in each others
vicinity, the clumps of quibblers refuse to mate with an outsider who does his
mating dance “all wrong”. This “reproductive isolation” is precisely the kind
which leads to genetic separation between groups. In the case of modern
humans, it also leads to cultural diversity.
I propose that these layers to the extent that they are limbic dominant, will through time, in
synaptic-patterning form relationships within their common cognitive will, each with a trigger
that links them, that associates them no matter the inherent potential in linkage of the biobrain
developmental stage they represent. The result is a imbic-network of narrative, of
behaviors and symbols so psychosomatically layered and intertwined, that like the gordianknot,
will not be easily untied.
Is this not the process in cognition and memory that we Sapiens Sapiens continue to be
acculturated to. How else to explain the extent and extremes in disinformation in bias that is at
the center of so much of our communications, that could not otherwise succeed as truth. Bias
and propaganda succeeds as truth because its limbic paleo-logic is compatible with the failure
in truth in memory and cognition inherent to the limbic-logic of our cognitive-immaturity.
To the extent that we are in cognitive-immaturity we have since infancy been acculturated to
limbic bias and propaganda in truth, and in that truth have run commercials of others and our
33

own design in our own minds and that of others since infancy. It is within this cognitive
immaturity that any development of abstraction in cognition will occur with intention in will of
abstractions subservience to our limbically dominated memory and cognition.
The purpose then of abstraction and abstraction in intellect in an immature-cognition is to in
subservience to limbic memory and cognition construct more subtle, retributively functional
topsy-turvey semantic structures than those possible with limbic logic alone. Abstraction in
service of the limbic dominant immature-cognition makes possible an encoding of the limbic
driven retributive memory within more complex semantic-knots of layers that are then the
stealth protection for expression of our most archaic and retributive limbic history in
“Nature”.
Unfortunately as the history of our species has so far born out, in all likelihood, as we organize
more and more intellect in service of a limbic dominance, in will in cognition, we Sapiens
Sapiens the only surviving brach of our family tree, will with even more intelligence in
retribution than our ancestors in evolution assure our inevitable collapse into the churning
alchemical pot of extinction that “Nature” is. For that is what the history of intellect in service
of archaic-limbic “Nature” has been for all the branches of our family tree
before us.
Clearly the cognition within which our memory forms is central to our building an identity and
life in the world that is either liberated from or a prisoner of our archaic history in “Nature”
with its cruelty and error, with all its inherent inhibition of our species bio-brain evolutionary
potential in abstraction and intellect in free-will.
It was a critical point in our species evolution when its inherent potential in cognition in
abstraction began to develop enough to make possible a memory in a kind of objectivity, a
memory less dominated by the subjective logic of emotional-bodyfeltness. It was a leap in
cognition that left our species more and more with one leg in limbic cognition while the other
reached for our inherent potential in abstraction. I would argue that Neanderthal in their bearcult
and other shamanic ritual had an inkling but did not quite separate the dream from
reality. It was Cro-Magnon and Sapiens Sapiens who were the first to begin to distinguish the
dream as a reality of sleep that interfaced the awake reality of thought and imagination.
This ability to separate the world of thought, of imagination from that of concrete-reality, made
possible the re-presenting in reality of thoughts, of imagined things, and the abstract measure
of events in time and space. It inspired the development of language, the language of words and
numbers, the spoken and the visual language, each with enough objectivity to serve reality,
making possible, like the transporter of Star Treks Enterprise, the artistic re-presentation, the
transporting of the imagined-remembered thing and thought, from its existence in the mind,
time and space of the explorer in ephemeral thought-imagination, to concrete existence in the
time and space of others and the community. Only then was a common-shared reality
semantically and psychosomatically evolved in complexity enough to be capable of the bonding
of individuals to collectivities of meaning supporting ever larger communities.
I would argue that only the newly evolving cognition in objectivity from H. habilis to Archaic
sapiens, from Neanderthal to Cro-Magnon, to Sapiens Sapiens, with its evolving greater
semantic complexity could support invention of the spoken and visual language. It was our
34

species evolving objectivity and long term memory that made it possible for our species to
organize a culture of learning that more quickly imparted the larynx-tongue diaphragm and
breath coordinations, that made more sense of the mind-hand coordinating that were all a part
of the evolving transporter-devises.
It was an advancing cognition in abstraction mapped by artifact over millions of years, often in
stasis for hundreds, upon hundreds of thousands of years, but with an inevitable progress
permitting through each branch of our family tree options in self-expression beyond the limbic
vocalizing, body and hand gestures.
Advances in memory and cognition in abstraction served to design more advanced means of
materializations in transport from imagination and thought to a reality out of greater semantic
complexity in encoding through abstraction, to speaking, story telling, sculpture, etching,
drawing and painting, to the theory and thesis I present here.
Keep in mind that it is exactly this progress in cognition and memory that permits me to reach
back to some 6 million years ago to our most ancient ancestor the Chimpanzee who transported
their imagination to concreteness through a less evolved simpler more limbic bio-brain system
absent Broca’s area, with 6 times less pre-frontal-development. So here
we are today able to understand that theirs was a bio-brain system that permitted the
construction of only the simplest meme-imitative-semantics through which to construct
thought and imagination, permitting the construction of only the simplest of transport, of only
the simplest imagined use of a leaf, a twig, a stick, and a couple of stones.
In the meantime through these 6 million years some 15 branches of our family tree 15 trials
and errors, in cognition and memory of our family tree had failed. Not until 60 thousand years
ago with 3 of the branches still duking it out, around the world, one of them Neanderthal in
Europe almost extinct, by 35,000 years ago. Another Cro-Magnon a branch of Sapiens Sapiens
with a bio-brain system development beyond that of Neanderthal, who it is assumed they drove
to extinction in Europe by 30,000 years ago and by 10,000 years ago what ever numbers of
Cro-Magnon not absorbed into the gene pool of the later arriving more cognitively evolved
Sapiens Sapiens, being driven to extinction, unable to compete with us Sapiens Sapiens the
third party and only survivors in this 6 million year history of survival of the fittest politic.
With Neanderthal extinct some 30,000 years ago and Cro-Magnon some 10,000 years ago we
Sapiens Sapiens, proved the superiority of our visioning-out, of our concretizing imagination, of
our projecting it out, in re-presenting it in language and community, in self-expression
beyond any imagined by all the branches of our species family tree that did not make it.
There were 6 that had the most promise that fell, that were pushed into “Natures” pool of
extinction, by those that succeeded them with an edge in evolution that had more potential in
imagination. All had a Broca’s area development, the first to come and go was H. habilis,
followed by H. rudolfensis, and H.ergaster, followed by H. erectus, Archaic H. sapiens, H.
heidelbergensis, Neanderthal. The last to fall was Cro-Magnon. They all appropriated “Nature,”
each exploiting more of the various material of “Nature”. Each in invention, in memory in
cognition, evolving beyond their predecessor their “inner-visions” to concrete expression of
embedded meaning, until Cro-Magnon and Sapiens Sapiens bio-brain system potential and
35

development in memory and cognition released their imagination into a burst of invention in
technology and art that lay in stasis some 60,000 years.
So began the conscious awake dreaming, a coherent remembering, a self-conscious possession
of things, beyond the ephemeral minds eye. And so here “We” are the last in the struggle with
“Nature”, the last to survive it or not, still making external, concrete and permanent what was
previously a wisp of thought. It is a history within which my dreams have become the thoughts
of our future shouting in my mind.
Joanna Schaffhausen in The Dreaming Brain discusses dreams as a way of remembering, a way
that itself is remembered or forgotten according to when in the dream cycle one awakens. If we
awaken from a dream during the rhythmic hippocampal-REM cycle, there is an 80% chance of
remembrance, while only a 7% chance of remembrance if we awaken during the non-rem
cycle.
This makes sense considering that dreaming is in its bio-brain and cognitive-process, brain
stem, thalamus, auditory cortex dominant, abstraction and objectivity in process in memory are
inhibited unless the dreamer is educated to lucid-dreaming, to abstraction and objectivity in
dream process and dream memory. In other words the Rem dreaming cycle is sensoryemotional-bodyfelt-limbic-dominant
in process and memory.
Within their limited bio-brain architecture one could imagine our cognitive and bio-brain
limbic-dominant earliest Hominid and archaic-Sapiens ancestors reality dominated by the
cognitive-processes we associate with unlucid dreaming with its inherent potential for error
in cognition and remembering. We can extend this process of error to their recall if at all of
only fragments of their dream memories, with fragments remembered as a reality. Their awake
thinking, experience and remembering must have been much like that of the dream lacking as
much lucidity.
I believe that is the case generally in the present, not only are we not lucid dreamers, we are
not lucid thinkers. I argue that it is due to acculturation, to educations failure, that despite our,
as Sapiens-Sapiens, bio-brain-evolution, having for some hundred thousand years now the biobrain-architecture
with its prefrontal-lobe-system-development 6 times greater than that of the
chimpanzee, our memory, our imagining, our dreams, our art and culture are still trapped in
the ancient past of our unlucid limbic-cognition.
We have the abstract-cognitive potential to all become lucid-dreamers, to abstract-cognitively
engage and direct our dreams to higher-purpose, beyond their limbic driven and directed
cognition, with its inherent retributiveness. As lucid dreamers we can apply the same memory,
cognitive and art skills to develop the ability to have a lucid relation to reality, moving it
through lucidity in memory and cognition to higher purpose.
But rather than strive for lucidity, we Sapiens-Sapiens since our surviving the some 15 previous
now extinct branches of our species family tree, have for some 30,000 years of generations
socially-engineered a failure of cognition and memory within our larger society. We have in this
history of limbic-retributiveness created classifications of cast, class, race, religion, gender, age,
ethnicity, criminality and sexual identity, that in their bias in justice and their biased
empowerment of intellect, engineered within a socially constructed survival of the fittest,
36

institutional frameworks and laws that have deprived most Sapiens-Sapiens on this planet of an
unbiased justice and an abstract-cognitive development, that will make possible a free-will in
intellect, that could authentically serve to achieve and safe guard a governance that in its
higher purpose affirms life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Something was not bio-brain system right from the beginning, an ancient, archaic imperfection,
a limbic-system which through acculturation is easily conditioned to dominance in cognition
over even our present stage in evolution in potential in abstraction. The first case study of feralchildren
should have made clear the danger of a limbic-acculturations compromise to our
development in and dominance of abstraction in memory and cognition.
It is within the cognitive dynamics of our species ancient bio-brain system imperfection that we
better understand all our notions of our species potential in free-will. That’s right free-will,
meaning free-will in intellect is only a potential built into our bio-brain system, that fails when
it is limbic-system dominated, compromising any potential to transcend the limbic-systems
limbic-logic, with the later pre-frontal systems potential in abstraction, objectivity and free-will
in intellect.
Even through all our many millions of years in evolution, no matter the degree of prefrontal
development, and development of its inherent potential in abstraction the outcome has been
the same, our semantics, all transporter-devices of cognition and memory, all creativity, all
thought, imagining and behavior have been organized to serve the limbic-system with its
inherent retributive-logic, continuing our species most cognitively primitive history in
retributive-reconciliation.
From the time of our species branching off of the missing-link that branched off of our
Chimpanzee beginnings, our species in imitation of the Chimpanzee culture have over our first
4 million years progressed little beyond the Chimpanzee world of limbic-phobic-logic with its
inherent retributive-reconciliation.
Keep in mind that it was 2 million years ago wielding a gazelle leg bone that we began bashing
skulls, killing everything that stirred our rage, our fear and fed our hunger, including each
other. So to what purpose then the progress in bio-brain system architecture, and its
inherent potential to create thoughts and imaginings if all the potential would do is serve our
culture out of 4 million years of animal-reflexive retributive-reconciling.
It is within our species history and continued potential in and for animal-reflexive retributivereconciling
that H. habilis drove all its predecessor cousins to extinction, as did each
succeeding branch of our family tree, until us Sapiens Sapiens who similarly exterminated the
branches that preceded us.
Its safe to say war invaded our species as a semantic reality 2 million years ago, and since that
time to the present evolved in its semantic intelligence in limbic-retribution from gazelle thigh
bone to all sought of weapons of mass destruction, including outer-space satellite launchable
ballistic multiple warhead nuclear missiles.
37

This limbic-system logic of survival-of-the-fittest, of might-is-right, is our ancient heritage of
culture our species lived and died by for 4 million years prior to H, habilis. H. habilis took the
pre-Habilis little more than chimpanzee bio-brain system potential in a semantic in
abstraction in consciousness, driven as it was by limbic phobic-reflex and rage, and gave it selfconsciousness,
gave it language, began development of its culture of intellect in limbicretribution.
For 2 million years now it has been a culture and acculturation of our creation within a limbic
dominant intellect with memory of being and beingness evolving in Machiavellianess,
surpassing with each development in intellect our most ancient Machiavellian-limbic-memory
link in the creation of our species, the Chimpanzee. It is we, in limbic-will in memory and
cognition, us Sapiens-Sapiens, choosing not to transcend through our potential in abstraction,
our bio-brain Machiavellian-limbic-nature.
It is less complicated to say, its our “Nature”, out of “Natures” nature, in its limbic-nature, with
its inherent potential for chaos, that drives our limbic-archaic-mind, to dominate our lives. I
argue instead that it is we who “will” to behave as if our gift of prefrontal-lobe and language
bio-brain system architecture and development, had not occurred, a gift given to direct memory
in abstract-cognition, to transcend our limbic-nature and that of “Natures”, nature.
There is within memory in sacred-scripture a covenant with creation, a sacred-memory that in
its affirmation of our special place in evolution in creation, demands the specially gifted-highlyevolved-bio-brain-system
that we as Sapiens-Sapiens all are, be fulfilled. It is know-thyself,
something only possible in free-will in intellect.
We have instead chosen in our loyalty to limbic-retributive-logic, to create civilizations that in
their process of retributive-disfranchising reconciliations, every day send more of its children
into the world to make their way prepared only with the minimal cognitive-tools of our species
most ancient less evolved bio-brain-system ancestors.
The issue of disfranchisement is evil enough within one pursuit of life, liberty and happiness
when the issue is one of an acculturation to antiquated intellectual ideas, but when
disfranchisement is one of denying one development of their inherent potential in memory and
cognition in abstraction, that moves disfranchisement into the realm of criminality. Our biobrain
system evolution has made memory and cognition led by abstraction, objectivity in
research and free-will in intellect the present reality evolution presents us with. Is there any
more authoritative reality upon which to base ones process in memory and cognition. To not
permit its realization, is to impose a clearly primitive archaic processing of memory and
cognition out of our earlier evolution as a species.
Imagine forcing a population to wear a brace that did not permit them to walk upright forcing
them to walk in a posture of an earlier state of muscular-skeletal evolution. Imagine such a
culture employing the brace for so many generations that not walking upright becomes a norm
insisted on by present generations who themselves not only seek the brace, but seek one that
will stoop them to a less upright position. So it is with limbic-dominant memory and cognition.
38

Memories of the intellectual past should in their theoretical and cognitive obsolescence be
forgotten, so implied Sir Frederick Charles Bartlett (1886-1969) in 1932 with the publishing of
his ground breaking work entitled Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social
Psychology. In Remembering he proposed a theory of memory that is still applicable, linking
memory directly to perception, stating that memory is as creative and susceptible to error as our
processes of perception.
Keep in mind that our processes of perception are determined by our processes of cognition
and cognition is determined first by ones bio-brain system architecture and secondly by ones
acculturation in a tradition in memory and cognition that either affirms or negates our biobrain
systems inherent potential.
John F. Kihlstrom in his paper entitled: “Memory, Autobiography, History,” quotes Bartlett,
Maurice Halbwachs (1877-1945) and Eviatar Zerubavel whose book Social Mindscapes was
published in 1997. Each speaks to the formative influence of acculturation and socialization in
all that comprises memory. Bartlett wrote that:
Social organization gives a persistent framework into which all detailed recall
must fit, and it very powerfully influences both the manner and the matter of
recall.
He also wrote that:
Remembering is an act of communications, of information sharing and selfexpression,
as well as an act of information retrieval. Accordingly our memories
of the past are shaped by the interpersonal context in which they are encoded,
stored and retrieved.
Halbwachs in (1925) argued that:
The individual calls recollections to mind relying on the framework of social
memory . . . there are surely many facts and many details . . ., that the
individual would forget if others did not keep their memory alive for him. But,
on the other hand society can live only if there is sufficient unity of outlooks
among the individuals and groups comprising it. . . . This is why society tends
to erase from its memory all that might separate individuals, or that might
distance groups from each other.It is also why society, in each period,
rearranges its recollections in such a way as to adjust them to the variable
conditions of its equilibrium.
I would argue that Halbwachs overlooks those in society that empower themselves by
perpetuating such xenophobic-xenotropic divisions as race, class, ethnicity and religion within
the larger society.
Many today argue with Halbwachs that memory is a micro-macro-social-construction, that the
concerns of the present shape the past and therefore our memory. In Social Mindscapes
Halbwachs points out that it is others that help us as much to forget as to remember,
39

determining what we shall forget and what we shall remember, including much that comes to
comprise a collective-past we can never confirm.
Kilstrom concludes his paper with:
In other words, memory is simultaneously a biological fact, a faculty of mind,
an exercise in rhetoric, and a social construction.
Today cognitive-science grounds our errors in perception to error in cognition out of micromacro-acculturation
and or bio-brain-system damage. In what I reference as factors that
comprise our forming a more or less mature-cognitive-process.
B. Dubrovsky in his article entitled, “Neuroscience and Memory,” begins by speaking of
memory as a process bound to meaning in cognition, as achieving prominence at least in the
west as early as greek and roman times. Praising Bartlett’s experimental departure from
Ebbinghaus, Dubrovsky points to Bartlett’s insistence on subjectivity as essential
for the true test of memory.
He quotes Bartlett:
Remembering is not the re-excitation of innumerable fixed, lifeless and
fragmentary traces. It is an imaginative reconstruction, or construction, built
out of our relation of our attitude towards a whole active mass of organized past
reactions or experience, and to a little outstanding detail which commonly
appears in image or in language form. It is thus hardly ever really exact, even in
the most rudimentary cases of rote recapitulation, and it is not at all important
that it should be.
Dubrovsky continues with Barlett’s observation that memory and perception always seek to fill
gaps. I assume that it is in the filling of the gaps that memory becomes especially inexact. But
inexact-remembering implies forgetting and lying, and the denial within ones own mind, of
both. I propose that to the extent that memory, that remembering is led by the limbic-system,
inhibiting abstract-cognition, that this is the case. I propose that when memory and perception
are led by abstract-cognition in free-will in intellect that poetic-elaboration and therefore error
is radically minimized.
Gerald Edelman the noble prize winning biologist in the early nineties provided a bio-chemical
basis of memory, linking psychology and biology, with his theory of re-entry, at least within the
bio-brain limbic-dominant monkey. Edelmans theory speaks of a
synaptic-global-mapping, wherein groups of neurons are selected in a map, simultaneously with
others grouped in their separate re-entry connected selected maps, in a process wherein
perception is correlated and coordinated and strengthened by the strengthening of the
interconnections through the reentrant signaling. Dubrovsky extends Edelmans theory, viewing
the relation of memory to perception, as specific to our ability to re-categorize previousperceptual-categorizations.
40

But an important variable is being overlooked here and that is the different kinds of memory
and cognition inherent to the bio-brain-architectures of the various species and the changes
that occurred through evolution, in particular to our species.
The monkey itself having changed little in some 60 million years has been and continues to be
bio-brain architecturally very limbic, their processes of cognition and memory are and we can
assume have always been very limbic meme-tation driven, what ever Hollywood’s revisions of
evolution in Planet of The Apes. They are and have always been absent
Broca’s area and still have less frontal-lobe development than even our earliest family branch
A. ramidus and A. anamensis of nearly 5 million years ago.
All attempts to understand our Sapiens Sapiens processes of memory and cognition through
comparisons made between us and other creatures must be stated within the context of
evolution. Recall that we Sapiens-Sapiens are the further evolution of a branch called H.
habilis of the family tree of our species 6 million years of evolution, of some 2 million years
ago. It was then that our species acquired an important addition to our bio-brain system called
a Broca’s area without which we would not have arrived to the status of Sapiens Sapiens.
Recall that in the prior to Habilis 4 million years our family tree within our then status as
Hominid was in bio-brain-architecture, in design and wiring, which can be argued
incrementally evolved to our Sapiens Sapiens 6 times more pre-frontal-lobe system
development than the chimpanzee was absent Broca’s area.
All comparisons and analogy between us Sapiens Sapiens in the present and others of our
species and other creatures must be done with caution. Always keeping in mind that evolution
has gifted us with a pre-frontal, Broca’s and other language area advantages that in architecture
and wiring permits in their inherent potential, an at least 6 times exponentially greater potential
for cognition and memory in abstraction than the Chimpanzee, and the Chimpanzee is a genius
compared to the Monkey.
What confuses the uninitiated about our inherent potential in memory and cognition, is that
our potential in dominance in abstraction and free-will in intellect, is so easily lost, subverted in
a disfranchising acculturation that is limbic-dominant, and inherently retributive in logic and
intellect. It is not easily unraveled, this history of cultural subverting of our since post-H.habilis
inherent potential in abstraction and complexity in sematic in language. Without which by the
way there is no free-will in intellect, without which there is no
authentic moral and ethical higher purpose.
Go ahead I dare you count the generation acculturated to an acculturation which in its loyalty
to our pre-H.habilis species history of limbic-system dominance, has served to perpetuate this
history. Recall now I speak of a loyalty of at least 4 million years of pre-habilis bio-brain
systems inherent dominance in limbic-logic, in limbic memory and cognition and some 2
million years of an evolving inspired by abstraction limbic-complexity of loyalty.
Gerald Edelmans theory of re-entry, understanding its development within his exploring the
bio-brain system processes of the limbic-dominant monkey, contributes much to our
understanding of our species pre-H.habilis evolving history of “will” in memory and
41

cognition. His theory points to a bio-brain-system-cognitive-structure of “will,” a “will”
inherent to the bio-brain-system itself, a “will” that can be realized as it fulfills its inherent
potential in categorization, in memory and cognition, of its bio-brain system, or subverted by
the imposition of processes in categorization inherent to a cognitive-mode from a less evolved
stage in bio-brain architecture.
“Will” is then, in kind, inherent to the evolutionary stage of a bio-brain system, and realized or
subverted by experience in an acculturation that either serves an earlier in evolution or later in
evolution bio-brain system potential in categorization.
Edelman leads me to conclude that diverse kinds of memory and recall are themselves an
assertion of their specific kind of cognitive-will, an assertion wherein a kind of cognitive-will
involves the activation of previous neuron-mappings which were themselves previously
categorized within the context of the cognitive-will specific to it. I am also able to conclude that
cognition, it’s kind, its logic and language, that dominated the processes of categorization in the
past, to the extent that they were limbic, although not immutable, will dominate
re-categorization in the present, and so on into the future.
Memory and recall of categorizations, their kind and cognition are central to culture process
and as such to art. Art as a psychosomatics of culture process acculturates, and as such can
serve traditions of culture and acculturation in the maintaining of group-biases in limbic driven
categorizations or deconstruct them with categorization driven by free-will in intellect. There is
no question that art process as it directs categorization can either evolve our potential in
cognition to further abstraction and free-will in intellect or devolve cognition to
more and more limbicness.
We Sapiens-Sapiens, have all the hardware, all the bio-brain-system connections within which
to evolve and mature our processes of categorization, to mature cognition, memory and recall.
But it is a promise waiting for us to meet its condition, a promise waiting for that
software, for a pedagogy wherein abstract-cognition leads the limbic with free-will in intellect.
Art has so far failed this promise, art has instead in a dogmatic-academy notion of progress in
culture and therefore cognition persisted in employing a pedagogy that educates us to intellect
in limbic-will, to be led by and serve limbic-will well beyond the important experiment in an
esthetics of art founded on the cognitive science of its time, releasing itself from Classicism as
the cultural symbol of “Surplus-Repression.” It engaged all the disciplines and called itself
modern-art in the visual arts there was Turner and then Impressionism, Modernism then spun
through Expressionism, figurative and abstract, through Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism and
Dadaism.From the 1860’s to the 1920’s inspired as it was by such figures as Jean Jacques
Rousseau and Sigmund Freud, the cognitive primitivism of the art of the Indigenous colonial
cultures, the art of the Insane, the Folk and Children.
By the early 1940’s as the world battled in its 2nd world war modern art had already migrated
from Europe to America and here the experiment found its second, third and fourth wind. from
the 1950’s to the present. Here the driving force until the early 1970’s was the less intellectual
“freedom of expression.” Europe’s Semiotics of the 1950’s became America’s adventure in
intellect and esthetics, becoming the esthetic foundation of the Post-Modern art movement of
the 1970’s. From the 1970’s to the present the limbic anti-intellectualism of Modernism
42

surfaced again and continues to assert itself inhibiting all attempts at an intelligence of
Modernism that is not driven by limbic-logic, inhibiting all attempts at research in the present
of cognitive science that make clear its subverting role in our present potential in cognition in
memory and recall.
A comparison can be made between the relation of a cultures focus in cognition in “Art,” in its
awake art-process, which can be understood as the awake-dream-process and the cognitive
process at work within that cultures sleep- dream-process which can be understood as the
asleep-art-process. An analysis of the comparison of the cognitive processes at work in the
awake culture and the asleep culture will reveal a cultures role serving either cognitive maturity
and therefore the evolving of abstraction and free-will in intellect or immaturity inhibiting
development of abstraction and free-will in intellect.
Dreaming reveals the bio-brain system inherent processes of expression and therefore art,
processes that left to themselves are even more limbic-logic led and therefore in greater
cognitive immaturity than the immaturity in cognition and memory that more or less left to
itself limbically leads our awake expression of self to cognitive immaturity, no less than the
processes in memory and cognition of our fine art in its form and content.
Within cognitive-science the problem is easy enough to understand, left to itself cognition and
memory will be a limbic dominant process, any abstraction occurring will be subservient to
limbic-systems logic, in all realms of self-expression. It is in this way, simply leaving it to
itself that immaturity in cognition and memory is educated. Our dream art process its logic in
cognition like that of our awake art is not only a gauge of the immaturity of the cognition and
memory at work in our dream and awake art processes, but is the means through education in
lucidity to serve their maturing in service of development of free-will in intellect.
By guiding our asleep and awake art within lucidity we are able to lead the art-process within
intention in abstraction in memory and cognition freeing our asleep and awake processes of
memory and cognition of limbic dominance with its inherent retributiveness. We are able
through our intention in lucidity to design higher-purpose, deconstructing our art from its
domination by our limbic-system and limbic organizing of our memory and cognition to serve
retributive-reconciliations. Lucidity in art permits us to win back our cognitive-potential in
intention in free-will in intellect, in memory and cognition inherent to our Sapiens Sapiens
stage in bio-brain-system development.
By applying the techniques of lucid-dreaming to both our asleep and awake art-process, to both
our asleep and awake memory and recall, we engage our art, our cognition, our memory and
recall, within their role and process in creativity, within the lucidity and intention of
abstract-cognition, in a free-will in intellect that serves our Sapiens-Sapiens stage in bio-brain
system evolution.
I reference, Dreaming and the Brain : Towards a Cognitive Neuroscience of Conscious States, by
J. Allan Hobson, Edward Pace-Schott and Robert Stickgold. Whether the reference is art,
culture or acculturation, their lucidity in cognition in memory and recall depends on an
objective-observer-mind. Lucidity needs a language-fluent-abstract-cognitive-dominant-mind,
to engage, participate in, and abstract-cognitively direct to higher-purpose what would in
limbic-dominance be a retributive-tainted-intention in memory and recall.
43

The lucid-cognizer is one who in abstract-cognitive-directed-intention with a clarity of the logic
inherent to abstract, to emotional and to body-feltness in memory and cognition. It is a clarity
that distinguishes the appropriate means, materials, art historic isms, manual and technological
processes by which to translate and use narrative content within an encoding of narrative
content meaning. It is a clarity that permits one to move through the inherent logics esthetics
creating a coherent self-expressive-language-fluency in cognition, in memory and recall, that
bridges, integrates, and evolves and therefore matures through abstraction in objectivity and
free will in intellect, the body-felt, emotional, and abstract cognitive-modes.
It is within such an abstract-cognitively grounded lucidity in the present of cognitive-science,
that art education is most able to make possible within all self-expression, within all our art
whether of our awake or our asleep state those reconciliations that serve higher-purpose.
Lucidity is essential for a self-expression that speaks to morals and ethics, that reconciles all
memory and recall in a conscience that is in its higher-purpose life-affirming.
Keep in mind that conscience like narrative-content-meaning not only varies with the various
cognitive-modes within which one is acculturated to encode experience, but varies as well with
the cognitive-mode that dominates recall. Of course the limbic in its subjectivity in
emotional-bodyfeltness is the least stable in conscience and therefore morals and ethics, being
in meaning and intention retributive.
The cognitive-mode in abstraction, is on the other hand stable to the extent that abstraction
serves to deconstruct the limbic-retributive-mode through a cognition and memory in
objective-research. Since it is within a deconstruction of the limbic in objectivity that free-will
in intellect which is not possible otherwise asserts itself and inspires conscience in meaning and
intention in higher purpose.
It is within the layers of our history in memory, within our history of reconciliations, in more or
less limbic dominance, in more or less abstraction, that we within remembering organize our
conscience in grace or retribution, in higher or lower moral-ethical purpose.
An important point here, is that remembering is a process that as it occurs in our awake, or
asleep state, is bound to the same layered history of reconciliations. In process, the layers of
remembering assert their history of acculturated limbic or abstract dominant driven morals
and ethics as a previous-coding, and the recoding of previous-coding, as cognitive-modes vary
with intention in experience, and their recall through that history.
In an abstract of an article entitled, “Seeking the Core: The Issues and Evidence Surrounding
Recovered Accounts of Sexual Trauma,” in Consciousness and Cognition, Vol. 3, 1994,
Jonathan W. Schooler writes:
People are highly capable of fabricating vivid recollections that can be confused
with reality.Once fabricated, there seems to be no limit to the preposterous false
memories that some individuals are capable of accepting particularly when in
the presence of a persuasive individual in a position of authority.
44

In an abstract of an article entitled, “Memory: A River Runs through It, in the same issue of
Consciousness and Cognition, Maryanne Garry, Elizabeth F. Loftus and Scott W. Brown writes:
Two decades of research using repeated false statements and underhanded
information have shown that people can easily be made to believe that they
have seen or experienced something they never did. I would argue that the
“some individuals” in Schooler’s study, and the “people” of Garry, Loftus and
Brown study are representative of the cognitively immature, that population
being limbic-dominant in memory and cognition that have the highest inherent
potential for false-remembering and false-forgetting. I also argue that falseremembering
and false-forgetting diminishes with the maturing of cognition
with its dominance in abstraction in free-will in intellect.
The studies confirm that limbic extremes in psycho-somaticness awakened by recall of
experience in trauma, and abuse contributes to a more pronounced false-remembering and
false forgetting.
The limbic system in its dominance is the child of our early stages in evolution and as such is
the bio-brain system child of our species history in consciousness, in memory and behavior,
with all its inherent error in ‘truth’ in memory and behavior. It is our later adolescent post-
H.habilis pre-frontal-lobe and bio-brain language system developments in evolution, that in
their potential in the maturing of our cognition and behavior through abstraction that our
consciousness and memtation as it remained subservient to the limbic-child became the
adolescent bully-murderer, that as an adult Sapiens Sapiens remained captive to the child and
adolescent history in evolution of cognition and behavior of our species in retributive error.
We have the hardware, the bio-brain system, we have the software, the cognitive-science and
educational institutions with which to bring “truth” to our cognition, to our memory and
behavior, to responsibly through the objectivity that free-will in intellect is, to in this Sapiens
Sapiens adult stage of our evolution parent our inherent limbicness to cognitive maturity
beyond that of our species ancient history as a less bio-brain system endowed limbic dominant
child and adolescent of evolution. For only in cognitive-maturity will our species potential for
‘truth’ overcome our potential to “false-remembering” and “false-forgetting,” overcome our
potential in self-expression for fabrication, our own, or a fabrication imposed by someone else.
Since art is in it very alchemy at the heart of the semantic process and logic of meaning, and
therefore central to all self-expression, to all memory, cognition and behavior, the cognitive
mode that drives art, is in its logic the character of its veracity in “truth.” Only such and
understanding of art, as a process at the center of memory and cognition, can we begin to
understand arts process relation to memory, to memories potential in spuriousness and
authenticity, and therefore the veracity of one expression of self in art, however ephemeral or
concrete, as thought, behavior or object.
Of course the art-process, or one could say the semantic or esthetic within which information is
processed is inherent to all creation, to all created things invisible and visible. It began some 12
billion years ago this art we call the universe, a pinpoint of vacuum expanding beyond all
notions of miracle, long before our species was a twinkle in “Natures” eye.
45

This marvel of processing of information, in micro and macro phenomena, of “Nature”, of
events and experience occurs in ways specific to each kind of thing, to its system-architecture,
to its bio-brain system wiring, organically within the organic, and inorganically within “things”
inorganic. It is a processing of information that occurs in ways specific to specific creatures and
animals, in ways specific to specific vegetables and minerals. Some “things” for example
process experience, through a memory-in-art within the magnetic, others within the electrical,
and others as chemical processes.
There are things in creation that combine magnetic, electrical and chemical processes in
various ways. With each processing of information happening within a wide range of
environmentally and culturally-conditioned, more or less spurious and more or less authentic
semantic-esthetic variables.
Our species processing of information, of internal and external experience, within our some 6
million years of an evolving bio-brain system and wiring has included the genetic, hormonal,
magnetic, electrical and chemical processes. It has included gesturing, vocalizing and sound
signaling, and for some 2 million years now an evolving spoken language. Our writing
demanding yet more development of cognition in abstraction did not occur until some 5,000
years ago.
All these processings of information inherent to our species, to our physical and cognitive
forming have throughout our evolution served our memory, perception and cultural
conditioning to dominance of our inherent potential in a more or less mature cognition. A
cognition serving either an earlier bio-brain system architecture of more limbicness or the
existing system architecture with greater prefrontal-lobe development and therefore greater
inherent potential in abstraction.
It cannot be stated often enough: Memory in its art, its kind and potential in process, depends
on the architecture, on the instrumentation, the hardware if you will, within which the
perceptual processing systems operate. It is the relation of this hardware to the soft-ware, the
architecture to the culture-process, the education within which those systems organize their
operations that is the critical factor in the “truth,” in the veracity of each step in the acquiring
and processing of memory in cognition.
These are all the factors, driven by the art-in-memory through which organic and inorganic
elements, a particle of matter, a mineral, a cell or more complex collection of elements and
cells organize. They are the factors through which a microbe, a puddle, an ocean, all organize,
as a life form, as our species through all its branches of our family tree organized. All things in
creation, within their authentic and or spurious memory in art, encodes and decodes
information, through which it adjusts its place in time and space. It is an adjustment of
“Nature” in “Nurture” that either fulfills or denies the inherent potential that is the “truth”
inherent to all things.
Memory, and here I reference Bruce Lipton and his theories of the Biology of Consciousness, is
a process the complexity of which encompasses our species inherent potential in cognition in
memory within not only each of our stages in evolution, but those of “Nature” from proton to
Sapiens Sapiens. It is then possible within each stage of bio-brain system evolution, as its
inherent potential in “truth” in art, in memory and architecture then permits an organizing in
46

cognition in more or less dominance in extra-sensory perception, that in our potential to attune
to and decipher a psychosomatic narrative from the magnetic, electrical, chemical and cellular
processes is more or less successful in the “truth” in its potential in “truth.”
It is this extra-sensory-psychosomatic attunement and ability to decipher its narrative, that in
our mother and ourselves effects and organizes both her and our hormonal and genome
activity, from conception, to birth and through much of the psychosomatics in ease and disease
of our entire existence.
If Lipton is correct, it makes sense to assume that throughout our species history some protoequivalent
extra-sensory-psychosomatic attunement and ability to decipher its narrative existed,
achieving its potential in highest development in Sapiens Sapiens. It makes sense that it would
be an ability that also evolved within our species bio-brain system evolution: That like
H.habilis pre-frontal-lobe development and that of the Broca’s and other areas serving
language development, that equivalent areas for extra-sensory-psychosomatic attunement and
ability to decipher its narrative also evolved.
Within this evolutionary model our pre-H.habilis ancestors had a less refined extra-sensory
psychosomatic attunement, than H.habilis and the branches of our species family tree that
followed in our species evolution. Pre-H.habilis had a less bio-brain developed ability in
abstraction, processing of language and self-consciousness, having a less evolved equivalent to
H.habilis Broca’s and other language development areas in their bio-brain system hardware
with which to attune to and decipher its narrative, in keeping with their then stage in evolution.
I would argue for a yet simpler explanation, that the same areas in bio-brain system evolution
serving language advancement also served the advances in extra-sensory-psychosomatic
attunement and deciphering.
Looking back to our 6 to four and a half or so million years ago ancestors, to A. ramidus, and A.
anamensis, and the four to two and a half or so million years ago A. africanus and A. afarensis,
both Gracile Australopithecines, all of whom were at least as smart as the
Chimpanzees that have been experimentally taught sign and symbol languages.
The Afarnesis who were bipedal and aboral are better known through the skeletal remains of a
female nicknamed “Lucy” found in Ethiopia’. Lucy, has since been referred to as the biblical
Eve’s great, great, great,great grandmother. Lucy in all likely-hood was a vegetarian who
sometimes ate meat was probably a bit more prefrontal and less limbic-emotional-bodyfeltretributive,
as our first Hominid common ancestors, A ramidus and A. anamensis that preceded
her. Their memory being less prefrontal was, sparse, like “unlucid-dream-recall” without
even the awareness of having dreamt. It was a memory with little veracity, rooted in minimallimbic-language-encoding
of narrative fragments, of sounds, gestures, images and vocalizations
a bit more developed than that of our most ancient ancestor the Chimpanzee.
Keep in mind that the bio-brain-systems of our ancient ancestors were despite some prefrontal
development just about entirely limbic in wiring, with development of Broca’s area and
Wernick’s area, responsible for semantic complexity in language not occurring until H. habilis,
our ancestor of 2 million years ago. Philip Tobias, Dean Falk and Terrance Deacon agree that
H. habilis are the earliest of our species to have the bio-brain system prefrontal-lobe
development capable of linguistic capacity, a capacity in memory and cognition nonexistent in
47

the Apes, the Chimpanzee, or Australopithecines. It was no accident that H.habilis were the
first of our species to extend tool use beyond the hand held tree branch, animal leg bone, jaw
bone, and stone shard found-tools. It is no accident that they represent the beginning of a
distinguishing of “truth” from “fabrication,” of our species struggle for lucidity and
consciousness of “truth” and “veracity.” They were the first to struggle with our species ever
evolving self-conscious realization of our species inhibition of inherent potential in memory
and cognition by our acculturated loyalty to memory and cognition of an earlier bio-brain
stage in our species evolution.
The additions in evolution of bio-brain system architecture to H.habilis of the Broca’s,
Wernick’s and other language areas was a leap forward in “Natures” design of our species, out
of the chaos in design in “Nature” from which our species arose. It made possible the
beginning in memory and cognition beyond that of meme and imitation, with its inherent
fabrication in error. Enough narrative content-meaning could now be constructed to make
possible the remembering and teaching, evolving our species adaptation, consciousness of
territory and technologies. Sharding and flaking of large pebbles to create more efficient hand
held flake-stone tools, as well as the working with wood was introduced.
Our species limbic dominant less prefrontal bio-brain system evolution prior to H. habilis
permitted only a cognitive expression, a remembering and “truth” telling dominated by the
senses, by magnetic, electrical, and chemical processes, by emotional-bodyfeltness, by limbiclogic
and its inherent fabrication. With H. habilis, advances in bio-brain-prefrontal
development our species cognition and memory began our journey in towards free-will, a
journey away from limbic-will in memory and cognition, away from a cognition and memory
serving fabrication and “truth.”
Mark the date on your calenders 2 million years ago our species began it journey towards an
abstraction in memory and cognition beyond the until then bodyfelt-sensory, limbic dominant,
magnetic, electrical, and chemical autonomic system driven grunts and chatter, to, a protoword,
less limbic-driven, less fabricated ‘truth’ encoding in language.
In The Global Brain, Howard Bloom outlines Richard Dawkins idea of the “meme”, the
ancient-cognitive-imitative-behavior, inherent to the memory and culture process of a variety of
animals. I include in this variety of animals our Chimpanzee and earliest Hominid ancestors”.
In practice the “meme” is a wordless- habit-stashing, which is at the core of all limbicdominant,
body-memory behavior. It is behavior out of memory organized and funnelled
through the brains limbic centers, that part of our species bio-brain-system evolved long before
there was a human-mind, from reptilian and mammalian times. They are muscle and emotion
memories, sorted by the amygdala, passed for safe keeping to the striatum, stored away in the
cerebellum, in the motor and sensory corridors of its widespread nervous system.
From our Sapiens Sapiens potential in cognition, it is our out of conscious-control,
independent-conditioned-reflex, stubborn, ancient-nervous-system processing of memory and
experience. It is called autonomic, because of its autonomy in process, outside our
consciousness of self: The kind of memory in learning Octopus (A) employed in the
Teddy Bear-electric shock experiment
48

This is a description of some 4 million years of our species memory process prior to the
evolutionary development of Broca’s and Wernick’s areas, that gift of creations artfulness giving
memory the bio-brain potential to take a very different route than that of autonomic-memory,
extending memory to a sematic complexity through abstraction never before possible.
Steven Pinker describes our species 2 million years ago new potential in memory and cognition
within a bio-brain system flow that pretty much describes what I point to as the root of our
species inherent limitation within all succeeding stages of evolution in potential in cognition
and memory. Pinker describes a bio-brain system that I argue since then as our species heritage
in bio-brain system wiring, has built into it a potential in memory and cognition that in its
processes of logic is still vulnerable to limbic-system dominance. The problem as I keep
pointing out is that the logic of the limbic system is tilted to fabrication and retributiveness.
It is within this inherent limitation that I argue there is a need for a dominance of the prefrontal
system, a dominance of abstraction and free-will in intellect in memory and cognition,
with intention to de-construction of all limbic retributive-logic in ‘truth’ in memory and
cognition.
His description of the addition to our species bio-brain system of Broca’s area, with the few
other added “verbal-twiddlers,” makes clear the bio-brain structural progress in evolution until
then, explaining the pathways of limbic influences on our processes in communications,
memory and cognition.
Here is how Howard Bloom describes it: Quoting Steven Pinkers, from his book Language of
Instinct, published by Willian Morrow, New York, 1994 :
They (memories) slide back to the curved prongs of the hippocampus, which flip them forward
to the cortexes of the temporal lobes, accessible to manipulators like Broca’s area and two other
verbal twiddlers which emerged in early Homo habilis—the supramarginal and angular gyri.
I mean you don’t have to jump up and down about it, but “holy-mackerel” it took 4 million
years for our species to acquire enough prefrontal and language-system-architecture. To despite
the still bio-brain dominance by its limbic-system, and despite the new additions being
compelled by the still limbic dominant architecture and acculturated cognition of our species,
finally, finally dreams and imaginings had the potential to begin to become objective thought.
That means less error, less fabrication, thought and consciousness of thought could begin to
have veracity, intention in reality could be a more solid-concrete thing. Thoughts had the
potential for a more complex semantic, making possible a limbic-logic-narrative bridge
between the bodyfelt and emotional mind, creating the cognitive bases in reality for scripted
story telling and acted-out-dreams which anthropologists have come to call ritual. It was the
beginnings of a consciousness in behavior absent till then.
Our species evolution in consciousness to Sapiens Sapiens, is best understood within our
evolution in bio-brain system because it is within that evolution of flesh, within its inherent
potential in consciousness, that our potential as Sapiens Sapiens exists. As we look back over
our evolution of some 6 million years, what we encounter is an ever de-evolving of memory and
cognition, an ever increasing dominance in behavior and culture in limbic-retributiveness.
49

Sliding back to Cro-Magnon, back to Neanderthal, to H. habilis, to the pre-Habilis Hominids
without a Broca’s area, or any other “verbal-twiddlers”, we witness also less, and less
prefrontalness, in bio-brain system development, we witness in a downward spiral to more and
more limbic meme and imitative-autonomic memory inherent to our species earliest limbic
system dominant bio-brain system architecture.
Within each slide back we encounter an ever devolving, culture and acculturation, with each
slide back in time through the branches of our species family tree there is a further regression
in memory and cognition that is more and more limbic-paleo-logic, more and more bodyfeltautonomic-sensory-associational.
Like the pre-frontally damaged of our present day who to the degree of that damage, are
limbic-dominant in memory and cognition, our less pre-frontal-lobe-system evolved ancestors,
as we look back to each less evolved branch of our species family tree, had at least the same
difficulty in their ever increasing limbic-dominance making it more and more difficult for them
to learn mazes, make plans, or spontaneously organize behavior. Like the pre-frontally
damaged of our present day a slide back through each branch of our species family tree
presents us with an ever increasing difficulty in our species forming, no less choosing from a
variety of alternatives. Innovation which depends on abstraction, and abstractions transferring
of objective information from one task to another, and one context to another becomes with
each slide back more painfully slow, and finally as with unbiased consideration of others nonexistent.
What is no longer arguable, is that within this “Nature,” nurture as each uniquely impacted on
our species bio-brain-systems evolution that our memory and cognition in memes and imitative
memory evolved to objectivity within its potential in evolution to the extent that our inherent
potential in semantics in abstraction, in symbol encoding and recoding was nurtured. It is a
history of evolving memory and cognition that also reveals that to the extent that the evolving
inherent potential in memory and cognition were not nurtured, that the resulting limbicdominance
with its immaturity in memory and cognition, when exposed to development in
objectivity in intention, there is a freeing of memory and cognition from dominance in limbicsubjectivity
and bias.
Intention is then the critical factor in nurture, to the extent that intention involves the freeing
of memory and cognition to objectivity, memory and cognition is within its inherent bio-brain
system potential able to asserts itself through developments in intellect in objectivity, and
within the inherent potential of Sapiens Sapiens to free-will in intellect, and higher-purpose in
intention.
Unfortunately our species history, nurtures role in evolution mostly reveals that the limbicsystem
in its inherent limbic-logic has been permitted to dominate our species development in
abstraction. The result has been a history of development dominated by a nurturing of memory
and cognition wherein we have introduced with each educated generation more and more
abstractly complex subjective retributive behavioral-memes in service of our memory in
archaic-error in cognition.
In this history of nurturing limbic-dominance of abstraction we have succeeded in introducing
into our world of culture process, into our species imitative-body-mind-memory, a more
50

complex semantic and syntax with which to serve retribution. By creating a culture-process so
driven by our earliest archaic mind we have created a potential in memory and cognition such
that it is capable of holding all our inherent potential in objectivity and therefore free-will in
intellect hostage to our limbic-system.
It’s a simple enough process Ivan Povlov called such a psycho-somatic weave in behavior for
good or bad, for higher or lower purpose a conditioned-reflex. Cognitive science takes us by the
hand revealing that it is within this psychosomatic weave that memory operates and resides.
The earlier in the family-tree of our species ancestry, the more bio-brain-architecturally,
inherently somatic, body and less psycho, mind, our conditioning-in-reflex and therefore
memory and recall.
I propose that despite our species bio-brain system progress in evolution, culture and
acculturation continued through all those millions of years to behave as if that progress had not
occurred. Culture simply continued to condition, to nurture our species to pre-prefrontal and
less than pre-frontal limbic dominance in memory and logic in cognition. Of course abstraction
as an inherent potential could not be entirely smothered, its assertion w as permitted to occur
only in subservience to the logic of the limbic-system.
It is within this larger context of memory and cognition that we need to understand our species
place in the art creation is, and by extension, how in our process in creation we in our selfexpression
in art, create place, create culture and acculturation. It is within this larger context
that we need to understand art as process in memory, cognition and behavior, that art as an
alchemy, as a physics, is at the process center of all of them.
We need to better understand the psychosomatics of embedded-meaning that art is, its process
in information, and its various concretizations in the physics and chemistry of “Nature”. For it
is through these understandings that we have the potential to transcend “Nature”. It is
then that we make sense of this history of billions of years of memory, of mind-less and mindfull
alchemy, of the diversity of memory and cognition, that all creation is.
There are some 12 billion years of the memory-culture of “Nature”, the memory-culture of
particles, of microbes, plants, of creatures, birds, insects, animals and Hominids, in an exchange
of information out of whose memory of DNA encoding and re-coding from which we Sapiens
Sapiens are the result. Billion of years of art, of culturing in memory, of the processing of
information, with the development of communications within and between “Natures”
organizations of memory of energy, and DNA, within all of limbic ”Natures” alchemy of
creation.
Hominid cognition, as memory, culture and art begins within all our species autonomicprocessing
of information, within all the sensory-signals, the sounds, tastes, smells and textures.
It is a meme, imitative, informing that includes the cold, the hot, the wet, the dry, the rough
and smooth. Included within these simple limbic-autonomic-beginnings of language’s
encoding, of signs and symbols, is pattern and color, gesture, posture and of special importance,
sound-vocalizations.
51

Keep in mind that all memory is an organization of information, and all information is a form
of coding and all coding is a form of language, and that all language however primitive depends
on memory, as memory represents within a potential in cognition, the conditional-means for
the exchange of information. It is memory as a cognitively directed conditioned, and
unconditioned reflex, as imitation, memes and abstraction, in a dynamic relation in affirmation
or negation of abstraction and objectivity, that forms the alchemy, the art within which culture
is the template.
Certainly within this very limbic-logic expression of self and art we can include the
Chimpanzee who have been taught to paint, and the Bower birds who create mini installations.
But once once we leave the bio-brain system realms of pre-Habilis and move up the
evolutionary ladder from Habilis, we move beyond the autonomic system driven art to that selfexpression
within which abstraction, objectivity and free-will in intellect more and more serve
the self-expression.
It is then that to the extent that self-expression by us Sapiens Sapiens is served by our inherent
potential in abstraction, objectivity and free-will in intellect, in cognition and memory, that our
self-expression achieves maturity.
Here I reference chapter 7 of Matt Ridley’s book entitled GENOME, chapter 7 is titled
“CHROMOSOME 7: Instinct.” The publisher is Perennial of Harper Collins.
A simplistic but workable notion within genetic theory of our species progress
in evolution, in memory and cognition, would find our species bio-brain-system
and prefrontal-lobe development progressing in steps each million more or less
years. It would be a progress wherein the areas found to exist prior to H.habilis
as bio-brain areas corresponding to those areas found in Habilis called Broca’s,
Wernick’s, and Insula areas, continued to evolve to our present Sapiens Sapiens
bio-brain system architecture.
The evolving would have occurred in steps through the branches of our species family tree.
Each million more or less years, there would be in wiring and capacity an additional one time
greater volume in pre-frontalness in proportion to a receding limbic system. The result of
such evolution would favor development in inherent potential away from limbic-system
dominance, towards an increasing potential in dominance in pre-frontal system abstraction,
objectivity and free-will in intellect, in memory and cognition. Keep in mind that 100,000 years
ago Sapiens Sapiens pre-frontal-lobe system was already 6 times greater than that of our most
ancient cousin the Chimpanzee.
The evolving of Broca’s, Wernick’s, and Insula areas discovered to have first existed in H.
habilis as areas formed beyond their earlier development as corresponding areas in our
Hominid-Pre H. habilis and more ancient genetic ancestral species links of less than one
percent with the common chimp, to the 30 million years ago nearly eight percent genetic link
with the old world monkeys.
Within a comparative analogy, within what bio-brain system gene research reveals of the
monkey, as discussed by Ridley in chapter 7 of Genome, one can conclude that the
Chimpanzee and our pre H. habilis Hominid ancestors, having areas in the brain that like the
52

monkey only correspond to the much more evolved Broca’s and Wernick’s areas first found in
H. habilis, that the monkey, the chimpanzee and pre-H. habilis Hominids were similarly,
dramatically limited in inherent bio-brain system potential in memory cognition and language
development.
The term corresponding in bio-brain system architecture is employed to make clear that it is a
less evolved primitive equivalent to what in H. habilis in its more evolved bio-brain system state
came to be called a Broca’s area a discovery that includes the Wernick’s and Insula areas.
In the monkey and by comparative analogy the chimpanzee and pre-H. habilis Hominids, the
corresponding areas are the Broca-homologue which being a more primitive stage in
development of the language system permits only a primitive control of the facial muscles,
larynx, tongue and mouth, dramatically limiting language development, memory and cognition.
This limitation in language development, memory and cognition was furthered by the less
evolved Wernicke-homologue serving the recognition of sound sequences and the call of others
of their branch in the family tree. The Insula-homologue plays a central role in the reading of
signs and symbols and general use of language.
It is within our species bio-brain systems inherent potential in evolution, of memory and
cognition, that arriving at 100,000 years ago as Sapiens Sapiens, we could finally having all the
bio-brain system hardware to permit our species a knowing of empathy and humanity as higher
purpose.Providing that is that our then culture supported the potential, and by the way that
proviso has not changed. Keep in mind I said a progress in bio-brain system hardware with a
potential to permit a knowing. What happened to that potential occupies much of my critique
of culture and acculturation throughout this writing.
I agree with Jared Diamond that the flip of the culture-coin seems to have come up tails most
of the time, with all our progress in evolution serving a limbic-system led abstraction, serving
an ever evolving complexity of error in knowing, buried in an ever evolving cleverness and
invention in service of retributive behavior.
Jared Diamond in The third Chimpanzee in his chapter titled “Epilogue: Nothing Learned, and
Everything Forgotten?,” only confirms how as a species we have chosen since H, habilis to
remain in servitude to our most ancient limbic, bio-brain-system-architecture, memory,
cognition and behavior. How we have in our limbic-loyalty betrayed our potential in abstraction
each millions of years of steps of the way.
He confirms our placing our evolving bio-brain potential in abstraction in stasis for hundreds of
thousands of years at a time as we placed our evolving potential in abstraction in service of our
limbic-system with its inherent primitivisation of all memory, cognition and behavior. He
confirms how progress when it did occur, occurred with abstraction serving to empower
retributiveness with more and more cleverness and invention in retribution.
Joseph Campbell in his Historical Atlas of World Mythology Vol I: The Way Of The Animal
Powers, Part 1: Mythologies Of The Primitive Hunters And Gatherers, confirms that since H.
habilis our bio-brain potential has resulted in a gruesome history wherein our species
empowered by an evolving bio-brain-system, went from the wielding of a skull-bashing,
leg-bone of a gazelle, employed by our between 2 million and 1 and a _ million years ago H.
habilis ancestors, in their driving Australopithecines to extinction to that of the more effective
53

hand-ax introduced by H. erectus about 1.8 million years ago in their assertion of their limbic
led phobic-memory of survival and the reflex to kill that which triggered it. Of course it was
often a common ancestor, that triggered the phobic-memory leading to their being hunted and
even ending up on the menu.
It was not until the great leap forward, by Cro-Magnon and Sapiens Sapiens, some 40 thousand
years ago, after some 60,000 years of acculturated ambivalence in bringing to realization
enough of their inherent potential in abstraction, in memory and cognition to create a culture
wherein their ancient history of limbic dominance in bio-brain system and culture process
would permit it’s development.
I argue such cultural stasis is the result of a limbically acculturated loyalty to our species lesser
evolved ancient memory and cognition in limbic meme-imitation of “Natures” lesser evolved
creatures, behaviors and culture, creating within that imitation a variety of limbic-dominant
proto-shamanic-cultures.
Not until 40,000 years ago did our species bio-brain systems inherent potential in semantics in
abstraction overcome its acculturated inhibition in cognition in abstraction enough to spark the
Cro-Mognon-Sapiens Sapiens, inherent potential for semantic-complexity with which to
transport, thoughts and imagination to concreteness with greater complexity.
As if suddenly culture began to fill with all sought of thoughts and things imagined, everything
from stone hand-axes and flakes. All kinds of tools of stone, wood, bone and bamboo emerged
in cultures throughout the world to serve survival and give comfort. Rituals for burial of
Cro-Magnon-Sapiens Sapiens became more elaborate than those of Neanderthal.
Invention and art burst forth like never before. Since the oldest dates of Europe’s cave art is
some 38,000 years ago and since Cro-Magnon are an earlier wave of Sapiens Sapiens whose
gene pool was around until 10,000 years ago, we must credit the earlier 60,000-10,000 years
ago Cro-Magnon with the major developments in art and culture in Europe until some 40,000
years ago. It was then that they were joined by a later wave of Sapiens Sapiens who being more
cognitively developed soon out competed Cro-Magnon, making their own contributions to the
further developments in culture and art.
The cave art in the Franco Cantibarian province is dated some 38,000 years ago, and includes
the historic Lascoux, Altamira and El Castillo caves. Cave art reached its heights in Europe
between 19,000 years ago to 14,000 years ago. Keep in mind that by 30,000 years of their
arrival the second wave of Sapiens Sapiens absorbed the Cro-Magnon gene pool driving them
to extinction some 10,000 years ago.
It is between 10,000 and 6,000 years ago in the cave wall paintings of Northwest and Northeast
Africa that we for the first time see groups of Sapiens Sapiens in the dress and body decorative
painting of their clan and time.Cave wall painting of domesticated herds of long horn cattle
appear for the first time.
As for Neanderthal no equivalent artifacts have been found at the earliest Neanderthal sites
which extend back to some 220,000 years ago, or earlier Archaic sapiens sites which date back
some 780,000 years ago. It is the later Neanderthal sites of some 70,000 years ago that have a
54

primitive ceremonial burial of some of their dead as well as ceremonial stone cabinets
containing bear skulls and thigh bones, serving their bear cult, and stone alters with opened
human skulls placed on them that speak of head hunting and cannibal shamanism.
Cro-Magnon and Sapiens Sapiens sites speak of an assertion of prefrontal cognition, memory
and semantic in language far in advance of Neanderthal. It was a progress that made possible
the craft skills and technology with which to introduce the art of beads, necklaces, pendants,
clay fired figurines, complex tools of worked bone, as well as create and map trade routes across
continents.
It is no chance accident or stranded UFO pilot whose art fills the caves of Altamira and
Lascaux, that made possible the large realistic sculptures of bear and bison made of clay, built
up on stone outcroppings in caves. Nor were the animals and realistic figures of nude women
etched into the stone walls of caves 38,000 or more years ago a prank of a late 1800’s or early
1900’s cave explorer, like the wheat field designs mythologized by science fiction and
hollywood, as being of other worldly origin.
Cognitive science makes clear that Cro-Magnon and the later wave of Sapiens Sapiens both had
the bio-brain system architecture and development in memory and cognition with which to
create the culture and art that became the first renaissance of our species. By 10,000 years ago
painting began appearing within all the overlay of paintings on cave walls, of large groups of
Sapiens Sapiens with bows and arrows hunting and doing battle. Each clan or generation of
Sapiens Sapiens immigrants to the area simply found free space on the cave wall, not finding
any overlaid the images of the previous group. I can’t help but be reminded of a graffiti like
process driving some of the cave art. Cave walls were covered with layers of paintings of
animals and figures some carrying spears others bows and arrows. Many appeared to have been
used for target practice.
The layers of paintings includes abstract shapes, earlier under-layers are almost entirely of
animals, with an image of a shaman in totem animal dress appearing here and there. There are
also female images some dancing in the earlier layers. The abstract diagrams seem to document
like a calender, cyclic events.
Their techniques evolved from the more limbic tactile relief sculpture and engraving to later
more abstract-cognition in service of the limbic-shamanic, re-presenting, possession and
controlling of reality, through the invention of the less limbic-sensory tactile, more abstract
in logic figurative painting.
The cave art itself, through each layer, can be understood as a shamanic-picto-graphic-speak
that speaks the memory cognition and shamanic concerns of each clan that inhabited the
territory.
It was a time that might be viewed as our species release from our first and darkest-age. The
promise of our species potential in cognition begun with H. habilis seemed till then almost lost
forever in the deepest recesses of our species limbic-Id.
Although not yet into the bright light of reason, not yet free of limbic-dominance with its
inherent retributiveness in memory and cognition, reason continued to favor the Id-darkness of
55

its beginnings. It is out of that favor of darkness in reason and the retribution inherent to it that
we Sapiens Sapiens are our species only survivors.
It is within that archaic memory of survival of the fittest that we Sapiens Sapiens with an
evolving development of abstract-cognition in service of the limbic, in service of our assertion
that our Id conjured phobic-might is right, have imagined and invented ourselves beyond the
bow and arrow, to deadly nerve-gas, deadly bacteria and viruses.
We have invented ourselves rockets that carry multiple war-heads of hydrogen bombs and
through genetic engineering there is more vicious and deadly inventing to come. We have done
all this and will continue to do this in our inherent potential in limbic-retributiveness, in our
assertion of limbic-tantrum-conscienceless-might.
It is as if we Sapiens Sapiens in our loyalty to our limbic-nature have no choice but to join in a
suicidal blind-faith with “Nature’s” conscienceless-limbic-nature, no choice but to join in
“Nature’s” cycle of extinction and creation.
It took us only 20,000 years to get from the bow and arrow to the atomic bomb, and 6,000 years
from the first wheeled vehicles to spacecraft, and star-wars technology. Dare we imagine, on a
screen of conscience the many thousands of wars our species have fought, the many
hundred of millions upon hundreds of millions that have died in all the limbic-phobic politics
of might is right.
Dare we imagine how many have died in the collateral-damage, in the resulting famines, and
diseases in just these 20,000 years of our Sapiens Sapiens inherent Potential in memory and
cognition dragged to lower-purpose, dominated by our species most ancient-archaic, limbicretributive
memory and cognition.
It seems almost silly to speak of education as the solution to our species acculturated and
therefore educated limbic-drive to extinction. But what more civil means within which to
impart the skills through which one can as successfully practice free-will in intellect, as they
have been taught to practice phobic-will in intellect. What more civil means does a society and
a people have to overcome the limbic-driven, blind-faith and rush to retribution that more and
more acculturates and educates our species, and organizes our planets cultures, societies and
politics.
If within education, art is to accomplish anything of relevance to the evolving of our inherent
potential in memory and cognition, such that it serves the survival of our species. Art education
needs to organize curriculum to serve our Sapiens Sapiens potential to create a memory,
cognition, art, and culture which in its dominance in abstraction in cognition and free-will in
intellect, deconstructs our acculturated history of limbic dominance in cognition. Education can
no longer see progress as simply an ever growing pool of cognition in abstraction, can
no longer see progress as an ever growing development of intellect, that is blind to its,
acculturated, inevitable-service to the limbic, especially with educations present focus on utility
and vocation. Such blindness spells the inevitable extinction of our species, as more and
more power of destruction comes to serve our acculturated loyalty to our ancient heritage of
limbic-compulsion in desire and greed, with their retributive-machiavellian devices. I reference
chapter 16 of The Third Chimpanzee, by Jared Diamond.
56

BOXES OF REMEMBRANCES: THE JEWISH RITUAL OF TEFILLIN AS
A SYMBOLIC EVOCATION OF THE ISRAELITE TABERNACLE
Maurice Schmidt
Texas A&M University-Kingsville
The Binding of Isaac by Maurice Schmidt, oil on canvas 1990
1

When my father (of blessed memory) died, the one possession of his that I desired was his pair
of tefillin. These are two cube shaped boxes that a Jewish male is required to wear for daily
morning prayer except on the Sabbath and festivals. They contain carefully folded parchments
upon which selected Torah passages are written by hand.
Tefillin are central to weekday morning prayer. They are also a memory bank of the primal
structures, rituals, and covenant of the Jewish people. My thesis will illustrate these memory
evocations and their connection to these finely crafted sacred boxes which are miniatures in
their contents and cube-form: a microcosm of the Holy of Holies of Israel’s ancient Tabernacle
as described in Exodus beginning with Exodus: 25.
As the entire congregation of Israel was present at the fiery mount of Sinai when the “ten
words” were heard and Israel’s covenant with G-d established, so too the entire congregation in
its various ways participated in the rituals emanating from that primal covenantal encounter.
At this point it may be appropriate to mention that in ancient times women also practiced the
tefillin ritual thus underlining the concept of universal participation. 1
Israel’s covenantal moments are memorialized in the rituals and structures of the Tabernacle. 2
All the traditional rituals of Judaic worship go back to and are derived from the Tabernacle’s
rituals as codified in the Torah. At the heart of my thesis is the visual symbolic means by which
the tefillin ritual transforms the worshipper into a consecrated priest entering the Holy of
Holies, being transplanted back in time to the sacral moment of covenant and, at the same
moment, physically transformed into an embodiment of the Tabernacle and the Torah.
II. SACRED CONTENTS IN SACRED FORMS
The forms and shapes and the precisely prescribed ritual attendant upon the tefillin are of an
equal nature to their selected prayer contents. For the sake of brevity and much clarity, I refer
the reader to the extensive and authoritative notes accompanying this essay as to the described
objects. Their contents and use are unfamiliar to many people, Jews as well as non-Jews.
Tefillin are sacred objects to Judaism and must be made to a precise code of materials, shape,
size, and color. The use of leather from a “clean” (i.e. kosher) animal is self-explanatory. The
four central prayers encased in each box are easily explained as a covenantal summary or coda
of the entire Torah. What I have not found anywhere nor heard commented upon is the origin
of their shape, their precise and beautiful construction, the reason for the strictures against
embellishment or innovation of shape or color: in short, the aesthetic symbolic reasoning
underlining their unusual appearance.
It is also unknown exactly when their design was first codified and by whom it was done. The
Torah prayers inside tefillin mention only their use in the tefillin ritual itself. The absence of
aesthetic commentary on ritual objects is a constant of Jewish tradition. As in all Judaic objects
explicitly sacred or holy in and of themselves, their sanctity derives from their Torah content 3
not from their physical form or materials. 4 The one exception would be the Menorah (the seven
branched lamp).
The sanctity of tefillin derives not only from their words inside but from their imitation in
structure to a Torah scroll. The sacred texts are written by hand, by a scribe upon parchment
and carefully rolled up for insertion. It is the tefillins’ shape which have fascinated me; the very
severity of their form and color and the awkwardness and intricacy of their usage. The windings
of leather, the timing of their placement upon the body interspersed with prayers are of utmost
urgency and precision and to an extent, a discomfort. Everything about tefillin militates against
one seeing them as merely beautiful objects, or as an enhancement of our appearance in that
physical way which we associate with objects of art and especially religious art. And yet, they
2

are as beautifully and precisely made as fine jewelry. Carefully removing these tefillin from
their bag and then from their outer protective cases as the ritual begins is, in some strange way,
to feel a gate opening slowly into a sacred dimension. 5 And they raise questions. Why two boxes,
one for the heart/hand and another for the head/mind? But, as with the Ten Commandments,
one stone could have sufficed, but two were prescribed. And why four prayers, a number
echoed in the four sides of a square which is the prescribed form of the tefillin?
What I have observed is a consistent and unique aesthetic created through the ages by Judaic
culture beginning with the Tabernacle descriptions in Exodus. It would be easy to ascribe this
aesthetic to a kind of minimalist tradition of deliberate severity of abstraction to avoid graven
imagery. Such an assumption would not be altogether incorrect. The weakness of such an
explanation, however, lies in its very simplicity and the literalness of its reading of the Second
Commandment. Implying a completely negative approach or rejection of the aesthetic has
come to be the familiar aversion to looking for any contribution to art from the Jewish tradition
or its scripture. The Judaic aesthetic is not simply a negative against the graven image, but a
subtle, complex, carefully calibrated positive and intricately woven set of choices, limitations,
innovations, and rejections that build up to an aesthetic cohesion as unique and unified and
influential as any in antiquity.
III. SHAPE AND RITUAL BECOME COVENANT AND JOURNEY
The altars of ancient Egypt were square at the top and base. Their pyramids were built upon a
square base and the holy of holies of their temples, the room of the statue of the temple god
was a cube form. Their buildings and statues were oriented to the cardinal points. 6 Their
priestly offerings were sprinkled to the north, south, east and west sides of their altars. 7 West
was the most sacred direction denoting the land of the dead by way of the setting sun and it was
also the direction the pharonic statues faced. For reasons unknown, the number “four” was
sacred to the Egyptians and the square was a visual diagram of “four.” 8
The altars of the ancient Israelites in both the Tabernacle and later Temples were also square
at the top and base. Their offerings too were oriented to cardinal points. 9 It may be more than
coincidental, but fascinating in any case, that when a pharaoh died, the four sacred viscera
were removed from his body (liver, spleen/stomach, kidneys, and intestines) and placed in four
canopic jars which were then placed in a cube shaped box and interred in his tomb. 10 Egypt
was the civilization from which the Israelites emerged, as slaves and as a nation. The Ten
Commandments and the prayers in Tefillin remind us of the fact.
It is a reasonable assumption that this sacred Egyptian vocabulary of forms would have been
familiar to the Israelites and held in some form of awe. It then became the task of Moses
Rabbenu (Hebrew for “our teacher”) to do what all creative teachers have always done, use the
familiar to invent new relationships to inspire a new way of thinking. In this case, it meant
using a vocabulary of idolatry to teach the thought and language of moral monotheism. The
Judaic or Mosaic substitutions, deletions, and additions are almost obvious from a comparative
study of Egyptian art and the biblical texts of Exodus. Such is the march to individuation of all
cultures and art throughout history; the evidence of influence is the proof of underlying
innovation.
The very mystery as to the origin of the tefillin’s shape may also have a clue in their apparent
Egyptian connection. Any reference to similarity or origin of those sacred objects to the
experience of bondage and idolatry would need to “get lost.” Thus the biblical narrative, so full
of precision regarding material and size of the Tabernacle structures, expresses no hint of the
symbolic meanings of shapes, colors, or forms. No aesthetic references or discourse tells us in
Torah or Talmud why the precise details described for sacred objects are the way they are. As
for tefillin, no form whatever is described in the Torah but their physical shape reflects the
3

same culture of forms used to build the ancient Tabernacle, the first shrine of moral
monotheism.
The square, as in Egypt, is the basic form underlying all the architectural elements of the
Tabernacle complex. The surrounding Outer Court is a double square and the Sanctuary within
it is a long building ten cubits high, ten cubits wide and thirty cubits long. The Holy of Holies,
containing the tablets of the Covenant, is a cube shaped room, ten by ten by ten cubits. It is the
most sacred space in Jewish history. Though larger and higher, Solomon’s Temple retains the
square floor plan for the Holy of Holies. 11
In the death and rebirth rituals of Egyptian religion can be seen the basic elements of all
nature worship which involves the centrality of Eros and Thanatos. Between the potency of
Eros and the mysterious trauma of Death, all life is bracketed. Yet wherever these forces
dominate religion through ritualized worship, their aestheticization becomes irresistible and the
spiritualizing power of moral monotheism falters. The centrality of the Torah, a written moral
and legal code, cannot be sustained against equal footing with Eros and Thanatos and yet no
religion can fail to deal with the latter. Judaism makes its great contribution in its resolution of
the paradox between the ever intrusive but amoral natural order and the virtually unprovable
moral order.
In every ritual from the burnt offerings at its altars to the prayers and commandments of its
daily ritual, one can detect this dialog of the disestablishment of nature as final arbiter of
existence and its replacement by the single transcendent G-d and His Divine Teaching. Indeed
the Patriarchal stories, beginning with the Creation itself and subsequent Prophetic writings
establish this same dialog. No less is it evident that this same dialog goes forward in the subtle
choices, combinations, additions and omissions of : shapes, forms, proportions, colors and
rituals recorded in those same sacred texts. It is Judaic civilization’s great contribution to art
that it created an aesthetic ritual art that subordinates the amoral natural order beneath the
centrality of divine order. Thus the Egyptian square shape of altars is retained but instead of a
cube shaped box containing four jars of primal human viscera, four primal covenantal Torah
texts are inserted in a cube. The cube replicates the Holy of Holies. This cube shaped room
contained the original two tablets of the covenant placed in the Ark which was faintly visible
through the veil in front of the Holy of Holies.
The two tefillin boxes also echo the two square shaped altars of the Tabernacle. The altar of
offering outside the Sanctuary was for animal offerings where blood was sprinkled. Here the
four types of offerings were done, one of which is the atonement for sin. I infer that this altar
corresponds to the (shel yad—of the hand) tefillin box which is placed on the left arm
alongside the heart, the organ of blood and passion, our animal dimension.
On entering the Sanctuary or Holy Place, (which only the High Priest entered), we see a second
much smaller altar of beaten gold, the Altar of Incense. Upon this altar, the High Priest burned
the sacred incense and, approaching the Holy of Holies, made atonement to G-d for his own
and for Israel’s sins. The Altar of Incense is echoed in the second tefillin cube, the (shel rosh—
of the head), metaphorically mind and thought, our spiritual dimension. While both tefillin
contain the same four Torah passages, in the tefillin of the head, the passages are inscribed on
four separate parchments which are then carefully rolled up, bound and inserted into this
tefillin cube’s four separate compartments.
The two tablets of Moses which could easily have been one are two because a pair symbolized a
covenant between the G-d of this testimony and His people. The two tefillin, which also could
easily have been one, echo the covenantal theme of the two tablets of the covenant at Sinai.
Additionally by converging upon heart/hand, and head, tefillin express the Torah’s command
to subject every part of our being: physical, mental, and spiritual to G-d’s will.
4

IV. BINDING AND PRAYING: THE TEFILLIN RITUAL’S SACRED AND METAPHYSICAL
JOURNEY
In closing, I will now indicate symbolic connections between the tefillin ritual and the
Tabernacle structures. I will leave out the full prayers quoting only abbreviated portions which
seem to underline those connections herein described.
Wrapping myself in the fringed prayer shawl (talit), my body is an echo of the Outer court and
its rectilinear shape and curtains and also the shape and curtains of the Holy Place within as
the talit forms my body into a rectilinear Holy Place. As the blue, purple, scarlet and gold
threaded curtains of the Tabernacle echo the heavens at morning and evening prayer times, so
too does the ritual prayer.
Bless Hashem, O my soul; Hashem, my G-d, You are great, You have
donned majesty and splendor; cloaked in light as with a garment,
stretching out the heavens like a curtain. 12
I remove the first tefillin (shed yad — of the hand) and unravel its strap. Turning it upside down
its rectangular base, the part that will lay against my flesh has notched corners where the strap
emerges, suggestive of the horned altars of Biblical times.
The aesthetic underpinnings of Jewish ritual are likewise subservient to the moral-didactic.
The high or charged feelings are not a goal in Judaic ritual practice. Yet this is not to say that
transcendent moments must not happen, that when following a path of Torah, we cannot enter
a holier place, a more sacred time for awe and reverence. Placing it on my left arm over against
my heart, puts me symbolically before the brass altar of animal offerings outside the Sanctuary
or Holy place. (Prayer)
I now wrap the strap seven times around my forearm and then immediately unwrap and place
the head tefillin (shel rosh) on my head above the hairline between my eyes. I am now in the
sanctuary before the Altar of Incense having obeyed the command wrapped inside the tefillin
“And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine hand and they shall be for frontlets between
thine eyes.” 13 (Prayer) “Blessed is the name of His glorious Kingdom forever.”
I now stand before the veil of the Holy of Holies. The seven windings of the tefillin of the hand
on my left forearm are adjacent to the Menorah, the seven branched lamp placed to the left of
the Holy of Holies. (Prayer)
May You pour goodly oil upon the seven arms of the Menorah, to
cause Your good to flow to Your creatures. May You open Your hand
and satisfy the desire of every living thing. 14
I now wrap the hand tefillin strap around the middle finger of my hand, the third finger and
then the palm of my hand in such a manner as to form the three Hebrew letters: shem, dalit,
yad which spell out Shaddai (Hebrew: G-d Almighty). I have become symbolically a reenactment
of the Tabernacle, its curtains, and its altars. I have physically bound myself to the
ancient covenant in many careful wrappings. The black tefillin on my flesh and the white talit
around my body evoke the black letters against the white parchment of a Torah scroll. I am
“black fire atop the white fire.” 15 (see End Notes). Like Isaac, I am bound over to the Lord.
The Tabernacle was the bridal chamber of Israel where G-d came down to dwell in our midst
and bind Himself to Israel forever. I am inside the Veil, inside the Holy of Holies where only
the High Priest was permitted.
5

And I will betroth thee unto me forever; and I will betroth thee unto me in
righteousness, in justice, in lovingkindness, and in compassion. And I will
betroth thee unto Me in Faithfulness; and thou shalt know the Lord. 16
Israel eternally remains His (G-d’s) betrothed. The wrapping of the tefillin strap
around the fingers in the manner of a groom putting the betrothal ring on the
bride’s finger. 17
And so we have recited the vows, I to G-d and G-d to me.
The leather bottom part of my old head tefillin dating from my Bar Mitzvah has grown
translucent from wear upon my forehead. I can see through the leather which has become like
a veil and peering inside the cube, I can clearly make out the four neatly rolled and bound
prayers suspended somehow in midair like Torahs in the synagogue. Here in miniature is the
veil before the Holy of Holies with the tablets of covenant or testimony as they are also called.
Now my father’s tefillin are much newer. He got this new pair in his old age and they are mansized
and especially finely made. And when I put these on I feel other connections. How,
indeed, are we bound in this covenant from father to son, from generation to generation,
simultaneously to past and future. We all were there as it is written, when G-d came down upon
the mountain “all on smoke” 18 and the shofar sounded and He spoke and bound us there to
Him and we to Him forever.
END NOTES
Origin of Shape and Color
Why Two instead of One?
The two tefillin evoke the two Tablets of the Law which being a pair signifies covenant. In
their precision of line and plane, tefillin remind me of those wonderful almost magical corners
seen in Spanish missions, crusader fortresses, and other ancient architecture. The square or
cube is by itself not so much decorative or even aesthetic, but rather arresting in its deviation
from natural forms. My earlier writings on the Tabernacle refer to the square or cube as
symbolic of the eternal divine. 19 Tefillin sanctity derives from content, not mysticism. Tefillin
contain key covenantal Torah passages inscribed by a scribe on parchment and rolled up
forming a miniature Torah.
Their black color and severe geometry against a white talit and bare skin evoke the black
Hebrew script against the white parchment of a Torah scroll: Judaism’s most sacred object.
The public viewing of an uplifted Torah scroll is described in rabbinical lore as “the black fire
atop the white fire.” 20 The seven bindings of the tefillin of the hand around the left forearm
between elbow and wrist bone are an evocation not only of the covenantal seventh (Sabbath)
day, but of the seven branched lamp placed to the left of the Holy of Holies inside the
sanctuary of the Tabernacle. A Jew, wrapped in his talit and wearing his tefillin, thus becomes
bodily an evocation of this ancient sanctuary whose forms and rituals manifested G-d’s
betrothal of the people of Israel. After the seven windings around the forearm, the tefillin of the
head is carefully placed above the hairline and, during prescribed windings about the fingers
and hand of the tefillin of the hand the beautiful passage of betrothal from Hosea is said.
and I will bind thee unto Me forever; yea I will betroth thee unto Me in
righteousness, in justice, in lovingkindness and in compassion. And I will
betroth thee unto Me in faithfulness, and thou shalt know the Lord. 21
6

Symbolic as these words are, they bear unmistakable reference to the physicality of marriage.
Jewish vows, in the same vein as the rite of circumcision, are a physical manifestation of
spiritual covenant.
It is possible to visualize the symbolic parallelism of the tefillin ritual to Israel’s primal
covenant with G-d after the deliverance from bondage in Egypt.
Placed completely above the hairline which would correspond exactly to an imaginary line
joining the top plane of the head to the frontal plane or forehead, a line that corresponds to the
same area along which the horns of hooved animals grow out. The bullock, the ram, and the
goat are animals used for offerings, being thus totally subservient to G-d. The Hebrew word,
“Keren” a common name, means horn or strength or beam of light. We would surmise that the
beams of light emanating from the head of Moses 22 may likewise have originated from this
point.
If there is merit to this assertion, as I believe there is, then the symbolic richness of this
placement of the tefillin of the head is an aesthetic symbolic choice of tremendous power,
scope, and beauty appearing as it does in ten Torah chapters, recounting G-d’s forgiveness of
Israel’s worship of the golden calf and His reestablishment of eternal covenant with Israel.
7

Notes
Tephillin (Tefillin), Boxes of Remembrance
“Worn by Jewish males age thirteen and over at the weekday morning service (originally they
were worn throughout the day). The injunction to wear them is base on four paragraphs in the
Bible (Exodus 13:1, Exodus 13:11, Deut. 6:4-9, Deut. 11:13-21). These paragraphs are written
twice on parchment once all together on one piece and once on four separate pieces with each
piece containing one paragraph. These two sets are placed in specially made leather cases, one
of which containing four parchments (shel rosh, i.e. “of the head”) is placed on the head so
that the front edge of the case lies just above the spot where the hair begins to grow and
directly above the space between the eyes . . .”
“The case containing the single parchment (shel yad, i.e. “of the hand”) is placed on the
muscle of the inner side of the left forearm so that the section through which the strap passes is
toward the shoulder.” A strap knotted in the form of the Hebrew letter yad secures it and is
then wound seven times around the arm and three times around the middle finger. The
remainder of the strap is passed under the palm and wound around it, forming the Hebrew
letter shen. The three letters form the divine name Shaddai (G-d Almighty. A separate
benediction is recited after putting on the head tefillin since it is regarded as a distinct
commandment.” 23
“Christian Scriptures allude to tefillin in a critical way, calling them phylacteries (i.e.
prophylactic amulets) . . . the Rabbis themselves did in fact stress that public display of tefillin
was one way in which one testified to G-d’s lordship and glory for He himself could be
imagined wearing them. Tefillin were therefore worn by some Jews every time they ventured
into the public domain, and occasionally women too wore them. But in time the practices was
restricted to certain hours and occasions; they were to be worn at day and not by night; and
they were to be put on during morning payers, after the donning of the talit.” 24
The four Torah passages inside each tefillin are as follows:
NOTES
Exodus 13:1-10
Exodus 13:11-16
Deuteronomy 6:4-9
Deuteronomy 11:13-21 25
1. Notes: Gleanings From Reform Torah
2. Exodus 19:24
3. The words of Torah, sacred writings, prayers particularly if the name of G-d is mentioned.
4. Non-object exceptions would be sacred places such as Jerusalem, the Temple Mount and
the land of Israel.
5. The tefillin of the head is divided into compartments across its top and vertical sides by
incised lines. On its left side is the raised Hebrew letter “shin” with four stems and on the
right side is another raised “shin” but with the usual three stems. I have been told that
the letter “shin” is symbolic for G-d’s name. Several other Hebrew letters carry this same
symbolic value.
6. The Eternal Present, the Beginnings of Architecture, Sigfried Gideon, Mellon Lecture,
1957, paged 348.
7. The Eternal Present, the Beginnings of Architecture, Sigfried Gideon, Mellon Lecture,
1957, paged 348.
8

8. The Eternal Present, the Beginnings of Architecture, Sigfried Gideon, Mellon Lecture,
1957, paged 348.
9. Leviticus 1, 10-11.
10. Treasures of Tutankhaman,, 5 th . Ed. Editors: Katherine Stoddert Gilbert, Joan K. Holt,
Sarah Hudson, Copyright by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1976, page 156.
11. First Kings 6:20 “the length thereof was threescore cubits (60), and the breadth thereof
twenty cubits and the height thereof thirty cubits.”
12. Psalm 104:1-2
13. Deuteronomy 6:8
14. Psalm 145: 16 Complete Art Scroll Siddur, 1996, Donning Tefillin, page 9.
15. Weekly portion, Hold Up the Word by Shlomo Riskin, Jerusalem Post, No. 2181, August
23, 2002, page 31.
16. Hosea 2:21-22.
17. Art Scroll Siddur, 1996, page 8, and commentary.
18. Exodus 19:18 Hertz Pentateuch page 293.
19. “In the Shadow of the Divine; The Tabernacle of Exodus as a Work of Art,” Maurice
Schmidt, 1999 National Conference Proceedings, School of Visual Arts Thirteenth Annual
National Conference of Liberal Arts and the Education of Artists. Page 295-299.
20. Weekly portion, Hold Up the Word, by Shlomo Riskin, Jerusalem Post, No. 2181, August
23. 202, page 31.
21. Hosea 2:21-22.
22. Exodus 34:35 “(Keren) root word, Koran or . . . ”beam of light”
23. The Encyclopedia of the Jewish Religion, Ed. By Dr. R.J. Werblowsky and Dr. Geoffrey
Wigoder, Holt Rinehart and Winston, Inc., Massada Press 1965, page 380.
24. The English Translation of the Torah by the Jewish Publication Society, 1981, page 472.
25. The Pentateuch and Haftorahs, Editor Dr. J. H. Hertz, C.H. Second edition, London,
Soncino Press, 5742-1981, page 261, #9.
9

Concordance to Outer Court
and Tent of Meeting
11

Concordance to Tent of Meeting
and Holy of Holies
12
Maurice Schmidt
2002

Tefillin of the Hand (Left)
(Shel Yad)
13
Maurice Schmidt 2002

Tefillin of the Head (Shel Rosh)
This tefillin is placed
above the hairline
defining a space where
the top of the head
joins the forehead, a
space corresponding to
the area from which
the horns of animals of
offering grow, i.e.
bullocks and rams.
This area may also
refer to the “Koran” or
“beams of light” which
shone from the face of
Moses.
(Exodus 34:35)
14
Maurice Schmidt
2002

RECONSTRUCTING MEMORIES THROUGH THE ARTS
Lauren S. Seifert, Ph.D.
Malone College
The arts have served many purposes over time and across history (Gombrich, 1950; Mondadori,
1988; Harrison & Wood, 1993). They can preserve the spirit of a particular era and reveal the
strengths of a culture. The arts may illustrate the perceptions, emotions, and thoughts of an
individual, and they can serve very positive roles to convey information about individuals,
groups, and events. Furthermore, the arts can record atrocities such as the stories of martyrs,
specific details about pogrom, and facts about genocide. They can make unforgettable those
traits and events in the world that many might try to forget.
How do artists remember through art? And how do the arts serve to help individuals and
societies reconstruct memories of the past? The current author would argue that nonlinguistic
art forms can influence memory in fundamentally different ways than might linguistic forms, by
enabling different types of encoding and, perhaps, more vivid sensory experiences than do
written accounts. Research about human memory indicates that multiple encodings may
ultimately lead one to better recall of information (e.g., Tulving & Thompson, 1973), and
studies of human cognition and neurophysiology indicate that non-linguistic (e.g., pictorial)
information is processed in different ways than linguistic information (e.g., Glaser & Glaser,
1989; Seifert, 1997; Kolb & Wishaw, 1985). Thus, multiple encodings through linguistic and
nonlinguistic means might lead to more robust memories. What are the implications of those
differences in processing between pictures and words for remembering through the arts? The
current author will draw upon research in the fields of cognitive psychology and neuroscience
to propose possible answers to that intriguing question.
LINGUISTIC AND NON-LINGUISTIC STIMULI CUE MEMORY DIFFERENTLY
On the basis of research about the different speeds for responding to linguistic and nonlinguistic
stimuli, several researchers have argued that pictures cue semantic memories more
directly than do words (e.g., Potter & Faulconer, 1975; Glaser & Glaser, 1989; Seifert; 1997).
The past fifteen years have witnessed a heated debate about that very issue—with opponents
manipulating such stimulus characteristics as spatial frequency, overall size, and number of
visual features in visual presentations of pictures and their names (e.g., Theios & Amrhein,
1989; Arieh & Algom, 2002). It is notable that one can alter the sizes and perceptibility of
words and pictures to find the fastest possible categorization speed for each. That optimal
speed of categorization is an indicator of the fastest possible activation of its meaning in
semantic memory.
A fundamental test of access to meanings in semantic memory is a comparison between
categorization speeds for optimally-sized pictures and optimally-sized words. In 1997, Seifert
published a set of studies to report results of that critical test. Her most important comparison
was between trends in processing speeds for various sizes of pictures and various sizes of words.
She demonstrated that the optimal size of word, with respect to processing speed, is different
than the optimal size of picture. It was intriguing that—even at optimal sizes for speed in
cognitive processing—words were categorized more slowly than pictures (i.e., 710ms v. 653ms).
Later authors have attempted to refute claims of picture superiority (e.g., Arieh & Algom,
2002). However, they have often perpetuated the mistakes of mis-sizing stimuli in their
comparisons and of making comparisons between pictures and words that are not optimally
sized for speed of cognitive processing (e.g., using stimuli akin to half the size of Seifert’s size 1
for words and in-between her sizes 4 and 5 for pictures: tiny words and big pictures); in so
doing, they have essentially compared “apples with oranges”, because stimuli that are not
1

optimally-sized for processing speed will necessarily yield artifactual results in a study of
cognitive processing speeds. Harmony et al., (2001) reported that their observations of EEG
changes during the categorization of pictures and words indicated a single, amodal memory
store for meanings to which neither words nor pictures have privileged access. Unfortunately,
they under-sized word displays and even failed to report sizes and visual angles for their picture
displays—rendering their results very difficult to interpret.
In 1994, Davidoff and Debleser, reported data from the case of HG, who had experienced a
CVA (i.e., cerebrovascular accident) of the left hemisphere. The affected area was the
infracalcarine fissure. HG’s symptoms included a deficiency in picture naming, without
problems reading words. Even more interesting was the evidence that HG could eventually
derive the name of an object, if he could visually inspect it from various angles or touch it.
Thus, his failed recognition of pictures seemed to stem from a problem relating the twodimensional
representation to the real-world object. The study of HG provided evidence for
dissociation between finding words in memory and finding pictures in memory, because HG
could do the former very easily, but had great difficulty with the latter. Functional dissociations
of this sort indicate that there are neurophysiological differences in processing between
pictures and words. If these are real differences in processing, then they may very well translate
into processing differences between text-based art forms (like poetry) and visual art forms (like
portraits).
In their study of picture and word processing with measurements of event-related electrical
potentials (ERP’s) as indicators of cortical activity, Federmeier and Kutas (2001) observed that
activation of fact-based semantic memories is not only different in speed, but different with
respect to the pattern of brain activation for processing pictures and words. Their results
suggest that meaning-based memories are not amodal—but may, instead, be subject to
privileged activation by pictures. It seems that semantic (or fact-based) memory may have
strong links to the sense modality of processing for non-linguistic stimuli and that those
modalities may provide faster (or at least different) routes to activation of semantic memories
than can be accomplished for language-based stimuli (which must always be processed in the
lexicon, i.e., as language, regardless of the sense modality that accomplishes the initial
encoding).
Neuropsychological evidence for dissociations between semantic memories and lexical
memories is not scarce. In fact, there is a long history of literature on aphasic syndromes
(various difficulties recognizing or producing language in its written and/or spoken forms) and
on agnosic syndromes (various difficulties recognizing objects or discerning their meanings; see
McCarthy & Warrington, 1990). In cases of prosopagnosia, which involves an inability to
remember faces, individuals may function quite normally and may have normal language skills
but be unable to recognize faces they have previously seen—indicating a dissociation between
memories for faces and memories for words (Hecean & Angelergues, 1962). Faces seem to be
special, with respect to localization of memories in the brain (i.e., being localized in the right
hemisphere along the lingual, fusiform, and parahippocampal gyri—with prosopagnosia often
involving lesions of those areas and of the splenium of the corpus callosum). Visual memories
for other, non-physiognomic objects (like pictures of common objects) seem to involve left
hemisphere localization in the occipito-temporal regions (Lissauer, 1890; see McCarthy &
Warrington). Very often, adults who experience brain injuries that result in agnosia will remain
normal, with respect to their language functions, but will be unable to recognize common
objects or pictures of those objects.
Additional evidence for linking of visual recognition of non-linguistic stimuli with semantic
processing in memory can be found in various studies of fMRI and PET imaging of the brain.
In their study of brain activation during normal object recognition, Gerlach, Law, Gade, and
Paulson (2002) reported involvement of the fusiform gyrus in semantic judgments about visual
2

stimuli—further implicating that area in decisions requiring semantic memory. And in a more
recent article, Adams and Janata (2002) reported fMRI imaging of active fusiform gyrus in the
left hemisphere as research participants matched pictures with words that described them at
various category levels (e.g., basic- or subordinate-level category).
IMPLICATIONS FOR A THEORY OF VISUAL ARTS AS CUES TO REMEMBERING
If previous authors are correct in their conclusion that non-linguistic stimuli (like pictures) cue
memories for meaning more directly than do linguistic stimuli (like words), then there are some
important implications for a theory of visual art as a cue to memory. For those visual stimuli
that are fundamentally non-linguistic, one might expect faster, more direct activation of
meanings in memory. Whether that faster, more direct access would be qualitatively different
than the activation of memory for meanings via the mental lexicon (which is presumably the
way words activate semantic memories) is very much open for debate. The current author
would contend that non-linguistic stimuli have far greater possibilities for activating emotions
and meanings in memory very quickly. After all, words—whether they are read or heard—must
be processed as language before they can be processed for meaning. If that is true, then nonlinguistic
stimuli have far greater possibilities for very fast impacts on the psyche. That is not to
say that words have more limited possibilities for impacting or making memories—only that one
would expect slower activation of meaning-based memories, if indeed the works of Seifert
(1997), of Federmeier and Kutas (2001), and of various neuropsychologists and aphasiologists
are veridical representations of reality.
Even if Seifert (1997) and others are incorrect about the speed of activation of semantic
memories by nonlinguistic stimuli, there is clear evidence of qualitatively different activation of
semantic memories and other meaning-based memories with pictures than with words. That is,
even if semantic memory is amodal, the paths to its activation via words and pictures are clearly
different—as is indicated by copious studies of brain activation during picture and word
processing (e.g., Adams & Janata, 2002; Gerlach et al., 2000). As McCarthy and Warrington
(1990) have suggested, “[T]he neuropsychological evidence for independent (or at least
partially independent) meaning systems is . . . ” that “impairment in visual knowledge is not
necessarily paralleled by comparable impairment in the verbal domain. Conversely, severe
impairment of verbal knowledge may occur without similar impairments in deriving meaning
from visually presented material” (p.54). If then, one assumes that there are systems for
activating meanings via pictorial and linguistic stimuli that are dissociable, it opens the
possibilities for interpretations of visual arts that are not dependent upon language. For
example, a painting representing a landscape may evoke emotions and thoughts that are not
tied to language. One might even go so far as to suggest that linguistic interpretations can lead
to confusions, rather than to clarifications of an art object’s meaning. In this view, the role of
language might be viewed as somewhat superfluous to the actual meaning of the work and
language would not be assumed to be superior to the picture in its ability to communicate ideas
or meaning. In such a view, language might be accused of confusing one about the meaning of
the picture just as often as it might elucidate its meaning.
The current author is certainly not the first to see the possibilities for language as obfuscator.
In the words of Bishop Richard Holloway, “our greatest gift, language, is also our greatest
danger. We destroy ourselves by our words. The difficulty is that things are not what we say
they are” (see Goldsmith, 2001, p.141). Previously, T.S. Eliot had similarly observed that
“Words strain, Crack and sometimes break under the burden…” (see Goldsmith, p. 141). When
one considers the value of non-linguistic representations, one must consider their abilities to
cross lines of culture, gender, age, race, and more.
When one considers possible roles of various types of non-linguistic communication, their
value to patients with aphasia or Alzheimer’s disease seems evident. Pictures, touch, music and
3

movement can be seen to take on renewed significance for communicating. And one must call
it “renewed”, because this is, after all, how humans begin: with communication that hinges
upon the non-linguistic. And why? Because humans begin life without language, but with the
sense modalities that make acquiring knowledge possible. If an individual suffers a stroke that
robs him/her of speech, it does not logically follow that s/he has also ceased to think. On the
contrary, clinical case evidence strongly indicates that meaningful thought continues (Seifert,
1999) and that patients may develop elaborate mechanisms for conveying ideas without words
(Caplan, 1987).
Consider Willem DeKooning (after SFMOMA, 1995)—who communicated through nonlinguistic
images what he, presumably, could not communicate with words. Goldsmith (2001)
has contended that the value of non-linguistic communication is amplified in diseases like
Alzheimer’s, when memories are fading and language skills decline. The current author would
argue that it is the value of non-linguistic modalities in these situations that provides strong
evidence for their dissociability from language. There are documented cases of use of symbols
and ritual to effect communications with individuals who have severe language deficits (e.g.,
Goldsmith, 2001; Seifert & Baker, 2002). And so then, for humans who have intact memory
and language systems, what roles can non-linguistic modalities play? To provide alternate
manner of representation to language that might sometimes supplement language-based
communications and that might sometimes stand alone with no need for language-based
interpretations. In order to accommodate this view of language as merely one possible way of
representing and communicating ideas, one might re-conceptualize the adage “a picture paints
a thousand words” to be “a picture paints a thousand ideas, and sometimes words are
irrelevant”.
REFERENCES
Adams, R.B., & Janata, P. (2002). “A Comparison of Neural Circuits Underlying Auditory
and Visual Object Recognition.” NeuroImage, 16, 361-377.
Arieh, Y., & Algom, D. (2002). « Processing Picture-word Stimuli: The Contingent Nature
of Picture and of Word Superiority.” Journal of Experimental Psychology:
Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 28, 221-232.
Caplan, D. (1987). Neurolinguistics and Linguistic Aphasiology: An Introduction. New
York: Cambridge University Press.
Davidoff, J., & Debleser, R. (1994). “Impaired Picture Recognition with Preserved Object
Naming and Reading.” Brain & Cognition, 24, 1-23.
Federmeier, K.D., & Kutas, M. (2001). Meaning and Modality: Influences of Context,
Semantic Memory, Organization, and Perceptual Predictability on Picture
Processing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and
Cognition, 27, 202-224.
Gerlach, C., Law, I., Gade, A., Paulson, O.B. (2000). “Categorization and Category Effects
in Normal Object Recognition: A PET Study.” Neuropsychologia, 38, 1693-1703.
Glaser, W. R., & Glaser, M.O. (1989). Context Effects in Stroop-like Word and Picture
Processing.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 118, 13-42.
Goldsmith, M. (2001). When words are no longer necessary: The gift of ritual. Journal of
Religious Gerontology, 12,139-150.
Gombrich, E. H. (1950/1988). The Story of Art. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc.
Harmony, T., et al. (2001) “EEG Changes During Word and Figure Categorization.” Clinical
Neurophysiology, 112, 1486-1498.
Harrison, C., & Wood, P. (Eds.). (1993). Art in Theory: 1900–1990. Cambridge, Ma.:
Blackwell.
Hecean, H., & Angelergues, R. (1962). “Agnosia For Faces.” Archives of Neurology, 7,
92-100.
Kolb, B., & Wishaw, I.Q. (1985). Fundamentals of Human Neuropsychology. 2nd ed.
4

New York: Freeman & Co.
Lissauer, H. (1890). Ein Fall von Seelenblindheit nebst einem Beitrag zur Theorie
derselben. Archiv fur Psychiatrie, 21, 222-270. [Edited and translated by M.
Jackson (1988). Lissauer on agnosia. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 5, 155-192.]
McCarthy, R.A., & Warrington, E.K. (1990). Cognitive Neuropsychology: A Clinical
Introduction. New York: Academic Press.
Mondadori, A. (Ed.). (1988/1989). The History of Art. (G. Culverwell et al., Trans.) New
York: Gallery Books.
Potter, M.C., & Faulconer, B.A. (1975). “Time to Understand Pictures and Words.” Nature,
253, 437-438.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. (1995). Willem De Kooning: The Late Paintings, the
1980’s. New York: D.A.P./Distributed Arts Publishers, Inc.
Seifert, L.S. (1997). « Activating Representations in Permanent Memory: Different Benefits for
Pictures and Words.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and
Cognition, 23, 1106-1121.
Seifert, L.S., & Baker, M.K. (2002). “An Individualized Approach to Religious Coping In
Alzheimer’s Disease.” Manuscript submitted for publication.
Theios, J., & Amrhein, P.C. (1989). “Theoretical Analysis of the Cognitive Processing of
Lexical and Pictorial Stimuli: Reading, Naming, and Visual and Conceptual
Comparison.”Psychological Review, 96, 5-24.
Tulving, E., & Thompson, D. M. (1973). “Encoding Specificity and Retrieval Processes in
Episodic Memory.” Psychological Review, 80, 352–373.
5

THEIR FACES BRIEF AS PHOTOS (John Berger)
Bozenna Wisniewska
Alberta College of Art and Design
The premise of my paper is to address the passage of hope, despair and the role that culture
plays in transforming dystopian experiences into ones of meaning. One of the most powerful
documents that, in the face of total annihilation and destruction, presents the strength culture
can instill in people is The Ringelblum Archive. Emanuel Ringelblum was a historian,
pedagogue and social activist who dedicated his knowledge and his life in the Warsaw Ghetto to
this archival collection. Its purpose was to record all aspects of Ghetto life. Three caches of the
archives were hidden in the Ghetto between 1942 and 1943. Two of them were recovered, the
third was lost, most likely forever.
The German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939 started a chapter of tragedy and horror,
it also started a chapter of courage. In her book, The Rape of Europa, Lynn H. Nicholas points
directly to how culture can become an endangered species and can be “captured” and
destroyed together with the people responsible for creating it. The author, in her thorough
investigation of the German invasion of Europe, concentrates on the systematic and deliberate
actions of the Germans in destroying the cultures of the countries they violently conquered.
Poland was the first to be invaded and the first to painfully witness the horrors of its cultural
heritage being demolished:
For Poland was to become Germany’s creature totally. Its culture and peoples
were to be eliminated and replaced by Hitler’s “New Order.” The Nazis were
only too eager to put their racial theories into actual practice in a place where
resistance could be countered with total brutality. They believed without any
qualms that Slavs, Christian or otherwise, were so inferior that they could not
be considered humans. They, along with Jews, were the “degenerate art” of the
human race. 1
The “degenerate” races, Jews, Poles and others, cherished their “degenerate” culture and
protected it with courage.
The strength of culture lies in its ability to maintain integrity and to become a source of
inspirational energy in traumatic instances. We need this supply of inspiration for our lives to
be meaningful and valuable. It is only too easy in tragic times filled with horror, of not knowing
how to survive, to lose touch with one’s roots, to lose touch with one’s culture. The voice that
tells us to maintain this contact can be just a whisper, but it elevates us beyond fear.
To flee dystopia with an authentic and conscious realization is not an act of escapism but,
rather, a courageous gesture that transcends brutal reality.
At a conference of SS officers on September 21,1939, before the surrender of Poland, Heydrich
and Eichmann drew up instructions for their Einsatzgruppen (Special Forces), “to prepare a list
of Polish . . . intellectuals of all types, for a fate as yet unclear,” and recommended that the
Jews be concentrated in ghettos “for better control.” 2
In November 1940 the Jewish Ghetto in German occupied Warsaw was sealed off. Three
hundred thousand people, most of them displaced from their homes, crowded in to the caged
quarters and were forbidden to go beyond the walls. How to live beyond surviving? One way is
to avoid apathy, if that is at all possible in conditions in which a people’s life and culture is
being degraded, demolished, shredded into pieces:
6

On November 22, 1940 during the week the Ghetto became sealed a small
group of Jewish intellectuals met in the home of Emanuel Ringelblum, at
Leszno Street. That meeting set the agenda for a cooperation project. Later on,
the Main Judaic Library (now the Jewish Historical Institute)—where official
Jewish charitable organizations had their offices until April 1942, was also used
as a meeting place. Meetings usually took place on Saturdays, hence the
group’s code name: Oyneg Shabbes—Joy of Shabbes Meeting. 3
From the first meeting until the last horrific days of the Ghetto Uprising the Oyneg Shabbes
members would collect information not only about the fate of Jews in Poland but also about
every aspect of life in the Ghetto. The Hidden Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto would later
become the most poignant and powerful document of how human potential cannot be caged.
Emanuel Ringelblum’s interest in interdisciplinary studies, especially in synthesizing history
and sociology, was unprecedented and helpful in developing the archives. His involvement in
documenting the culture and life of the Jewish community in Poland helped him organize the
archives in a way that included not only universal experiences, but personal traumas. “Thus,
there were constant attempts to interview people from all walks of life: professors and
smugglers, rabbis and policemen . . . ” 4 One of the projects, in the form of a school assignment,
reached the official and clandestine schools in the Ghetto. Each child wrote about his life
there, his dreams for the future. Some children included small drawings and short poems.
From little drops of optimism to spasmodic screams, ”Why do we suffer so much?” This, a
fragment of an anonymous child’s essay, is dated January 16, 1942. We might not know the
name of this child but his question reaches far beyond anonymity.
There were more and more painful realizations about the plans of total annihilation of the
Jewish population and its culture. The pace and effectiveness of the Germans in eliminating
millions of people made many Jews, particularly Jewish intellectuals, very much aware of their
destiny. There were many efforts to let the world know the fate of Jews during World War II.
Emanuel Ringelblum considered passing on this information an absolute necessity: he said the
archive’s aim was, “To alert the world to our pain and our torment.” 5 Ringelblum was
surrounded by a team of exceptional people who dedicated their lives to the the collection of
documentary material. Some of them lost their lives: Rabbi Szymon Huberband, Menachem
Linder, Izrael Lichtensztajn. Others survived: Rachela Auerbach, Bluma and Hersz Wasser.
The document they were responsible for is one of tragedy of paramount proportions that helps
us remember in a human way. Ringelblum and his colleagues did not finish their work. It was
interrupted in the spring of 1943. They managed, however, to hide their material. On August 3,
1942 “the first cache of research material was stuffed into ten metal boxes and placed inside a
specially built shelter . . . ” 6 “The second cache of documents—packed in two large metal cans” 7
was hidden in 1943. The third cache was also hidden in 1943. In total there were more than
six thousands documents of archival material. The ambition of the Jewish Museum in Warsaw
is to publish every single document from The Ringelblum Archives that reached its collection.
Emanuel Ringelblum, his wife Judyta, their son Uriel, thirty other Jews and the two Poles,
Mieczyslaw Wolski and his nephew who hid them in their small bunker, were murdered by the
Germans. It was March, 1944. In 1999 UNESCO decided to place The Archive of the Warsaw
Ghetto in the “Memory of the World” Register.
December 1940: courses in Applied Arts and Drawing were offered in the Ghetto. A graphic
design student, Maria Berg, commented on the fast pace that made students in the program
work intensely with precise goals in mind. Every Friday Maria and her fellow students helped
7

in the Ghetto’s orphanages and children’s hospitals. The students created a mural around the
children’s playground next to Janusz Korczak’s orphanage.
Janusz Korczak (Henryk Goldszmit): physician, pedagogue, writer, one of the most beautiful
human beings who, in the midst of dystopian torment, was able to create, at least for some
moments, a garden of eutopia. His orphanage was moved twice between 1940 and 1942 and,
yet, each time Korczak and his colleagues were able to provide the children with motivation
and belief in themselves. What a difficult task. Is it possible to instill self-respect and belief in
self-value in horrific times that devalue everyone and everything? Korczak’s gentle, intelligently
sharp sense of humour, his absolute dedication to the orphans and his strong belief in
education helped to maintain a fragile sense of normalcy. The children sang, played music,
drew and created theatre performances. There were posters advertising these extraordinary
events and the children felt important and touched by the spontaneous applause of the
audience. Fear was reduced to something small, almost non-existent. “The little girls gaze on
catastrophe from a tower of smiles.” 8
To many children the structured day in school became vital and necessary in their lives. Izrael
Lichtensztajn was a liaison between Oyneg Shabbes and the Ghetto’s clandestine and official
schools. As a result of the materials he collected we know how special the efforts of Ghetto
pedagogues were. Korczak’s orphanage was one of many pedagogical institutions within the
walls of the Ghetto. Korczak was also the author of a book for children: King Matthew the
Little.The book became very popular for its pedagogical and imaginative powers, optimism, far
reaching sensitivity and belief in a world of happy people living their happy moments. It is a
living piece of literature, a book of true beauty. As Christopher Hewat said, “ . . . beauty is the
perfect marriage of sadness and sweetness.” 9
Korczak contributed to the Ringelblum Archives with a four page letter-memoir. These four
pages are written with dense clarity and wit, nothing pretentious, everything of its simplicity
extraordinary. His vision of reality is not veiled by total optimism. In a photograph of Korczak
taken during the war he wears glasses but his eyes are seen clearly through them. We see what
he saw: the horrific decline of human values, and the brutal destruction of human life and
dreams. His experience is magnified, his gaze narrates.
In 1996 Alfredo Jaar commemorated the horrific genocide in Rwanda. His work humanely and
sensitively portrays the universal with the personal and the balance between them. While in
Rwanda, Jaar met a 30 year old Rwandan woman, Gutete Emerita, whose husband and sons
were slaughtered right in front of her. In his installation that commemorates and evokes
Gutete’s personal loss and pain, Jaar was able to capture the universal feeling of personal
tragedy. One million eyes, one million tragedies, each one of them personalized and lived: The
Eyes of Gutete Emerita. The Eyes of Janusz Korczak. Our Eyes . . . The prologue of a catalogue
on Alfredo Jaar’s work titled Lament of Images consists of a poem by Ben Okri of the same
name. It transports readers to the core of horror, of tragedy, of destruction, while at the same
time inviting them into the mind of the oppressor:
And they burned what
They could not
Understand.
They burned
All that frightened them . . . . 10
When the orphans were being deported to Treblinka Janusz Korczak was offered the chance to
stay behind; but the thought of abandoning the children was unbearable to him. He was
murdered in Treblinka death camp with all the children from his orphanage in August 1942.
8

Every time I think about their last walk I am reminded of a proposal for Documenta in Kassel
by Melvin Charney and Krzysztof Wodiczko. Charney and Wodiczko wanted to transform the
railway station in Kassel into the gates of a death camp with a big sign reading: It is Better if
They Think They are Going to a Farm. At first the proposal was accepted but, just a few weeks
before the opening of Documenta, the artists received a letter informing them about the
rejection. Krzysztof Wodiczko was born in April 1943, the month of the last desperate act of the
people “behind the wall”: the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
Cultural life in the Ghetto was truly vibrant. Theatre productions unified many professionals:
actors, musicians, composers, designers and artists. Already in December 1940 the first
professional theatre was opened in the Ghetto and a production of Moliere’s L’Avare was
presented to the audience. Because there were strict rules imposed by the Germans forbidding
Jews to perform works by Aryan authors, the posters advertising the play gave the name of the
translator rather than that of Moliere. This would become common practice in the future. The
Germans did not notice but, of course, everyone in the Ghetto knew who the author of L’Avare
really was.
In the winter of 1942 a ticket to most of the theatres was 2 zloty, one kilogram of bread 13
zloty! Performances took place on weekends and week days. Weekend performances were
usually sold out. On weekdays audiences reached no less than 80%. Nowy Teatr Kameralny
started in July 1941. Its location was on Nowolipki 52. Rubin Szwarc, an architect, was
responsible for adapting the space to its new function. In conditions where it was almost
impossible to find any building materials, his simple ideas and effective solutions helped create
an ideal performance space. Andrzej Marek (Marek Orsztajn) became the artistic director of the
Kameralny. Before the war Marek was well respected in the cultural circles of Warsaw. His
direction was always innovative, perceptive and imaginative. He consistently escaped
stereotypical commercial success and searched for introspective and intellectual structure. His
dream was for a “ . . . cultural platform of systematic and valuable propagation of peace,
tolerance and mutual respect . . . ” 11 His dream paralleled that of Emanuel Ringelblum who
also tried to have theatre performances, concerts, poetry readings, art openings and discussion
clubs at the Judaic Library. The archives started by Ringelblum were also housed in the
Library. Thus, without a doubt, this building on 5 Tlomackie Street, became the heart and soul
of the intellectual and cultural life of the Ghetto.
The Main Synagogue on Tlomackie Street opened its doors to the public with a series of
religious concerts. One of the most talented kantors, Gerson Sirota, sang there. His voice had a
magical power of transforming space. People who participated in his singing sessions felt
enlightened.
The Great Symphonic Orchestra started to perform in the summer of 1941. The performances
took place in many different locations throughout the Ghetto. Its program was a very ambitious
and dangerous one that included Aryan composers such as Mozart, Schubert, Bach, Haendel
and Brahms.The years 1942 and 1943 marked the tragic and cruel end of this talented and
professional orchestra: almost all its members were brutally murdered in Treblinka.
Someone who performed almost to the degree of exhaustion was Marysia Ajzensztadt (Miriam
Eisenstadt). Everyone in the Ghetto knew this talented young singer whose father was the
conductor of the synagogue choir and a composer. Marysia’s voice was unique in its beauty,
gentleness and strength. Her repertoire was amazingly flexible: from arias from Traviata and
Madame Butterfly to popular folklore songs. Expressiveness and elegance were attributes of this
young singer. Marysia was killed on Umschlagplatz in 1942 when she tried to get in to the same
train wagon as her parents.The Ghetto lost its beloved robin.
9

A small man with glasses with a gentle gaze stands in the left corner of a photograph. He is
holding a banjo. His name is Jakub Glatstein. He is a composer and conductor as well as a
preserver of the songs and music of the Jewish proletariat. His life is embraced by music and
embraces her. To his right there are children from one of the orphanages in the Ghetto. Their
heads are shaved, their big eyes are directed straight at the photographer. Some children smile,
others have a little serious post-performance look. They are hungry and some of them might be
sick, but they would never have missed their concert. Their faces are brief as photos, but
everything about them encourages remembrance. Jakub’s daily visits and classes, as well as his
love of music, let his students find themselves in a world of floating dreams and allowed his
students to even catch them sometimes. Jakub and his children were murdered in Treblinka
death camp in 1942. His wife died of typhus in the Ghetto.
Gela Seksztajn was trained as a painter before the war. In the Ghetto where she became a
dedicated teacher, she taught art classes to many children at the clandestine school at 68
Nowolipki Street. She donated many of her works to Oyneg Shabbes and some of them were
discovered with other hidden documents. In the Ghetto she worked mostly with watercolours,
painting children and still lives. In a photograph of Gela taken before the war her face radiates
with a smile, intelligent, bright eyes . . . Gela Seksztajn, her husband Izrael Lichtensztajn, and
their 20-month old daughter Margalit, most likely died during the first night of the Ghetto
Uprising in April, 1943. In August 1942 she wrote in her last will and testament, “Poised on
the border between life and death, more certain that I won’t live than that I shall.” 12 Seksztajn
hoped that her artworks would become part of a collection of a “ . . . Jewish museum that will
be established in the future in order to recreate prewar Jewish cultural life.” 13 She also wrote in
her wish “that some trace (remain) of my name and the name of my daughter, the talented
little girl Margalit Lichtensztajn” 14
Night falls.
In his book, Night, Elie Wiesel recalls talking to his friend after their torturous race from one
concentration camp to another. The prisoners were forced to run for hours to reach their
destination of horror:
“How do you feel, Juliek?” I asked, less to know the answer than to hear that
he could speak, that he was alive.
“Alright, Elizer . . . I am getting on alright . . . hardly any air . . . worn out. My
feet are swollen. It’s good to rest, but my violin . . . ”
“What, your violin?” He gasped, “I am afraid . . . I am afraid . . . that they’ll
break my violin . . . I’ve brought it with me.”
I could not answer him. Someone was lying full length on top of me, covering
my face. I was unable to breathe . . . 15
The journey into the night continues and Wiesel writes:
I heard the sound of a violin. The sound of a violin, in this dark shed, where
the dead were heaped on the living. What madman could be playing violin
here, at the brink of his own grave? Or was it really an hallucination?
It must have been Juliek. He played a fragment from Beethoven’s concerto. I
had never heard sounds so pure. In such silence . . . . He was playing his life.
The whole of his life was gliding on the strings—his lost hopes, his charred past,
his extinguished future. He played as he would never play again. 16
10

NOTES
1 Lynn H. Nicholas, The Rape of Europa, (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 61.
2 Ibid., 62.
3 Eleonora Bergman, “Oyneg Shabbes—Joy of Sabbath Meetings” in Scream the Truth at
the World, (New York: Museum of Jewish Heritage and Zydowski Instytut Historyczny,
2001), 11.
4 Ruta Sakowska, “Emanuel Ringelblum and the Underground Archive of the Warsaw
Ghetto” in Scream the Truth at the World, (New York: Museum of Jewish Heritage and
Zydowski Instytut Historyczny, 2001), 5.
5 Emanuel Ringelblum in Scream the Truth at the World, (New York: Museum of Jewish
Heritage and Zydowski Instytut Historyczny, 2001), 17.
6 Ruta Sakowska , “Emanuel Ringelblum and the Underground Archive of the Warsaw
Ghetto” in Scream the Truth at the World, (New York: Museum of Jewish Heritage and
Zydowski Instytut Historyczny, 2001), 9.
7 Ibid.
8 Wislawa Szymborska, “A Moment in Troy” in Sounds, Feelings, Thoughts: Seventy Poems by
Wislawa Szymborska, (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995), 39.
9 Christopher Hewat, “Object Lessons” remarks at The Hotchkiss School/Feb. 25, 1996.
10 Ben Okri, “Lament of Images” in Debra Bricker Balken Alfredo Jaar Lament of Images, (M.I.T.
List Visual Arts Center, 1999), 7.
11 Bozenna Wisniewska’s translation of Ruta Sakowska’s Ludzie z Zamknietej Dzielnicy-Z dzejow
Zydow w Warszawie w latach okupacji hitlerowskiej: pazdziernik 1939-marzec 1943,
(Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, 1993), 126.
12 Gela Seksztajn in Scream the Truth at the World, (New York: Museum of Jewish
Heritage and Zydowski Instytut Historyczny, 2001), 53.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
15 Elie Wiesel, Night (New York: Bantam Books, 1996), 89.
16 Ibid. 90.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bricker Balken, Debra. Alfredo Jaar-Lament of Images. M.I.T. List Visual Arts Center,
1999.
Engelking, Barbara., Jacek Leociak. Getto Warszawskie-Przewodnik po Nieistniejacym
Miescie. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IFiS PAN, 2001.
Fater, Isachar. Muzyka Zydowska w Polsce w Okresie Miedzywojennym. Warszawa:
Oficyna Wydawnicza rytm, 1997.
Museum of Jewish Heritage and Zydowski Instytut Historyczny. Scream the Truth at the
World-Emanuel Ringelblum and the Hidden Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto. New
York: Museum of Jewish Heritage and Zydowski Instytut Historyczny, 2001.
Nicholas, Lynn H. The Rape of Europa. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.
Sakowska Ruta. Ludzie z Zamknietej Dzielnicy-Z dziejow Zydow w Warszawie w latach
okupacji hitlerowskiej-pazdziernik 1939-marzec 1943. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo
Naukowe PWN, 1993.
Sakowska Ruta, eds. Listy o Zagladzie. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN,
1997.
Archiwum Ringelbluma-Listy o Zagladzie, edited by R. Sakowska, Wydawnictwo
Naukowe PWN, Warszawa 1997.
Szymborska Wislawa. Sounds, Feelings, Thoughts:Seventy Poems by Wislawa Szymborska. New
Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1981.
11

Wiesel Elie. Night. New York: Bantam Books, 1986.
12

INSCRIPTIONS
Weronika Wisniewska
Brooklyn, New York
As I was working on my paper and determining the most effective way to begin I came across
Trinh T. Minh-Ha’s essay entitled “Grandma’s Story.” I was immediately struck by the title of
the work since my most recent photographic piece has to do with my own Grandmother’s
stories. A line taken from the essay seemed like a suiting starting point. “My story, no doubt, is
me but also, no doubt older than me” 1
A story can be passed down through generations becoming an integral part of a personal
history. My grandmother, Seweryna Szmaglewska, was 23 years old in 1939 when the German
Army invaded Poland. A young polish girl studying Polish Literature at the University in
Warsaw would not seem to be the most likely suspect to be arrested by the Gestapo. My father’s
mother belonged to a scouting group of which most of the girls had known each other since
childhood. Similar groups around the country began to form a resistance against the Nazi party,
it is difficult to say how much these groups were able to achieve, yet they posed enough of a
threat that some members where arrested. Apparently, a number of people within my
grandmother’s scouting group were among those arrested and ordered to reveal the names and
addresses of their friends. When interrogated and tortured by the Gestapo, some of the victims
gave the Germans the information they were searching for.
The Gestapo found out my grandmother’s name and address and that she was active in the
resistance. In 1942 while she was visiting her parents in the town of Piotrkow the Gestapo
arrested her. She was transported to the concentration camp at Oswiecim; the Germans
renamed the town Auschwitz. Later, she was moved to Brzezinka (Birkenau in German). This
camp was regarded as Auschwitz II. There, the greatest number of people perished. My
grandmother survived, most likely because she was not Jewish. Six months after the Second
World War she wrote Smoke over Birkenau a book about her life at Auschwitz. The book was
written as a record of her experiences. It is an account of her memories and of the traumatic
events she witnessed and endured during her three years at the camp. Because of the
documentary qualities of her book, she was called to testify as a witness at the Nuremberg
Trials, where her work was admitted as evidence.
It is through her book that I have been able to hear and witness her story and it is her book
that has directly influenced and inspired my work “Inscriptions”. I began by photographing a
copy of my grandmother’s book as well as incorporating its text with objects that represented
the macabre of Auschwitz. I then photographed the book alone, using it directly as a reference
to history, the event and my grandmother’s story.
My photographs intertwine qualities of the personal and the historical. They are about
relationship of a personal story to history and how the story transforms through time. I am
interested in how my grandmother’s experiences affected her and how they were passed down
through a generation to me. What type of impact do these floating memories carry two
generations and a continent removed from the event? How do these memories relate to a
ubiquitous understanding of the historic event that surrounds them? And most importantly,
how am I to represent an experience so real yet so impossible through the use of photography?
In the book Becoulded Visions—Hiroshima and the Art of Witness Kyo Maclear refers to the film
“Hiroshima Mon Amour.” In the beginning scenes the character of the French actress
proclaims to her lover, a Japanese architect, that she saw everything that happened in
Hiroshima. Yet her memory of the event is constructed purely of photographic footage and
reportage seen after the atomic bombings. The French actress’s statement emphasizes that
13

photographs have helped us to grasp historical atrocities in a way that was never before
possible, transposing themselves onto our own memory and understanding of an event.
With the liberation of the concentration camps in 1945, photographers from all over the world
were sent to document what the world was unable to see, unable to witness and even unwilling
to believe. The first images of the camps introduced the world to images of atrocities, starved
figures, piles of corpses, death. Today, we are exposed to an innumerable amount of these
images, past and present. Our senses are numbed by the layers of images that separate us from
the catastrophic events, wars, and revolutions in the world. Not only has the volume of media
representation desensitized us towards atrocities, so has the language used to describe these
events. The words themselves are overused; their meaning lessened; Holocaust, genocide,
death camps, ethnic cleansing. These words dislocate us from the occurrence; they recall
another time, another country.
Photographs, television and even the web have allowed us a connection into the past but “as
more and more information comes to us via new media, less and less seems to come via direct
bodily or sensory experience.” 2 This further alienates us from history. Our dislocation is
augmented by our inability to sense the past. We can never truly understand it because we are
physically removed, unable to touch it. My work “Inscriptions” is an attempt to reclaim a
certain physical and personal sense to a historical moment.
I am fascinated by how the event of the Holocaust is represented, preserved and memorialized
in history and in museums. The Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. uses a
myriad of photographs in its exhibitions most of which are documentary in nature. As I walked
through the exhibit I felt as if I had seen all of the images before in books and films, I was
overwhelmed, my senses paralyzed. It wasn’t until after I reached the small plaque that read
“end of exhibition” that I noticed something that reached me on a personal and intimate level.
I was able to enter into a world of imagination and emotion.
I turned to see a room that was warmly lit with natural light coming in from the windows and
candles that were placed around the room. Above the rows of candles where inscribed the
names of the concentration camps. The candles symbolize those who had suffered, it was this
metaphor that touched me when I was least expecting it. The Hall of Remembrance, its
emptiness and silence, illuminated my senses and emotions. Coming out of the dark crowded
exhibition space this room felt like a release and, in a sense, a freedom.
I was struck how a room that was empty and quiet could evoke feelings that the images and
direct representations could not. Could it be that the images of the Holocaust left no room for
interpretation, we know that these images are horrible and atrocious yet we have no further
connection to them. We cannot believe that such things happened, they are beyond our
knowledge and emotional understanding of the world, we are left feeling disconnected. The
Memorial Hall provoked a personal reaction, each museum visitor would see this encounter in
a different way. There were no explicit details and graphic images, rather room for the mind to
wander through its emotions.
I have always felt a strong connection to my grandmother even though I was not physically
close to her. I never had the chance to speak to my grandmother about what she endured and
what she witnessed, her book is my strongest connection to her story and her memories of the
Holocaust. I have always approached her book as a cherished object; there remain only two
copies in my family. The book that I have been working from was my grandmother’s own copy,
the first pages inscribed with her name and her address in Warsaw.
14

A book, for me is a physical and personal object, an article that requires touch and a response.
“Inscriptions” takes its form as an artist book, an emotional exploration and discovery. This
book refers back to my original inspiration Smoke Over Birkenau
The size of my book (7.5” by 9”) allows for a personal experience and interaction with the
work. It is placed on a small wooden table. How is one meant to approach it? Is it an artifact,
can it be touched? The viewer does not encounter the white cotton gloves typically placed near
an artist’s book or a work of this nature. I did not want there to be a layer removing the viewers
touch from the book, it is meant to be a sensual experience. Only one viewer at a time can turn
the pages and have a conversation with the past.
I draw on the tactile and physical attributes of the book to evoke a sense of intimacy. The
books and its images are representations of a disjointed past. The images covey a sense of loss,
fragmented by the passing of time and generations. The cover is worn and stained, beckoning
to be opened to reveal its story.
We enter the first pages of the book through a black and white image of barbed wire, horizontal
lines that extend the full length of the page. These lines take the place of text, words that will
never be fully articulated or understood. They also mirror the lines inscribed on the following
image.
With the turn of the page we witness a palm with all of its crevices open to us inviting us to
read its history. Extending from the fingers is written “ In 1939, when the German’s invaded
Poland, grandma was 23 years old, a year younger than I am today.” This line of text brings the
viewer from the past into the present, from a collective memory into an individual personal
story that has been transported through time. This text serves as an introduction to the subject,
it also implies a connection between my grandmother and I.
We enter into a physical sequence of hands searching through fabric. The life-size shots of my
hands unraveling the material envelope the viewer into the process of discovering what is
underneath the cloth. Where are we and what is it that we are searching for? The viewer
becomes a privileged witness and shares in the experience by physically touching and holding
this action in their own hands, mirroring the emotional layers of my own interaction with my
grandmother’s story. In the right corner we begin to see some letters, we have unwrapped a
book. This evocative sequence leads the viewer into the depths of my work, which we enter
through a reproduction of the original cover of my grandmother’s book into a darkened
sequence of images.
As we approach this section I feel that it is important to mention the physical quality of the
pages of this artist book and once again emphasize the importance of the viewers touch. The
page is noticeably thicker to the touch, we can feel that it is a much heavier and thicker paper
emphasizing that we are entering into a book. A book within a book, a history wrapped and
absorbed by another.
When we open the cover we notice the inside flap of the book. Just as with any book the reader
can choose to read this text to gain more information about the author.
It reads: “This is a full-length and no holds barred, description of life in a German death
factory, Oswiencim II, known as Birkenau and feared as one of the most dreaded of the horrorcamps
set up by the Nazis. The author is a Polish girl who lived inside Birkenau, as one of its
women prisoners, from 1942 when the Gestapo arrested her, until the liberation in 1945.
Within that period she saw a parade of thousands of prisoners, old, young, frightened, proud of
all nationalities and all strata of society—political prisoners, prisoners of war and just prisoners
on suspicion. There was a succession of barrack and camp overseers—all Aryan and differing
15

only in the degree of ingenious severity wit h which they ruled. Here in this book which had a
overwhelming success in Poland, is the whole story. The first sight through the bars of…” The
text is cut here with a note (continued on back flap). Read in part or in its entirety, this text
helps to contextualize the work.
The paper on the opposite side is opaque, smoother and lighter to the touch. We are brought
back to another movement, the act of turning a page. The physical act of turning the pages is
what brought the viewer into the world of the book, allowing him to travel from past to present,
from my grandmother's story to my own. In this next sequence the viewer directly mirrors the
action that is taking place in the images by the simple act of turning the pages. The repetitive
quality of the actions leads the viewer into the fist pages of my grandmothers book, we entering
into her text, her words, her experience. The text draws us into a night at the camp.
“Dark night. More than a thousand women are asleep on strange scaffoldings, in one great
room. A thick darkness, filled with breathing and exhalations. Even the blankets which you
never see by day light seem a part of the darkness…And while you lie immovably in the dark
cavern of your bed you must throw off the weariness…”
SILENCE
The SS were leading the surviving prisoners in a long column, headed for Germany, Grandma
was among them. One of the women she knew stole a sheet. They lay on the ground and
covered themselves with it. In the falling snow, no one noticed…
Her eyes looking directly at us, the dots of her dress, my grandmother’s concentration camp
photograph. She and the viewer exchange looks, the viewer is placed in a strange position, in
the footsteps of the person who took the photograph, possibly an SS officer. This is the only
artifact I use from the event, it begs for a respectful distance on the part of the viewer making
my grandmother’s forward glance all the more salient.
There is a voice which leads us to the last section of “Inscriptions.” “I tired to find grandma in
the fields of Birkenau. I knew that she walked in those fields and that her footsteps were once
imprinted in the mud. The fields are like a graveyard, the chimneys stand alone, emaciated
figures that have stayed here, ghosts resembling tombstones.” My grandmothers memories have
been transposed to her book, this segment is composed of book after book in her memory.
It was not until after I finished this piece that I learned about the Jewish tradition of the yisker
biher, which translates literally into “Tombstones of Paper”. These books were made by
survivors to commemorate those who had perished, they are a collection of photographs and
stories, an attempt to remember and preserve what once was.
When I had finished this book, I began caring it with me often. When I met with the artist
Krzysztof Wodiczko he was intrigued by how this book travels with me in a simple box, a token
and fragment that I carry with me like an immigrant would carry his most cherished
belongings.
I see this book as a fingerprint that refers to a specific experience and event. It serves as a link
to my grandmother’s experiences and memories. Her text placed within the framework of my
photographs are personal traces and to use her words “drops in the vast immeasurable ocean”.
The images are artifacts of an emotional experience, which have been embossed on my
identity.
My work is a trace, a residue of a time still remembered. We have reached the twilight of
Auschwitz as living memory. It still lingers in the memories of the few survivors living today. It
has slowly begun to reside in a world removed from the personal, becoming a part of written
16

history. For me, the events of the Second World War abide on a psychological island between
the personal and the historical, the ineffable and the tangible. “History, and particularly history
after Auschwitz, can be encountered, grasped, and understood only through the
acknowledgement of the very inaccessibility of its original occurrence and experience.” 3
NOTES
1. Minh-Ha, Trinh T. “Grandma’s Story” in Blasted Allegories, edited by Brian Wallis.
The MIT Press, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1989, p.6.
2. Maclear, Kyo. Beclouded Visions—Hiroshima and the Art of Witness, State University of
New York Press, 1999. p. 12.
3. Saltzman, Lisa. Anselm Kiefer and Art After Auschwitz, Cambridge University Press,
1999. p.16.
17

SEWING PLANTS: THE INTERTWINED HISTORY OF BOTANY AND
NEEDLEWORK
Maura C. Flannery
St. John’s University
In deciding on a topic for a presentation at this conference, I often begin with a single image
that I’ve found striking and try to build a theme around it. The image that got me started on
this year’s presentation is a photograph of two “pages” from Julia Barton’s “book” of
embroidered leaves called English Gardens. I found this photograph in Thomasina Beck’s
(1988) book, The Embroiderer’s Garden. On the left-hand side of Barton’s folio is a very
realistic and detailed image of Dianthus (pink) and on the right, a rendering of a garden plot.
It was the flower that caught my eye. I had never seen an herbal page created from thread
before. It had never dawned on me that anyone would do such a thing, and do it so well—and
then to make it into a book page so the similarity is even more striking. On the same page as
the photograph of Dianthus, Beck also includes a photograph of the cover of English Gardens,
“bound in green velvet with the title letters applied in red leather [with] the ‘end papers’ of
marbled silk” (p. 95). In addition, she reproduces the page picturing Dianthus from an 1583
herbal that Barton adapted, so the similarity to an herbal illustration was hardly accidental.
This becomes even more obvious in another page from Barton’s book, this one representing a
lily, complete with a detail illustration, as is often found in herbals.
Barton’s book got me thinking about the relation between sewing and botany. I am doing
research on an early-20 th century botanist, Agnes Arber (1912), who wrote a history of early
printed herbals and through this work, I’ve become interested in visual representations of
plants. These are essential to progress in the science of botany; it is often easier to describe the
subtle differences between two closely related plant species in pictures rather than in words
(Kirchoff, 2001). Some observers go so far as to argue that botany could not progress as a
science until the development of the printing press, which made possible the accurate
reproduction of images of plants.
My interest in sewing primarily involves quilting, which I became involved in about five years
ago, and soon became obsessed with. I quilt, but I also love to read about the history of
quilting, and that has led me to the history of needlework in general, including
embroidery—and hence to Beck’s book. I’ve managed to put a few plants in some of my quilts,
including a few passable sunflowers but nothing of the accuracy or detail of Barton’s flowers.
But perhaps it is the crudeness of my renditions that made me immediately appreciate her skill
and led me to think about why someone would try to reproduce in thread what is much more
easily done with ink and paint.
This is the issue that lies at the heart of this paper. It is an issue that has a great deal to do with
how women have viewed themselves in the past and what counts as important for women
today. It also has to do with what counts as valid forms of representation in science, and how
the conventions of scientific illustration have developed. I will argue that while Barton’s
flowers, no matter how accurately done, would not be considered as illustrations for a botany
text, they may in fact have characteristics which make them more realistic than any drawing or
painting could be.
1

In The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine, Rozsika Parker (1984)
presents a feminist history of embroidery, and among the points she makes is that flowers have
long been central images in women’s needlework. She focuses on the European embroidery
tradition, particularly that of Britain, but it should be noted that flowers were commonly found
stylized in Islamic needlework as well as in Asian embroidery (Krody, 2000). Parker points out
that flowers have long had a connotation of frivolity and in the sixth century there was an edict
forbidding nuns from depicting flowers. But later in the middle ages and in the Renaissance,
flowers became popular subjects in tapestries, though these were hardly just done by women.
Many of the embroiders and tapestry makers were men belonging to professional guilds, but
women also did needlework in the privacy of their homes, and it is this tradition that came to
be more significant in the 18 th and 19 th centuries.
In the 16 th and 17 th centuries, garden flowers were often depicted in needlework. Plants and
animals were also prominent in Biblical scenes, stressing the wonders of God’s creations. By the
mid-18 th century, plants were so popular in needlework that “to flower” became synonymous
with embroidery (Richter, 2000). Embroidery was seen as a fitting way for upper class women
to spend their time, and instruction in needlework was an essential part of the education of
girls. At the same time, gardens were becoming the province of women, and so it is not
surprising that flowers retained their central place in needlework. One example of someone
who combined interests in gardening, botany, and needlework was Mary Delany (Hayden,
1980). She is best known for the cutout flowers which she began to create when she was in her
70s. They are so accurate that botanists were able to identify the species depicted. But Delany
was also a superb embroiderer. The dress which she wore to be presented at court was made of
black silk and was ornamented with two hundred different kinds of flowers, all represented
with great detail and accuracy. Delany and her husband were avid gardeners, so she had firsthand
knowledge of plants as well as plenty of models for her art. She also consulted botany
books and was friendly with such noted botanists of the day as Sir Joseph Banks.
While Delany’s work may not represent that of the average embroiderer, there are many
examples of needlework that almost equal hers in quality if not in quantity. Embroidery had
become associated with femininity, and so fine needlework was seen as a sign of other fine
traits in a woman. But by the 19 th century, several other themes were woven into women’s
needlework. Some saw fancy and extravagant designs as signs of decadence. By the middle of
the 19 th century, needlework was sometimes seen as not a serious way for women to spend time
unless it was closely tied to their roles as keepers of home and family. It was considered
appropriate for women to embellish linen and upholstery, and perhaps even clothing, but not
to excess. At the same time, the concept known as the language of flowers had become popular
among women. This meant that different species of flowers were associated with different
emotions and ideas. So when flowers were rendered in thread, they often carried messages of
love, devotion, or longing. The language of flowers helped to further solidify the idea of flowers,
and needlework, as appropriate to a woman’s sphere.
At the same time, the science of botany remained a male domain, as did all other areas of
science. Women did study botany, but almost always as amateurs, though the study of plants
was considered more appropriate for women than were other sciences. Botany was something
that could be done close to home, perhaps even in one’s own garden. Botany texts aimed at
women, and even written by women, became popular; botany was taught in academies and
2

colleges for women. And there were women botanists, such as Augusta Duvall Bussey (1843-
1931) who combined botany and needlework; she created a botanical crazy quilt rich with
embroidered flowers (Bowman, 1991). This was hardly a unique approach. Though we may
assume that the flowers depicted here may be slightly more detailed and more realistic, flowers
appeared in many crazy quilts, and in other kinds of quilts as well. In 2001, the Textile
Museum in Washington, DC mounted an exhibit entitled “Fanciful Flowers: Botany and the
American Quilt” in conjunction with the International Quilt Study Center at the University of
Nebraska, Lincoln. The exhibit included quilts with flowers ranging from the very realistic to
the extremely stylized. Rozsika Parker notes that “the subject matter of a woman’s embroidery
during the 18 th and 19 th centuries was as important as its execution in affirming her femininity,
but execution was still important (p. 11).”
I think there is a fascination with representation in a lot of art. It is about solving the problem
of how to make an apple out of paint or thread or wood, how to translate a form and an image
from one medium into another, realistically. That is at least one major impulse of art. And for
women, sewing was their medium and the garden was their milieu so it makes sense that the
two should come together. But there is also the idea of skill, of making the flowers as realistic
as possible, and thread was a good medium for that. It came in many colors and those colors
could be blended, by using thin strands. There is a delicacy to sewing that matches the delicacy
of flowers, and here was a way to show the skill of sewing. Sewing for many women wasn’t
necessary for utilitarian purposes, so the artistic side could flourish. This was the age of realistic
art, so it is not surprising that the flowers should bed done realistically. This was a way to show
one’s skill and one’s femininity. It was a way to garner praise, and praise came with the
extremes, the extremes of skill or of quantity of output or the smallness of the stitches. This
was a way for women to produce something that was deemed worthy of attention.
While flowers were often the focus of attention, leaves sometimes also proved riveting subjects
for quilts, as in the case of a striking mid-19 th century quilt with its presentation of 36 different
kinds of leaves (Binney, 1984). In the same vein and even more intriguing botanically is Iris
Aycock’s 1994 quilt Hammered at Home (Austin, 1999). These two quilts show the contrast
between two different approaches to botanical illustration. The first shows perfect leaves, the
ideal or type form, while the Aycock quilt displays leaves in all their individuality and
imperfection. In both cases, the artist has used the leaf itself as a model or template.
As far as present-day needlework is concerned I am more familiar with the world of quilting
than of embroidery, though the border between the two is often fuzzy. As with 19 th century
quilts, the representation of plants on recent quilts runs from the highly realistic to the very
stylized. To give outstanding examples of each, I want to show the work of Velda Newman and
Jane Sassaman. For me, one of the most awe-inspiring quilters is Velda Newman (1996), whose
sewing is all done by hand. She has only created about a dozen large quilts, which is not
surprising because of the work involved in each. One of the most spectacular, Hydrangea, is 7by-8
feet in size and is a close-up of the flowers of this shrub, with each floret made from an
individual piece of fabric appliqued in place. It takes close observation of nature to create
something so realistic and at the same time so artistically dramatic.
Jane Sassaman’s (2000) work is very different from that of Newman, though no less fascinating.
She does machine quilting, her colors are bolder, and she plays with plant forms, using them as
a starting point for very vibrant and lively takes on nature that convey the essence of the life
3

and organic growth of plants. Both Newman and Sassaman are trained artists who do numerous
sketches for their quilts, and always they go back to observing nature firsthand before
embarking on a project. This is also true of the work of Ruth McDowell (1998). Like that of
Sassaman, it is stylized but still shows a close observation of nature. In the extensive section
McDowell devotes to the St. Johnswort, she even includes a version with the tiny black dot
which she explains is a defense mechanism for such a slow-growing Alpine plant: it contains a
poisonous pigment.
Nowhere are quilts created today with more attention to botanical detail than in Australia and
New Zealand. Quilters there are especially proud of their biological treasures and create
beautiful quilts to show them off. In one issue of Australian Patchwork and Quilting were
instructions for making a wall hanging with Banksia carefully created in applique (Day, 2000)
and in another, an article by Frances Mulholland (1999) on her quilt depicting gum trees. The
New Zealand Quilter magazine ran a whole series of articles on making blocks, each with a
different native plant.
I could go on, because there are many more examples I could draw from. There was an exhibit
of quilts in Virginia, each displaying a plant that has been investigated for the presence of
substances that might be useful in the fight against breast cancer. And right now there is a
craze for making quilts with three-dimensional flowers and leaves, to heighten the realism even
more. And to draw from fiber arts other than quilting, I should mention that there are a
number of artists who stitch real leaves into their work, carrying realism to an even greater
extreme. An Australian artist has created a jacket with eucalyptus leaves stitched all over the
body of the garment. At the other extreme, Anne Mudge has created TapRoot out of stainlesssteel
wire rope. She has also made what looks like decaying seed pods in a work called Study
#73.
This work brings us a long way from the delicate flowers of Mrs Delany and other 18 th and 19 th
century needleworkers, but I think all these women do have something in common. They all
were careful observers of nature. They went to nature for their inspiration and used their
creative abilities to translate the beauties of nature into a very different medium, a medium that
has often been denigrated, even by women. This is particularly true of embroidery, which is
now seen as an almost exclusively female art form. I hesitate to use the term art form to
describe it because many people would consider it less of an art form than a hobby, and a
rather banal one at that. This is because it is often associated it with those stamped pieces of
linen found in kits. True, a lot of the women who do embroidery and needlepoint, even today,
do use stamped cloth and canvases. But they don’t have to. There are women, like Barton and
Beck, who bring a tremendous amount of creativity to stitching.
One example of such creativity says a lot about women and botanical art in all its forms, both
now and in the past. Mary Grierson has created a beautiful scene that combines embroidery
with needlepoint, and a great deal of botanical history as well. Grierson is someone in whom
the traditions of botanical art and needlework come together, even more intimately than they
did in Mary Delany. For many years, Grierson was the official botanical illustrator at the Royal
Botanic Gardens at Kew. In this needlework piece, she pictures a portion of the Gardens as
seen from the Marianne North room. North was a 19 th -century botanical artists who also
worked at Kew and whose paintings cover the walls of this room dedicated to her work.
4

While Grierson’s needlework in pictured in Beck’s The Embroiderer’s Garden, her botanical
illustrations can be found in Shirley Sherwood’s (1996)Contemporary Botanical Artists.
Sherwood notes that only two out of every seven artists included in the book is a man.
Twentieth-century botanical art is primarily the domain of women; this was hardly true in the
past. Though there have been great female botanical artists for centuries, the most famous
botanical artists of the past were men such a Ehret, Bauer, and Redouté. Sherwood raises the
question of why this change, but can’t come up with an answer that satisfies her. Part of the
reason may be economic. Many botanical artists cannot make a living at this work, but the
compensation may be adequate for women who wish to work at home while taking care of a
family.
Additionally, I think the case can also be made that by the 20 th century, botany had become a
second-class science. For example, throughout the century the place of botany in the biology
curriculum has shrunk. Peter Bernhardt (1999), in a recent book on floral botany, notes that
biology education moved steadily away from plants in the 20 th century. A look at textbooks
from the early years of the century indicates that plants, rather than being relegated to a short
chapter or two, were given more than their share of attention. But today there is little parity
between coverage of plants and animals in most introductory biology books. Perhaps the
dynamism and fast pace of the 20 th century had no place for organisms that don’t run around
and have response times measured in hours and days rather than in seconds and minutes. It is
telling that people find carnivorous plants fascinating. After all, they are the plants that most
act like animals.
I would like to speculate that there is another reason for botany’s reduced status in the
biological hierarchy. By the end of the 19 th century, it became the science considered most
appropriate for women. As it became a woman’s field, it became less appropriate as a man’s
field. I admit that I am overstating the case, and that the thousands of male botanists in this
country would vigorously protest my viewpoint, but I think there is at least a modicum of
validity to it, it is at least one piece in the puzzle of why botany and botanical illustration have
changed in the 20 th century.
Now to the other side of my argument, the needlework side. All the images depicted in
Sherwood’s book are paintings or etchings. There is no needlework in this volume, even the
needlework of someone like Grierson. In addition, these images in this book, as with all
botanical illustrations, are very formalized. Almost all botanical art presents a single species on
a page with no background. It is a disembodied plant, and often a truncated plant that lacks
roots. Such illustrations are rarely done in oils on canvas, so the idea of painting with thread
would be unheard of. And while at least some botanical illustrations are now considered as art
works, needlework is less well-received, and usually relegated to the world of craft.
It may not be a coincidence that botany and needlework are both considered rather second-rate
in their respective realms, and both are closely associated with women. I would like to make
the case that women’s perspectives on plants as illustrated through needlework have something
valid to say scientifically and would enrich the science of botany, just as more traditional
botanical art has done for centuries. Needlework flowers of the detail seen in Barton’s work, or
in an example of Japanese shishu embroidery (Lang, 2001), display as much detail and are as
true to life as many botanical illustrations. I would argue that they have a distinct advantage:
their texture provides a better sense of the three-dimensionality of a plant than a watercolor
5

ever could. The texture also gives some sense of the texture of leaves and flowers. While I am
hardly suggesting that embroidery replace watercolor as the medium of choice in botanical
illustration, I do want to suggest that the whole field of scientific illustration needs to be
reconsidered and what counts as valid representation needs to be reevaluated.
In the 18 th and 19 th centuries wax anatomical models were commonly used for medical
instruction, and these models, at least those that remain intact, are now receiving a great deal
of attention. Some, referred to as wax Venuses, were rather seductive women with shapely, if
partially dissected, bodies. They sometimes had a string of pearls around the neck, and
carefully coifed hair. This was considered appropriate for medical instruction, though it would
hardly be countenanced today. In the 16 th and 17 th -century anatomy texts, figures were
portrayed against elaborate landscapes, something else that isn’t seen today. My point is that
the norms for scientific illustration do change over time. So why couldn’t embroidered images
of plants be among the appropriate forms of depiction in botany. It is at least an idea that is
worth considering.
In closing I would like to make the point that there is validity to the needlework
representations of plants both in the past and in the present in that they indicate the link
between science and art. In studying plants both for scientific and artistic reasons, there is an
intense observation needed which leads to a communion with the specimen. The observer
comes to know the plant on a deep level, this was what Barbara McClintock’s work on corn
illustrates (Keller, 1983). Her observations of plants in the field, of cobs of variegated corn, and
of the cells in the corn kernels were all at this deep level where there is union with the object
of study. Out of this union came her groundbreaking ideas on genetics, just as the union
created in an artist with her observations of a plant leads to a singular work of art—whether that
work is of paint or thread or fabric. Some artists choose paint as their medium, but others
choose thread or fabric, and the results can be equally worthy of our attention.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Arber, A. (1912). Herbals, Their Origin and Evolution: A Chapter in the History of Botany,
1470-1670. Cambridge, Great Britain: Cambridge University Press.
Austin, M.L. (1999). The Twentieth Century’s Best American Quilts: Celebrating One Hundred
Years of the Art of Quiltmaking. Golden, CO: Primedia.
Beck, T. (1988). The Embroiderer’s Garden. Devon, UK: David & Charles Craft Book.
Krody, S.B. (2000). Flowers of Silk and Gold: Four Centuries of Ottoman Embroidery.
Washington, DC: Textile Museum.
Bernhardt, P. (1999). The Rose’s Kiss: A Natural History of Flowers. Washington, DC: Island
Press.
Binney, E. (1984). Homage to Amanda: Two Hundred Years of American Quilts. Nashville, TN:
Rutledge Hill Press.
Bowman, D. (1991). American Quilts. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Day, J. (2000). Miniature Banksia Wall-Hanging. Australian Patchwork and Quilting, 7(1), 67-
70.
Hayden, R. (1980). Mrs Delany: Her Life and Flowers. New York: Colonnade.
Keller, E.F. (1983). A Feeling for the Organism. San Francisco: Freeman.
Kirchoff, B.K. (2001). “Character Description in Phylogenetic Analysis: Insights from Agnes
Arber’s Concept of the Plant.” Annals of Botany, 88, 1203–1214.
6

Lang, L. (2001, January/February). Shishu: Evolution of a Japanese Art in Hawaii. Fiberarts,
pp. 46-48.
McDowell, R. (1998). Piecing: Expanding the Basics. Lafayette, CA: C&T Publishing.
Mulholland, F. (1999). “Core of My Heart My Country.” Australian Patchwork and Quilting,
6(2), 52-53.
Newman, V. (1996). Velda Newman: A Painter’s Approach to Quilt Design. Bothel, WA: That
Patchwork Place (with Christine Barnes).
Parker, R. (1984). The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine. London:
Women’s Press.
Richter, P.B. (2000). Painted with Thread: The Art of American Embroidery. Salem, MA:
Peabody Essex Museum.
Salazar, M. (1997). The Quilt: Beauty in Fabric and Thread. New York:
Friedman/Fairfax.
Sassaman, J. A. (2000). The Quilted Garden: Design and Make Nature-Inspired Quilts.
Lafayette, CA: C&T Publishing.
Sherwood, S. (1996). Contemporary Botanical Artists: The Shirley Sherwood Collection. New
York: Abbeville.
7

REMEMBERING OUR MORTALITY: ARTISTS AND DOCTORS IN THE GROSS
ANATOMY LAB
Deanna Leamon
University of South Carolina
In order to invent heaven and hell a person would need to know nothing
except the human body.
—Jose Saramago, Blindness
1. MAIN POINT
I am here to advocate a closer collaboration between anatomists and artists. Such collaboration
can help both anatomists and artists reconcile the human and emotional dimensions of their
work with the scientific objective dimensions of their work. I’ve found this to be true in my own
work making figurative drawings and paintings, and also in teaching figure drawing to students.
And the medical students and faculty in the gross anatomy classes I’ve been involved with also
have found this to be true.
In 1999, I spent my sabbatical auditing USC School of Medicine’s gross anatomy lectures and
dissection. In addition to sitting with the medical students through the lectures and assisting
with prosections, I spent time making quick studies of the cadavers at every stage of the
dissection. I did this to improve my understanding of the human body and, to see what we are
like when we are dead. While I was doing this I became aware of the parallel struggle that
doctors have in balancing needed objectivity with equally needed humanity or subjectivity.
2. OBJECTIVE AND SUBJECTIVE
“Objective” and “subjective” are not ideal terms, and an examination of the history of their use
shows them to be very slippery. For my purposes I focus on two dimensions to our interactions
either as artists or as physicians with bodies, living and dead. The first dimension is part/whole.
As we interact with bodies do we treat them as wholes—a whole human being—or as a collection
parts—femur, rib cage, etc? The second dimension is individuality. As we interact with bodies
do we treat each one as an individual deserving special respect as an individual, or as an
instance of a type—homo sapiens or what have you? For the purposes of this paper I will call an
“objective” treatment of bodies that which focuses on types, not individuals, and,
simultaneously, that where the focus is on parts, not wholes. I will call a “subjective” treatment
of bodies that which focuses on individual wholes.
Objectively, the body is an intricate biological mechanism. But each “objective biological
Mechanism” also is a human being. Each objective biological mechanism is a fully emotion
bearing person and needs to be seen as such. We can call this the “subjective view” of the
body.
This usage is not perfect, either historically or in its appropriation of contemporary usage. But
it does capture an important dimension along which artists and physicians have struggled
through history in their interactions with bodies. Neither pole, “objective” or “subjective” is
correct, for each captures important elements of what it is to be human. Yet, it has proven very
8

difficult to find a full reconciliation here. My paper traces some of the movement back and
forth along the dimension established by these notions of “subjective” and “objective” by
artists and physicians.
3. THE NEED TO RECONCILE
These two views of the body have posed and still do pose problems for doctors. To be effective,
a doctor in our culture has to understand how the body is a biological mechanism and how the
mechanism is malfunctioning. Simply to get over the taboo against seeing and touching the
body of a stranger, a doctor has to see the body less subjectively, more objectively. At the same
time, medical practice would be deeply deficient if doctors neglected the humanity of their
patients. Contemporary medical education appears to be trying to address this issue. In part
because doctors have come under heavy criticism for taking an overly objective and uncaring
view of their patients.
Artists who are interested in working with the figure also have struggled with finding a balance
between the objective and the subjective views of the body. To make a convincing translation
of an actual three-dimensional figure into a two-dimensional fiction, artists have to learn to see
form. For instance, the human eyeball must be seen as form in space, not the window to the
soul at least initially. Taboos also have to be suspended in a figure drawing class with nude
models. These bodies have to be seen objectively as form in space, not as objects and seats of
desire (or repulsion, or amusement etc.).In parallel with the doctor’s dilemma, however,
depictions of figures that are anatomically accurate but devoid of humanity have no value as
art.
4. HISTORICAL SKETCH
Looking at the evolution of anatomical images, the same polarity that I am referring to as
subjective/objective can be seen in the history of these images. One approach to anatomical
studies is conceptual and idealized; it favors working from several cadavers to find the
“true”norm. Forms are simplified for the sake of clarity. Final drawings are composites.
Another approach is naturalistic or realistic, and favors working from a single cadaver. These
images frequently emphasize our mortality, and they do this, in part, by presenting an image of
a dead body, cadaver or skeleton that simultaneously is dynamic, suggesting the life that once
inhabited the body.
Some scholars have suggested this as a difference between medieval and Renaissance
anatomical drawing. Da Vinci blended both approaches. Although he drew from many
cadavers, and was interested in “general truths,” the drawings remain dynamic, expressive, and
naturalistic. Vesalius and Albinus dominate anatomical representations after Da Vinci and
before Henry Gray. They present, respectively, more subjective and more objective approaches
to the body.
Vesalius almost certainly was influenced by Da Vinci. Vesalius, published around the middle of
the 16th century, falls into the more subjective camp, and his style dominated anatomical
drawing for another two hundred years. Albinus, published in 1747, marks a shift to the less
subjective. There is more emphasis on the refinement of form, on measurement using several
cadavers for one drawing. This represents an effort to find the “true norm.” This style
9

overshadowed Vesalius and remained very popular until Gray’s Anatomy was published in
1858.
Gray follows in Albinus’s footsteps. Medical illustration became a specialized “profession.”
There was a shift in materials as well, instead of charcoal, wash, woodcut and etching, artists
used pencil, colored pencil and watercolor, and, of course, photography. Using anatomical
models made of wax became rare.
There was a short-lived—but significant—shift to the subjective side in England in the late
1800s. Several doctor/anatomist/artists, notably John Bell, George Stubbs and Peter Camper,
integrated the artistic and medical approaches to the body. It would be incorrect to identify
these scholars simply as doctors or as artists. In their work we find a more subjective approach
to the body. Outside of this work, however, Gray’s became the model for anatomical drawing,
and this remains true today.
In the Art Academies of the 19th century a tension remained between Vesalius’s and Albinus’s
styles. It is during this period of course that one sees an obsession with measuring classifying
and categorizing. These ideas influenced the way artistic anatomy was taught. The Beaux Arts
Academy advertised itself as offering the “scientific method” approach to artistic anatomy.
5. 20TH CENTURY DEPICTIONS OF THE BODY
By the 20th century artists and anatomists were, by and large, entirely estranged from each
other. But, perhaps reflecting the tenor of these times, both produced depictions that
emphasized analysis into fundamental parts. In anatomy, this meant an emphasis on a cellular
understanding of the body. In art, abstract expressionism sought to explore the fundamentals of
mark making, brush stroke, color, pattern, isolating them from the burden of representation.
The images that resulted are curiously similar.
An amazing and revealing fact: In preparing this talk I wanted to compare a full/complete
skeleton depiction from one of the standard 20th century anatomy texts—Netter, Grant,
Clemente”—with a Renaissance depiction. I couldn’t find one. There is not one complete
skeleton in any of the now standard anatomy texts. We humans have been taken apart and,
reduced to our parts.
Gunther von Hagens’s remarkable and controversial exhibit of plastinated cadavers is a marked
departure from the lifeless anatomical depictions that have dominated the 20th century. He has
sought to incorporate an aesthetic element in his cadavers, and the centerpieces of his exhibit
are whole body cadavers in remarkably dynamic poses. The effect, however, is different from
the whole body poses from the Renaissance. von Hagens’s cadavers seem almost alive, ready to
continue fencing. Mortality is the last thing on their minds. Still the work is remarkably
subjective—in the sense that I have been using the word.
It is instructive to contrast von Hagens with “The Visible Human Project.” The Visible Human
Project is considered “the state of the art” in anatomical illustration. It is the hottest thing
happening in the United States, and there is a remarkable difference between these—objective
“Tupperware” depictions of bodies and von Hagens’ cadavers. It is the technology that makes
this such a big deal.
10

6. COLLABORATION
Quite by accident I discovered that medical students like having artists around. One of the
students who went through Gross Anatomy with me described her experience as follows:
I do remember seeing her there all the time, and I always wanted to go look
over her shoulder and ask, “well what are you looking at now?”. . . The last day
of anatomy class . . . Deanna displayed her sketches. I was excited to finally see
them, hoping that I could finally get that peek over her shoulder. She laid them
out in order for us: the order in which she drew them and the order in which
we did our dissections . . . One by one, as I walked through our whole year’s
dissection, I started thinking about the people who had given their bodies. . . .
[F]rom that first step into anatomy class I completely forgot that these were
once living people with real lives. I guess you have to do that to do the
dissections, and seeing Deanna’s drawings brought out so many feelings I was
obviously suppressing when I walked into the lab.
Working in collaboration with the Director of USC’s Anatomy Lab Lance Paulman, I have had
an area of the Anatomy Lab set aside to exhibit my students’ and my own drawings, drawings
based on our time in the Anatomy Lab. Paulman and I will follow this up with a questionnaire
to the medical students to solicit their feedback on having these drawings in the Lab. So far all
the informal comments I’ve received have been very positive.
The benefit to Art students to visiting the Anatomy Lab is a little harder to measure. I believe
they come away from the experience with an increased sensitivity to skin texture and pallor,
and texture in general. Their time in the Lab gives them a good lesson in the value of working
from the general to the specific; doing so is absolutely necessary or they would be overwhelmed
by the complexity of what’s in front of them. They also understand what it means to use all of
your senses when you draw, the smell of embalming fluid, of dead organs, the utter stillness.
When they draw from a live model after drawing from a cadaver, they seem better able to see
the form as alive, a living, breathing, fluid-filled, heart-beating, mortal person.
Artists and anatomists would benefit from collaborating again. To appreciate life, we need to
appreciate death; this is what is most deeply fundamental to our humanity. Through working
together toward a shared understanding of our mortality we can create better art and better
medicine.
11

SEPTEMBER 11 AND AFTER: A VIRTUAL CASE BOOK
Barbara Abrash
New York University
The burning towers may be the iconic image of September 11, but what stays in the mind for
most of us in New York is the vast outpouring of expression—the shrines, posters, photographs,
messages that filled the streets of Lower Manhattan and our rush to every possible form of
technology—e-mail, throw-away cameras, voice mail, cell phones, video cameras, websites—by
which to communicate and find meaning in the midst of catastrophe. Individuals trying to find
words, connect, give shape and meaning to unfathomable events.
This democracy of voices, this rich—often eloquent—outpouring of expression, stood in stark
contrast to mass media, which (after a stumbling start that featured weeping anchor men)
quickly settled on a narrowly framed story of “therapeutic patriotism”—nation unified in grief
and on its way to war.
How will September 11 be told and remembered—how will it enter national memory and
history? Will it be the television version—a kind of remembering that obscures the lived
experiences of September 11 and the many acts of meaning produced on the ground and in
cyberspace? Or will it, in Barbara Kirshenblatt Gimblett’s words “Reveal the role of history’s
ordinary actors in creating the historical record even as they are living it.”
The events of September 11 produced an unprecedented shift in the global political landscape,
in which communications and media played an unforeseeable role in opening circuits of
information, connection and discussion, from the local to the transnational. This event brought
into relief the importance of alternative networks and systems of communication. It was a
moment when individuals, many of whom never before made media, created alternatives to
what the mainstream media had to offer.
As a colleague in Amsterdam wrote to us,
Everyone of us, from those at the fiery heart of events grabbing mobile phones,
to we the “universal eyewitnesses” scrambling to make contact with others
attempting to make sense of a world turned upside down, became transmitter as
well as a receiver…we all became nodes in the global media network.
9-11 and after: a virtual case book (www.nyu.edu/fas/projects/vcb) is a web publication
produced by The Center for Media, Culture and History at NYU and in collaboration with
designers Alison Cornyn and Sue Johnson of Picture Projects, that provides a snapshot of
responses to September 11. It brings together essays, first-person accounts, reports, visual
images, and websites to provide a composite view of the ways in which people (as opposed to
mass media ands government) used media on September 11 and in the days after.
Its central subject is that ephemeral material—the shrines, poetry, messages, banners, e-mail,
digital art, web logs, etc.—that filled our lives and is a kind of snapshot of what people needed
to express, how they expressed it, and their many webs of communication.
With its multiplicity of views and voices, its overlapping stories and connections—9-11 and after
demonstrates how new technologies and the development of network society have enlarged our
means of creative expression and produced a relocation in time, space, and memory.
The contributors to this “virtual case book” are based in places as diverse as Delhi, Jerusalem,
1

and Amsterdam. But the focus is on Lower Manhattan —specifically the area below 14 th street
that was cordoned off for several days after the attack. We were physically isolated in what
sometimes felt like a medieval town, but we were also a community at the epicenter of global
communication, redefining the local and the global.
We all remember how city streets and the Internet were claimed and reconfigured to facilitate
the urgent need to search for loved ones, express opinions, to mourn, or just to connect. As city
surfaces were covered with messages, posters and shrines—turning the streets into what
someone has described as a giant public art project—so too did the web and internet become
public sites of mourning, commentary, and quest.
The vcb traces some of the ways in which virtual and physical worlds converged and
intertwined, how old and new technologies were deployed to create new networks of
communication and forms of expression.
Today I’d like to show a few examples from the site to suggest the range of expression and
patterns of connection that were revealed. (CDRom—no live connections)
Amahl Bishara writes about Al-Jazeera satellite tv, which introduced Arab perspectives and
images in unprecedented ways into the mass media mix—to both Arab and western audiences.
A new flow of information from east to west.
.
Ravi Sundaram at the Sarai media center in Delhi, presents a selection of e-mails from the
Sarai internet list—messages from South Asians working in New York. It is a conversation that
quickly moves from first-person reports from Ground Zero (“today I shaved my beard”) to a
discussion of impending war coming closer to home. To Sundaram, this provided suddenly
vivid evidence of the south-north flow of labor and the human reality of labor migration.
Both of these sites emphasize reconfigurations of the local and the global, and new spaces for
the circulation of ideas and information. But also the ways in which digital technology can
make otherwise unobserved patterns and situations visible.
Public spaces, both in the streets and on the web, were claimed, overwhelmingly for shrines,
memorials, and remembrance of all kinds. Shrines appeared not only in the streets and parks,
but also virtually—digital shrines, memorial video quilts composed of photographs, and
testimonials abounded. Practices of memory—both in real space and cyberspace—became social
acts, as grieving individuals came together around rituals of remembrance.
Leshu Torchin describes how websites mobilized individual testimonies of loss and grief into
collective community practices, rendering visible formerly unseen or unacknowledged worlds
(such as the undocumented workers lost in the attack) visible. She notes a site honoring gays
and lesbians lost in the attack, including Father Murphy—whose leadership gay rights advocacy
went unmentioned in official biographies. These are sites, she says, by people who want their
histories to be part of the grander narratives that will be told about September 11.
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett also talks about shrines and memorial sites—spontaneous,
inclusive and raw—which she says, “by encouraging creativity without artistic ambition, helped
close the gap between art and life.”
The camera, of course, is central to the desire to remember BKG talks about this mostphotographed
event in history, and “the powerful sense that one is a witness to one’s own
experience and obligated to express and record it.”
2

Thanks to digital cameras, the image became an instantaneous part of the event. That
unparalleled project, here is new york, (that Charles Traub will speak about in detail) is a
most notable example of the humanizing potential of technology, and the recombinant
possibilities of digital imagery—hung in a gallery space (which was also a place of meditation, a
town hall, a trauma center, and a tourist destination), exhibited and sold on the web, collected
in a book.
The virtual case book is also an archive of archives. The September 11 digital archive is
specifically concerned with the politics of memory. It is committed to telling the “history of all
the people in their own voices” and as they lived it—their site is a compendium of counternarratives
that challenge the official stories. This site features personal stories, oral histories, emails,
digital folk art (for example, digital shrines, memorial quilts, animations, videos,
cartoons, and altered photographs).
The Digital Archive reveals the diversity of responses to the attacks—how common, for
instance, was the desire (expressed in e-mails from the families of survivors, for instance, and
from immigrants in NY who have fled terrorism elsewhere) not to escalate violence, the fear
that violence begets violence; September 11 digital archive with its digital collections, political
analysis, and portals to information, is an archive for historians of the future.
TV ARCHIVE
Television, is our national storyteller, a place where personal and collective memories are
produced and claimed. At the same time, the television spectacle of the burning towers and
surrounding events has been called by Diana Taylor a form of “percepticide”—a display of
images that prevents one from seeing—or at least knowing what one is seeing.
The Television Archive has collected television broadcasts from September 11 and the days
after, from 19 stations worldwide makes this material publicly available. It offers a unique
opportunity use of media to challenge the media spectacle itself. These broadcasts, which
might otherwise be regarded either as intellectual property available only for a fee, or as too
ephemeral to collect, are a vital public resource. Here is an interactive site for research,
commentary, and consideration of the nature and consequences of the role played by television
our shared social and political experience.
The virtual case book itself is an archive—of ephemeral material that documents the lived
experiences and many acts of making meaning by people who experienced the WTC attack. It
is not only a depository, a source of evidence; lying as it does at the intersection of personal
memory and social meanings, it also is a source of counternarratives to the official versions of
September 11 as it becomes part of American history and memory. However, as a digital object,
the vcb itself is a bit of ephemera.
We think of the virtual case book as a scholarly resource and a site of memory, a place in which
history can be interpreted and reinterpreted, where evidence is preserved and memory
reconstructed.
“But how,” in the words of Barbara Kirshenblatt Gimblett, “do you secure an ephemeral
experience?’
3

EXHIBITING 9-11: A HISTORIOGRAPHY
Leslie K. Brown
Boston University
(Please note: this paper was originally presented with slides, hence the words LEFT and RIGHT
indicate left slide and right slide)
On March 11 th —the 6 month anniversary of September 11 th —desiring a quite calm place of
reflection, you enter a softly lit, warmly painted gallery. LEFT RIGHT What you behold is
varied in subject and media, but united in theme. You are greeted with a seven-foot tall grid of
what looks at first to be a quilt of white paper squares hanging from the ceiling. When you
approach, you realize that this grid is constructed out of magazine pages with images of candles
sandwiched in-between. LEFT As the piece is back-lit, the candles glow ever so slightly. If you
counted, you’d realize that there more than 3,000 of these squares held together with tape—the
number of lives lost that day.
LEFT Next, you behold four images by a Boston-based photographer: a memorial around a
tree at the Pentagon, a memorial to two of the airline pilots in Boston, a memorial to
firefighters arranged on an office chair in New York City, and a memorial in the snowy fields of
Pennsylvania. RIGHT You pick up a map of Ground Zero indicating viewing locations and
temporary memorials. LEFT RIGHT A grid greets you next. Typed phrases emerge from a sea
of black. Each of us will conjure up different, or maybe the same, photographs to accompany
the words.
LEFT You end your visit by reading a sign tacked to a fence in one of the photographs: “All of
you taking photos, I wonder if you really see what’s here or if you’re so concerned with getting
that perfect shot that you’ve forgotten that this is a tragedy site, and not a tourist attraction. As I
continually had to move ‘out of someone’s way’ as they carefully tried to frame this place of
mourning, I kept wondering what makes us think we can capture the pain, the loss, the pride
and the confusion—this complexity—into a 4 x 5 glossy.—Firegirl, NYC, 9/17/01.”
These images and installations shots are from an exhibition 6 Months, A Memorial LEFT
RIGHT (March 11 through April 28, 2002) organized by the Photographic Resource Center at
Boston University, seen here in the cover of the PRC newsletter featuring Marcus Halvei and
the show’s closing card, featuring Susan E. Evans. Taking this exhibition as a point of
departure, I will consider the phenomenon of the makeshift memorial in light of the
proliferation of September 11 th exhibitions featuring photography from a historiographical
perspective. This discussion is not exhaustive, nor model, but merely a starting point for I
believe it is as important to collect exhibitions as it is artifacts.
As a student of popular culture, I was fascinated by the urge to create anything on a
tremendous scale to make up for a perceived void. Museum and history professionals
responded with an overwhelming need to cull, archive, and present visual responses to the
tragedy. Galleries and artists echoed the unchoreographed accumulation in the public arena as
if normal presentation and art making gave way to the vernacular. The collage/grid format
formed a sort of 9-11 iconography.
I wanted to take the time to point out that I have purposely not masked my slides to emphasize
this idea of Vernacular Presentation as outlined by photohistorian Geoffrey Batchen to give you
an idea of context the objects themselves, as many are exhibition flyers.
4

Fueled by a sense of mass amnesia, the race to memorialize seemed to be located at the end of
the memory spectrum. To borrow the words of historian James Young, “In effect, the initial
impulse to memorialize events . . . may actually spring from an opposite and equal desire to
forget them.” Like the museums faced with too many donations, we'd hoard now and sort
through it all later. It is likely that these displays will be recreated at some meaningful time.
Intriguingly, this is already happening.
The idea to do some sort of 9-11 show was decided upon before I arrived as Curator. At an
opening September 13 th , the PRC’s board agreed, given Boston’s connection to events and the
center’s mission, to hold open a slot for the 6 month anniversary. Since last November when I
arrived in Boston, LEFT I have been collecting press releases, exhibition invitations,
catalogues, and websites. In the early months of 2002, in addition to the five shows at the
International Center of Photography, for example, fifteen exhibitions were listed at New York
City cultural institutions alone. 9-11 history.net, a collaborative website between the Museum
of the City of New York and the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Behring
Center, also documented the ever-increasing list of exhibitions, programs, and collecting
efforts. In discussing these exhibitions, I realize that I am a participant/observer; my
background as a museum professional necessarily affects my observations.
I would like to approach the following exhibitions as “artistic creations,” as outlined by Young.
He explains in The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning, exhibitions
“juxtapose, narrate, and remember events according to the tastes of their curators, the political
needs and interests of the community, the temper of the time.” Studying exhibitions—their
timing and tenor—reveals much. Taking this further, how do exhibitions relate to and expound
upon memory? Moreover, can we have a memory of an exhibition we never saw? 9-11
exhibitions in particular veered from the norm, tugging at the heartstrings of the visitors, and
multiplying at a dizzying speed. The shows allow us to meditate on the act of exhibiting itself.
These 9-11 exhibitions let the processes that usually went on behind closed doors—from
“acquisition” to “curation” to “installation”—to go public for all to see.
From the PRC’s exhibition alone, the vast majority of artists participated, either with the same
work or with similar work, in different 9-11 exhibitions in 2002. RIGHT Cheryl Sorg’s work,
for example, The Missing Peace was central in the Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego’s
show, Without Borders, Transcending Terror (September 1-October 13). LEFT Liz Linder’s
God Bless America series was shown, as was LEFT Margaret Morton’s panoramas of missing
walls, in an exhibition, RIGHT New York after New York: Photographs from a Wounded City
(June 13-September 16), at the Musée De Lausanne in Switzerland. LEFT Steve Aishman’s
series featuring Boston locations linked to the events was featured in RIGHT SohoPhoto’s
Through the Lens of September 11 (September 5-28). As symbolized by this re-contextualizing,
the mutability of memory is perhaps even more important to point out than issues raised by any
single exhibition. The nexus created by the reshuffling of artifacts and artworks reminds us that
meanings, and thus memories, are not fixed.
LEFT of candles RIGHT BLANK Defined broadly, the first “exhibitions” could be seen to be
the public, uncurated make-shift memorials, located in various neighborhoods all across the
United States. As quickly as two weeks later, New York City Park officials began to tear down
these shrines. Interestingly, this phenomenon coincided with the time when major news
networks stopped playing the television footage on endless loops. Batchen remarked that
motion pictures were “replaced…with monochromatic still images, as if to displace the painful
perennial present of the moving footage with the more comfortable ‘having been there’ of the
static photograph.” Moving the memorials inside had the same ameliorating effect—placing
them in the past tense and halting the accumulation. Memorials were thus memorialized.
5

Batchen also points out that many missing posters and exhibitions “demonstrated that no one
image could capture the September 11 experience adequately; hence the need for this dense
collage, this chaotic fragmentation of memory.” As stated by on the Legacy Project’s website,
which is devoted to human tragedies of the 20 th century—“As we feel the shock of the attacks in
our own lives, we will build memories of people we did not know, at a time and place we were
not present.” Like a fragmented computer, RIGHT different memories, personal and
communal, were seemingly placed in vastly, disparate sections of our consciousness. We were
not sure of how the parts could possibly relate to the whole. Each exhibition was a snapshot of
what we, or others, thought felt one could deal with at the time. RIGHT Like a contact sheet of
photographic images, visitors were shown responses—amateur to professional—unedited.
Photographing the memorials of September 11 is akin to the popular nineteenth-century
practice of photographing extravagant casket floral displays. Both help to retain a trace of these
ephemeral objects. In retrospect, one wonders how these memorials began. Who lit the first
candle? How many people contributed to it? Curiously, it seems few photographs show the
vastness of these memorials. Most documentary photographers of 9-11 memorials adopted an
extremely close vantage point or documented them inch-by-inch in a composite fashion. LEFT
This consistent photographic viewpoint might be metaphoric for emotional distance. If these
memorials still existed, perhaps we’d take a step back.
LEFT RIGHT (blank blank)
503 photographs by 273 photographers from 68 countries,
toured the world for eight years, making stops in thirty-seven
countries on six continents. Over 9 million people saw
documentary images of life and death by photographers known
and unknown.
No, this clause is not describing “Here is New York”, LEFT seen here in a exhibition
announcement from the Corcoran’s current manifestation, or “September 11 Photo Project”—
LEFT two of the remarkable grass roots photography exhibitions mounted after 9-11—but a
1955 exhibition, The Family of Man. RIGHT The exhibition, curated by the Museum of
Modern Art’s Edward Steichen, was in itself a kind of memorial to post-war America. The
Family of Man featured copy prints hung in an unorthodox manner, a repeating image of a
flute player separated the various themes. The trajectory of love, birth, and death was
punctuated by a ghostly image of the atomic bomb. This image of destruction, however, is
curiously absent from the eponymous publication.
“Here is New York” and “September 11 Photo Project” each displayed over 3,000 photographs
responding to the tragedy. Both hung their photos in unconventional manners—taped and
pinned to walls—and both are touring internationally with over 22 venues to date. After the run
of Steichen’s masterpiece, it was housed in France to be reassembled almost 40 years later.
While it is too early to say whether any of the numerous photography exhibitions will reach the
stature of The Family of Man, these projects as well as the countless other exhibitions will
likely make ripe subjects for many future dissertations.
LEFT RIGHT Like the Family of Man, many of these exhibitions produced companion
books. Somehow, we still feel, even if we didn’t attend the original exhibition, that we
“experienced it.” Not only is it important to collect the abundance of visual responses, but also
to remember that they were affected by their contexts. For better or worse, we believe that the
passage of time brings perspective. Normally, state and national programs echo this belief by
requiring thirty to fifty years to pass after an event before a marker that commemorates it can
6

e erected. While exhibitions are different than markers and monuments, their effect on
people and their attitudes is no less profound. In the case of 9-11, most visitors to the traveling
exhibitions are likely not to have visited any of the crash sites. The exhibitions and books
therefore serve as traveling memorials. Instead of a static plaque or statue, they are constantly
transformed as they move through space and time. Ironically enough, they become less and
less public—from gallery wall to museum archive; from bookstore to library shelf RIGHT Seen
here in a display from the PRC show.
Modeled after democratic projects such as these, countless other institutions offered their
galleries as collecting repositories for community responses. “Here is New York” moved from
storefront to the institution that defined modernism and hosted the Family of Man—the
Museum of Modern Art. From February 28 through May 21, 2002, MoMA presented 150
photographs from their historic collections, together with invited images from everyday New
Yorkers and a digital display of “Here is New York.” As chief curator Peter Galassi stated in
the press release, “To make a photograph is to point out something that matters. . . . The
exhibition is an experiment. . . . We hope it will teach us how people feel about the city.
Perhaps it will also teach us something about photography.”
RIGHT A more recent exhibition, Picturing What Matters: An Offering of Photographs is
currently on view at the at the George Eastman House through January 20, 2003. Like,
MoMA’s exhibition, the Eastman House’s show is trifold: Thousands of images by community
members are shown alongside 125 works selected by the museum staff and images from
international news agencies. Intriguingly, the second portion includes “Joe Rosenthal’s historic
flag raising at Iwo Jima, Ben Fernandez’s portrait of Martin Luther King outside the United
Nations, and Dorthea Lange’s poignant Migrant Mother” and will travel worldwide. Seen in the
Norman Rockwell-esque exhibition announcement, images are presented as antidote, further
ingraining already iconic images into our minds.
LEFT Another exhibition had a similar morale-boosting aspiration. Life magazine
photographer Joe McNally captured almost 300 portraits in the weeks afterward 9-11, 85 of
which are currently finishing a national tour. The nine-foot by four-foot Polaroid images depict
the “Faces of Ground Zero.” The vernacular entered into these portraits in the form of the
accoutrements the sitters were encouraged to bring: a jackhammer, a flashlight, an oxygen tank.
In typical Time-Life fashion, this exhibition catalogue was only one of the many keepsake
books published. LEFT RIGHT The others included A Year in Pictures, One Nation seen here,
and most recently, The America Spirit: Meeting the Challenge of September 11. Curiously,
echoing the grid motif seemingly connected to 9-11 iconography and exhibition display, both
of the latter books featured photo mosaics.
A few days after the attacks, photographer Joel Meyerowitz contacted the Museum of the City
of New York about documenting the World Trade Center and its destruction for the purpose of
creating an archive. LEFT Ultimately numbering over 5,000 images, it will become a part of
the museum’s permanent collection. For Meyerowitz, documenting the tragedy and recovery
was linked directly to memory. He stated, “To me, no photographs meant no history.” The
Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the US State Department later asked the
museum and Meyerowitz to create a special exhibition from the ever-growing archive. The
show of 28 images is traveling extensively all over the world through 2003. Among the almost
100 venues cited, the settings include Jakarta, New Delhi, Islamabad, Jalalabad, and Kabul.
As stated on the website, 911exhibit.com, the aim is to “visually relate” the events to the public
and “to provide over overseas US diplomatic missions with a dramatic exhibit that reminds
foreign audiences of the extraordinary extent of the World Trade Center attacks, documents the
recovery efforts and portrays the threat terrorism poses to any metropolitan area, a threat that
must be combated at all costs.” Thus, the only photographer who was granted unprecedented
7

access to ground zero has not only built a powerful memory bank but one that will speak for
and about American politics as its travels all over the world. This seems to be the illustration of
what Young has observed regarding the promulgation of the illusion of shared memory, “if part
of the state’s aim...is to create a sense of shared values and ideals, then it will also be the state’s
aim to create the sense of common memory, as foundation for unified polis.”
The work of folklorist, ethnologist, and photographer, Martha Cooper brings us full circle.
Cooper was featured in both LEFT 6 Months, A Memorial in Boston and in a fascinating
exhibition on the same occasion, RIGHT Missing: Streetscape of a City in Mourning March 12-
July 7, 2002 at the New-York Historical Society. LEFT Shown in stark contrast to the Magnum
September 11 show which once occupied the same gallery, Missing showed real and recreated
memorials in a museum context—the public becoming artists unaware—and was a collaboration
with Citylore, a center for urban folk culture. LEFT RIGHT Merging high and low, the gallery
space allowed memorials from disparate places and times to come together. This show fell
under a larger, curiously-named rubric at the historical society—History Responds.
As stated on their website, History Responds included a collecting effort: “Residents in the area
have donated charred papers, shards of glass, a violently contorted Venetian blind (found in a
tree), and even vials and dust and debris gathered instinctively in the aftermath.” LEFT
Echoing this, the Museum of the City of New York intends to lend out sections of the preserved
Bellevue Hospital Wall of Prayer, while Fire Engine 6, the first to answer the call at the WTC,
is on exhibit at the New York State Museum. The strange lists of objects reads like an inventory
of a deceased person or the ephemera of a morbid museum. RIGHT Akin to issues raised by a
series by Joel Sternfeld seen on the right, is this the detritus of mourning, a bizarre national
fetish, or the stuff of material culture?
Even one year later, responses to these tragic events in the Boston area are still slowly
emerging. As a non-native Bostonian, I was struck by the city’s unique way of healing as well
as how it collectively dealt with its role in the tragic events. RIGHT On the right you see one of
the sentiments written on the PRC’s comment wall. Recent exhibitions in the Boston area
include Marcus Halevi’s year-long documentation of 9-11 memorials in New York, Washington,
and Pennsylvania, a group show, Paradox: artists respond at the Somerville Museum, and
Vermont photographer, Kevin Burbiski’s images of 9-11 spectators, Looking at Ground Zero, at
the Decordova Museum. A native of the Boston suburb Dorchester, photographer Eugene
Richards traveled to Boston to speak the week of September 11 th , 2002 on the occasion of his
elegiac exhibition and book, Stepping through the Ashes.
LEFT Seen here on the cover of Somerville, Massachusetts -based Doubetake Magazine’s
special edition, Burbiski allows us to bear witness to the formation of memories. As stated on
the Decordova’s exhibition card, Burbiski “chose to document people’s emotional reactions to
Ground Zero rather than the site itself.” LEFT RIGHT These moments of realization show
people grasping the situation in an intensely personal way. We imagine a multiplicity of
individual memories, not a sanctified remembrance of the state. It is fitting here that at this
juncture that we now choose, or museums have chosen for us, to observe and absorb people’s
reactions.
In his book, Lies Across America: What Our Historical Sites Get Wrong, James Loewen
reminds us of the importance of realizing by and for whom as well as when a monument or
memorial is constructed. What makes a successful memorial is not the passage of time—but its
ability to encapsulate historical perspective. Each tribute is a tale of many eras: the person or
moment being historicized and the time in which the memorial was erected. New York Times
writer Michael Kimmelman affirms this: “You will notice the speed with which the Oklahoma
City memorial…was undertaken. It wasn't until 1922 that the United States got around to
building a memorial to Lincoln, and even then it was controversial.”
8

Loewen offers a useful distinction that can be used to help us conceive of the immediate and
widespread memorializing that was and still is occurring after September 11. According to
societies in Eastern and Central Africa, the deceased are divided into two categories: the Sasha
and the Zamani: “The recently departed whose time overlapped with people still here are the
Sasha, the living dead. They are not wholly dead, for they live on in the memories of the
living…when the last person knowing an ancestor dies, that ancestor leaves the Sahsa for the
Zamani, the dead. As generalized ancestors, the Zamani are not forgotten but revered.” The
New York Times echoed this observation: “In 38 years, if present trends continue, half the
population will have been born after Sept. 11, 2001, says Prof. Andrew A. Beveridge of Queens
College, using Census Bureau projections.”
Most tombstones, Loewen cited, are products of the Sasha. Under this definition the September
11 make-shift memorials, art, and even this exhibition are Sasha-inspired as well. Those
memorials erected within weeks of someone passing, Loewen explains, “[are] sometimes the
most accurate….often located in quiet cemeteries or quiet parks, Sasha monuments and
markers often simply remember an event and those who died in it, often listing them (and
sometimes the living) by name.” LEFT RIGHT
For, coming from the Sasha, these exhibitions, like this paper, are merely products of their
time. However, it is important to collect and consider them now, for the Zamani. What future
9-11 exhibitions will be like, we can only guess. In the end, perhaps the “official” responses are
no grander than the assemblages of melted candles and crumpled photographs.
9

PHOTOGRAPHY THROUGH DOCUMENTATION AND INTENTION
Anna Heineman
Iowa City, IA
Through time, art has literally been written in stone. Whether it be the early Egyptians
preserving Pharaohs on the Palate of Narmer or the glory days of the Romans captured in
carvings, we can gain insight into their culture and lives through the documentation they left
us. Both early and contemporary critics have claimed that photography is purely a mechanical
process that documents objects but leaves no room for artistic interpretation. My argument is
that the artist can use photography as a powerful tool to document time by capturing the
essence of the subject, for the artist presents an image of the subject that will become a
permanent memory for the viewer.
The artistic intent of the photographer is vital to the outcome of the photo. Photographers,
defined here, are of a different caliber than the parent who takes pictures of a child blowing out
candles on a birthday cake. The exhaling cheeks captured mid-blow is a great picture for the
family photo album. To clarify, in order for a photograph to embody an essence, it must speak
to a broad audience of all ages and cultures, being powerful enough to print the image on the
viewer’s mind.
All art can capture a moment, though photography does it literally with the instantaneous snap
of a shutter. One only needs words to recall the famous images of a screaming Vietnamese child
running from the burning napalm, or the unforgettable pose of Marilyn Monroe with her skirt
billowing up around her. Although words have the power to express the horror of world chaos
or the voluptuous Monroe, descriptions are incomparable to the vivid black and white
photographs depicting the essence of both. Photography is a documentation of the times. This
photographic documentation that has only recently made a fingerprint in the entire history of
art has changed the way we view life.
The intent of the photographer is similar to that of the painter when documenting individuals,
for both artists aspire to capture the essence of the person. The painter has the power to
manipulate the subject to produce his or her intent. Painters and photographers sculpt their
subject with light and shadow. The difference being that painters can easily manipulate their
subject whereas photographers must work with what literally lies in front of the lens. A portrait
painter, such as Paul
Gauguin, can choose to soften the edges and capture the look in the eye to heighten the inner
being of the person. A talented painter can easily sweep the blemish off the cheek with the
stroke of a brush. Rosiness to the cheeks can be added and the squareness of the shoulders can
be more easily defined. A photographer, such as Imogene Cunningham however, has the raw
facts staring her in the face, with light and shadows being her paintbrush. The photographer
must manipulate the external factors, namely sunlight, darkness, or a lone spotlight, to capture
the same softened edges or glimmering eye that portrays the individual’s essence.
Capturing the epitome of an individual is challenging, especially when the person’s profession
is acting. The essence that defines an actor by nature is depicted most often on moving film.
Capturing a still frame portrait that displays personality can be challenging when body language
and movement define an actor. Clarence Sinclair Bull, George Hurrell, Joseph von Sternberg,
and Ruth Harriet Louise are only four of a group known as the great Hollywood portrait
photographers. These Hollywood portrait photographers of the 1930s had the talent to idealize
their subjects. They captured the essence of the stars during their era by epitomizing their
essence, and glorifying their individuality that made them actors. These portrait photographers
10

not only captured Greta Garbo, Carole Lombard, Marlene Dietrich, and Clark Gable on film,
they created the stars as the world knows them. By shadows, light, and composition, they could
make the actors look sad, sullen, or seductive. These portrait photographers did not merely
capture the image of the actor; they created the image of a star. The image of Greta, here, has
an almost angelic presence. Clarence Sinclair Bull used her hands to frame her face, with
everything being drawn to the perfect right eye. The illumination of her face and hands creates
the essence of a movie star rather than the presence of the-girl-next-door. The hands and face
of an actor are used in provoking emotion from an audience. The clenched fist of anger or the
worried lines of a forehead are an actor’s instruments. He chose her two features, the hands
and face, which are Greta’s tools in her field. The photographer intentionally takes her tools
and moulds her to how he desires. He centers on her face and hands, creating an idealized
beauty. Photography has the power to immortalize the stars, allowing them to
remain forever young and beautiful.
Photographing the effects of war, however, can make the viewer wince and shudder. Capturing
the essence of the moment can transport a viewer to the scene, exposing all harsh details and
rough exteriors. Robert Capa, a World War II photographer, shot this tragic scene on
D-day. The blurry movement of the picture compounds the palpable fear and determination of
the soldier. This shot shows a man’s brave effort to swim to shore. The moment captured in
time epitomizes the determination of a soldier. The viewer, decades after the incident, either
remembers a part of our country’s tragic past, or becomes a part of what previously had been.
With patriotism in mind, the photographer can intentionally inspire the viewer. “Raising the
Flag at Iwo Jima” is an epic moment that captured the passion of our country. Five faceless
men hoist the flag into position as Joe Rosenthal, the photographer, captured the scene.
Although fifty-six years separate the soldiers raising the flag at Iwo Jima and firemen raising
the flag after September 11th, the same nationalism is still embodied in these two photographs.
Both works of art make the observer remember the moment as well as those lives that were
lost, by giving them a glimpse of the scene. In both these instances, a brief moment in time was
captured, and will remain permanent.
Photographers can use the essence of a subject for evidence of the horror that is witnessed.
Margaret Bourke-White photographed the Holocaust, blatantly showing the harsh reality of life
behind barbed wire. The powerful title she chooses, “The Living Dead of Buchenwald” has the
power to stir up the uneasiness in one’s stomach. She personifies individuals, making each one
human by showing every pair of eyes behind bars. The black and white contrast adds to the
solemn feeling, depicting the dismal truth of the concentration camp. This powerful
photograph is terrifying evidence of our world’s history. Bourke-White’s work of art reminds us
of the dismay that should never happen again.
Photography was the weapon Lewis W. Hine used for evidence to protect children. Hine,
himself, was a victim of child labor. His childhood scars inspired him to free children from
horrific working conditions. Hine’s photographs showed young children, barefoot and dirty,
working from the wee hours of the morning into the late hours of the night. Hine
photographed these exploited children, and the evidence was used as documentation to end the
child labor practices. 1 His photographs succeed as both evidence and art, changing the laws to
help better
society as well as giving us poignant pictures of diligent children taken with an artful eye.
Photography as documentation is widely accepted, though photography as art is a common
topic of debate. Although Alfred Steiglitz defined photography as art long ago, the issue
remains scrutinized even today. Roger Scruton, a philosopher who published “Photography
and
11

Representation” in the late 1990s, accuses photography of being a surrogate of an object. A
surrogate, as he defines it, is the capturing of an object or person on film that is exactly the
same in reality. 2 To simplify his theory, if one takes a picture of a toadstool per se; it is the
surrogate of the toadstool that is displayed on film. Since the surrogate has no expression
behind it, neither the photograph nor the object represented has artistic value. In paintings, the
observer may look for the creator’s motivations in the properties of the works of art. If the
photograph is a surrogate, Scruton believes the aesthetic interest is diminished to appreciating
only the object represented. 3
I dispute this by pointing out the influence photography has had on other mediums. Degas's
painting of The Place de la Concorde imitates a photograph in his depiction of the candid pose
of the pedestrians. The subjects are captured in a photograph-like manner. The spatial
arrangements of the off-center Parisians have a snapshot appearance. They are depicted as
walking off the canvas with their minds cluttered with thoughts. With this idea, Degas’ painting
may be looked at as a surrogate as well, capturing people and objects on canvas that mimics the
actual scene. Perhaps Degas captured the surrogate by painting this particular still framed
moment he witnessed without manipulating the scene. Alfred Stieglitz’s The Street captures
similar candidness along the snowy urban streets. The off-center tree leads the eye down to the
horse and carriage. The carriage, with only the front wheel apparent to the viewer, has not yet
come into the picture. The horse-drawn vehicles disappearing into the blustery weather was
created by Steiglitz for purely aesthetic purposes. He shot this scene to record the feeling of the
place and the busy feel of the street corner mid winter. Degas’ painting embodies similar
informality of the Parisians walking in and off the scene. The still-framed shot of Degas’ The
Place de la Concorde and Stieglitz’s The Street intentionally incorporated the candid feel of the
place exemplified as art.
Although images of horse-drawn buggies and moon lit skies are created though a series of
chemical reactions, the artistic intent can still e included to make the work art. However,
individuals, both contemporary and past, have favored photography to be as science as opposed
to an art. The technical processes of a camera are simple enough for a child to press a button
with a picture immediately being taken on film. This stigma of the simplicity of photography
still looms. However, compare the technical processes of a photographer to that of a
sculptor or a painter. All use outside mechanisms to create their finished product. Ansel
Adam’s camera, Michelangelo’s chisel and Picasso’s brush are all tools used to aid in the
making of art. Think of Rembrandt's wood cut prints and Whistler’s etchings. Surely these are
more than mechanical processes that lack artistic intent. Photographers, printers,
sculptors, and painters alike strive for the concrete essence of their intention. Though a
painting is different from a photograph that is in turn unlike sculpture, all have an artist or a
collaborative group to strive for the vision each individual intends.
Intention in photography has changed dramatically through time, from capturing a seated
family dressed in their Sunday best to the compound eye of a fruit fly. The beginnings of the
Brownie camera led to posed and literal “still-lifes” of objects with people stopped in motion.
We have now progressed into the evocative, to produce photographs that invoke the
mind. Photographers now strive to capture the fleeting moment that those before us never
thought possible. Science is caught on film, such as the uniting of the sperm and egg. Life
being created is visible to the world through the aide of a camera and film. The essence of life
is created before our eyes and is trapped in history for the viewer to wonder in amazement.
Photography can epitomize the brief fleeting seconds that happen so quickly one forgets to take
notice. Through the photographic documentation of these moments, the world will learn,
become informed, persuaded, and convinced.
12

A photographic image can be fused into an individual’s memory as quickly and irrevocably as it
is captured on film at the click of a shutter. The power of a photograph can evoke feeling,
emotion, and desire in a viewer. Photographs can transport the viewer to the heat of the Sahara
desert to the depths of the blue sea. They show the poverty stricken, as well as the innocence of
a child and the gaze of two people in love. Photographs can take a viewer back in time, to get a
glimpse of society before we knew it, or to show minute life that cannot be seen with the
naked eye. Photography is an art form that documents existence. These photographs lead you
by the hand, showing the beauty of life. All you have to do is open your eyes.
NOTES
1. Monk, Lorraine. Photographs that Changed the World. Doubleday. New York, New
York, 1989.
2. Scruton, Roger. “Photography and Representation.” Arguing About Art. Alex Neill and
Aaron Ridley. Second Edition. Routledge, London, 2002, pp. 195-213.
3. Ibid.
13

MERITORIOUS OR MERETRICIOUS
Jacqueline Belfort-Chalat
Lemoyne College
The role of the artist in any given society, in any given place, and in any given time is extremely
varied. As I have tried to order my thoughts and feelings, I feel a bit like someone trying to catch a
fish in waters which vary from murky to limpid, with sharply shifting highlights and almost opaque
dark shadows. As a sculptor I am conscious of the need for structure. As a painter I think of a
support. Odd, isn’t it, that one says support, rather than surface. The surface is the end result of the
paint and other media placed on the support, whether it be a wall of stone or stucco, or canvas, or
board, or paper.
The Gospel according to John starts out "In the beginning there was the Word…" But I think that is
more of a metaphysical image. I tend to focus on the Genesis beginning which describes chaos. The
subsequent description of the creation process resembles the historic earthly start-up of human
beings attempting to imitate God by creating some sort of form and order out of the swirling setting.
Order implies a plan. And action implies a purpose. The usual purpose underlying the early objects
which could be construed as art is religious. These earliest forms are crude expressionist clay or
stone small sculptures of females with large bellies and hips and large pendulous breasts. Apparently
from the beginning humans realized a connection between fertility and females. We really cannot be
sure whether this was a desire for fertile human females, or fertility in connection with farm crops or
simply the wild fruits of the earth to be found and gathered.
Connected with the hunting theme we also have found crude animals carved or formed from clay,
and paintings on stone walls in caves or out in the open, showing the hunted and the hunters, with
the hunted being shown in much more realistic mode than the humans in the scene. We have
inferred that this type of art was created with the purpose of controlling the desired outcome . . .
namely provision in one form or another of the basic needs of sustaining life.
It is interesting that the Bible contains in the most basic list of rules, the Ten Commandments, an
interdict against making statues of gods. By extension Islam bans depicting all human form, and its
highest art consists of forms of the "word," a word not to be made "flesh" in the metaphor used by St.
John. However, I do find it interesting that initially God the Creator is not shown. Nor can I think of
male forms which predate the various Venuses such as the Willendorf. But by implication, the
biblical bans against creating images which could be set up and be worshipped implies that early on
a variety of gods were conceived, formed, and set up on altars both public and private.
Initially the artist or image maker was respected. Indeed, the artist, shaman, and chief were often one
and the same individual. But as time went by, and life become more complex and organized, roles
became more specialized. In a tribal setting, there might be a wise elder chief, a war chief, a
medicine man, and a wise woman serving the varied needs of the group. With agricultural and
herding, and camps becoming settlements which would grow into towns and cities, each category
grew into cadres. Councils or senates for governance, priests and priestesses, healers of both sexes,
and the military became formal divisions of the society as a whole, growing in size and importance as
the territory controlled by an initially small informal group grew.
1

All these various groups needed headquarters. Not only a place to meet, but where activities
pertinent to each category could be conducted. Buildings and spaces had to be clearly designated so
as to make explicit the specific activity and status of the societal group in question. Does this sound
like a work opportunity for artists? It does to me.
However, this is not work which springs from the curiosity of the artist's eye nor is it powered by the
heart's desire to give form to inchoate ideas. This is now a job, which can be described and overseen
not by an individual patron or a small group of cave-dwellers who will be dazzled by whatever is
done. Now we have stepped out onto the road leading to the realm of major projects, major money,
and the mass market.
Now the artist is not looked up to as a keeper of mysteries, a companion to whom God and Nature
whisper secrets. No, now the artist has been de-graded in status to a workman for hire, or worse by
far than this, degraded into the quasi-human status of slave. At this point we see the artist putting
skills not at the feet of the gods, but at the feet of human wanna-bes. Think of the demagogues of
Egypt Greece, and Rome and the erection of statues and temples in honor of individuals who
required, and indeed insisted and enforced, abject worship. Failure to provide suitable and
satisfactory groveling brought horrendous torture leading to death by means guaranteed to deny
human status to the soi-disant heretic enemy of church and state.
Some of the slave artists did very good work indeed. Some became famous in their own right, so that
thousands of years later, we all have a fair idea of the name and work of Praxiteles, for example. But
by and large we have no knowledge by name of the adorners of the various pyramids of Mayan
culture or Incan culture or Cambodian culture. Who made the convoluted decorations on Shang
bronzes, the terra-cotta armies of the Chin emperor, the bloated ladies depicted in the Tang dynasty
who somehow evolved from the sinuous women of the Han dynasty. Mysteriously the makers of
form shaped the prevailing mood and tone of different eras in different places.
Think about it. As humanity spread over the surface of the earth, different styles evolved, and the
face and form of humans also rearranged and changed in many subtle variations of shape and
texture and color. The Xenophobic choose to ascribe values or ranks to color, or shape of features, or
stature, or texture of hair. But peel off the skin, and the muscles and organs and blood are the same.
Blood types vary, but the categories are found in every race. The person in need of a transfusion
today needs only to know if the blood type matches. And most telling of all, humans from any part of
the globe can reproduce. If there were a biologic difference, this could not happen.
One of the very earliest influences on my thinking was the series which Malvina Hoffman did for the
Field Museum in Chicago. She traveled all over the world doing portraits for the collection called
The Races of Mankind. Outer shape and indeed posture and activity do vary. But what shines out of
each head through the facial expressions is intelligence.
The series of portraits in the Prado which Velasquez did in the 17 th century of the dwarf jesters of the
court also come to mind. Despite all the statues and paintings I've seen of the Passion of Christ, the
painting of Don Sebastian de Morra is for me the exemplar extraordinary of the combination of pain
and indomitable dignity. The slight tilt to the noble, indeed, handsome head contrasts with the dolllike
lifeless pose of the body whose humanity is revealed only in the clenched fists.
2

Images which once glimpsed pierce our hearts and remain with us forever are examples of the
meritorious. The subject matter doesn't have to be as lofty as human heads. Durer's lovingly careful
rendition of a segment of turf showing form, color, and rhythm, or Mondrian's orderly progress
towards distilling landscape or cityscape into his understanding of its essence has enriched anyone
who examines these works. Thus the exploration and interpretation of nature is in my opinion a
good and meritorious activity. To those activities and products which widen our eyes and broaden
our understanding at any level, we must award merit.
This holds true even when the artist is working for his living in a setting which is not that worthy of
merit. The portrait Goya painted of the Royal Family comes to mind. Talk about spindle-shanks
married to a shapeless sack. Indeed I have to give the Spanish throne credit for not tossing him out.
But thinking of Goya reminds me of his brushes with the Inquisition. In modern times art and
authority at its most naked has persecuted and pursued artists. This is authority which would strip
humans naked and torture them and kill them and try to suppress the work of mind, heart and hand.
Despotism can be found everywhere and in all times. It is not a twentieth century invention to create
the charnel houses of concentration camps. The monuments of bones and skulls scattered in the
wake of the Mongol hordes as they swept west, the varied trophy building of headhunters
everywhere, also remind us of another very strange human capability. We kill our own species. And
then we seem to have a great need to celebrate this in song and story, dance and glory, stone and
paint gory in detail, and frequently monumental in size and scope.
And guess who gets the job.
The nineteenth century poets of the Romantic movement liked to think that art is produced for art's
sake. I have never agreed with this. While at times the process and the search can be pleasurable,
producing art can be a physical and psychological ordeal. Driven by who knows what forces, the
artist probes and palpates his physical and social setting in an effort to understand his world. But
understanding is not enough. The artist, or at any rate, the professional artist also wants to
communicate his findings. The externalization into a physical form of the artist's inner thinking and
feeling produces art.
But it is a rare artist who will always be content with producing miniatures of expression. Sometimes
an artist wants to let the ideas leap forth and spread out. And oh so often it was the despot who
offered the biggest walls, the biggest palates, the biggest need for monumental art. In a society where
consensus is operative, it is difficult to find agreement about payment for art, much less agreement
about the need for art. In our present society what greets our eyes as we travel the roads are huge
posters or neon signs or television images blown up to epic proportions in areas such as Times
Square or the Ginza. But it is not unique art for the most part.
True, the countryside for miles on end has been wrapped in a variety of materials, and installation art
and performance art do get backing. But this is also ephemeral and cannot be even considered to
approach long-term existence. To find art which has lasted the longest, I think we have to go into the
churches and religious edifices of most religions of the world. I think the original purpose of the
religious art now in use was didactic. The precepts and stories of the organized religion were made
available to the majority of believers who were unable to read the sacred texts. It makes me wonder if
there have ever been studies done seeking a correlation between literacy and a ban on imagery made
material.
3

The monumental statues of the Gods, then the emperors starting with Augustus, then the statues of
the saints, Buddha and the bodhisattvas, colossi of every type and description, were subjects of
commissions which were surely as tempting to the artist as the apple offered in the Garden. And
sometimes the prize is much more humble. Food on the table, a roof overhead, clothing, indeed all
the trappings of life once one goes beyond the cave, furs, and food from field and stream are not to
be sneered at. Romney, Gainsborough, Sargent, are not really so very removed from the itinerant folk
artists who roamed the roads of colonial America, limning people for pride and posterity.
Nobody points a finger shaming portrait artists in general, who honestly recorded people ranging in
rank from the humblest to the highest of society. We do view with cold and mocking glances the
monuments which arise out of dictatorial regimes such as Fascist governments from Germany and
Italy to various South American locales. We also do not have any respect for the grandiose
Communist art of Russia and China and other satellite states. Dictator art in general strikes one as
empty of artistic value. I don't see much difference between the most elaborate forms of this genre
and the "art" of Kinkaide. Repetitive, produced by formula, and interchangeable, this is lifeless art
because it is not unique.
Life is both generic and unique at the same time. All humans have a head, heart and hands. We are
meant to be erect and to move from place to place on two rather than four limbs. Many of our
attributes are symmetrical, but close inspection demonstrates that we are slightly different in form
and measurements of our left side compared to our right side. We are asymmetrical within our
symmetry. Furthermore, we are so unique, not only in our outer shapes, but even within parts of our
individual cells. We are so unique that our DNA can identify an individual out of all the billions of
other humans. I hope this boggles your mind as much as it does mine.
Uniqueness also seems to be a requirement of art. The coldness of commercial art seems to me to be
a function of interchangeability. One billboard design can be used around the world. If you watch
Antiques Roadshow, you know that value is enhanced by scarcity, and anything which once was
produced in quantity, but is now just one or a few remaining examples, is worth a small fortune.
As I think about what I've been saying about the meretricious, I think I have been kind to the artists
who produce art which is less than great or borders on non-art. This benevolence extends only to
those who work to eat however. To the degree that the artist subverts his heart and mind to the
service of evil, then that person is accountable. At some point each artist, as indeed each individual
in any walk of society, must ask the most basic question. This asks if the action is aimed at producing
good, which always also contains truth. If the action is to spread untruth, or has a central aim of
causing harm, then one must conclude that the results of this action are meretricious and immoral.
If my musings about the origins of art have any validity, if art started in human attempt to probe the
mysteries of the universe, then the results of this probe will yield that which can stir and move others
to be more than would be the case if this art had not been produced.
The dictionary describes awe as an emotion of mingled reverence, dread, and wonder inspired by
something majestic or sublime. Art attempts to examine and interpret our world and all it holds. At
its best, art contains much that is awesome, at its worst it is simply awful. Because dread is an
element of the awesome, artists are frequently set at the margins of society, and in some eras were
segregated even after death. But artists will to some degree be cherished because this is the group of
4

humans who sometimes against great odds continue to try to share the deeply perceived truths which
the majority do not see or feel without the gifts of the artist.
5

SHARED SPACES, UNEXPECTED SOURCES
Bowdoin Davis, Jr.
Maryland Institute College of Art
This paper was presented this year (2002) at the Sixteenth Annual National Conference on
Liberal Arts and the Education of Artists, held by the School of Visual Arts in New York. The
thematic heading for this conference was Art Remembers, while this paper was positioned
within the category Borrowings: The Common Alphabet. This paper points out links between
commercial exhibition spaces and the spaces Marcel Duchamp’s pieces establish in a post-1912
world. My concerns with Duchamp here are partially dependent on research that led to my
book (2002) Duchamp: Domestic Patterns, Covers, and Threads, 1 though the concerns there are
differently focused.
Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) is well known for his Readymades, a category of art that applies
either to his found objects or to those that he has modified. While Duchamp has, by his
Readymade, presented a variant on the conventional hand-made artifact, his real contribution
may lie in his changing the framework within which the artifact is perceived. Exemplary of
these Readymades are Duchamp’s 1913 Bicycle Wheel (original 1913) (Fig. 1) and a suspended
snow-shovel (original 1913) (Fig. 2) seemingly titled with some anticipation, In Advance of the
Broken Arm.
Most of the objects that Duchamp presents as being readymade presuppose their manufacture
in workshops or factories, and in this, these pieces all lead us unsuspecting, away from the
conventions within which we once viewed art. Duchamp’s Readymades were proffered us
within the art environment; the objects themselves enable us to envision a surround different
from the art gallery. Rather than Duchamp only creating and displaying just the objects we see
as art, he also dragged with him much of the Twentieth Century, protesting, but buying his and
the descendants of his Readymades. It is the Readymade object which has evoked not only the
factory as it emerged from the industrial revolution of the Eighteenth Century, but as well, the
display space that each type of object carries with it, a space which is a function of the object’s
originally intended use, reason for manufacture, or even how it is promoted for sale. While it is
both the object and its framework that Duchamp presents to us for reconsideration, it is the
recontextualization that has wrought the most havoc upon the conventions that were presumed
to surround art and art-making.
When Duchamp unsuccessfully attempted to enter Fountain (a men’s urinal placed on a stand,
its back face-down) (Fig. 3), in a 1917 exhibition in New York held by the Society of
Independent Artists, 2 he was trying to place an object belonging to the domain of plumbing in a
space whose framework had been delimited by the conventions of artistic display; these were
the art gallery itself, and inside, the objects which were made to be exhibited in such a venue.
What made Fountain or many other Duchamp pieces problematic was the set of expectations

However, when an artist placed the object in that art exhibition space, the mere gesture of
inserting it in that space labeled the object as something that had to be considered as
belonging there. The result is that the piece took on the persona of a work of art, merely due to
the display space in which it was shown. Remember, we once assumed that the space of the
exhibition was the one in which the object belonged. Perhaps it did, but in Duchamp’s case,
the object carried with itself the associations it had with spaces in which it was manufactured
and/or then put to use. When we place these objects within the space of the art gallery, we
modify the function of the art gallery; the gallery space became partially or almost entirely
conflated with the modern exhibition space during the Twentieth Century.
In this process we have recognized the art gallery/museum for what it is, a commercial space;
both the display space and the objects that inhabit this space increasingly become an
extension of the commercial world.
In 1987, Barbara Kruger’s photo silkscreen on vinyl, Untitled (I Shop Therefore I Am) (Fig.
4), first screamed its now-twisted Cartesian “I think therefore I am” at us in terms of
contemporary consumer habits. It is an “in our face” insistence on the presence of the world of
commerce. Instead of thinking, we impulse-buy and do so with the vehemence afforded us by
the credit card, suggested by Kruger’s red card and its message in white letters which reads: “I
Shop, Therefore I am.” It is this assertion which has its roots in the industrial revolution that
emerged in the Eighteenth Century. The fusion of art and consumer-related images was to
emerge clearly with the 1851 construction of the Crystal Palace in London’s Hyde Park (Fig.
5). Unbeknownst to the generation of 1851 was the “credit card” referenced in Kruger’s
piece, even though the commercialism which has emerged since the mid-Nineteenth Century
has become part of some of the statements that artists have made in the latter part of the
Twentieth Century, and which they continue to make in our time.
The Crystal Palace, which housed London’s great exhibition of 1851, provides an exemplar
for the exhibition practices of many future international expositions. Successors to this London
exhibition of 1851 would trade upon its breadth and focus; amongst later exhibitions then,
there is one in particular that we need to examine for it will more-directly presage the role the
manufactured object would come to have within the context of art. This would be the large
trade exhibition of 1912 held in Munich, the Bavarian trade fair known as the Bayrische
Gewerbeschau.
As travelers emerged from the Munich train station in 1912, they were greeted by a signpost
(Fig. 6) bearing the initial letters “BGS” of the Bayrische Gewerbeschau at the top, and the
circle-enclosed emblems of the eight Bavarian districts as they were under King Leopold. 3
Near its base was a prominent sign; this told travelers not only that the show lasted from May
to October but also directed them to the exhibition grounds within Munich. The
Gewerbeschau was a trade exhibition though it included as well a mix of examples from the
fine and applied arts.
Inside this trade fair, in addition to machinery and pottery, were displays of many kinds of
arts, from puppets made by Steiff (Fig. 7) to rooms containing religious icons (Fig. 8).
2

We need to acknowledge that there had been other large trade fairs since the 1851
Exhibition in London; two international ones were held in Paris in 1889 and 1900. As will
become apparent, however, the 1912 Munich trade fair has more significance than we may
have previously considered. Local advertisements, not only in newspapers, but on street signs
as well, spread word of its presence; such notice could hardly have eluded visitors or for that
matter, the residents of Munich.
It is even more significant that the French artist Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) had arrived
in Munich in June of 1912; he was to spend two months there. 4 Duchamp had ample
opportunity to wander around Munich and the Gewerbeschau was a major attraction that
year.
Exhibitions as comprehensive in scope as the 1912 Munich Gewerbeschau provided huge
spaces for the display of products from an increasingly industrialized world.
The interior of Hall I (Fig. 9) was planned with a center aisle, with exhibition spaces to either
side, and a view of the hall (Fig. 10) leads us past these exhibition spaces and draws our
attention to the large circular image of Bavaria personified.
Hall II (Fig. 11) by Richard Riemerschmid at the 1912 Munich Gewerbeschau is shown here
as well, and it too contained displays similar to those found in Hall I. The exhibition
contained articles and machines made to appeal to the interest and demands of consumers
from a growing middle class.
A multitude of displays contained objects both from industry and home manufacture. These
objects were produced by skilled craftspeople and artists, and their exhibits existed almost sideby-side
5 within the 1912 Munich Gewerbeschau. Could Marcel Duchamp have seen the
1912 Munich Gewerbeschau?
To answer this question, one first needs to return to the mid-Nineteenth Century for the
prototype of this exhibition in Munich. The chromolithograph (Fig. 5) depicts products of
British manufacture within the Crystal Palace at the 1851 International Exhibition held in
London’s Hyde Park. In the left foreground of this image (Fig. 12) one sees visitors whose
presence is graced by portrait busts, both human and equine. Directly behind these displays is
a huge multifaceted lighthouse lamp. The products of industry (the new technology) and the
arts are enmeshed together in display as though they had forever been depicted this way.
Successors to this exhibition would continue such associations. Significantly, in this
exhibition, for the first time, the arts and manufactured goods of many nations were displayed
in one venue at what, by the end of the Nineteenth Century, would become routinely known
as a trade fair. Held primarily within Joseph Paxton’s modular cast-iron and glass structure,
this exhibition became the forerunner of international trade fairs where objects of all kinds
were exhibited; sometimes they occupied the same space, while at others they were in adjacent
but contiguous structures. This mid-Nineteenth Century commercial venture, designed to
attract both exhibitors as well as consumers from all countries, set the precedent for successive
3

national and international exhibitions. These fairs were to provide a meeting place both for
fine arts as well as for crafts manufactured either in home settings or commercial
establishments. Such exhibitions, and in the Munich of 1912, the Bayrische Gewerbeschau
was one of these, provided huge spaces for the display of articles and machine products from
an increasingly industrialized world. Thus, in the Munich 1912 fair, a multitude of displays,
both from industry and home manufacture, as well as from skilled craftspeople and artists,
existed side-by-side (Figs. 8, 10).
Exemplary of this are the adjacent exhibition rooms in the main hall; many objects could be
displayed almost side by side in a large hall. Just as easily, objects from many manufacturers
could appear in a single room as is seen in this photograph of an exhibition room displaying
the books published by Bavarian publishing houses or sold by other book dealers (Fig. 13). All
of this is part of the Munich Gewerbeschau.
An article by Duchamp scholar Thierry de Duve suggests explanations as to why Duchamp’s
art changed so dramatically after his 1912 summer visit to Munich.
de Duve says: 6
Our hypothesis is that this constellation of differences between
Paris and Munich was in itself capable both of displacing the
questions that Duchamp posed to himself about his practice
and of leading to new questions even if he was not yet aware
of them.
de Duve suggests that while in Munich, Duchamp could have become aware of the
Gewerbeschau in some manner, and that “[f]rom May to October 1912 Munich was the site
of a gigantic ‘industrial exposition.’ Or should we say an exhibition of ‘industrial art’? 7
We have been left to conjecture: de Duve concluded, even-handedly, that Duchamp “visited,
or did not visit” the 1912 Gewerbeschau. I find it difficult to remain in the realm of
conjecture, given the work Duchamp did while in Munich, although de Duve gingerly
suggests that the Gewerbeschau must have had “reverberations” which Duchamp could not
have helped but notice during that summer of 1912. One needs to look at this trade
exhibition, the 1912 Munich Bayrische Gewerbeschau, as essential to Duchamp’s revelations
that almost any object, and not just objects made to be “art,” could serve as art, and that in
doing so, these objects changed the nature of the space in which art is exhibited. The mix of
object types in the nearly adjacent spaces provided by the exhibitions at the 1912
Gewerbeschau was revelatory to Duchamp, for it offered him a new paradigm in which the
rarefied atmosphere of the gallery exhibition of “Fine Arts” was replaced by the commingling
of objects of all types. The commerce, in objects of the sort such as that which might be found
in an open-air bazaar, under the rubric of the Bayrische Gewerbeschau, had finally, and for
Duchamp, suddenly supplanted the traditional conventions of how art could be exhibited
and what it might be. The Gewerbeschau offered through the mix of exhibits from a multitude
4

of venues, some exemplars for what eventually would transmute into Duchamp’s
Readymades.
The Gewerbeschau also contained clues which I believe are important for Duchamp’s major
early piece, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even and also known as The Large
Glass (1915-1923) (Fig. 14). A look both at Duchamp’s 1912 Munich work as well as that
which followed its direction makes it difficult to believe that Duchamp was not in attendance
at the 1912 Gewerbeschau.
The May 9th 1912 issue of Die Illustrirte Zeitung, a newspaper widely published in
the cities of Leipzig, Berlin, Vienna and Budapest, contains a full-page drawing (Fig. 15) by
Ferdinand Spiegel with the header “Der Zug der Volker” (The Way of the People), while
beneath, the caption reads: Zur Bayrischen Gewerbeschau 1912 in München, Mai_Oktober
(to the Bavarian Trade Exhibition, 1912, in Munich, May-October). 8 Young and old,
heavy or svelte, nattily or exotically attired, children, adults and dog alike; are all shown
moving towards a banner at left emblazoned with the initials “BGS” of the just-opened
equivalent of an international exposition, the Bayrische Gewerbeschau. The depicted
magnetism of the trade exhibition almost portends the attraction which the large shopping
mall still has for people in the early Twenty-First Century: Consumerism was alive and well in
1912.
The halls of the 1912 Munich Gewerbeschau, d(Fig. 11)as in the case of the 1851 Crystal
Palace in London’s Hyde Park (Fig. 5), were temporary, designed for a focus on the
exhibitors, and in many places were constructed of materials such as cloth or paper, both of
which are still used today in the short-lived window displays in major chain stores in the
United States and Europe. Designed by Richard Riemerschmid, 9 an architect from the
Munich suburb of Passing, the main exhibition room, Hall I (Fig. 10) of the Munich
Gewerbeschau was a huge temporary space, its lower left and right areas crowded with
displays by exhibitors of machines, machine-produced artifacts, handwork of all sorts, and
even artifacts from home-based industries. Traditional art and the results of industrial
production were joined not only under one roof but also within the entire exhibition. This
exhibition, through Marcel Duchamp and his Readymades, has affected much of the art of
the rest of the Twentieth Century.
In the June 20th 1912 issue of the Die Illustrirte Zeitung appeared an article titled Moderne
Ausstellungstechnik (auf Grund der Bayrischen Gewerbeschau München 1912) (Modern
Exhibition Techniques on the Grounds of the Bavarian Gewerbeschau, Munich, 1912). It is
here that the purpose of the Gewerbeschau is laid out. Roughly translated, it reads in part: 10
What is new and worth mentioning is that beyond the
exhibition are several accompanying manifestations. There
you can watch the making of many things you use daily. You
never really know how these things are made. In our times the
manufacture of things, at least in larger cities, is withdrawn
into inaccessible factories. But how can somebody judge
5

whether a thing is good or bad, full of quality or meaning, if
one doesn’t know how it is made? From such thoughts came
the idea to show visitors to the Gewerbeschau (trade fair) how
blacksmiths and locksmiths, cobblers and box-makers, pottery
[Fig. 16] and glass-blowers, glove-makers and straw-hat
weavers, medal stampers and fabric-weavers, book- and
lithograph pressers, cabinet-makers and basket-weavers all
executed their work, how they brought their piece of work from
a raw product to the piece shown in the exhibition, how they
promoted it. The way this is done opens a new route to the
future on one hand, as much as it takes you back to the
memories of how your ancestors produced things. Who were
these ancestors, who worked under other material conditions
and who could work with much more peace and quiet? Such
exquisite examples of pieces with the older craftsmanship, done
with especially high standards, are shown for comparison and
inspiration next to the products of our times. They are taken
out of their stiff existence in museums and brought into the
fresh vibrant life of our day. They are fulfilling, on every part,
the very mission that is the leitmotif of the Gewerbeschau: To
represent and elevate the good taste both amongst the
producers and consumers. (Emphasis added.)
Already then in this early 1912 promotional article for the Gewerbeschau, the connection
between the making of old and new is made while its purpose is clearly a concern with
maintaining the quality of yesteryear’s products in those produced in the Bavaria of 1912.
The way to do this was to show older craftsmanship side-by-side with the articles then being
produced. Whether or not Marcel Duchamp read all of the material attendant to the
exhibition, the mixture of artifacts from such different venues and with such different forms of
manufacture must have made an impression upon him. It was not long after he returned to
Paris that he produced his first Readymade.
Finis
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Davis, W. Bowdoin, Jr. Duchamp: Domestic Patterns, Covers, and Threads. New York:
Midmarch Arts Press, 2002.
de Duve, Thierry. “Resonances of Duchamp’s Visit to Münich.” In: Dada/Surrealism:
Duchamp Centennial, no. 16:41-63. Association for the Study of Dada and
Surrealism, 1987.
Tomkins, Calvin. Duchamp: A Biography. New York: A John Macrae Book; Henry
Holt and Company, 1996.
6

CATALOGUES, REPORTS AND PERIODICALS
Bayrische Gewerbeschau 1912 in München: Amtliche Denkschrift. Published by the
Board of Directors. München: Delphin Verlag, 1913.
Illustrirte Zeitung, Nos. 3593. Published in Leipzig, Berlin, Vienna, and Budapest, 1912.
“Moderne Austellungstechnik (auf Grund der Bayrischen Gewerbeschau Munchen 1912),”
Illustrirte Zeitung, No. 3599. Published in Leipzig, Berlin, Vienna, and Budapest,
1912.
NOTES
1. Bowdoin Davis, Duchamp: Domestic Patterns, Covers and Threads (New York,
Midmarch Arts Press, 2002).
2. Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography (New York: A John Macrae Book;
Henry Holt and Company, 1996), p. 200.
3. Before 1945, Bavaria was composed of eight Regierungs-Bezirke (districts) whose
district shields are shown, (Figure 6), left to right, beginning at the top: (1)
Oberbayern, (2) Niederbayern, (3) Pfalz, (4) Oberpafalz, (5) Oberfranken, (6)
Mittelfranken, (7) Unterfranken, (8) Schwaben and Neuberg, with its capital at
Münich.
4. Tomkins, p. 93.
5. Bayrische Gewerbeschau 1912 in München: Amtliche Denkschrift herausgegeben
vom Direktorium (München: Delphin Verlag, 1913), pp. 85-90. On page 86 is a
description of the main hall, Halle I.
6. de Duve, Thierry. “Resonances of Duchamp’s Visit to Münich.” In:
Dada/Surrealism: Duchamp Centennial, no. 16:41-63. Association for the Study
of Dada and Surrealism, 1987, p. 44.
7. de Duve, p. 59
8. Illustrirte Zeitung, No. 3593 (9 May, 1912): p. 995. Published in Leipzig, Berlin,
Vienna, and Budapest.
9. Bayrische Gewerbeschau 1912 in München: Amtliche Denkschrift herausgegeben
vom Direktorium (München: Delphin Verlag, 1913), pp. 85-90. On page 86 is a
description of the main hall, Halle I.
10. Illustrirte Zeitung, No. 3599 (20 June, 1912): p. 1290. Published in Leipzig,
Berlin, Vienna, and Budapest.
7

REMEMBERING RABINDRANATH TAGORE
Mark W. McGinnis
Northern State University
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) is not a household name in the West as is the name of
his contemporary, Mahatma Gandhi, but in India many hold him in equally high regard.
Tagore was first and foremost a prolific writer. He produced poetry, plays, short stories, novels,
essays, letters, lectures, and a profusion of miscellaneous writings. He was also an innovative
educator, a popular and well-traveled lecturer, a beloved composer of over 2000 songs, and
late in life a painter. He was considered a leading nationalist in India’s struggle for
independence from British rule. But he was a nationalist who was strongly against any form
of nationalism or militarism that pitted one nation against another. He was considered by
many Indians to be a national treasure and a primary voice of Indian culture and heritage.
He was also an adamant proponent of fusing the best of the East and West to create
harmony in what he saw as the inevitable merger of cultures coming in the future. His
visionary stance on this matter made him a controversial figure in some Indian circles.
Tagore came to the attention of the West in 1911 when a slim volume of his poetry was
published in England. He did the translation from his native Bengali to English, and a
heart-felt introduction was written by W. B.Yeats. The book was titled Gitanjali (Song
Offerings). It is a series of 103 short poems that explore the human search for the spiritual. The
depth of beauty and insight in the poetry took the West by storm and in 1913 he became the
first non-European to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. His fame was fortified by more
publications and in 1915 he was given a knighthood by the British. He returned that honor
in 1919 to protest the Armistar Massacre where 50 British soldiers opened fire on 10,000
unarmed Indian men, women and children, killing 400 and wounding 1200.
The complexity and quantity of Tagore’s contributions to humanity are complied in 29 large
volumes that contain his written words and the numerous biographies that have attempted
to document his life. In this essay I would like to focus on some of his perceptions on aesthetics
– his vision of beauty and truth. As we move into the technology dominated 21 st Century, I
feel the deep humanity of Tagore’s perceptiveness and wisdom has much to offer us.
I would like to focus on one particular lecture he gave at the University of Dacca in 1926. It
was refined into written form under the title of The Religion of an Artist in 1936. This
remarkable statement on aesthetics was produced late in his life, five years before his death at
the age of 80. It expresses the purity of his search for beauty and truth and also his sharp,
critical analysis of modernist aesthetics.
In the lecture Tagore says:
That fact that we exist has its truth in the fact that everything else does exist,
and the “I am” in me crosses it finitude whenever it deeply realizes itself in the
8

“Thou art.” This crossing of the limit produces joy, the joy that we have in
beauty, in love, in greatness. Self-forgetting, and in a higher degree, selfsacrifice,
is our acknowledgement of the infinite. This is the philosophy that
explains our joy in all arts, the arts that in their creation intensify the sense of
unity which is the unity of truth we carry within ourselves. The principle of
unity which it contains is more or less perfectly satisfied in a beautiful face or a
picture, a poem, a song, a character or a harmony of interrelated ideas or facts
and then for it these things become intensely real, and therefore joyful.
Tagore is expounding the essence of beauty and truth as found in the permeating principle of
unity. A unity that can only be truly understood when we are able to transcend the
singularity of the self and see the deep unbreakable unity of all creation. In that realization is
not only truth and beauty but also innate joy of understanding—of awakening.
Later in lecture he continues:
In perfect rhythm, the art form becomes like the stars which in their seeming
stillness are never still, like a motionless flame that is nothing but movement. A
great picture is always speaking, but news from a newspaper, even of some
tragic event, is stillborn. Some news may be a mere commonplace in the
obscurity of a journal, but give it a proper rhythm and it will never cease to
shine. That is art. It has the magic wand which gives undying reality to all
things it touches, and relates them to the personal being in us. We stand before
its productions and say: I know you as I know myself, you are real….
This observation of the power of unity and rhythm to tie itself to the unity that exists within
us explains not only our joy and attachment to great works of art but also our acquiescence
and subordination to the world of advertising that has used some
of the most creative artistic minds of the 20th century.
Tagore continues:
This sensitiveness to the touch of things, such abundant delight in the
recognition of them, is obstructed when insistent purposes become innumerable
and intricate in our society, when problems crowd in on our path clamoring
for our attention, and life’s movement is impeded with things and thoughts
too difficult for a harmonious assimilation.
This has been growing evident every day in the modern age, which gives more time to the
acquisition of life’s equipment that to the enjoyment of it. In fact, life itself is made secondary
to life’s materials, even like a garden buried under the bricks gathered for the garden wall.
Somehow the mania for bricks and mortar grows, the kingdom of rubbish dominates, the days
of spring are made futile and the flowers never come.
Our modern mind, a hasty tourist in its rush over the miscellaneous, ransacks cheap markets
9

of curios which mostly are delusions. This happens because its natural sensibility for simple
aspects of existence is dulled by constant preoccupations that divert it. The literature that it
produces seems always to be poking her nose into out-of-the-way places for things and effects
that are out of the common. She racks her resources in order to be striking. She elaborates
inconstant changes in style, as in modern millinery, and the product suggests more the polish
of steel that the bloom of life.
Fashions in literature that rapidly tire of themselves seldom come from the depth. They belong
to the frothy rush of the surface, with it boisterous clamor for recognition of the moment…. Its
expressions are often grimaces, like the cactus of the desert which lacks modesty in its
distortions and peace in its thorns, in whose attitude an aggressive discourtesy bristles up
suggesting a forced pride of poverty. We often come across its analogy in some of the modern
writings which are difficult to ignore because of their prickly surprises and paradoxical
gesticulations. Wisdom is not rare in these works, but it is a wisdom that has lost confidence in
its serene dignity, afraid of being ignored by crowds which are attracted by the extravagant
and the unusual. It is sad to see wisdom struggling to be clever, a prophet arrayed in caps
and bells before an admiring multitude.
While Tagore is referring to literature every comment rings true when applied to the visual
arts, and it seems the comments are even more relevant to the post-modern era than to the
modern era in which he was writing. His observation on our headlong rush to accumulate
rather than experience forms the basis on how our innate sense of unity has been buried under
a pile of vacuous titillations that make up much post-modern art and entertainment. The
proponents of this art often site the reflection of reality and culture as their justification.
Tagore has a response for them:
It has often been said by its advocates that this show of rudely loud and cheaply lurid in art
has its justification in the unbiased recognition of facts as such; and according to them
realism must not be shunned even if it be ragged and evil-smelling. But when it does not
concern science but concerns the arts we must draw a distinction between realism and reality.
In its own wide perspective of normal environment, disease is a reality which has to be
acknowledged in literature. But disease in a hospital is realism fit for the use of science. It is an
abstraction which if allowed to haunt literature, may assume a startling appearance because
of its unreality. Such vagrant specters do not have a proper modulation in a normal
surrounding; and they offer false proportions in their features because the proportion of their
environment is tampered with. Such a curtailment of the essential is not art, but a trick which
exploits mutilation in order to assert a false claim to reality. Unfortunately men are not rare
who believe that what
forcibly startles them allows them to see more than the facts which are balanced and
restrained, which they have to woo and win. Very likely, owing to the lack of leisure, such
persons are growing in numbers, and the dark cellars of sex-psychology and drugstores of
moral virulence are burgled to give them the stimulus which they wish to believe to be the
stimulus of aesthetic reality.
There can be no doubt that many in the art world and many more in popular culture have
10

een duped into believing in the unreality produced by the out-of-context use of the violent,
ugly and sensational. There can be no doubt that the violent, ugly and sensational do exist
in our culture—and globally—they are real. But the supremacy and prominence of which they
are portrayed is tremendously unrealistic. By making them the leading aesthetic of our culture
we condemn ourselves to their dominance. It is difficult in an age where reality has been so
distorted by emphasis on the adrenaline-stimulating dark and the abnormal to even know
that the unity and harmony can exist for us, but it does exist and it is the true reality.
Tagore concludes the lecture with the following words:
It is for the artist to remind the world that with the truth of our expression we
grow in truth. When the man-made world is less an expression of man’s
creative soul than a mechanical device for some purpose of power, then it
hardens itself, acquiring proficiency at the cost of the subtle suggestiveness of
living growth. In his creative activities man makes nature one with his own
life and love. But with his utilitarian energies he fights nature, banishes her
from his world, deforms and defiles her with the ugliness of his ambitions.
The world of man’s of manufacture, with its discordant shrieks and swagger, impresses on him
the scheme of a universe which has no touch of the person and therefore no ultimate
significance. All the great civilizations that have become extinct must have come to their end
through such wrong expression of humanity; through parasitism on a gigantic scale bred by
wealth, by man’s clinging reliance on material resources; through a scoffing spirit of denial,
of negation, robbing us of our means of sustenance in the path of the truth.
It is for the artist to proclaim his faith in the everlasting Yes—to say: “I believe that there is an
ideal hovering over and permeating the earth, an ideal of that paradise which is not the mere
outcome of fancy, but the ultimate reality in which all things dwell and move.”
I believe that the vision of paradise is to be seen in the sunlight and the green of the earth, in
the beauty of the human face and the wealth of human life, even in objects that are
seemingly insignificant and unprepossessing. Everywhere in this earth the spirit of paradise is
awake and sending forth its voice. It reaches our inner ear without our knowing it. It tunes
our harp of life which sends our aspiration in music beyond the finite, not only in prayers and
hopes, but also in temples which are flames of fire in stone, in pictures that are dreams made
everlasting, in the dance which is ecstatic meditation in the still center of movement.
In a time where negativism, nihilism, and pessimism dominate, Tagore’s call for us to open our
eyes to the paradise of unity and harmony that surround may sound either naïve or
visionary. For me it is a visionary call. A call that asks us to rise above the chaotic discord of
the piles of rubbish we have heaped around us and find the beauty that is at the center of
existence -the
ultimate unity of which we are an indispensable part. For an artist reared, educated, and
matured in the frenzied variety of the postmodern world to find the quiet unity of the center
may seem an unreachable task, but once again, Tagore shows us a way—the way of an artist.
11

Let me conclude with two poems from Tagore’s Gitanjali.
Gitanjali LXIX
The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs
through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.
It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth in numberless
blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers. It is
the same life that is rocked in ocean-cradle of birth and death, in ebb and in
flow.
I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life. And my
pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.
And, Gitanjali XX
On the day when the lotus bloomed, alas, my mind was straying, and I knew
it not. My basket was empty and the flower remained unheeded.
Only now and again sadness fell upon me, and I started up from my dream
and felt a sweet trace of a strange fragrance in the south wind.
That vague sweetness made my heart ache with longing and it seemed to me
that it was the eager breath of the summer seeking its completion.
I knew not then that it was so near, that it was mine, and that this perfect
sweetness had blossomed in the depth of my own heart.
We in the arts have the “magic wand” that Tagore earlier referred to. We have the ability
and responsibility to use that wand to illuminate the truth, or we can, as so many have in
recent decades, use the wand exploit the underbelly of our culture. It is up to the individual
whether they wish to remain in the muck and mud of the lotus roots or rise to transcendent
beauty and
glory of the blossom.
It may be said of Tagore that he was ahead of his time, but I don’t believe that is true. He
was most certainly a man of his time but also a man who is timeless. His work would ring as
true and beautiful if it was written in 500B.C., 1200A.D., 1912, 2002 or 2102.
The lecture, “The Religion of an Artist,” may be found in its entirety in The English Writings
of Rabindranath Tagore, Volume 3, pp. 683-697, Sahitya Akademi, New Dehli, 1996. The
second part of the lecture, where the above quotes are found, is also published under the title,
“The Religion of an Artist,” in A Tagore Reader, pp. 230-240, Beacon Press, Boston, 1961.
12

Gitanjali is available from numerous publishers including a $1.50 volume from Dover Thrift
Editions or a $1500.00 handmade artist’s book available in the spring of 2003 from me.
13

MONUMENTS IN MINIMALISM: SAFELY UNIVERSAL
David Evenhuis
University of Pennsylvania
I. Introduction
Let me begin with an image. A week after the events of September 11 th , the New York arts
community, just as the rest of the nation, gradually began the tremendous task of simply
returning to everyday work. Theaters on Broadway reopened, the New York City Opera
performed, the Met resumed its season. Each venue marked the return to work in its own
ways—say, by offering free performances or with the singing of “God Bless America”—but
almost universally present at these performances, as it was at thousands of high school football
games, school plays, even the World Series, was a single gesture: a moment of silence.
Elegant, restrained and austere, a simple moment of silence can be a profound and powerful
act that frames emotions often too deep and complex to be handled appropriately with words.
Authors as diverse as Shakespeare and Wittgenstein have suggested that silence is all we have
when dealing with the deepest mysteries in life. Composer John Cage’s most famous musical
work is structured of three movements totaling four minutes and thirty-three seconds—of
silence. Cage claimed that his intent was to provide a frame of time for individuals to focus on
the natural sounds of life; thus, the normally intrusive ringing of a cellular phone in a concert
hall would be just as much part of the performance of 4’33” as the gentle whir of an air
conditioning system. Attending a performance of this composition reminds observers in a
dramatic way that silence is never really so silent—it is full of aural content. In the same way, a
moment of silence observed at Yankee Stadium is not as nearly as simple and benign as it may
initially appear.
The moment of silence has unquestionably become our contemporary standard for a public
remembrance of tragedy or death. It is tasteful, unobjectionable, simple (it certainly does not
take much involved preparation), and appropriate at most any event. It has replaced public
oration, eulogy and prayer in our offering of a small memorial of remembrance for the dead,
and in many ways it is a perfect statement for our politically correct times. But the moment of
silence is part of a more pervasive trend for our public memorials to employ an aesthetic of
Minimalism in their design.
This paper seeks to determine the reasons why an aesthetic of Minimalism has become so
dominant in shaping public acts of remembrance over the last generation. After examining
some basic principles of Minimalist design, and why such features work so well in public art
and memorials, I hope to offer a critique of the explicit and implicit political and social
motivations that often drive these large projects. However, in the end it will be shown that
Minimalism has an amazing ability to preserve its aesthetic integrity as a form of public art, and
it may still offer us the best solution when faced with our current daunting task of constructing
an appropriate memorial to remember the dead from the 9/11 tragedies.
II. MINIMALIST BACKGROUND
1

The Columbia philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto, writing in an article for the Nation
magazine on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, makes a useful distinction between a public
monument and a public memorial. He states that a monument celebrates a victory, whereas a
memorial mourns the dead. Thus, we have the Washington Monument confidently thrusting
into the sky counterbalanced by the Lincoln memorial, a low-lying Greek temple of hushed
reflection. 1
The act of remembering a tragedy publicly has become a necessary component of
contemporary life. From the Holocaust, to the Vietnam War, to the bombing at Oklahoma City,
we have become aware not only of the need to recognize the emotional impact of our tragedies,
but we have also been more quick to identify these tragedies as historically important. We are
moved forward to ever quickening memorial construction by both the charge never to forget
our dead, as well as to reinforce our own pragmatic identity as resilient survivors. (Consider for
example that the Lincoln Memorial was not authorized until 1911, and not completed until
1922.) We have also become, especially in the United States, much more aware of ourselves as
a culturally mixed nation where the necessary and democratic claims of respecting diversity
have filtered into all aspects of contemporary life. Thus, when faced with the task of creating a
public memorial, designers and politicians must face the competing demands of the general
public, the families of the deceased, as well as art experts—all of whom have legitimate claims
to feeling a deep sense of ownership in the memorial. So the urgent question becomes: What
type of memorial design will best fulfill our needs?
Writing for the New York Times this past January, Michael Kimmelman provides an excellent
brief history of the use of Minimalism in recent memorial design. He rightfully states that “The
purpose of a memorial is to get people talking, so that the memories being honored are kept
alive after the events memorialized pass into history.” 2 In the most easily recognized case of a
successful contemporary memorial, Maya Lin’s 1982 Vietnam Veterans Memorial in
Washington D.C., this purpose has been achieved in particularly dramatic fashion. Situated
between Washington’s obelisk and Lincoln’s temple, Lin’s memorial is a refined exercise in
restraint and provides us with a useful primer on the basic elements of Minimalist design.
Lin’s famous memorial design grows out of the artistic and theoretical work of first-generation
Minimalist artists in the 1960’s such Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Robert Morris, and Carl Andre,
along with the earlier antecedent work of painters such as Barnett Newman and Frank Stella.
Minimalism focused on creating a kind of middle ground between that of painting and
sculpture, creating three-dimensional objects which were often projected out from walls or
brought directly into the viewer’s space—namely sculpture which was brought down off the
pedestal. The pieces tended to have tight geometric structures, and usually possessed either a
monochrome or highly reductive color scheme. Additionally, the use of repetition became a
hallmark of Minimalist design—grids, stacks, and linear patterns were used to full artistic effect.
A quick glance at the Vietnam memorial reveals the implementation of these basic Minimalist
principles. The structure is composed of two highly polished mirror-like black granite walls
which ascend, and descend, from single points to meet at a gently-angled central hinge over ten
feet high. The only adornment on the walls is, of course, the names of all the U.S. soldiers who
either died in the Vietnam War, or were still listed as missing in action at the time of the
memorial’s construction. Ordered by year of death, the names are presented all in identical
2

font, in tight grid-like formation, which intensifies the sense of stillness already brought by the
black background.
By combining elements of repetition, reduction, and geometry with the natural intensity and
specificity of a list of names, Lin has created the most visited, and perhaps most beloved,
memorial on the Washington Mall. However, the idea of listing the dead has antecedents
stretching back much further than the 1960’s. In many small towns and big cities throughout
the U.S., monuments and memorials to the Civil War stand with the names of local soldiers
who died in battle. Even Herodotus tells of an ancient battle in which an entire battalion of
three hundred Spartans were killed fighting with a unified Greek army against King Xerxes at
Thermopylae. Their heroism was so revered that soon after the battle, stone pillars were
erected on which all three hundred names were inscribed.
Similarly, the beauty and effectiveness of the actual design principles espoused by the
contemporary Minimalists were fully recognized by the Greeks as well. Xenophon, the other
major chronicler of the life of Socrates, has one of his interlocutors in the Oeconomicus wax
poetically about simple good housekeeping.
How beautiful it looks when shoes are arranged in rows, each in its proper
place, how beautiful to see all kinds of clothing properly sorted out, each kind
in its own proper place, how beautiful bed-linens, bronze pots, table ware…
even pots appear graceful when they are arranged in a discriminating manner.
It follows from this that all other things somehow appear more beautiful when
they are in regular arrangement. 3
It is clear from the statement above that the essential ideology of Minimalism has long been
recognized to be a basis for beauty which provides a context of austerity, derived from its
elemental form and abstract nature, that appeals not only to human rationalism, but also incites
great emotional intensity.
III. CRITIQUE
Even though it is clear that a Minimalist aesthetic can be used to great effect in the design of
public memorials, the ascendancy of this artistic vision over the past twenty years raises deeper
questions regarding the reasons why Minimalism has become so dominant in the public realm.
A simple overview of corporate art collections, for example, reveals an overwhelming
preponderance of Minimalist works. They have become the blue-chip standard of corporate
collecting—they are guaranteed to increase in value, they are easily accessible and appreciable
even to a public not grounded in art history, their often large scale is metaphorically in synch
with the expression of power, and because of their purposeful lack of narrative content, they
offend practically no one. The only major offense that Minimalist works usually provoke from
skeptical onlookers is aesthetic in nature—simply that they are too easily constructed. (Why
didn’t I think to paint a white stripe on a red canvas and laugh all the way to the bank á la
Barnett Newman?)
For the most part, though, Minimalist artists are not provocateurs. They are not in the game of
crafting a breast for the Virgin Mary out of elephant dung, or constructing a Nazi death camp
out of Legos (to recall two recent New York controversies). Rather, Minimalist works such as
3

the jewel-like stacked boxes of Donald Judd, or the florescent light constructions of Dan Flavin,
have no narrative content whatsoever. Depending upon one’s interpretation, these works may
have either purely visual content (based say on geometric relations or the play of light and
shadow), or they provide a context for deeper feelings of meditation and reflection (though the
actual content of these feelings is certainly vague and inherently personal).
In spite of the fact that Minimalist artists may have the intent of leaving out traditionally
objectionable material from their work, this is not to say that the tradition of Minimalism has
been completely free of controversy. At his first major exhibition in England, American artist
Carl Andre—whose seminal work often consisted of floor-bound rectilinear arrangements of
construction bricks and metal squares—was lambasted by the British tabloid press as an artistic
con man, much the way that the sometime Minimalist British artist Damien Hirst was mocked
earlier this year by the American newspaper columnist Dave Barry. In his weekly syndicated
column, Barry curmudgeonly identified Hirst’s groupings of piles of garbage at a recent gallery
show as the absolute worst kind of artistic charlatanism. Additionally, we only have to
remember back to the mid-1980s for another chilly public reception to a major Minimalist
work—Richard Serra’s “Tilted Arc.” The piece was composed of a single enormous gentlyarcing
sheet of rusted Corten steel, and was installed in the plaza of a federal office building in
downtown Manhattan. Many of the office workers in the building absolutely hated the work,
claiming that it ruined the plaza to morbid effect and created additional hassle by blocking
natural pathways to the building. Even some brave art critics such as Danto maintained that its
removal would, in fact, be for the best. He claimed that while the work may possess artistic
merit, and even beauty in itself, it is simply to antagonistic to work as public art. After a
lengthy and vicious court battle, the work was removed in 1989.
But, perhaps the most relevant controversy for our present concern is the Vietnam Veterans
Memorial. Today the memorial is beloved largely because of the uniquely personal experience
which individuals have there, and this personal vision is a direct result of having to read so
much into the work; that is, there is no explicit political, religious, or nationalistic narrative to
direct our experience. However, when it was unveiled in 1982, many right-wing politicians
derided the work as a subverted liberal ideology. It was said that the black granite walls
represented shame, failure, and humiliation, and the experience of descending its ramps was
metaphorically too close to a descent into hell. Moreover, these critics, along with several
prominent conservative veterans groups, maintained that a simple list of names was not
properly heroic, and that only traditionally representational art could do our soldiers justice. As
a political consolation, a grouping of three realistic looking (and ethnically diversified) U.S.
soldiers, designed by the Washington D.C. sculptor Frederick Hart, was installed near the main
wall two years later. Ironically, even though Hart was commissioned largely through the efforts
of conservative political interests, he himself was very active in the anti-war effort during the
Vietnam conflict. Additionally, in 1993, a third piece was added to the memorial puzzle, when a
realistic bronze grouping of three uniformed women holding a wounded male soldier was
installed near the other sculptures. The addition of realistic figures to the Vietnam memorial
does not necessarily constitute a perversion of an originally pure artistic vision; rather, it is
simply illustrative of the complexities faced by a memorial designer, and it is also indicative of
the possible aesthetic and emotional limitations which a Minimalist framework inherently
possesses when brought to the public arena.
IV. MONUMENTS TO MINIMALISM
4

At the height of the Minimalist movement in the late 1960’s, the critic Michael Fried leveled an
influential attack against what he referred to as “literalist” art in his essay “Art and
Objecthood.” 4 In the essay, Fried argues that the movement is appropriately literalist because
nothing is being represented, or put into a series of special relationships, as are colors and lines
in the pictorial space of a painting—even the most abstract painting. Instead, Minimalist artists
seek to emphasize the literal shape of a three dimensional object by putting the observer into
its immediate physical space—for example, walking around a six-foot steel cube by Tony Smith.
Fried insists that this “espousal of objecthood” amounts to a justification of a new kind of
degenerate theatricality; and this sense of the theatrical, or even of staging—that is, placing the
viewer into direct confrontation with the work—reduces the rarefied and disinterested aesthetic
experience accompanying the best painting and sculpture of the past to a kind of cheap and
mundane literal experience of present works.
What Fried could scarcely notice though in 1967 is that perhaps this very feature of
theatricality may account for the already acknowledged deep emotional effectiveness of
minimalist works, and likewise may explain just why Minimalist design has been so successful
for public memorials. For, in a memorial which remembers the dead, dramatic emotional
significance is precisely what makes a work relevant and successful. (For example, aesthetic
experience can hardly account for the fact that the National Park Service maintains an
enormous warehouse which holds the entire collection of mementos left at the Vietnam
Veterans Memorial—from baby pictures and unsent love letters to a full sized Harley Davidson
motorcycle. The Louvre has hardly brought in such a personalized bounty from its treasures.)
Moreover, Fried’s critique of Minimalism smacks of the kind of narrow-minded Modernist
elitism that eventually made critic Clement Greenberg simply irrelevant to the dynamically
evolving artworld around him.
This philosophical game of determining the proper limits of art—and thus proposing some kind
of definition accounting for the entire extension of the term—s continually wrought with
trouble. Firstly, the world of art is in constant flux from the application of new techniques and
technologies, and from the constant pressure of curators, magazine editors, gallery owners, as
well as artists themselves to find the next big thing. And secondly, artists are inherently
resistive to the aesthetic prescriptions of ivory tower critics.
Even though a fair critique can be leveled against the motives for creating our important public
memorials in a Minimalist framework, it nevertheless must be noted that an unintended
outcome of this tendency is the fact that these memorials now have an interesting double
meaning. That is, on the one hand they shape a space and create an environment for
remembering and mourning the dead, but on the other hand, memorials like the Vietnam
Veterans Memorial and the Oklahoma City Memorial have in fact become
monuments—monuments to the art historical victory of Minimalism as a movement of public
art.
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has set a deadline date of September 11, 2003 for
determining the design of the eventual 9/11 memorial in lower Manhattan. But, already in both
the discourse surrounding this decision and the actual construction of the most significant and
successful 9/11 memorial to date—the Twin Towers of Light—one can easily see that the
5

vocabulary of Minimalism is highly prevalent. The Twin Towers of Light itself is a paradigm of
Minimalist aesthetics. Dedicated on March 11, 2002—the six-month anniversary of the
attack—the memorial was composed simply of two 50 square-foot banks of blue searchlights,
each holding 44 high powered bulbs. The banks produced parallel columns of light that
stretched much higher into the sky than the original Trade Center towers and remained in
place for a month’s time. Initially conceived by its design team to project one column of red
and one of blue, the colors were in time simplified to a monochrome palate in recognition of
the many international victims of the tragedy. From a critical perspective, the decision to
project two identically colored columns is a testament to the reductive power of Minimalism:
not only did it produce a work of art aesthetically more austere, powerful and unified than
parallel columns of differing hues, but this decision was a prime example of how Minimalism
can provide a political solution to a sensitive work of public remembrance. Additionally, further
symbolism in the Twin Towers of Light, also arising from its Minimalist framework, was readily
apparent both to critics and the general public; that is, being immaterial, these towers of light
were in fact much more resistant to attack than the original glass and steel towers—a plane
could fly right through them.
Architects, designers and artists from around the world are now in the process of submitting
proposals for the rebuilding of the ground zero sight and the specific task of constructing a
permanent 9/11 memorial. Through this process, the public has been introduced to a new
term: the footprints of the Twin Towers. These footprints consist of the actual ground space
once occupied by the two buildings. As more designs come forward, as in the recently
published book A New World Trade Center 5 as well as in the bold edition of the New York
Times Magazine from September 8 th of this year (which invited some of the world’s most
esteemed architects to rethink entire lower Manhattan), considerations of these footprints have
ever greater relevance. Many designs for rebuilding the ground zero area leave the footprints
untouched—creating a specifically demarcated zone of sacred ground. In fact, the ground zero
sight is already a kind a secularized sacred space, and literal pilgrimage site, for individuals
from all over the country and world. And this call for an aesthetics-of-absence in the treatment
of these footprints once again betrays the appropriateness and effectiveness of Minimalism in
memorial design. Maya Lin’s proposal for the Times Magazine, for example, suggests the
construction of two unadorned square reflecting pools covering the footprint areas. Likewise,
but in a more whimsical fashion, architect Nathan McRae’s design contribution to the New
World Trade Center book is entitled Preservation of Loss. He proposes the construction of a
rectangular shaped skyscraper directly over the site of the footprints, but instead of destroying
access to the footprints, they would be untouched, creating two massive square columns within
the building itself.
Perhaps the most poignant memorial though to the 9/11 tragedy has already been created by a
person who is neither an artist nor politician. David Cohen is the owner of the Chelsea Jeans
store, a clothing store located only a block from the former World Trade Center. As reported by
Michael Kimmelman in a separate article for the New York Times, 6 the front windows of
Cohen’s store were smashed on the day of the attack and the gray dust from the two falling
towers filled the store, covering all his merchandise. Most of the clothing was ruined, but
Cohen decided to enclose the front corner of his store in glass, and preserve the neatly folded
piles of blue jeans, sweaters, and t-shirts as they were left after the attacks. The memorial
recalls the quiet and orderly beauty that Xenophon spoke of almost 2500 years ago—yet, in a
6

horribly immediate manner. There is no political message, no moral lesson, no religious
comfort—there is only dramatic perfection beneath a gentle layer of dust.
So perhaps we should gather together at this conference and hold a moment of silence for the
ornate, the rococo, and all the moral lessons that the art of the past has tried to teach. Maybe
the best we can do is simply to provide a framework for remembrance rather than offer an
interpretation of our tragedies. Obviously, there is no perfect design solution for our memorials,
but an aesthetic of Minimalism can provide an openness of personal and aesthetic experience
that can certainly be a foundation of broad democratic values.
NOTES
1. This article, along with other writings of art criticism from the Nation, are collected in
Danto’s book State of the Art (New York: Prentice Hall, 1987).
2. Michael Kimmelman. “Out of Minimalism, Monuments to Memory,” in The New York
Times, 1/13/02
3. Xenophon. Oeconomicus. Trans. Sarah B. Pomeroy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), VII,
19-20.
4. The essay first appeared in Artforum, Summer 1967, along with a collection of other pieces
devoted to the project of Minimalism by Robert Morris, Sol LeWitt, and Robert Smithson.
5. Max Protetch, ed. A New World Trade Center: Design Proposals from Leading Architects
Worldwide. (New York: Harper Collins, 2002)
6. See Kimmelman’s “Art is Ashes, Drama in Dust: Saving Serendipity’s Memorial,” in The
New York Times, 8/19/02
7

BRÂNCU_I AT TIRGU-JIU
The Local Context of His WWI Memorial
Maureen Korp
Ottawa, Canada
The Endless Column by Constantin Brâncu_i is perhaps the best-known feature of a war
memorial complex 1 the sculptor designed in 1935-1938 for the town of Tirgu Jiu 2 high in the
Carpathian mountains of western Romania. The column has recently been restored. It does not,
however, stand alone. The Endless Column is part of a monumental architectonic program with
richly mythic features.
On October 14, 1916, at the height of the Great War, the town was successfully defended by a
rag-tag lot of “old people, women, boy scouts, and children,” as a memorial plaque 3 on the
bridge crossing the river Jiu declares. The defenders had fought from that bridge and held it.
Casualties were high, more than a thousand died, but the town had been saved. In 1934, the
county’s chapter of the National League of Women asked Mili_a P_tra_cu, a well-known
Romanian artist, if she would accept a commission to design a sculpture, a column, to
memorialize such unlikely heroes. P_tra_cu suggested, instead, another artist be
approached—Constantin Brâncu_i. He was the hometown boy. Brâncu_i accepted.
The architectonic program Brâncu_i designed for the column’s siting encompasses the entire
town. The program is laid out along an axis running W to E, beginning at the river Jiu in the
West, stopping at the Table of Silence, continuing along the Alley of Seats, through the Gate of
the Kiss, 5 down the Avenue of the Heroes, by way of the Church of the Holy Apostles SS. Peter
and Paul, before reaching its terminus: the eastern hilltop on the far side of town. There the
Endless Column rises to the sky.
THE LAND OF THE DEAD
The ancient story visualized in the sculptural ensemble is this: the heroic dead cross a river
into the land of the dead. Mourners sit in silence–they await the celestial marriage and rebirth
of the hero’s eternal soul. The earth claims its own, as she must. The corporeal body returns to
the mother, cells divide; from the rot of the flesh new life springs. The soul, blessed by ritual
offerings at the sacrificial altar (i.e, the Romanian Orthodox funeral Mass), journeys onward
through the land of the dead.
The soul is female; anima traveling in the persona of beautiful M_iastra, the great bird, the soul
bird. The soul bird flies to the sun, her solar direction set for her by the grave post. It is an axis
mundi holding up the sky–a tri-level terrestrial connection of underworld grave to solar
rebirth. 7
Brâncu_i’s scale at Tirgu Jiu–a sweep from one side of town to the other--is grand. His motifs,
however, are local and familiar. They are the traditional Romanian beliefs of rebirth and
regeneration. In these beliefs woman is the life giver–as mother, as grandmother, and, in
death—woman is the soul bird, the M_iastr_ lured to the grave post with grandmother’s funerary
8

ead. 8 Only when the beautiful soul bird is released from the body’s grave, can she begin her
solar journey. M_iastr_ flies to the sun, and is reborn.
Romanian folkloric practice celebrates death with song, dance 9 , and food. The foods served at
the graveyard feast will be ones associated with fertility and sacrifice—preeminently eggs and
bread because the ancient meaning of a Romanian death is the same as that ascribed to
weddings. Death, like weddings, is an occasion to celebrate fertility and regeneration. And,
when heroes die, death arrives as a beautiful woman, a princess, the “world’s bride.” 12 But for
all, the graveyard is a place of continuing sociable contact—between then and now, between the
living and the dead 13 —throughout the calendar year.
THE AVENUE OF HEROES
There is a park near the bridge that the townspeople had so successfully defended. What better
site could there be for the memorial column? And, if the artist would also agree to design a new
gateway into the park–perhaps, a “stone portal” 14 . . . ? The artist agreed to design that, too.
Brâncu_i was not far into the design detail of both the column and gateway when he conceived
a new schema, radically inventive: locate the column outside the park. Erect it on a hilltop
clear to the east side of town. To align the eastside hill to westside river visually, the artist drew
a W-E promenade. At a point halfway along the axis, the plan for the promenade intersected
with a site already under construction. A little church was being built there. The church,
felicitously, had also been commissioned by the women’s committee. It, too, was being built to
honour the WWI dead of Tirgu Jiu.
Brâncu_i’s new plan also meant the column on the eastern hilltop would become visible at a
point on the axis right after leaving the church. The artist and the committee liked this feature.
The revised plan was accepted. In 1937, the church was consecrated, Brâncu_i attended the
ceremonies. The church is familiarly known as the “Church of the Heroes,” and the
promenade is called today the Avenue of Heroes.
THE TABLE OF SILENCE
In the park by the river, 16 Brâncu_i added a third element to the program—the Table of Silence.
The Table is comprised of one large cut stone circle set atop another only somewhat smaller.
Around the table the artist placed twelve stools, 17 each at a remove from the table and from one
another. 18 This is not a circle begetting intimacy. The table is larger than one would find in a
Romanian home. Brâncu_i intends another possibility.
Dan Grigorescu links the round table and its seats to a similar arrangement found in a nearby
Dacian sanctuary. 19 It is unknown if Brâncu_i was aware of this ancient archaeological site,
however. Others have posited an allusion to the solar cross of the pre-Christian Dacian
culture. 20 The problem with this interpretation is the lack of a cross and circle
arrangement—the tabletop is a plain circle, nothing inscribed upon it, and it sits on another
circle just as unadorned.
9

Thirty stone seats were designed by Brâncu_i to flank the walkway from the Table to the gate.
Finding some leftover slabs of stone, the artist had benches built. These were placed on either
side of the Gate. 21
The table, the seating, and the gateway all combine to provide the little park with the
appurtenances of the sociable Romanian graveyard. It is that architecture which is as familiar
today as it was in Brâncu_i’s youth. Indeed, the Table of Silence is constructed in the same
manner as the very table Brâncu_i made and used in his Paris studio. At this table the artist,
who was renowned for his hospitality, served meals to his guests. 22
THE GATE OF THE KISS
Romanians erect gates at the entries to their homes, to their churches, to their graveyards. On
these gates are incised protective devices. Each gateway marks a passage from an impure place
to a better place—be it the home, the church, or the afterlife. Brâncu_i’s design for the Gate of
the Kiss is marked by an iconic image he returned to many times in his work—the kiss.
The Gate of the Kiss is a simple post and lintel stone arrangement cut from honeyed travertine
locally quarried. On the lintel 40 paired figures are incised. They kiss. The lintel is stylistically
related to the Montparnasse sculpture Brâncu_i had placed years before—at the request of
friends—on a young unmarried woman’s grave in Paris. 23 The lintel itself is as simple and sturdy
as a bride’s dowry chest. 24
Our eyes go first, however, to the gateway’s supporting posts. The two posts are emblazoned on
each of their four sides with a bifurcated circular swelling. It suggests the dividing cell, the egg,
the eyes of the soul (Brâncu_i said as much, too). 25
Eric Shanes describes a composite reading of the splitting cell and egg as “ . . . the filling of the
dilated female aperture with the twinned male genitalia.” 26 In other words, sex. One can
thicken the description further with two more readings—the tree of life and, maybe, the bride’s
spindle.
The tree of life, in Romania, is a fir tree. It is depicted in many ways 27 —sometimes with a bird
on top, sometimes springing from a so-called “flowerpot.” On a Maramures gate, for example,
the tree of life is presented as a bisected circle with a branching bar. It is, nonetheless, a tree,
its roots triangulated into the earth, its branches spreading to the heavens. 28 The tree pulls the
sun down to the earth mother. The device Brâncu_i cut into each side of the squared posts of
the Gate of the Kiss similarly pulls our gaze down to the earth below.
Is the bride’s spindle symbolically related to Brâncu_i’s gateposts? Perhaps—if inverted. The
spindle is certainly suggestive of the Endless Column. The shaft of each bride’s spindle is
uniquely designed. The weight, however, is always constructed the same way. It is a puzzle. As
the bride turns the spindle back and forth in her fingers, she hears the gentle clatter of a seed
tucked within the puzzle weight. The bride is being reminded of the children her marriage will
bring. 29 Her husband carved the spindle as a pledge of his intentions to marry her and “to plant
those seeds in her.” 30 Her husband has also carved the gateposts that mark the way into their
home with similar suggestions.
10

Brâncu_i, too, preferred to carve wood with his axe. 31
The committee commissioning Brâncu_i may have wanted a triumphal arch—something like
that in Bucharest perhaps, an arch modeled on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. What they got
was a triumph, the perfect synthesis of the sculptor’s life-long focus on love—in a wistful, yet
erotic, post-and-lintel presentation.
GRAVE POSTS
When a child is born in a Romanian village, it is customary to present the baby to a fir tree.
The tree is asked to watch over the child throughout the individual’s entire life. Then, at the
time of death, the natal fir tree will be cut down and carved into a post for the grave. 32 If that
tree no longer exists, another tree 33 can be used. But there must be a grave post. This is why.
M_iastra, the soul bird, is deep within the grave; she has the incorporeal soul of the dead
within her, but she is still attached to the rotting body. M_iastra must be lured from the grave.
Grandmother puts a sweet funerary bread on top of the grave post. It works. M_iastra emerges
from the grave. She sits with folded wings on top of the post. From there to the sun is not far.
The soul can, and will be, born again.
In Brâncu_i’s 1910-1912 M_iastra, assemblage, the soul bird is positioned in just that
manner—with folded wings. M_iastra is serene, poised. Soon she begins her solar flight. Below
are the mouldering bodies of the dead—vividly realized in the artist’s Double Caryatid (c.1908).
THE ENDLESS COLUMN
In a 1933 catalogue statement, Brâncu_i wrote of his desire to build a column one day that
would “support the arch of the firmament.” 36 At Tirgu Jiu, during the construction of the
Endless Column, the artist spoke of it in the same terms–it was to be a column to hold up the
sky. 37 This is a traditional expression Romanians use when speaking of grave posts. They are
the “columns that hold up the sky” 38
Indubitably, the Endless Column is a grave post–but, what a grave post...! It has been designed 39
with an elegant regard for the music of the heavens.
Constantin Brâncu_i was an educated man. Using the Golden Section of Pythagoras, Brâncu_i
devised a set of uniform specifications for the column. The individual modules are built upon
Golden Section ratios to achieve an average height of 1.8m 40 per module—a very human scale.
The modules are each perhaps six feet tall. 41
Brâncu_i transformed the village folkloric grave post into a universalizing aspiration. At dawn
the column is transfigured becoming a shaft of infinite light. Endless. M_iastra flies straight and
true from its zenith. I imagine Pythagoras and Zalmoxis are cheering from the heavens.
The Endless Column was erected in three months’ time,. permitting the dedication of the war
memorial complex on October 27, 1938. The artist journeyed from his home in Paris to attend
the ceremonies.
11

Constantin Brâncu_i would not see Romania again. Three weeks earlier, Oct. 3, 1938, the
Germans had invaded Czechoslovakia. The second Great War had begun. Some ten years
before the artist was quoted as saying:
Once rid of the religions and the philosophies, art is the one thing that can save
the world. Art is the plank after the shipwreck, [the plank] that save
someone... 44
VILLAGE LIFE TODAY
Nearly a hundred years later, it is still possible to see something of the kind of world from
which Constantin Brâncu_i set out in 1904 when he left Romania at the age of 28, and headed
on foot for Paris.
In the villages, at the end of day, people take their ease on benches beside the gates to their
homes. There one will sometimes find seated, not on a bench, but directly on the ground, her
feet planted firmly to the earth, an old woman dressed in black. She is a grandmother, the
much-honoured bunica suggested years before by the artist in Brâncu_i’s Ancient Figure
(1906-1908) and the Wisdom of the Earth (1908).
In every village today there is an old woman, who can tell you what the new baby’s name is and
what the future will be for the child. That grandmother--some might call her a “sorceress” (The
Soceress, 1916-24)-- must be implored, beseeched with a red-coloured bread, to come see the
new-born baby, to give the baby a blessing. In such honours paid the village’s ancestral seer, 45
linger old beliefs in the transmigration of the soul. The old pre-Christian transmigration beliefs
underline, too, the ritual washing of a new-born baby in the wooden tub in which grandmother
kneads her bread. 46
Traditionally, it is grandmother who makes the sacramental bread for births, baptisms,
marriages, and funerals because she is “pure.” 47 Each grandmother has her own bread stamps.
When grandmother dies, her stamps are kept within the family, but not used again. 48 Brâncu_i
used similar shapes in his sculptural assemblages. 49 The Beginning of the World (1920), for
example, illustrates the way some of Brâncu_i’s sculpture begins in a primal, physical contact of
the work with the earth. The assemblage consists of a stone cruciform base, surmounted by a
marble egg on a metal disc. It is a sculpture for Easter.
At Easter red-coloured, hard-boiled eggs are served at table. Red eggs symbolise, of course,
germination, the fertile egg, rebirth, the joy of life. Eggs are not eaten during the Lenten fasting
period. The Beginning of the World, on a mythic level, celebrates the resurrection or rebirth of
the sacrificed god. Romanian folk tradition says the colour red was first obtained when Mary
the mother (or was it Mary Magdalen? versions differ), placed a basket of eggs at the foot of the
cross where Jesus hung to die. His blood flowed over the eggs and they became red. 50 Even
today, the village bride wears white, but dresses her attendants in red.
For Brâncu_i the egg shape was quickly subsumed into sculpture, the Newborn (1915), the First
Cry (1917), Sculpture for the Blind (1916) (first exhibited wrapped), 51 and the various heads,
such as Head of a Woman, (1910-c.1925), The White Negress (1923), and divers Mlle Pogany
12

(1912, 1913, 1920, 1931), among others. 52 In the Gate of the Kiss (1936-37), the eggs are
fertile, cells dividing.
Near Brâncu_i’s home village is a famous church with frescoed imagery of severed martyrs’
heads rolling along the avenue. 53 The frescoes are preserved today in a small museum on the
monastery grounds. Once, however, they were on the walls of the church. I can imagine a boy
looking at them closely with fascination and thoughtfulness.
BRÂNCUSI IN EXILE
The year before Brâncu_i died, he drew up a will. In it, the artist left his studio and its
Contents—lock, stock, and barrel—to the French government. As Romanian historian Barbu
Brezianu painfully concludes, there was only one reason 54 for the artist’s dramatic back-of-thehand
gesture. Brâncu_i had been insulted beyond measure by the then Romanian Communist
government and the enthusiastically Communist-dominated Academy of the Popular Republic
of Romania. The Academy had rejected the artist’s offer to donate work from his Paris studio to
the people of Romania. Moreover, in Tirgu Jiu, the Communist mayor of the town had himself
commandeered a bulldozer in a futile effort to topple the Endless Column. The mayor had
other uses for its metal, but the column did not fall. 55
There was a last-minute effort by the Romanian government to make peace with the artist. It
failed: “With the traitors in Bucharest, I have nothing to discuss. They have sold the Romanian
people to the Russians. I prefer to stay and die in France,” said the artist. 56
Since the 1960s, however, Romanian scholars, 57 well beset with anguished thought about the
Academy’s summary rejection of Brâncu_i and his work, have published studies which embrace
Brâncu_i as the echt-Romanian. Brâncu_i, the Romanian sculptor is the consistent theme of
their scholarship: 58 they argue the Romanian context of Brâncu_i’s work is foundational in the
artist’s work. 59
I agree. The Romaneste context is a world view steeped in folklore, potent as tzuica; redolent
with Orthodox church belief and practice, a world view worked through as patiently as the
mamaliga, warming on the back of the stove. Knowing any of the Romaneste context deepens
our understanding of Brâncu_i’s trans-national and specific genius. Nonetheless, Constantin
Brâncu_i should have the last word here. The artist directs the viewer to the work itself, saying:
Don’t look for obscure formulas or mysteries. Because what I will give you is
pure joy. Contemplate my work until you see them. Those close to God have
seen them. 60
Constantin Brâncu_i was born in 1874 in the little village of Hobi_a, near Tirgu Jiu. He died in
1957 in Paris where he had lived since 1904. The artist is buried in Montparnasse cemetery in
a grave with two other Romanian artists. 61 They were his heirs (Brâncu_i had no children) and,
like him, they were artists-in-exile from their homeland There is no grave post at their grave.
NOTES:
13

1. Barbu Brezianu, Brâncu_i in Romania (Bucharest, Ed. Academiei, 1974; new edition,
Bucharest: Editura, ALL, 1999, Tr. Ilie Marcu), p. 49.
2. Tirgu Jiu is also spelled Targu Jiu by translators. No particular spelling predominates.
3. As quoted by Eric Shanes, Brâncu_i (New York: Abbeville Press, 1989) from the
memorial plaque on the River Jiu bridge, p. 83.
4. Catalina Bogdan-Mateescu, Brâncu_i Târgu Jiu Monument: An Interpretation (Bucharest:
the Publishing House of the Romanian Cultural Foundation, 1995), pp. 5-9.
5. Brâncu_i’s axis bifurcates the Church of the Holy Apostles SS. Peter and Paul. The axis
runs directly through the high altar behind the iconostasis. Some scholars have argued
that the church should be moved off the axis; however, this changes the iconographic
program. According to Richard Newton of Olin Partnership, Philadelphia (e-mail Newton
to Korp, October 8, 2002), the church is to remain precisely where it is on the axis:
“What you interpret from the layout drawing of the Ensemble in the area of the Church
on our web site is not a roundabout. The Church remains in its present location on the
axis. Our proposals for this axis are to control vehicular access to the street, repave it and
the sidewalks with a local stone and to plant trees either side of the street throughout the
length of the axis. In the vicinity of the church the road widens and splits into two. What
appears as a “roundabout” will in fact be a stone paved space for pedestrians framed by
tall trees, all providing a sympathetic context for this wonderful little church, a place to
pause on the mile-long walk between the two parks and just before the column comes
fully into view.”
6. Nationalist fervour regarding the Tirgu-jiu complex has also resulted in argument
concerning the names Brâncu_i gave to parts of the whole. Other names put forward as
authoritative include the “Column of Infinite Sacrifice,” “Unity of the Nation,” “Table of
the Apostles of the World,” and “Church of the Heroes.” This claim is made by Dan
Popp in an article published July 31, 2001, in Romania Libera. Popp knew the grandson,
Grigore Stoicoiu, of Matthew Stoicoiu. Matthew Stoicoiu knew Brâncu_i. The path and
roadway linking the table to the column is, in fact, today called “Avenue of the Heroes,”
but, Calea Eroilor (Avenue of the Heroes) is one of the most common street names one
can find throughout Romania. Similarly, the Church of the Holy Apostles SS. Peter and
Paul is known locally as the “church of the heroes.” And, the Endless Column was
initially commissioned as a column of “infinite gratitude.” Lastly, the Gate of the Kiss was
proposed by the women’s committee as merely a “stone portal,” according to Brezianu,
Ibid, pp. 42-45.
7. Romanian scholar Mircea Eliade wrote often of the ability of artists to understand and
work from within the primal myths of human history. See, for example, Eliade’s essay
“Brâncu_i and Mythology” in Mircea Eliade, Symbolism, the Sacred, and the Arts, ed. By
Diane Apostolos-Cappadone (New York: crossroad, 1986), pp. 93-101: “It is significant
that, in the Colonne sans fin, Brâncu_i should have rediscovered a Romanian folklore
motif, the “pillar of the sky” (columna cerului), which is an extension of a mythological
theme already shown to exist in prehistory, as well as being fairly widespread throughout
the world. The “pillar of the sky” supports the heavenly vault. It other words it is an axis
mundi . . . the axis supports the sky and is also the means of communication between the
heaven and earth.”
8. Casandra Culcer, University of Bucharest, 3-mail, November 20, 1998.
9. “Traditions & Trumpeters: Flute-players, the pride of Vrancea,” Romania Libera, August
18, 2000 (tr. G. Tillman).
14

10. On Easter Monday, for example, the dead are served an Easter meal in the graveyard. It is
their Easter, too and they are joyful that day, as reported in “Customs and meaning of
Easter,” Ziua, May 4, 2002 (tr. G. Tillman).
11. Casandra Culcer, University of Budharest, e-mail, November 20, 1998: . . . The round
table might symbolize the sun (the Celtic wheel of the sun), but for sure it is a wedding
party table, as in the popular tradition death itself is seen as a wedding. So the heroes
die-take on their way to the other world, assisted by their ancestors, kiss good-bye the
living world, then comes the gap, the chaos of the city, before they reach the column, the
launching point to the highness.”
12. Ibid.
13. Some say the dead actually return for the summer solstice: see “Traditions and customs
of ‘Sanziene,’” Romania Libera, June 24, 2002 (tr. G. Tillman)
14. Brezianu, ibid., p. 156: “Originally Mrs. Arethie T_t_rescu (head of the Gorj chapter of
the National League of Women, and the wife of the prime minister of Romania)
commissioned two works: “The Column of Infinite Gratitude, dedicated to the heroes
fallen in 1916 in the battles along the Jiu River and the Stone Portal, that was meant to
be the main gate to the public gardens of Tirgu-Jiu.” Brezianu, in a note (ibid.) writes
further: “All the correspondence between Brâncu_i and the patron who commissioned
the monuments in Tirgu Jiu concerning the project itself has been destroyed by the
Securitate . . .”
15. Brezianu, ibid, p. 46.
16. The riverbank is higher today because if forms part of a flood wall needed after the river
Jiu was dammed, according to Donald G. McNeil, Jr. (“A Sculptor’s Gift to his Native
Romania is Gilded in Squabbles,” New York Times, April 16, 2001.
17. The number of stools arranged about the table is twelve—a number with several Christian
liturgical (E. G. 12 apostles), calendric (e.g., 12 months, 12 hours), and pre-Christian
mythic layers of significance. For example, on the Thursday before Easter, not only are
Easter eggs colored, but the “12 Gospels” are read. Those listening to the reading tie
knots in string for each gospel as it is read. This action helps protects against misfortune,
according to a recent Romanian newspaper article: “On Flower Sunday there is a
dispensation for fish,” Ziua, May 1, 2002 (tr. G. Tillman)
18. Brezianu, ibid., p. 170.
19. Dan Grigorescu, Brâncu_i (Bucharest: Editura _tiin_ific_ _i Enciclopedic_, 1977), p. 91-
92.
20. Casandra Culcer, University of Bucharest, e-mail, November 20, 1998.
21. Brezianu, ibid. p. 175.
22. Edith Balas, Brâncu_i and Rumanian Folk Traditions (Boulder, Colorado: East European
Monographs, 1987), pp. 8-9.
23. Brâncu_i sculpted the Montparnasse Kiss in 1909, not long afterwards a friend of the
artist asked if the sculpture could be erected as a tombstone for the grave of a young
woman who had committed suicide. Brâncu_i agreed and cut the tomb’s inscription
himself according to Brezianu, ibid., p. 25.
24. Shanes, ibid., p. 90.
25. Eric Shanes quotes both Petre Comarnescu’s and Malvina Hoffman’s Recollections of
conversations with Brâncu_i in support of both of these ideas (Shanes, ibid., pp. 90-93.)
26. Shanes, ibid., p. 93.
15

27. Romanian scholar Mircea Eliade notes that the tree of life, or cosmic tree, is one of those
Christianized “mythico-symbolic complexes abundantly diffused through the world.” See
28. Micea Eliade. A History of Religious Ideas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
29. James Brown, personal communication, Baia Mare, May 1998.
30. Brown, ibid.
31. Isamu Noguchi, “Recollections on Brâncu_i,” in Balas, ibid. p. viii.
32. Casandra Culcer, University of Bucharest, e-mail, November 20, 1998:”. . . the column
(simple without ornaments for men, or adorned for women, or sometimes having the
soulbird on top . . . the funerary bird would appear . . . with closed wings standing quiet,
as a receptacle for the ready-to-leave soul, or with open wings, a celestial image of the
soul-bird flying.”
33. Silvia Margineanu, personal communication, Bucharest, Spring 1996.
34. Museum of Modern Art, New York, Illustration in Shanes, ibid., p. 22.
35. Romulus Vulcanescu, Romanian Mythology, pp. 200-204.
36. Brezianu, ibid. p. 160: Catalogue of the exhibition at the Brummer Gallery, New York
City, 1933-1934.
37. Claudia Ploscu, “Interview with Sorana Georgescu Gorjan,” Adevarul Literar si Artistic,
nr. 560, March 20, 2001 (tr. G. Tillman)
38. Culcer, ibid.
39. In 1935 Brâncu_i met in Paris with a Romanian engineer, Stefan Georgescu Gorjan, to
discuss how the column could be built. Gorjan inventively, and pragmatically, suggested
individual units of the column be strung like beads upon a supporting inner shaft. He
became the supervising contractor onsite, working closely with Brâncu_i throughout as
reported in an interview by Claudia Poloscu with the daughter of Gorjan. See: Claudia
Poloscu, “The Endless Column is set up on the site of an old cattle market—interview
with Mrs. Sorana Georgescu Gorjan, the daughter of the Column engineer,” Adevarul,
March 10, 2001 (tr. G. Tillman)
40. Ibid.
41. Sixteen modules were cast of iron, and arranged with two half modules top and bottom
and in between 15 complete modules for a total projected height of 28.8m (but, by some
calculations, actually a bit more, 29.33m). Grigorescu, Ibid., p. 89. “ . . . 16.2 which is the
value of the golden number multiplied by ten.”
42. Micea Eliade, A History of Religious Ideas, vol. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1982), pp. 170-179.
43. August 15-November 15, 2937, as cited in “The Endless Column to be Rebuilt,” Ziua,
September 14, 2000 (tr. G. Tillman). Its restoration, however, in the post-Ceau_escu
period took years and was not completed until 2001; the restoration of the rest of the
architectonic program and its elements—including the park and its sculpture, the Avenue
of Heroes, the Church of the Heroes—is ongoing.
44. Quoted by Dorothy Dudley, “Brâncu_i,” Dial 82, February 1927, cited in Shanes, ibid., p.
107.
45. Balas, ibid, p. 40: “The Forces of nature were placated and governed by the
interprentation of omens and carefully prescribed ritual. The presiding figure at such
rites was generally an old woman, who was as significant a personage in a given village as
the local priest and probably more so.”
46. “A unique exhibition in Slobozia: a history of civilization told through ceremonial
breads,” Romania Libera, July 11, 2000 (tr. G. Tillman and C. Culcer).
16

47. Women who are menstruating or in afterbirth cannot make bread. Until recent times they
could not enter a church.
48. Tiberiu Alexa, personal communication, Baia Mare, April 1996.
49. Balas, ibid., p. 36.
50. “Customs and meanings of Easter,” Siua, May 4, 2002 (tr. G. Tillman)
51. Shanes, ibid., pp. 74-76.
52. Jack Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Science and Technology on the
Sculpture of this Century (New York: George Braziller, 1968), p. 86: “As early as 1912 the
critic Jacques Doucet realized that the subtlety of these near egg forms by Brâncu_i was
accentuated by slight impressions and textures that interrupted otherwise symmetrical
surfaces. If the ovoid form, polished and gleaming, is the perfect collector of light, then
any imperfection on its surface would act as a premonition, a visual hint of the forces of
internal organization harbored within.”
53. Tismana monastery, founded in 1375, the oldest monastery in Romania, is located very
near Brâncu_i home village of Hobi_a (Dan Richardson and Tim Burford, Romania : The
Rough Guide, 1995, p. 101). The frescos, extant in Brâncu_i’s childhood on the walls of
the church, have been removed and are now part of a little museum display ina separate
building on the grounds of the monastery.
54. Brâncu_i applied for French citizenship, giving up his Romanian passport, a few months
after the Academy of the Popular Republic of Romania rejected the artist’ offer to donate
to the “ . . . Art Museum of the Republic of the works by the sculptor Brâncu_i, around
whom are gathered all the anti-democrats in the field of arts” (Brezianu, ibid, pp. 12).
55. c. 1948, according to, Brezianu, ibid., pp. 12: “Ten years after making this present to his
country—the communist regime, through its handymen, offended him repeatedly,
beginning with the unsuccessful attempt of the major of Tirgu Jiu to pull down the
Column, inorder to be melted . . . . “ In a lengthy interview with Claudia Ploscu
(published in Adevarul Literar si Artistic, nr. 570, June 6, 2001), Plscu collects more
horror stories about Brâncu_i scholarship in Romania, quoting Bogdan: “Our
Traditionalists and nationalists of all stripes, and laster on Communist dogmatists rejected
Brânsu_i, counting him a foreign body, an eccentric Western product, a status that, in
general, discontinued at the threshold of the sculptor’s final years.”
56. Brezianu, ibid,. p. 13.
57. See, for example, Catalina Bogdan-Mateescu, Brâncu_i ‘s Targu Jiu Monument: An
Interpretation (Bucharest: Romanian Cultureal Foundation, 1995)j; Barbu Brezianu,
Brâncu_i in Romania (1974; rev. ed., 1999); and Dan Grigorescu, Brâncu_i (1977). The
year 2001 was declared “Brâncu_i Year in Romania” by the national government.
58. Please note: the Romanian studies are often translated and simultaneously published in
English and French by Romanian publishers. See, for example: Paul Rezeanu, Bråncu_i
la Craiova (Bucharest: Editura Arc 2000, 2001. The text is in Romanian, French, and
English. A number of Western studies also acknowledge the Romanian folkloric context
of Brâncu_i’s work, including, for example: Eric Shanes, Brâncu_i (New York: Abbeville
Press, 1989.) One of the better studies is: Edith Balas, Brâncu_i and Romanian Folk
Traditions (Boulder, Colorado: East European Monographs, 1987). None, however, re
exhaustive.
59. “The Brancusian Universe in an exceptional exhibition at the Sibiu Village Museum,”
Romania Libera, July 20, 2001 (tr. G. Tillman): “The organizers at Sibiu present objects
of great heritage value . . . the whole constituting an essay on the relationship of Brâncu_i
creations to Romanian folklore traditions, a relationship whose authenticity is found as
17

much in the artist’ lifestyle, temperament, and thinking, as in the entire Brancusian
oeuvre.”
60. “The Eye of the Artist: Constantin Brâncu_i photographed his own works,” Romania
Libera, August 8, 2001 (tr. G. Tillman).
61. Alexandru Istra_i and Natalia Dumitrescu, identified in Brezianu, ibid., p. 55: “At the
suggestion of Sonia Delaunay, and of Jean Cassou, Brâncu_i bequeaths in his will to the
Musée National d’Art Moderne all the works and objects in the studios fromImpasse
Ronsisn, on condition that the studios will be reconstructed. The painters Alexandru
Istrati and Natalia Dumitrescu are nominated universal heirs and Professor Dr. Pascu
Atanasiu as testamentary executor.”
18

MOURNING, ABSENCE, AND TRAUMA: REPRESENTATIONS OF THE HOLOCAUST
IN CONTEMPORARY ART AND ARCHITECTURE
Milton S. Katz
Kansas City Art Institute
Although several renowned artists like Marc Chagall, Ben Shahn, Morris Louis, Leon Golub,
and Jacques Lipchitz confronted the Holocaust in a number of evocative works during World
War II and immediately afterwards, there followed a period of approximately two decades in
which the Holocaust was largely neglected. This was understandable, since artists followed the
lead of many Holocaust survivors in choosing to remain silent about the event. Rico LeBrun, a
non-Jewish artist, however, insisted,"The Holocaust was a subject that no serious artist could
neglect." In the last two decades we have come to witness an extraordinary amount of literary
and visual art about what is referred to in Hebrew as Shoah. The Holocaust has become a
preoccupation for many international artists and almost a sacred challenge to translate those
historical events into a visual display for museums and memorials throughout the world. To do
this, however, visual artists like their literary counterparts, had to invent new symbols and new
metaphors. Primo Levi understood this well when writing about his experiences he stated,
"Daily language is for the description of daily experience, but here is another world, here one
would need a language of the other world." Shaping a new aesthetics of suffering and pain,
contemporary art about the Holocaust has evolved from Theodore Adorno's insistence on a
scream, to a language of mourning, absence, and trauma. The void and gap that marked a
break with civilization became a defining metaphor of Holocaust art and architecture.
We will examine a number of American, European, and Israeli artists and architects from
different backgrounds who bring to the subject their unique perspectives because of their
relationship to the event. These artists fall into 3 groups:
1. Holocaust survivors who continued to work as professional artists and whose work lies
somewhere between visual memory and metaphoric memory.
2. Children of survivors, sometimes called "the second generation," whose art is a medium for
expressing their special relationship to the Holocaust and to their parents. In their work they
explore questions of memory, absence, presence, and identity.
3, Artists not directly connected with the Holocaust who have developed a sensitivity toward
the subject and attempt to understand the event through their creations. These artists confront
the Holocaust from a variety of motives, and some of them use the Shoah in a universal
attempt to penetrate the nature of man and woman, and to investigate a number of postmodern
issues probing the limits of representation and a critique of our consumer culture. Media used
by these artists include painting, sculpture, photography, graphic design, needlepoint, and
multimedia installation.
A document that survives from the art jury committee of the Vilna ghetto from March 16, 1943,
indicated approval for exhibiting 27 sketches from "S.Bak (9 years old). Since then, Samuel
Bak's entire life has been involved with the difficult memories of the Holocaust and he has
emerged as one of the most accomplished Holocaust survivor artist in the United States.
Although he began as an abstract expressionist, since the 1970s his art has turned into
surrealistic metaphors in an attempt to deal with his survival as evidenced by this painting
“The Last Movement” completed in 1996. His work may be likened to a healing art or reflect
the deep tragedy of the powerlessness of ghetto existence. Explaining his art, Bak declared, "I
have chosen the way of creating images of a seeming reality, imbuing them with a multitude of
1

layers, from clear and unknown symbols to the most private and intimate feelings of a world
that has its own apparent logic."
The figures in Polish artist Issac Celnikier's paintings articulate the conflict between the
reverent silence of grief and the aching need to bear witness. Following the liquidation in 1943
of the Bialystok ghetto in which he sought refuge, Celnikier was subjected to a barbarous and
prolonged internment in a series of Nazi camps at Stutthoff, Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen, and
Flossenberg. Re-establishing life after the war in Prague, and then in Warsaw, he forged a
distinctive pictorial language steeped in the traditions of European figurative art, with which he
hoped to communicate the universal experience of human suffering. The cycles of monumental
canvases painted in the 1980s, of which Uprising 1983-84 is one of the most powerful,
expresses his outrage and sorrow at the killing of innocent civilians by the occupying armies of
the Reich. This work recalls the destruction of the Bialystok ghetto and the inhabitant's
courageous revolt in August 1943. At first glance the viewer see a painting filled with cries and
frenzied movements of the human throng, then later we begin to distinguish the individuated
human forms from the confusing orgy of violence. The appearance is that of wounded flesh,
scars inflicted on the surface of the canvass.
Out of 15,000 children brought by the Nazis and their accomplices to Terezin ghetto and later
deported to Auschwitz, only 100 survived. Helga Hoskova-Weissova was one of them. Liberated
from Mauthausen by the American army in May 1945, she returned with her mother to her
home in Prague where she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, and several years returned to
join its faculty. Like most Holocaust survivors, she struggled to forget her days in the camps,
but in the 1960s found herself attempting to come to terms with her grief through expressionist
paintings. Thirty years later, she returned to her haunted memories in an even more
pronounced and symbolic way. One of her favorite works, Memento, completed in 1993,
depicts the still raw emotion of the artist as the eyes filled with sorrow remember the dead
children's shoes strewn all around her.
Gabrielle Rossmer evaded the Holocaust by coming to America from Germany just before the
outbreak of World War II. While she and her immediate family escaped from Bamberg,
Germany, her grandparents did not and perished in the Holocaust. Rossmer was invited to
return to Bamberg in 1991 to install a sculptural ensemble that recalled her own family's
emigration from Germany and the horrors of her grandparents' deportation and extermination.
The exhibition took the title In Search of the Lost Object (1991) and was installed in the
Municipal Museum that formerly had been the Judenhaus, the very place of the grandparents
house arrest. There are many objects of her families' history in the installation, but the lost
object is the one most dear that cannot be retrieved. Rossmer's individual loss becomes the
tragic episode through the power of her art, and also a metaphor for all displacement and
similar suffering.
Edith Altman's father was arrested in Germany and detained in Buchenwald Concentration
Camp in the days after Kristallnacht in November l938. Eventually, he was released and, after
many desperate encounters, the family immigrated to Chicago. Reclaiming the Symbol /The Art
of Memory (1992) is an attempt to confront the symbols used by the Third Reich to empower
and to terrorize. The work strives to reclaim the star, the cross, and the swastika to their
positive use. The swastika may well be the earliest known symbol, the solar wheel, the
movement and power of the sun, the origin acting upon the universe, and a positive symbol
before the Nazis used it. "By taking the swastika apart, by deconstructing its meanings and
disempowering it," explains Altman, "I hope to change its fearful energy. In a spiritual or
mystical sense, I am exorcising the evil memory of the swastika, in hopes of healing our fear."
Gerda Meyer-Bernstein came from Germany to England in the l939 children's special
emigration at the age of 15. Later she immigrated to Chicago. Her installation p piece Shrine
2

(1991) is an extended meditation on the meaning of Auschwitz and the people who ran it. Set
in a darkened room with hay strewn on the floor, the installation evokes the bleakness of the
camp environment. Barbed wires line the walls, with photographs of the crematoria and
appelplatz (roll call square) behind the wire. This is the world that Elie Wiesel called "the
kingdom of night," and these haunting words are well understood in the darkness and silence
of the installation. Shrine evokes the claustrophobic environment of the cattle cars used by
Nazis to transport their victims to the concentration camps, and that feeling is emphasized
through repetition of photographs of the ovens on the left wall of the installation. On the right
wall are photos of the infamous commander of the Auschwitz camps, Rudolph Hoess, who was
tried by the National Tribunal of Warsaw, found guilty and executed at Auschwitz in April
1947.
The two most significant non-Jewish artists who experienced the camps and survived to have
outstanding careers are Jozef Szajna and the Croatian artist, Zoran Music. For more than three
years, Szanja was a Polish inmate at Auschwitz. Later he was imprisoned at Buchenwald. Now
in his eighties he still remains haunted by the Holocaust experience. He offers a chilling
explanation: "I am cut off from the halter—Death is in me, and I have to sleep with Her."
Following liberation on April 15, 1945 by American forces, the landscape of Auschwitz became
a central motif in his artistic and theatrical career. Szanja's most important work is
Reminiscences, a memorial to Polish artists killed by Nazi terror. First winning critical acclaim
at the Venice Biennial in 1970, this installation has been reproduced, and since 1998, has been
on display at the Buchenwald Museum in Germany. The focus of the exhibit is a series of
cutouts, suggestive of the frontal photographs taken of prisoners at Auschwitz. Dominating the
debris and cutouts is a prison photograph of Ludwig Puget, an art professor who advocated
non-collaboration with the Nazis and perished at Auschwitz. In this installation, Szanja's
pessimistic post-Auschwitz worldview becomes very clear. As he has said of his work: "There is
a world of great silence, consisting of a forest of old easels, standing up like guillotines; crosses
made up of half burned silhouettes and unfinished sculptures, dusty photographs and
concentration camp numbers."
A survivor of Dachau, Zoran Music, continued to be haunted by the Holocaust experience and
created a powerful series of drawings entitled “We Are Not The Last,” first completed in 1970.
Here the artist did not pinpoint blame, but bemoaned the continued cruelty of humankind,
unable to learn from the past, sinking repeatedly to the level of the Nazis. Music stated this
position by having his Holocaust dead rise up to accuse us and to warn us that we too will
become corpses if we are not careful. In a 1973 work, these mounds of corpses rise and deflate,
collapse or decompose, to become an ocean of flesh. The despair and anger expressed through
these images, what he called "the eternal landscape of universal suffering," also resounds in his
explanation of them: "How often did we say in Dachau that such things should never be
repeated in this world. They are being repeated. This means that the horrible is in Man himself
and not only in a specific society. I had a need to speak out on this once and for all."
For second-generation artists, their subject is not the Holocaust as much as how they came to
know it and how it has shaped their lives. Art Spiegelman's use of the comic book is both an
innovative and problematic form of art used to convey the Holocaust experience. Many
survivors found Maus with its depictions of Jews as mice and Germans as cats something that
came close to blasphemy. Yet, the work has won numerous awards and continues to read as a
sensitive and honest reflection of a second generation trying to come to terms with his parents
Holocaust experience. Maus grew out of a comic strip Spiegelman did in l971 for an
underground comic book; a three-page strip that was based on stories of his father's and
mothers that he recalled being told in childhood. What the artist calls "realistic fiction" Maus I
was published in book form in l986, followed by Maus ll in l993. As the artist was entering
himself into the story, he needed to incorporate distancing devices like using animal mask
faces. The way the story got told and whom the story was told to is as important as his father's
3

narrative. The result is an engaging, and, at times, brutally honest depiction of father and son,
and how both struggle to come to grips with a scarred and tortured past.
After finishing art school in San Francisco, Shimon Attie moved to Berlin in the summer of
1991. Walking the streets of what was the Jewish section of the city that sum mer, he wrote
that he felt the presence of the lost community very strongly, even though so few visible traces
of it remained. Attie's memory and imagination had already begun to repopulate the
Scheunenviertel district of East Berlin with the Jews of his mind. The Writing on the Wall
project grew out of his response to the discrepancy between what he felt and what he did not
see. The artist has written that the purpose of his work was "to peel back the wallpaper of today
and reveal the history buried underneath." Over the following year, Attie projected the images
of Jewish life before the Holocaust from photographs he found in his research back into
present day Berlin. Each installation ran for one or two evenings, visible to local residents,
street traffic, and passerby. During these projections, Attie also photographed the installations
themselves in time exposures each lasting from three to four minutes. The resulting
photographs have been exhibited throughout the world. After Berlin, he completed
complementary projects in Dresden, Amsterdam, Krakow, and Copenhagen where his row of
nine underwater light boxes in one of the canals commemorate Denmark's heroic rescue of its
Jews during the Nazi occupation across the sea to safety in Sweden.
Audrey Flack was the first American photo-realist painter to have her work accepted in the
collection of the Museum of Modern Art in 1966. Knowing that sooner or later she would have
to confront World War II and the Holocaust, she made a painting of Adolph Hitler in l963-64
and then World War II (Vanitas) twelve years later. She chose to base her central image on
Margaret Bourke-White's famous photograph of just liberated inmates posed behind a barbed
wire fence at Buchenwald. In the lower part of the painting, she included some words by Rabbi
Nachman of Bratislava, one of the intellectual giants of early Hasidism, concerning belief in the
presence of God as a means to mitigate despair. In a glaring contrast Flack placed around the
former prisoners bright colored pastries, jewels, a blue butterfly, a red candle, and a blue jar in
order "to tell a story, an allegory of war... of life... the ultimate breakdown of humanity," and to
include violent contrasts of pure evil and "beautiful humanity... of opulence and deprivation."
The overall effect was shocking when the painting was first exhibited. Flack's vanitas was
designed to remind heedless, narcissistic humanity of its moral transience.
Jeffrey Wolin, a professor at Indiana University, has developed a unique photographic approach
to the Holocaust. A Guggenheim Fellowship involved photographing and videotaping
Holocaust survivors. His 1993 photographs show survivors such as Hungarian born Maria
Spitzer as they look today, for the most part in the safe and normal environment of their homes
or workplaces. However, the menacing past experiences, traumas and suffering, plus the
persistence of memory, is imposed on the photograph by a textual narration of the person's
history. The stories are intimate and recall the absolute horror of the person's humiliation, near
destruction, and survival.
Susan Erony learned about the Holocaust working in the civil rights movement. She spent
three and half years focusing her artwork on the Holocaust and trying to answer the question:
How can extreme discrepancies in the quality of existence be such a reality of the human
condition? She went to Eastern Europe three times between 1990-1992, photographing
concentration camps, Jewish cemeteries, like this one in Prague, and German steel plants.
Erony collected remnants from Jewish synagogues in Poland and the Czech Republic, talked
with Holocaust survivors, children of survivors, Polish resistance fighters, and Germans born
after the war.
Judy Chicago's Holocaust Project: “From Darkness Into Light,” with photography by her
husband Donald Woodman, completed in 1989, is a large multi-media exhibit that engendered
4

a storm of controversy for its universalist approach to the subject. Chicago is a feminist artist
who places the Jewish experience of the Holocaust in a larger global and historical context of
power and powerlessness, and raises a series of questions about the relationship between the
Holocaust and contemporary events. Her project concludes with a work entitled "Rainbow
Shabbat," a large stained-glass work whose center panel extends the Friday evening Jewish
Sabbath meal into an image of international sharing and global peace across race, gender, class,
and species. Chicago has all the people seated turn their heads towards the praying woman, "as
if to suggest," she writes, "that the structure of male dominance that now oppresses the planet
must make room for a profound change, one in which women's voices can truly be heard, along
with those of everyone who shares this tiny globe." The centers of the rainbow side panels
contain yellow stars. The humiliating badges Jews were forced to wear are transformed into
glorious symbols of courage and the power of the human spirit. Sandblasted into the window,
in Hebrew and English, is a prayer based on a poem by a Holocaust survivor. These words,
which embody the goal of the Holocaust Project, read: "Heal those broken souls who have no
peace and lead us all from darkness into light."
Although this project is viewed by many to be a work of major importance as it has been
exhibited throughout the world, it also receives its share of criticism. Many people resent the
link the project makes between the Holocaust and other forms of oppression, insisting that the
Shoah was a unique event in world history and should not be compared to anything else.
Critics also maintain that in our struggle to universalize the oppression and human suffering,
we not only lessen the importance of the Holocaust, but trivialize it as well.
Like many other artists, George Segal was reluctant to deal with Holocaust imagery when he
was asked to design a piece called the Holocaust for a site in San Francisco overlooking the
Golden Gate Bridge. Not wanting to reproduce German savagery, Segal posed a heap of corpses
so that a 6-sided Star of David and a cross became apparent in their overall configuration.
Further, a woman holding an apple lies with her head in man's abdomen, which, in turn, has
his arm on the central figure, invoking images of Eve, Adam, and God. Among the figures there
is also a young boy protected by an older man, suggesting Abraham and Issac as well as the
persistence of civilized values in an uncivilized world. The Eve figure suggests regeneration and
survival, also exemplified by a single figure standing near a barbed wire fence, the only
standing person in the entire composition.
The Holocaust Memorial in Miami Beach, Florida, designed by award winning international
sculptor and architect Kenneth Treister and dedicated in l990, begins with a sculpture of a
mother and two nestling children fearful as the signs of the Holocaust first appear. The work is
framed by Anne Frank's well-known message... "That in spite of everything I still believe that
people are good at heart." In the middle of this memorial, there is a 42' high bronze sculpture
of Love and Anguish, an outstretched arm, tattooed with a number from Auschwitz, rises from
the earth, the last reach of a dying person. The work also depicts close to 100 figures in
different family groupings. Bronze tormented figures precariously cling to the skin trying
desperately to escape. Here families try to help each other in a final act of love, all expressing
the mixed emotions of terror and compassion. The final sculpture depicts the same mother and
two children who started the journey... now dead... framed by the haunting words of Anne
Frank. "ideals, dreams, and cherished hope rise within us only to meet the horrible truths and
be shattered." To represent the void left behind by the "people of the book" as Jews are
sometimes called, Israeli born artist Micha Ullman, designed a monument for Berlin's
Bebelplatz to commemorate the infamous Nazi book burning of May 10, 1933. Today the
cobblestone expanse of this square situated between Humboldt University and the famed Opera
House is empty except for the figures of people who stand there and peer down through a
ground level window into the ghostly white, underground room of empty bookshelves. A steel
tablet set into the stones simply recalls that this was the site of some of the most notorious
5

ook burnings and quotes a German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine's prescient words, "Where
books are burned, so one day will people be burned as well."
Of the European artists born in the closing days of World War II, two standout in the creative
ways they confront the Holocaust in their respective works. The most renowned of the new
German painters, Anselm Kiefer, was born in the Black Forest as Allied troops stormed through
it during their final drive to crush the Third Reich. Thus he grew up in the immediate post-war
years when many Germans tried desperately to suppress memory of their Holocaust past. As a
young artist, he was intent upon exploring what he saw as the "tension between the immense
things that happened and the immense forgetfulness." A monumental work, Germany's
Spiritual Heroes, was created in 1973. On six strips of burlap sewn together, Kiefer drew
perspective lines to form a deep theatrical space. The viewer is placed at the entrance of a
cavernous room, slightly off center, engulfed by wooden beams. The interior is at once a
memorial hall and crematorium. Eternal fires burn along the wall as if in memory of the
individuals. This highly flammable wooden room is in danger of burning, and with it Germany
and its heroes will be destroyed. Kiefer's attitude towards his country's heroes and their
Holocaust past is both sharply biting and ironic. These great figures and their achievements are
reduced to just names, recorded not in a marble edifice but in the attic of a rural schoolhouse.
One of the most famous works of art to emerge out of the Holocaust ashes is Paul Celan's
lyrical evocation of the Nazi death camps, "Todesfuge" translated as Fugue of Death. This
heartbreaking poem concludes with these symbolic words, "your golden hair Margarete, your
ashen hair Sulamith." In the early 1980s, Kiefer created two paintings which take as their
source, if not their subject, the figures of German and Jewish womanhood who structure and
haunt Celan's poem. Much of the transformation in the painting Sulamith is found in he power
of the name, a biblical Jewish name that is born in the "Song of Songs" and comes to rest in
the fugue of death. With the conferral of the name, the application of ash to the canvas, and
the evocation of the Hebrew Bible and Celan's poem, the darkened chamber is transformed,
transfigured, translated into a site of Jewish memory, a Holocaust memorial in painterly form.
On the surface, the painting seems to represent the interior of a piece of Nazi architecture—a
massive monument to death. Kiefer turns Celan's poetic image—your ashen hair Sulamith—not
into an image, but into the name alone inscribed in small white letters in the uppermost left
hand corner of the painting.
In the works of France's Christian Boltanski memories of the Holocaust appear to be
immensely disturbing, deeply ambivalent, and largely unresolved when "documented" with
fictitious evidence of a long suppressed past. Amassed in Boltanski's "archives" and "altars" we
find somber, melodramatic installations composed of blurry old school portraits, faded articles
of children's clothing, and time capsules in the form of rusted biscuit tins, with the whole
illuminated by small exposed lights. The Monument series is pivotal in Boltanski's work, partly
because in 1984 be began to explore his own Jewish heritage (Father is Jewish, mother
Catholic), at the same time exploring our personal and cultural ideas of memory, memorials,
and monuments. The use of these fragile materials in his monuments suggests life's fragility
and the lost lives of those who have disappeared from the earth through genocide.
Two installations evoke the Holocaust directly by using images of specifically Jewish children.
For Chases High School Boltanski used a photograph of the graduating class of a private
Jewish school in 1931 that he found in a book on Jews in Vienna. The installation consisted of
18 blurry black-an -white close-ups of each of the students. The artist rephotographed the
students individually, enlarging their faces until they lost their individual features. As an effect
their eyes became transformed into empty black sockets while their smiling mouths turned into
grimaces of death. These overexposed photographs, presented in tin frames perched on top of a
double stack of rusty biscuit tins, were over lighted by extendable desk lamps, evoking those
that are used in interrogation rooms. His series Jewish School of Grosse Hamburgerstrasse in
6

1938, completed in 1991, includes works based on photographs taken at a Jewish school in
Berlin. Since it is more than likely that most or even all of the represented Jewish students did
not survive the Holocaust, his art produces a terrifying effect by reenacting principles that are
defining aspects of the Shoah: a radical emptying out of subjectivity as a road leading to the
wholesale destruction of a people.
Another installation that evokes the Holocaust referentially is one that he gave the title
“Canada”–the euphemistic name the Nazis gave to the warehouses that stored all the personal
belongings of those who were killed in the gas chambers or interned in the labor camps.
"Canada" here stands for the country of excess and exuberance to which one wants to emigrate.
Here Boltanski exhibited 6,000 second-hand garments. The brightly colored clothes were hung
on nails on all four walls covering every inch of the room. This installation not only brought to
mind the warehouses in the concentration camps, but also the sheer number of garments
evoked the number of people who died in the camps and whose possessions were stored in
"Canada".
Disturbing questions of representations and moral integrity surround the recent exhibit
"Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/ Recent Art" at the Jewish Museum in New York City. This
exhibition focused on the works by 13 internationally recognized artists, often two generations
removed from the Nazi era and descended from families of both victims and perpetrators.
Employing the language of conceptual art, these highly controversial images challenge us to
confront the faces of evil and to question how images shape our perception of evil today.
Nazism represents an obsession for the contemporary imagination. Years ago, the German artist
Gerhard Richter, openly broached the question as to whether the popular dissemination of
Holocaust images amounted to a new, respectable kind of pornography. As we view the works,
please consider whether the Jewish Museum has broadened the arena of discourse of
Holocaust representation thereby deepening Holocaust consciousness in our collective
memory, or whether, as Thane Rosenbaum argues in Tikkun, the Jewish Museum is
unintentionally legitimizing Holocaust desecration, and providing cover for anyone wishing to
do the same.
The works in the show that proved most controversial tend to employ reconfigured images of
the Holocaust to extend postmodern's consumer critique. Tom Sachs, an American Jewish
artist, investigates the way consumer culture works against personal identity, especially
marketing and advertising. For Sachs, these objects reflect the most controlled corporate
identity since National Socialism. Giftgas Giftset, with its designer Xyklon B gas cans, and
Prada Deathcamp (1998), are especially troubling. With these two works, the assertive
conflation of supposed "good" and outright "evil" tests our sense of propriety and our ability to
separate aesthetics from history, morality from lifestyle.
Following the path of David Levinthal's seductive photographs of Nazi toys, Polish artist
Zbigniew Libera's LEGO Concentration Camp Set (1996) forces us to confront the tension
between innocence and aggression, playfulness and terror. The work is a series of seven boxes
in an edition of three. On each box are pictured three-dimensional miniatures that the artist
has built. Libera photographed the self-constructed models and then refashioned the images
into a standard juvenile friendly packaging. The miniatures represent nothing less than the
most horrific and morally debased architectural complexes even built. Among the structures
the artist made and photographed are models of barracks and crematoria. Aggregate objects,
including body parts and clothing, appear on the side of one box.
Alan Schechner digitally manipulates photographs of Jewish Holocaust victims to draw uneasy
parallels and point out differences between the Nazi era and the present. In “It's the Real
Thing—Self Portrait at Buchenwald” (1993), the artist digitally inserts his own images into a
7

now famous Margaret Bourke-White photograph taken when the Jews were liberated from
Buchenwald in April 1945. Bourke-White's black and white photograph documents the horrors
she witnessed—men with sunken cheeks, shaven heads, and desolate expressions, wearing
ragged stripped uniforms. By introducing himself —a second generation English born Jew,
round face, well fed, and with a full head of hair—into the picture, the artist collapses the space
between history and the present. Coming to terms with the ironic shock and perhaps even
terror over the manipulation, we are left to ponder Schechner's presence among the survivors,
to connect him and ourselves, one or more generations removed from the Holocaust, with the
victims and their sufferings. Another disturbing image is the inclusion of a Diet Coke can,
centrally placed and the only element depicted in color. The irony of the robust artist among
gaunt, malnourished survivors becomes embarrassing in the presence of a symbol of our
culture's self-indulgent body consciousness. Just as much as Germany succumbed to Nazi
culture because it was the dominant paradigm, so does our contemporary culture succumb to
consumerism. Given such recent findings that the Coca-Cola company collaborated with the
Nazi regime in the 1930s, Schechner's image invokes how removed and complacent we have
become from the devastation of the Holocaust.
Another theme revolved around what writer and critic Susan Sontag labeled "Fascinating
Fascism," the strange mix of seduction, repulsion, and eroticism that underlies so much of
Nazi-inspired imagery. Polish born Piotr Uklanski's “The Nazis” (1998) reflects a practice
related to postmodern art that intellectually scrutinizes and visually reframes representations
from mass culture. Prompted by an article in Arena magazine about best-dressed actors, and by
his realization that a number of these actors had been shown in Nazi attire, Uklanski tracked
down photographs of movie stars dressed for roles in which they personify Nazis. Equating Nazi
with male, the artist powerfully illustrates how post World War II society eroticized the Nazi
uniform, thus linking banality and evil with Hollywood glamour and extravagance.
In the series “Economical Love” (1998), Austrian artist Elke Krystufek depicts male sexual
exploitation by reappropriating some of the imagery Uklanski had already appropriated. She
collaged elements of Uklanski's celebrity Nazis onto her large-scale painted and photographic
nude self-portraits. Like Uklanski, Krystufek places the viewer in close complicity. In
particular, she puts one in the untenable position of being a voyeur and colluding with the
Nazis. At the same time, she makes the viewer the object of both her gaze and that of the Nazis.
One of the most disturbing and compelling works in the exhibit is titled “Live and Die as Eva
Braun” by Israeli artist Roee Rosen (1995). When first shown at an exhibition at Jerusalem's
Israel Museum in 1997, the piece became the center of a furor that eventually involved the
Israeli Museum of Education. Various critics labeled the work as sensationalistic and declared
that this work turned the Holocaust into pornography. “Live and Die as Eva Braun” consists of
a set of numbered narrative texts written by the artist and printed on narrow fabric banners.
The banners are accompanied by a heterogeneous group of drawings that incorporate Nazi
references apparently inserted into traditional children's book illustrations. The texts are
addressed to the viewer, who is invited to assume the role of Hitler's lover as she shared a last
tryst in the bunker before their joint suicide. As the narrative unfolds, the viewer is both inside
and outside the story, enjoying a lover's embrace and preparing to submit to death, while
simultaneously observing the scene with horrified fascination. Mixing innocence and guilt,
Rosen presents cheerful little frauleins dancing with little storm troopers, Fascist eagles
perching in storybook skies and swastikas lurking in innocuous landscapes.
Finally, in the most abstract work in the show, German artist Mischa Kuball uses light to
explore contrasting ideas of image and symbol, the sacred and the profane, power and
powerlessness. The corpselike shape of “Hitler's Cabinet” (1990) is made of inexpensive wood,
unpainted, and unadorned. Each of the four ends of the cross is pierced with rectangular
openings, through which 35-milimeter slides are projected onto the floor. Creating ghostlike,
8

fan shaped forms; these images are stills from German films in the 1920s and 1930s. When lit,
the stills transform the pressed wood cross into a swastika, a symbol today forbidden by
German law. Here the artist reminds us that the symbols, images, and implications encoded in
a wide range of German films between the wars reflected the aspirations and fears of the
German people and helped to prepare them for the rise of Hitler and the Nazi movement. The
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C., designed by James Ingo Freed
and completed in 1993, is an evocative work of contemporary Holocaust art. At first glance the
building seems benign. But all is not what it seems. Everywhere the building contains elements
of concealment, deception, disengagement, and duality. The curved portico of the 14th street
entrance—with its squared arches, window grating, and curbed lights—is mere facade, a fake
screen that actually opens to the sky, deliberately hiding the disturbing architecture of skewed
lines and hard surfaces of the real entrance that lies behind it. This motif of contrasting
appearance and reality is repeated throughout. The Museum's first floor holds the Hall of
Witness, a large, 3-story, sky-lit gathering place. The elements of dislocation that are first
introduced outside the building reappear here. The building employs construction methods
from the industrial past and offers an ironic criticism of early modernism's lofty ideals of reason
and order that were perverted to build the factories of death. Design features that fill the Hall
of Witness and recur throughout the building directly summon the tragic themes of the
Holocaust. Crisscrossed steel strappings seem to brace the harsh brick walls against some great
internal pressure. Inverted triangle shapes repeat in windows, floors, walls, and ceilings. The
Hall's main staircase narrows unnaturally toward the top, like receding rail tracks heading to a
camp. Exposed beams, arched brick entryways, boarded windows, metal railings, steel gates,
fences, bridges, barriers, and screens—"impound" the visitor, and are disturbing signs of
separation. Everywhere there are dualities and options. The play of light and shadow, black and
white, along with contrasting wide and narrow spaces arouse contradictory notions of
accessibility and confinement. The entire Hall is defined by unpredictability and uncertainty.
Altogether, the interior suggests a departure from the norm, informing visitors that they are in a
profoundly different place. It is an environment that stimulates memory and sets an emotional
stage for the Museum.
Just as the architecture of the building draws much of its power from the history of the
Holocaust, so the four site specific works of art, displayed in and outside the building, evoke
emotion and reinforce the memorial function of the Museum.
Richard Serra's monolithic sculpture, entitled Gravity, is a 12-foot square slab of steel that
weighs nearly 30 tons. It is wedged near the black granite wall at the bottom of the stairs to the
Concourse level of the Hall of Witness. Tipping slightly, it impales the staircase. The steel
finish has been left in its raw, industrial state, which compliments the factory-like surfaces of
the Hall of Witness. The sculpture cuts the stairs asymmetrically, destabilizes the space, and
forces a rift in the flow of visitors as they descend the stairs—a disquieting process of forced
separation.
Visitors encounter Ellsworth Kelly's work in the third floor lounge after touring the exhibition
sequences that recount the escalation of Nazi violence between 1933 and 1939. In contrast to
the dimly lit exhibition spaces, the lounge is high ceilinged and filled with light. On two
opposing walls are Kelly's four wall sculptures, collectively entitled Memorial. Kelly's sculptures
create a constant interplay of light and shadow and change throughout the day. The artist has
likened the sequence of three equal forms to memorial tablets that, in the anonymity, bear the
names of all victims of the Holocaust.
After visitors have viewed the exhibition chronicling the ghettos and the death camps, they
enter the second floor lounge to encounter a wall drawing by Sol LeWitt, entitled
“Consequence”. Five large squares dominate the long wall. Each square is bordered in black,
and contains a central gray square outlined with a band of white. In between the white and
9

lack contours are subtle colors of varying hues. LeWitt describes the square as the most stable
and implacable of forms. The rhythmic patterns of squares within squares invites introspection,
while the repetitive gray areas centered in the fields of color suggest absence—lives, families,
and communities made vacant as a consequence of the Holocaust.
Joel Shapiro's abstract “Loss and Regeneration” poignantly addresses the disintegration of
families and the tragedy of lives interrupted by the Holocaust. His work, situated on the
Museum plaza, consists of two bronze elements that engage in symbolic dialogue. The larger
piece is a towering, abstract, tree-like form that suggests a figure. Approximately 100 feet away,
a smaller, house like structure is precariously tipped upside down on its roof. The work
memorializes the children who perished during the Holocaust, and is accompanied by an
excerpt from a poem written by a child in the Terezin ghetto in Czechoslovakia: "Until, after a
long, long time, I'd be well again. Then I'd like to live And go back home again."Shapiro likens
the overturned house to the subversion of the universal symbol of security, comfort, and
continuity. The larger figure is conceived as an emblem of renewal, a metaphor for cycles of life
and death, the experience and the overcoming of anguish, the possibility of a future even after
all has been lost.
In what Professor James Young describes as "the uncanny arts of memorial architecture," here
we have the recently completed "Jewish Museum" in the capital of a nation that not so long ago
systematically and murderously voided itself of Jews, making them alien strangers in a land
they had considered "home." This challenging and extraordinary work of art was designed by
American architect Daniel Libeskind, born in Lodz in 1946 to the survivors of a Polish Jewish
family decimated in the Holocaust. The jagged shape of the Jewish Museum as a broken Star of
David presents a disquieting extension to the Baroque facade of the old Berlin Museum from
which it extends. Three basic ideas formed the foundation for the museum's design; first the
impossibility of understanding the history of Berlin without understanding the enormous
intellectual, economic, and cultural contributions of its Jewish citizens; second, the necessity to
integrate the meaning of the Holocaust, both physically and spiritually, into the consciousness
and memory of Berlin; and third, only through acknowledging and incorporating this erasure
and void of Jewish life can the history of Berlin, Germany, and Europe have a human future.
Libeskind calls his project "Between the Lines" because it reflects two lines of thinking and
organization, and about relationship. One is a straight line, but broken into many fragments;
the other is a tortuous line continuing indefinitely. Cutting through the form of the Museum is
a Void, a straight line whose impenetrability forms the central focus around which exhibitions
are organized. In order to cross from one space to the other, the visitors traverse over 30
bridges opening into the Holocaust Void-space, the embodiment of absence. An external space
enclosed by a tower, it is lighted only indirectly by natural light that comes through an acutely
slanted window up high in the structure, barely visible from the inside. The deconstructivist
building architecturally embraces something quintessential to German-Jewish history and
culture, the void points towards that which is absent, has vanished—but still must be made
present. Here we witness the creative genius of the artist who strives to articulate the dilemma
Germany faces whenever it attempts to formalize the self-inflicted void at the center—the void
of its lost and murdered Jews.
One installation “Shalekhet (Fallen Leaves)” by Israeli artist Menashe Kadishman can be seen
in the accessible Memory Void and two other Voids. More than 10,000 faces cut from sheet
steel lie like autumn leaves on the floor. Welding seams, burn marks, and rust give each face its
on physiognomy. In the context of the Jewish Museum, this installation is first of all a memorial
to the victims of the Holocaust; but the artist also understands his work as a universal message
and the reference to autumn as hope for new life the following spring.
10

The only way out of the building is through the Garden of Exile, which consists of 49 concrete
columns filled with earth, each seven meters high, spaced a meter apart. Forty-eight of these
columns are filled with earth from Berlin, their number referring to the year of Israel's
independence in 1948. The 49th column stands for Berlin and is filled with earth from
Jerusalem. They are planted with willow oaks that spread out over the gardens of columns into
a great, green canopy overhead. While the columns stand at 90-degree angels to the ground
plate, the plate itself is tilted in two different angels so that one stumbles about as if in the dark
feeling like you're drifting at sea without any support. We are sheltered in exile on the one
hand, yet still somehow thrown off balance by it and disoriented at the same time.
Perhaps it is only fitting that we conclude this presentation in the land of Israel. There are
numerous outdoor works of art at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial and Museum in
Jerusalem. A recent creation, The Valley of the Communities, was designed by the architectural
firm of Lipa Yaholom and Dan Zur. This massive work spread over some 2.5 acres highlights
the names of thousands of Jewish communities destroyed by Nazi Germany and its
collaborators and the few that suffered but survived in the shadow of the Holocaust. The task
of the artists was to create a monument to ruin, an act which required the "construction" of the
"destruction." Therefore nothing was built above ground; instead it was excavated out of the
earth. This evocative memorial resembles a concentration of huge open graves gaping in the
ground. It is as if what had been built up on the surface of the earth over the course of a
millennia—a 1,000 years of European Jewish communal life—was suddenly swallowed up. On
the glaring bright Jerusalem stone walls the names of some 5,000 communities have been
engraved—symbolically embedded forever in the very bedrock of Israel.
In the preface to one of his works, English writer Joseph Conrad defined Art as "an attempt to
render the highest justice to the visible universe, to find in that universe, in matter as well as in
the facts of life, what is fundamental, enduring, essential." Although deeply disturbing and
intensely problematic, I believe that Holocaust art aids in this exalted effort by helping us to
come to terms with the catastrophic event and at least consider, and perhaps even challenge,
the conditions which allowed it to happen.
Artists and Artworks Discussed
1. Samuel Bak, "The Last Movement," 1996.
2. Issac Celnikier, "Revolte," 1983-84.
3. Helga Hoskova-Weissova, "With the Living," 1963, "Memento," 1996.
4. Gabreille Rossmer, "In Search of the Lost Object," 1991
5. Edith Altman, "Reclaiming the Symbol / The Art of Memory," 1992.
6. Gerda Meyer-Bernstein " Shrine," 1991.
7. Jozef Szanja, "Environmental Reminiscences," 1998.
8. Zoran Music, "We Are Not the Last," 1970-73.
9. Art Spiegelman, "Maus," 1986, 1993.
10. Shimon Attie, "The Writing on the Wall," Berlin, 1991-92.
11. Audrey Flack, "World War II (Vanitas), 1978.
12. Jeffrey Wollin, "Maria Spitzer," 1993.
13. Susan Erony, "Photographs," 1992.
14. Judy Chicago, "Holocaust Project: From Darkness Into Light," 1989.
15. George Segal, "Holocaust," 1982.
16. Kenneth Treister," Sculpture of Love and Anguish," Miami Beach, Fl, 1990.
17. Micha Ullman, "Bibliotek," Berlin.
18. Anselm Kiefer, "Germany's Spiritual Heroes," 1973, "Margarete," "Sulamith," 1982.
19. Christian Boltanski, Chases High School," "Jewish School of Grosse Hamburgerstrasse in
1938," 1991, "Canada," 1990.
20. Tom Sachs, "Giftgas Giftset," and "Prada Deathcamp," 1998.
11

21. Zbigniew Libera, "LEGO Concentration Camp Set," 1996.
22. "Alan Schechner, "It's the Real Thing—Self Portrait at Buchenwald," 1993.
23. Piotr Uklanski, "The Nazis," 1998.
24. Elke Krystufek, "Economical Love," 1998.
25. Roee Rosen, "Live and Die as Eva Braun," 1995.
26. Mischa Kuball, "Hitler's Cabinet," 1990.
27. James Ingo Freed, "US Holocaust Memorial Museum," Washington D.C., 1993.
28. Richard Serra, "Gravity,"
29. Elsworth Kelly, "Memorial,"
30. Sol LeWitt, "Consequence,"
31. Joel Shapiro, "Loss and Regeneration,"
32. Daniel Libeskind, "Jewish Museum, Berlin," 1998.
33. Menashe Kadishman, "Shalekhet" (Fallen Leaves), 2002. Jewish Museum, Berlin.
34. Lipa Yaholom and Dan Gur, "Valley of the Communities," 1998, Yad Vashem, Israel.
12

WITH A PEN AS HIS WORD AND ME AS HIS WITNESS
Michael Fink
Rhode Island School of Design
He left his parents’ house and fought in World War II. He came home as a wounded G.I. for a
short stint, mostly to heal and to wait. But once took off out of town, he never turned back. He
let go a trunk of his youthful sketches in the cellar. His childhood sculptures, like the books he
had pored over, he forgot in the attic. His paintings hung on the walls of the parlor, but he
made no claim on his past—or so it struck me, until quite recently.
Over the years, I often made the sentimental journey to wherever my uncle, Herbert L. Fink,
lived with his wife Polly and their family. They spent some seasons with her mother in
Glastonbury, Connecticut, while he taught art classes at Yale. They moved to Carbondale,
Illinois, and retired to Rockport, Maine. I made a number of visits to their Victorian townhouse
by the seacoast and made a film about his studio there, with my R.I.S.D. colleagues, Peter
O’Neill and Merlin Szosz. But then, my uncle surprised me.
He created a series of drawings from his memory of the world we had shared. Herb is my
double uncle. He was the ringbearer at the wedding of his half-brother, my father, to his
cousin, my mother. He drew that event, the dawn of my own world, as the marriage of a
delicate girl to a more earthbound man: around him stand the beasts of the jungle, boars and
bears, the symbols of the aggressive business world and clan into which she had entered like a
princess in a folktale. He sent me this genre series, a sepia study set in the Providence of the
1920’s.
And then, during the millennial winter, he sent me another group. This time, he recalls the
summer colony we formed in our Fink compound at Oakland Beach. There, he built his own
skiffs and small sailboats. He draws them and, perhaps based on a few snapshots saved from
the depression era, the members of the extended family who stay fixed in his mind and
memory. He included in the marvelous package a pen and ink souvenir of his bar mitzvah at
Temple Emanu-el, a fanciful fantasy of me, his nephew, transformed into the very image of the
Jewish bridegroom, with my wife’s face featured but in the style of the Jewish bride of east
Europe. He continues the motif, using me as the imaginary model for the Wandering Jew, the
Fiddler on the Roof, and the Jewish Poet, garbed in the Chassidic costume and coiffed in the
Orthodox way.
Perhaps my favorite of these representations and digressions is the portrait of Samuel Raphael
Fink, Herb’s half-brother, my father’s younger sibling. “Who else will remember him?” Herb
prints, or writes, in his left handed calligraphy, underneath this memorial. Uncle Sam was the
only truly religiously observant person in the household and clan. When he was born, his
mother died. Sam would hallucinate, evoke her image in the sky. He never failed to light a
prayer candle in her memory. It was not only a formal loyalty. Sam was a dreamer, an idealist,
even an intellectual, always studying biology, art history, religious philosophy. In a business
family, city, culture, nation, time, he paid for his spiritual nature by living in the shadows,
seeking refuge in asylums. Nevertheless he performed with honor and with heroism in World
1

War II, like Herb, and they remained fond allies, perhaps against the family that placed little
value on the endeavors of artists and visionaries.
Of course, no two souls drink from quite the same fountain of memory. My uncle is from
another generation, another childhood household. His enormous talent also separates him
from me, only a sentimental storyteller. Even so, these elegant and magical marks on paper,
evoking his world, which was the world imprinted upon me in my earliest years, came as a
fabulous gift.
Sometimes Herb will call or write and ask me if I can locate one of the children’s books he
remembers. There was one about a miraculous and elfin tree, with strange illustrations. For me,
that tree could have been any of the elms, oaks, maples, that grew on the hillside between his
parents’ homestead and my own, three houses down from his. Because Herb has always
showered me with beautiful images from his own mind and hand. These latest efforts, going
back to his roots in the Bible, bring me a fresh shock.
He has also reviewed the great and tragic stories from the Torah—Abraham sacrificing Isaac,
Adam and Eve leaving Eden, Job stripped of everything, even relief from the cruel light of the
great sun, reminding me again of how universal and eternal those tales are. We lived in a very
small world, an oval street carved from a farm, a ranch, an orchard, a wetland, but it contained
and predicted everything. Herb and Polly lost two sons in accidents. Herb’s Biblical sketches
make these tragic events the elements of a universal and mythic drama. Yet, prophetically, he
had also drawn Job in charcoal as a student—I found the sketch in that abandoned trunk.
Nobody can draw the human figure with Herb Fink’s superb and inspired craftsmanship, a
unique mixture of observed detail imbued with the deepest of feelings and the most symbolic of
metaphorical alchemy.
He can bring the dead back to life with a pen as his wand and me as witness.
2

FROM IDEALISM TO TOTALITARIANISM: THE HISTORY OF HISTORY PAINTING
Robert Hendrick
St. John’s University
In keeping with the theme of the conference, “Art Remembers: Remembering and Interpreting
Historic Moments,” I had initially planned to have my presentation trace the history of history
painting in Western art from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. I had intended to show,
in some detail, how the concept of history painting changed from an eighteenth-century
idealism to a nineteenth-century focus on political advocacy and nationalistic partisanship to a
defense of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes. But my enthusiasm for the topic did not take
into account the constraints of time, so I’ve decided to devote my material to some key
paintings that initiated the decline of history painting from its original idealistic position.
Following the Renaissance, the idea developed that there existed a very specific hierarchy in
painting, a hierarchy in which history painting occupied the most exalted position, followed in
descending order by portraiture, landscape painting, still life, and genre. By the late eighteenth
century, history painting was viewed as the only form of painting capable of forming and
propagating concepts of civic virtue. The subjects of history painting were drawn not only from
historical events themselves, but also from literature, mythology, and the Bible. The paintings
were always rather large in size; what Diderot had called “grand machines” reflecting what he
referred to as “une grande idée.” 1 The essential characteristics of the history painting were the
presentation of heroic actions (either real or fictional) with both skill and imagination. The
purpose of all this was to influence the viewer and thus affect human conduct. The goal of the
classic history painting, then, was to present inspiring examples of human behavior in an effort
to elevate the viewer morally and hence promote public virtue, sometimes referred to as “civic
humanism.” The goal of civic humanism in art was “directed towards describing and
recommending those virtues which will preserve a civic state, a public, from corruption.” 2
It is important to note at the outset that “the history painting of civic humanism was intended
to serve the interests not of particular groups or individuals, but of virtuous society as a
whole.” 3 It was precisely when Jacques-Louis David and his followers switched from painting
examples of civic humanism to pictures extolling Napoleon and his exploits that history
painting began its decline. I might add parenthetically that another threat to the supremacy of
history painting was also developing after 1800. That was the growing popularity of genre
painting. As Mark Thistlethwaite has noted, history painting and genre painting both share “the
fundamental trait of being narrative modes in which success depends upon readability.” Of
course, genre painting is far smaller in size than history painting and the goal of genre is to
accurately present commonplace incidents of daily life rather than heroic, inspiring events in
which the artist aimed “to evoke exemplary and exalted nobility.” 4
The classic defense of history painting was presented between January 1769 and December
1790, when Joshua Reynolds delivered fifteen “discourses” on art to the students of the Royal
Academy in London. As the first president of the newly opened Academy, Reynolds sought to
establish in the minds of his students a lofty concept of the ultimate purpose of art. Each
discourse was published after its presentation and in 1797 a collected version appeared.
Numerous editions of the discourses followed, in French, German, and Italian as well as in
3

English. While not original, these lectures formulated a classic statement of the concepts that
had dominated European art for three centuries.
Essentially, Reynolds wanted the artist’s education to teach him 5 to strive to elevate the
thoughts, and hence the actions, of his viewers. This was to be accomplished by depicting ideal
forms in compositions stressing themes of grandeur, dignity, heroic actions, truth, etc.
Reynolds saw the ideal of art as “unfolding truths that are useful to mankind, and which make
us better or wiser, [an art which] excites ideas of grandeur, or raises and dignifies humanity.” 6
To achieve this, he defended the traditional hierarchy mentioned earlier. But in defending the
primacy of history painting, Reynolds urged the artist to use his imagination to “deviate [if
necessary], from vulgar and strict historical truth. . . . Alexander is said to have been of a low
stature: a painter ought not so represent him. . . . This is not falsifying any fact . . . a painter of
history shows the man by showing his actions.” 7
An excellent example of history painting in its late-eighteenth-century classical form is
Jacques-Louis David’s (1748-1825) Death of Socrates (1787), which was praised by Reynolds
as the most perfect picture of its kind .8 As Anita Brookner has noted, it was a painting
“conceived in a secure eighteenth-century world in which attention to the classics [and]
obedience to the philosophes [of the Enlightenment] . . . were the moulding influences” in art. 9
Socrates is about to commit suicide by drinking hemlock; he is sacrificing himself both in a
defense of truth and as an act of obedience to the laws of his society. In this large painting
(about four by six-and-half feet and located here in New York at the Metropolitan Museum of
Art), Socrates reaches for the cup of poison, but will not grasp it until he finishes speaking to
his disciples, who are extraordinarily distraught. He is going to respect the laws of Athens,
while simultaneously exercising his rights as a free person. “He was the victim of intolerance
but would demonstrate his moral supremacy by ending his life as the citizen of a state that
would no longer accept his independent views.” 10
Note how Socrates is portrayed: not realistically as an older man of sagging flesh, but rather
with a physique many athletes would be proud of. As we saw in Reynolds’ prescription, this
physical nobility reflects (for the edification of the viewer) Socrates’ moral and intellectual
nobility. As he preaches to his disciples, the painting preaches to the viewer. David’s message
seems to be that obedience to the law, however unjustly imposed, is of paramount importance
in society.
Before developing the main point I’d like to make today, I want to take a brief detour to look at
several nineteenth-century American history paintings. This will allow me to present what I
consider to be the best of the post-classical (or post-David) examples of this style of art.
Although the work of both Benjamin West (1738-1820) and John Singleton Copley (1738-
1815) contained numerous history paintings, neither depicted noble subjects from America’s
past in their art. Consequently, John Trumbull (1756-1843) is usually considered to be our first
history painter. Trumbull served in the Revolutionary War as an aide-de-camp to General
Washington and starting in 1786, he began a series of paintings on subjects from that war. His
general theme was that individual sacrifices would lead to victory and national survival; that
martyrdom was necessary in attaining victory. His Death of General Warren at the Battle of
Bunker Hill (1786) is an example of this theme. Trumbull’s Declaration of Independence, July
4, 1776 (begun in 1787 and not finished for decades) is probably the best known of any
American painting. He depicts “rationalism at work, free will in action; it stands as the
4

embodiment of the age of enlightenment.” 11 Trumbull achieved the goal of traditional history
painting by presenting the viewer with an example of morally significant and edifying action.
Indeed, in all his work we can see emerging a stress found in so many nineteenth-century
history paintings: the desire to inculcate patriotic pride. But Trumbull’s Declaration is a static
work; history paintings need action or emotional events to work well. Contrast it with Emanuel
Leutze’s (1816-1868) giant painting, Washington Rallying the Troops at Monmouth (1854).
Trumbull’s Declaration is by far the more significant, but Leutze’s painting works better
because of the swirling action around the central figure of our national hero.
Consider William T. Ranney’s Marion Crossing the Pedee (1850). It is a history painting
showing General Marion moving his troops during the Revolutionary War. It’s so realistic,
however, that despite its large size, it is almost a genre painting. Marion himself is hard to find;
he is taking directions from someone else. There is nothing heroic or inspiring here. But
compare Ranney to my favorite of all history paintings, one that was finished a year later in
1851 on a very similar subject: Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware (12-andhalf
by 21 feet; also at the Met). Four times bigger than the Ranney, this is a “grand machine”
if there ever was one. Washington is easy to find; in fact, he is theatrically spotlighted. Unlike
the crowd in Ranney’s picture, here all extraneous figures have been removed and those that
remain reflect Washington’s grim and stoic determination. Unlike Ranney’s sluggish Pedee,
even the river in the Leutze is a challenge to be overcome. There is no flag in the Ranney; in
the Leutze the flag is the focal point of the picture, at the apex of a pyramid of figures. The
drama and the visual impact of the Leutze make it a perfect example of history painting in the
grand manner.
Leutze also succeeded in creating a masterpiece of history painting because he grasped a point
Ranney ignored. In Ranney’s painting, General Marion is simply moving his troops across a
river. Leutze’s Washington is leading his men into a crucial battle of the Revolutionary War.
Leutze was adhering to a widely accepted principle of neoclassicism: it was “preferable to show
a great warrior in a state of composure which follows from or anticipates his martial exploits,
nobility of character being best conveyed through balanced self-possession rather than
unbridled passion.” 12 This was true of all the heroes in history paintings. Note how calm
David’s Socrates is in the midst of his weeping disciples.
The closeness of Washington Crossing the Delaware to the ideal of history painting as
envisioned by Reynolds does not alter the fact that history painting changed greatly in the
nineteenth century, especially in French painting. It was a change that began in the reign of
Napoleon. Rather than encourage art that glorified the principles of the revolution or
strengthened patriotism and civic virtues, Napoleon and his state-controlled Salons sought
paintings that idealized him. An example is Antoine-Jean Gros’ General Bonaparte Visiting the
Pesthouse at Jaffa (1804; 17 by 23 feet). It depicted an event that occurred in March 1799
when Napoleon, at the end of his disastrous Egyptian campaign, visited a hospital in an effort
to convince his soldiers that the plague that was raging through the army was not contagious.
Although he apparently avoided all contact with the sick, to the extent that he kicked one ill
soldier away from him, the Gros painting tells quite a different story. In it, Napoleon shows no
fear of the sick, going so far as to touch the bulbous sore of a plague victim. The gesture was a
reference to the mythical power historically ascribed to French kings to be able to heal
scrofulous abscesses. Thus Gros makes Napoleon a heroic figure and an heir to the miracleworking
kings.
5

Another painting that cast Napoleon in a particularly good light was one specifically
commissioned by him from Pierre-Narcisse Guérin, Bonaparte Pardoning the Rebels in Cairo
(1808). It refers to an uprising against the French that occurred in October 1798. The French
had reacted brutally to the rebellion, beheading many of the insurgents and rolling their heads
through the streets. Yet Guérin makes no reference to this brutality, instead portraying a
generous Bonaparte magnanimously pardoning the surviving rebels. Another painting that
made reference to this uprising was Anne-Louis Girodet’s Revolt of Cairo (1810). This was also
commissioned by Napoleon as a pendant to the Guérin, probably in an attempt to stress how
noble and forgiving he had been in pardoning the rebels. But the Revolt of Cairo interests me
for another reason. It is an early attempt to justify what would later be called imperialism. 13
Note how it appears that just one or two Frenchmen seem to be driving back huge masses of
Arabs, thus visually depicting European strength over Oriental weakness. Note too the cruelty
of the Arabs: one has beheaded a French soldier and holds his head by the hair. The severed
head has traditional Christ-like features. The artist’s object here seems to have been to contrast
militant Islam against martyred Christianity. And finally note the nude slave holding the dying
and opulently-clothed pasha in the right foreground. They represent the West’s concepts of the
“corruptions of the East: slavery, voluptuousness, and homosexuality.” 14 Edward Said could
have used this painting as more evidence for the thesis of his well-known book, Orientalism.
Subsequent nineteenth-century French regimes (there were three monarchs, two republics, and
an empire after Napoleon) all used history painting as had Napoleon: to glorify the current
government. History painting had lost its moral purity. It declined for other reasons as well.
Critics as diverse as John Ruskin and Charles Baudelaire ridiculed the style and called for its
end. Patronage shifted to the middle classes who did not want “grand machines” which they
could not afford and for which they had no room to hang in their homes. Instead they sought
landscapes and genre scenes.
History painting did experience a revival in the twentieth century as various totalitarian regimes
found its style congenial. As an example, there is a Chinese communist painting depicting an
incident in the Long March of 1935. Mao’s men are shown crossing a chain bridge over the
Tatu river. Their faces are lit by the fires on the bridge supposedly set by their Nationalist
enemies. In reality, the Nationalists set no fires; they were already captured when the bridge
was crossed. But totalitarian myth-making encouraged these Gros-like distortions of fact.
Although history painting is virtually moribund today, we still occasionally get paintings like
the one by the Hungarian Ferenc Daday depicting then Vice-President Nixon (in an outfit that
screams for a hero’s white cowboy hat) greeting refugees from the Hungarian Revolution of
1956 as they enter neutral Austria. This huge painting (6 by 10 feet) ignores the fact that the
United States encouraged the revolt against the Soviets (in which at least 30,000 Hungarians
died), and then did nothing to help them. We are a far cry from the idealism and civic
humanism of David’s Socrates.
NOTES
1. Quoted by Anita Brookner, Jacques-Louis David (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980),
p. 20.
2. . John Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt (New Haven:
6

Yale University Press, 1986), p. 10.
3. Brandon Taylor, “History Painting West and East,” in David Green and Peter Seddon,
eds. History Painting Reassessed: The Representation of History in Contemporary Art
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 66.
4. Mark Thistlethwaite, in William H. Gerdts and Mark Thistlethwaite, Grand Illusions:
History Painting in America (Fort Worth: Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, 1988),
pp. 35 and 39.
5. There were very few professional female artists in this period.
6. Discourse Seven (December 10, 1776); reprinted in Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art
(New York: Collier Books, 1966), p. 116.
7. Discourse Four (December 10, 1771), reprinted in Ibid. pp. 57-58.
8. Brookner, p. 38.
9. Quoted in Warren Roberts, Jacques-Louis David, Revolutionary Artist: Art, Politics, and
the French Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), p. 19.
10. Roberts, in Ibid. p. 32.
11 . Thistlethwaite, p. 20.
12 . Thomas Crow, Emulation: Making Artists for Revolutionary France (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1995), p. 35.
13. My discussion of these paintings has borrowed heavily from Todd Porterfield’s excellent
study, The Allure of Empire: Art in the Service of French Imperialism, 1798-1836
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).
14. Ibid., p. 69.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barrell, John. The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1986).
Brookner, Anita. Jacques-Louis David (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980).
Crow, Thomas. Emulation: Making Artists for Revolutionary France (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1995).
Gerdts, William H. and Mark Thistlethwaite, Grand Illusions: History Painting in America (Fort
Worth: Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, 1988).
Porterfield, Todd. The Allure of Empire: Art in the Service of French Imperialism, 1798-1836
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).
Reynolds, Joshua. Discourses on Art (New York: Collier Books, 1966).
Roberts, Warren. Jacques-Louis David, Revolutionary Artist: Art, Politics, and the French
Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989).
Said, Edward W. Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).
Taylor, Brandon. “History Painting West and East,” in David Green and Peter Seddon, eds.,
History Painting Reassessed: The Representation of History in Contemporary Art
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 66-81.
7

INHUMANE HUMANITIES: COLLEGES OF EDUCATION IN RETREAT FROM THE
HUMAN EXPERIENCE
James E. Nowlin
Montana State University-Billings
THE METAPHOR
In the eleventh century a rich young gentleman named Francesco Bernadone found himself in
the throes of a bit of a religious epiphany. One day when fitting himself into his finest medieval
clothing and about to undertake a “chivalrous campaign” he happened upon a gentleman
whose earthly needs seemed to be more pronounced than his own. So, Francesco gave him his
coat. That very night Francesco dreamed that he was being called to rebuild the “Celestial
City”. He heeded this calling to such an extent that he literally began to give away everything
he owned. In fact, he gave so liberally that his father, a rich businessman in the Italian town of
Assisi, was moved to disown him. At this point Francesco took off all of his clothing and said
that from this point forward, he would possess nothing, absolutely nothing! The Bishop of
Assisi “loaned” him a cloak, whereupon Francesco wandered off into the woods singing a
French song.
True to his calling, Francesco spent the next years in abject poverty. He looked after lepers. He
began to rebuild crumbling, abandoned churches with his own hands (Francesco seems to have
taken his dream of rebuilding the “Celestial City” quite literally), and in general gave himself
totally to the notion of helping his fellow human beings. He devoted his entire life to the idea
that it was “discourteous” to be in the company of anyone poorer than himself.
In 1226, St Francis of Assisi, for so is he now called, died. He died at the age of 43 absolutely
worn out by his labors on this earth. True to his character, on his deathbed he asked
forgiveness of poor brother donkey (his body) for the hardships he had wrought upon
it. Two years after his death little Francesco was canonized. Immediately after that his
“followers” began to build a great basilica in his honor. It soon became the richest and most
evocative church in all of Italy (Clark, 1969). “A strange memorial to the poor little man
whose favorite saying was, ‘Foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the
Son of Man hath not where to lay his head”‘ (Clark, 1969, p. 77).
Even without a personal theology, it is metaphorically easy for one to get an image of St.
Francis wandering through the afterlife (and he at least certainly believed there was
such a thing) saying to those “followers” and anyone else willing to listen, “wait, wait, you
missed the point, you missed the point”! The point was about a quality of life, not about
great basilicas. The point was about a state of being, not an unrelated state of doing. The
point was about inner riches, not external wealth. At some point in time in this metaphorical
afterlife, St. Francis will run into a deceased professor from a college of education (St.
Francis will first want to make sure that the professor is definitely dead—the line marking
“deceased” from “not deceased” is not always clearly delineated in many education
professors) and begin to relate his “they missed the point “ tale of woe. The professor will
listen for a bit and then say condescendingly, “well, I see your problem, you didn’t have a
series of methods classes.” No doubt St. Francis will then look at him quizzically and mutter,
8

“yes well, to be sure they all missed the point, but perhaps none as badly as you.
THE PROBLEM
To echo St. Francis, colleges of education have missed the point (and, in a larger sense, society
as a whole seems content to allow, condone, even approve of this untenable state of affairs)!
They have tried to produce technical, professional teachers following misinformed ideas of
objectivity and misunderstood efforts at pragmatism and have virtually ignored the fine arts and
humanities in their efforts to prepare elementary and secondary teachers. In some ways, it is
almost as if schools of education suffer from some self-inflicted inferiority complex. They want
to be viewed on an intellectual par with the natural sciences and so “they continue to behave as
though there is such a thing as ‘objectivity’ and, moreover that the only subjects admissible in
the academy are those that are measurable, quantifiable, and unentangled with messy emotions
and transitory enthusiasms” (Smith, 1990, p. 284). And in the oddest of paradoxes, they
continue this behavior despite the findings of some of the most noted natural scientists. Nobel
prize winning physicist Walter Heisenberg’s idea of the “uncertainty principal”, the notion that
pure objectivity is an illusion because a researcher’s own predispositions always alter the
“object” of an experiment, is accepted by most natural scientists today (Smith, 1990). In fact,
Smith (1990) notes that many prominent natural scientists seem to follow the observations of
physicist James Trefil (author of The Dark Side of the Universe) who states that most important
scientists are rarely those pure objective creatures who believe something only after laboratory
replications “ad nauseam”. Instead, they believe that beauty, elegance and simplicity have a
natural place in science and that an idea must bring a spark to the soul if a true scientist is to
accept it. Many teacher education programs have ignored the ideas of the arts and humanities
and have therefore lost the ability to bring a “spark to the soul” of teacher and student alike.
Just as education has been the last institution to hold to Logical Positivism’s principal of
verifiability, it has also been the last to let go of the “objectivity as truth” myth. The effort to
prove (verify objectively) that “we are as good a profession as anyone” has caused teacher
education programs to ignore the fine arts and humanities because they do not generate
objective data to justify their existence and also actually to discourage students from engaging
in the arts and humanities because there is no time to work these esoteric topics into a
curriculum designed to produce “professional” (specialist) teachers. The tragedy, the absolute
crisis indicated here is the idea that those fine arts and humanities that we so cavalierly ignore
might just be the very things that provide the aforementioned “spark to the soul”.
This steady infiltration of the specialized and occupationally oriented material in
teacher training programs has produced a decimating erosion of the general philosophical
topics of a liberal education, especially those concerning the fine arts and humanities in
teacher education programs (Brubacher, 1965). The elective curriculum popularized by
Charles Taylor at Harvard subjected the design of liberal education in teacher training
programs to the sentimental values of the students rather than to the intrinsic values and ideas
espoused by the fine arts and humanities. Early on there were educators who found flaws in
such an “elective system”. Chase (1993) notes that as early as 1912, Alexander Meiklejojn
called the elective system “a kind of intellectual bankruptcy. It is an announcement that
(college teachers) have no guiding principles in their educational practice, no principles of
selection in the arrangement of study, no genuine grasp of the relationship between knowledge
and life” (p. 24). Such a curriculum in teacher education certainly further encouraged students
to concentrate on their “likes” and also on those courses that they felt were more closely and
9

practically related to their lives. They replaced esoteric with instrumental values leading to
teacher education preparation programs characterized by a curriculum devoted to “life
adjustment”. In other words, in the on-going battle between the instrumental and the esoteric,
colleges of education found it out of fashion to embrace a “good idea” as the most pragmatic
concept of all.
From this emphasis on misunderstood pragmatism, it is no great leap to a demand for a focus
on occupational or at least preoccupational studies for the teacher education curriculum. In
other words, the goal of colleges of education becomes the production of employees armed with
narrow specialties. Such employees could be “canonized” by state certification standards, and
grand basilicas endowed by NCATE could be built as a testament for the triumph of the trivial
over the hallowed, a triumph for external wealth over internal riches, a triumph of intellectual
poverty over the treasures of the arts and humanities. Cardinal Newman stated this best when
he observed that there are two kinds of education, “the end of the one is to be philosophic
[surely partially the province of the fine arts and humanities] and the other to be mechanical:
the one rises to general ideas, the other is exhausted upon the particular. . . . I only say that
knowledge, in proportion as it tends more and more to be particular, ceases to be knowledge
(Newman, 1959, p. 138).
This insistence towards specialization in colleges of education has produced a cultural
apartheid that segregates future teachers from a cultural heritage. It produces an “unnatural”
and unacceptable divorce from those very things in life that represent the hallmark of civilized
sentient beings. Without those civilizing agents in life, the fine arts and humanities, we must, by
definition, become an uncivil people. Sadly, the people (agencies) referred to here is colleges of
education; those who teach the very people who are in turn going to begin the education
(students) of almost all the future generations of learners. This is not about western civilization
per se, nor dead Euro centric white males, nor any other politically correct or incorrect debates
of the recent past. This is simply about exposing future teachers to a world of ideas that can
only be experienced through the fine arts and the humanities. Those ideas know no time nor
geographical constraints, no gender or ethnic boundaries. They are ideas of creativity, justice,
beauty, and duty as expressed in the fine arts and the humanities, and thus they constitute what
might be called civilization.
Those studying in colleges of education are not being allowed to engage in these “civilizing”
dialogues with the arts and the humanities. It is certain that, in turn, they will not be able to
engage their own students in this essential dialogue, and so the cultural segregation will
continue. “Ruskin stated that “great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts;
the books of their deeds, the books of their words, and the books of their art. Not one of these
books can be understood unless we read the other two, but of the three, the only trustworthy
one is the last” (Clark, 1969, p. 1). And it is this last “book” that is most ignored by colleges of
education.
A healthy civilization is the deep structure of society. The economy, the political system, the
way people live in their environments are all expressions of civilization. To be a part of a
culture is to share a certain set of values with others, and to recognize that there are common
concerns that override individual differences. Yet culture is fragile, and takes constant
attendance to keep it in good health. The evidence suggests that today the nation’s social fabric
has been rent by the loss of any sense of shared purpose and common welfare (Chase, 1993).
The modern way we educate future educators has parallels in some of the attitudes that
10

characterized various ancient civilizations caught at the nadir of their culture. There was a
paralyzing fear that spread epidemically in those cultures. This fear caused people not to
question anything nor change anything. These cultures were full of meaningless rituals and
mystery religions that destroyed self-confidence, “and then exhaustion, the feeling of
hopelessness which can overtake a people even with a high degree of material prosperity.
There is a poem by the Modern Greek poet Cavafy, in which he imagines the people of an
antique town like Alexandria waiting everyday for the barbarians to come and sack the city.
Finally the barbarians move off somewhere else and the city is saved; but the people are
Disappointed—it would have been better than nothing” (Clark, 1969, p. 4).
THE VACUUM
This metaphor of life so pervaded by meaninglessness that even something disastrous is
preferable to the incessant tedium of vacuousness speaks of a profoundly purposeless
civilization. This same sense of being caught in an existential vacuum seems to pervade teacher
education. Viktor Frankl, noted primarily as a counseling philosopher and Holocaust survivor,
developed in NAZI concentration camps theories dealing with the ideas of existential vacuums
(feelings of meaninglessness). In general, Frankl developed these ideas as they relate to
individuals, but it seems likely that they can have institutional applications as well. As with
individuals, it seems unlikely that institutions fall into an uncivilized existential vacuum
overnight. Rather, it is a gradual decline that is so subtle that it often goes unnoticed. Frankl
identified four steps that lead, one following the other, to this vacuum.
The first step is the development of a plan-less, day-to-day attitude. One could ask whether or
not such an attitude exists in teacher education programs, indeed in all of education, today. Do
we have a plan, a purpose for education in our society? There are those who would answer in
the affirmative. For evidence they might cite former (and current) presidents Bush and Clinton
(all loudly claiming to be “the education president”) and their “America 2000 plan” or, in its
most current manifestation, the “No Child Left Behind” plan. Fortunately, the original plan
died in the 102nd congress. Unfortunately, it was revived by President Clinton and was actually
passed into law, virtually the same as the previous plan, but cleverly renamed “Goals 2000”.
Even more unfortunately, the education minions of current President Bush have recently done
away with even that plan (one could only assume that in some sense this was appropriate—the
entire idea behind Goals 2000 was to implement all of those goals by the year 2000 and since
not one of even those shallow goals was met almost three years ago, perhaps a “new plan” was
called for). This new plan is the “No Child Left Behind” plan. Except for a few very disturbing
additions concerning, essentially, canceling some First Amendment rights, there is really no
great difference in any of those three plans. But some would argue that we still have a plan
because even though “renamed”, the current plan still contains the same educational visions as
the President Clinton plan (“Goals 2000: The Educate America Act -Senate Bill 846, House of
Representative Bill 1804) (APA testifies, 1993, p. 5). That plan (as is the current President
Bush plan) is virtually identical to the six “National Educational Goals” that formed the heart
of the first President Bush’s Renaissance 2000 plan.
Where would such a plan lead education? The common thread running throughout this
misguided “pseudo-plan” is one of economic gain, technology, and global parity in the market
place. These concepts are explicit or implicit in five of those six national goals for education.
The tactics used to implement this plan are little more than emotional scare tactics. We have all
11

seen examples of these tactics bandied about in front page headlines blatantly proclaiming
tabloid horror stories such as—”Recent SAT scores show American students lagging behind the
Japanese, the Germans, the Koreans, the Canadians, and possibly some species of elk”. The
theme of these “scare tactics” is basically that someone (the Japanese, Germans, Koreans, etc.)
is getting ahead of America in some measurable way. Curiously, that measurable way almost
always seems to pertain to business and economics rather than education. For example, after a
recent set of SAT scores were released, alarmed business leaders claimed that the low scores
carried the broad implication that schools were not even preparing students for the assembly
line much less “respectable” corporate jobs (Business adjust, 1991). Foster Smith, a senior Vice
President of the National Alliance for Business stated that, “in some cases businesses have had
to ‘dumb down’ the work—spend time and money on machines and work processes that fit an
undereducated work place”. (Business adjust, 1991, p. 7-A).
These tactics have not changed much for literally decades. In 1983, the federal government’s
National Commission on Excellence in Education issued the report known as “A Nation At
Risk.” In language designed to frighten the reader into more money for a plan-less,
meaningless public education policy, the commission warned, “if an unfriendly foreign power
had attempted to impose on America the mediocre education that exists today, we might well
have viewed it as an act of war” (Spring, 1991, p. 24). This pseudo-intellectual saber rattling is
a thinly disguised attempt to develop a plan for the sole purpose of economic and market gain
and yet pass it off as a “plan for education”. This is made clear when the same report declared
that, “if only to keep and improve on the slim competitive edge we still retain in world markets,
we must rededicate ourselves to the reform of the educational system for the benefit of all”
(Spring, 1991, p.24).
All this is perhaps a political plan. Perhaps it is an economic plan. But it is not an educational
plan. When considered as an educational plan such ideas are worse than no plan at all and
bring us closer to the abyss of the uncivilized existential vacuum. Such a plan is the plan of the
“sound bite” and the “slogan.” It is the plan of meaningless platitudes designed to minimally
satisfy the taxpayer until the next bond issue, or next mill levy, or next Goals 2000 is passed. It
is a plan that totally ignores the fine arts and humanities, and one that dulls the mind and
withers the soul of education. It is the plan to build bigger, richer, and emptier basilicas.
If a person or an institution remains in a plan-less state for any length of time it degenerates
into a sense of fatalism. This is Frankl’s second step downward into an existential vacuum.
Fatalism is simply the belief that though conditions are unacceptable, there is nothing that can
be done to change them. It is the belief that our destiny is out of our hands. The symptoms of
this stage of the vacuum are the “exaggerated sigh” and the reliance on a nebulous, sinister,
and virtually omnipotent outside agent to relieve us of personal responsibility. Examples of this
abound. The teacher says (with an elongated, and heartfelt sigh of course) that he/she could do
better with more support from the parents and the local administration. The local
administration (not to belabor the point, but it must be remembered that all of the following
statements are accompanied by the ritual obligatory sigh) says that he/she could do better
without all the federal regulations and bureaucratic nonsense. The professor of education says
that he/she could do better with more higher education funding, with more support from the
Dean, with less interference from the board of regents or the state legislature, ad infinitum. At
every level the litany continues. We sigh and admit we are impotent because of “them”
12

(whichever “them” is most handy at the time) and such an admission reinforces the entrenched
fatalism that paralyzes us.
To all this fatalistic abdication of responsibility, Socrates says, “nonsense”. Perhaps that’s too
liberal a translation from the Greek. What he did say though (which roughly translates to
“nonsense”) is, “what a society values, that it will cultivate”. Read carefully; he didn’t say
society would try to cultivate its values or make a sincere effort to cultivate its values. He said it
would cultivate those values, period. Basically, Socrates would have very little patience with the
pseudo-reform movements in education because they are mere movements of subterfuge
designed to cover the fact that what we have is really what we want. If we didn’t want it, we
wouldn’t have it. What we have has been scrupulously cultivated and is therefore the product
of what we value. If we valued something different badly enough, we would cultivate something
different. This stage of fatalism in colleges of education is a caricature of the oldest medical
joke in history—the patient says to the doctor, “it hurts when I do this”, to which the doctor
replies, “well stop doing that”. We in education bemoan our fate, and talk about all the things
that don’t work. To which any sensible observer would remark, “well stop doing those things
and try something else” (having colleges of education begin a civilizing dialogue with our
future teachers concerning the fine arts and humanities would certainly seem to fit this call to
“try something else” quite nicely). But the call to try something else is usually met with a sigh
and a mumbled reply stating, but “they” won’t let us.
Proceeding ever downward to the uncivilized existential vacuum from planlessness, to fatalism,
we now encounter the third stage—conformism. Colleges of education are uncommonly fond of
pseudo-intellectual fads. From new math, to whole language, to assertive discipline, to learning
styles, to right brain/left brain thinking, to transformational grammar, to cooperative learning,
the list goes on and on. Perhaps many of these fads have worthwhile pieces to add to a quality
educational experience for our future teachers. But rarely are they treated as the potential
minor step in the right direction, which surely could be their only claim. Rather, they are
treated as some sort of magical panacea that will instantaneously transform colleges of
education into an intellectual Valhalla if only enough disciples will convert and conform to
whatever fad is popular at that moment. An astute observer would note that it is rare when
such clarion calls for converts are not rewarded with conforming multitudes. Books will be
written, workshops will be held, and Continuing Education credits will be offered to all who
will embrace whatever fad has gained momentary popularity. After a brief period of time, the
disciples will wander off, blank faced, in search of the next pseudo-intellectual epiphany, and
one is reminded of the Miltonic quote so frequently repeated by Robert M. Hutchins, “the
sheep look up, but are not fed” (1968, p. 115).
When caught in this web of conformity, Frankl (1975) noted that we publicly (and
institutionally) echo Schopenhauer’s admonition that “we seem eternally condemned to
vacillate between the two extremes of want and boredom” (p. 169). We are like children in that
we see a new toy, and we can’t live without it. We know that when we get it, we will be fulfilled
and happy. But after ten minutes with the new toy, we realize that it really wasn’t what we
wanted after all, and so we search for a new magic toy to enchant us. Such shallow
enchantment is always ephemeral, and it never quite satisfies as we thought it would. We want,
we get, we become quickly bored with our new found fad and then, “herdlike”, we move off in
search for the next educational salvation just appearing on the horizon (trust me, there’s always
one there).
13

According to Frankl, the final step in this downward existential spiral is fanaticism. Hopefully,
colleges of education (and society in general for that matter) are not at this point yet. But the
atmosphere seems ominous. There are certainly any number of current fanatical groups who
are making considerable inroads with our disaffected youth. Censorship in America’s schools is
alive and prospering. The often fanatical quasi-religious/political right’s agenda has increasing
influence on teachers and students. The 1990 Children’s Defense fund tells us that every day in
America 27 children die from poverty, 30 children are wounded by guns, and 135,000 children
bring a gun to school. Such statistics go on and on and do not bode well for our attempt to
avoid an uncivilized vacuum. The attempt by colleges of education to right these fanatical
leanings by developing methods courses on classroom management seems somewhat
shortsighted and even frivolous and ignores Whitehead’s (1929) admonition that many
catastrophes of mankind have been produced by the narrowness of people with a good
methodology.
The existential vacuum apparent in colleges of education has seemingly followed Frankl’s steps
precisely; each step following the other as night follows day. First the “planlessness” that leads
to fatalism, which leads to conformism, which ends in fanaticism. Unfortunately many boards of
regents and state legislatures look on this vacuous chaos and see only the final stages of the
problem and attempt to impose order on this chaos through “ducal fiats” such as required
measurable accountability programs and required empirically based minimum competency
exams for both teachers and students (which will of course result in minimum competencies
exhibited by both teachers and students alike). Such simplistic notions designed to impose
order on fanaticism are not possible and should not be desirable even if they were possible.
Sagan (1991) noted that in a letter to James Madison, Thomas Jefferson stated that “a society
that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both and deserve neither” (p. 13).
THE PLAN
It seems likely that another approach could be more successful. According to Frankl, fanaticism
(the point where modern education reformers seem to want to begin) could not be possible
without first passing through the stages of conformism, fatalism, and planlessness. Therefore, it
seems possible that colleges of education could avoid all these steps leading to an uncivilized
existential vacuum if they would avoid the plan-less first step. In other words they/we/ me
should develop a plan that provided meaning and purpose for future teachers who could then
pass that sense of purpose along to their own students. This plan should be simple, consistent,
and to the point. This brings us full circle back to the simplicity of little Francesco Bernadone,
and to an educational plan where the aim of education is wisdom and goodness (Hutchins,
1943). Next, the plan would attempt to implement Samuel Johnson’s conviction that “the
supreme end of education is expert discernment in all things—the power to tell the good from
the bad, the genuine from the counterfeit, and to prefer the good and the genuine to the bad
and the counterfeit” (Peter, 1979, p.165). These two points constitute the entirety of the plan.
They are points that can, to a large degree, only be addressed by specifically creating the
necessary dialogue between future teachers and the fine arts and humanities. They are the
exact points that colleges of education miss, just as Francesco’s “followers” missed the point of
his life.
14

There are those who would dismiss such thinking as absolutist. They would quickly point out
that wisdom, goodness, and genuineness are relative terms and that democratic peoples should
do all in their power to resist the imposition of such absolutes on education. And so they
should. But that is not what is being advocated here. This effort is not saying that wisdom,
goodness, and genuineness are commodities that can or should be imposed on anyone, least of
all future teachers. What is being advanced here is the simple notion that the uncivilizing
existential vacuum can be avoided through a dialogue between colleges of education and their
students concerning ideals such as wisdom, goodness, genuineness, justice, and beauty (to
name a few) that are to be found only in the fine arts and humanities Further, it advances the
notion that these dialogues must take place if future teachers are to be able to continue the
dialogue concerning such ideas with his /her own future elementary or secondary students
(which surely must minimally at least be a better place to begin necessary changes).
The intent here is not to use colleges of education to attempt to impose ideals such as wisdom
and goodness on its students. Nor is it the intent to even try to use colleges of education to
attempt to define such ideals for its students. The plan suggested here is an attempt by colleges
of education, through the fine arts and humanities, to convene and conduct a dialogue with its
students to simply discuss these ideals. The goal of such a plan is not to discover to everyone’s
satisfaction a commodity labeled wisdom or beauty or truth. In a pluralistic society this may not
even be possible. Wisdom and other such ideals are illusive when we try to treat them as
commodities to possess or goals to attain. But paradoxically, as St. Francis found inner riches
through external poverty, we may find that wisdom, goodness, genuineness, and beauty are byproducts
of the dialogues that schools of education can hold with their students through the
fine arts and humanities. It is a simple plan. But as the spirit of Assisi turns his back on the
hollow canonizations and empty basilicas, so too must schools of education turn their backs on
the market place mentality, and the teacher as technocrat ideal and concentrate, through the
arts and humanities, on the inner riches sustained through dialogues about the great ideas.
“These are the aims of life, [and colleges of education] and society should be organized to
promote them first of all. It is the sign of a backward civilization when in a financial crisis the
first thing a community thinks of is to close the art museums and reduce expenditures on
education. A civilization without art and thought, or one that does not value these, is a pack
rather than a civilization” (Hutchins, 1953, pp 17-18). The plan being advanced here is the
only plan for education that can bring with it a brightening of the soul, a spark to the soul, a
civilizing influence.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brubacher, J. (1965). Bases for Policy in Higher Education. New York: Viking Press.
_________. (1991, August). “Businesses Adjust to Ill-educated Workers.” The Billings Gazette.
p. 7-A.
Chase, A. (1993). “The Rise and Fall of General Education: 1945-1980” Academic Questions.
6 (2), 23-26.
Clark, K (1969). Civilisation. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers.
Frankl, V. (1975). Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy. New York:
Pocket Books.
Hutchins, R. (1943). Education for Freedom. Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State
University Press.
Hutchins, R. (1953). The University of Utopia. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
15

Hutchins, R. (1969). No Friendly Voice. New York: Greenwood Press, Publishers.
Newman, J. (1959). The Idea of a University. New York: Doubleday & Co.
Peter, L. (1979). Peter’s Quotations: Ideas For Our Time. New York: Bantum Books.
Sagan, C. (1991, September). “Real Patriots Ask Questions.” The Billings Gazette-Parade.
p.13.
Smith, P. (1990). Killing the Spirit: Higher Education in America. New York: Viking.
Spring, J. (1991). American Education: An Introduction to Social and Political Aspects. New
York: Longman Publishing Group
Staff. (1993, July/August). APA Testifies on Educational and Occupational Skills Reform Bill.
Psychological Science Agenda. Washington D.C.: American Psychological Association
Press. p. 6.
Whitehead, A. (1929). The Aims of Education and Other Essays. New York: Macmillan
Company.
16

TEACHING ART EDUCATION IN A STUDIO ORIENTED ART DEPARTMENT
Shari S. Stoddard
Central Washington University
For the past two years I have taught at a small to medium size state supported university in the
northwest. Size of course is relative to what one is used to. As an undergraduate and graduate I
attended two big ten universities in the mid-west. My first teaching position was at a flagship
university in the South where I taught with five colleagues in the art education program. After
five years I took a position at a medium size teaching university in the Midwest along with six
other art educators. Four years later I moved to the Pacific Northwest where I am currently the
only art education faculty member. I teach Art in the Elementary School taken by elementary
and art education majors, and Components of Art Education and Art in Secondary School for
art education majors. I also oversee a one-credit course in which art education majors make a
portfolio that they will use in applying for a job.
My undergraduate degree is in fine arts. My master’s degree is in art education, and my Ph.D. is
in Curriculum and Teaching with art education as my cognate area. I have experienced
prejudice against the discipline of art education from both studio professors and education
professors. Art education is sometimes viewed by education faculty as the far-out, rulebreaking,
strange and weird program where students do not have to adhere to rules and
guidelines, keep deadlines, or stay on task. On the other hand studio faculty sometime view
the art education program as the conservative, rule following, lack-luster, over-there area. They
blame the art education area for not teaching future teachers how to better prepare students for
studio or art history classes, for not teaching students to be more creative or more
knowledgeable, and for being too uptight in creating artwork. They view these students as the
products of the education system to which the art education program belongs. Also the art
studio professors sometime feel the reason the general public does not appreciate and/or
understand art is because the art education program did not do an adequate job in educating
teachers who later teach the future public. Because of these beliefs I think it is important for
studio and art history faculty to know about the curriculum being taught in art education today,
its value and it’s content. It is also important for studio and art history faculty to realize that
students the art education professors educate will in turn someday teach the students who will
then apply for admission into art schools.
This talk will focus on the main art education curricula being taught in institutions of higher
learning so that the audience will be better informed as to what is involved in educating future
art teachers. Some of the problems inherent in having an art education program housed within
an art department will also be presented.
For the last twenty years Discipline-Based Art Education (DBAE) has been taught in most art
education programs in institutions of higher learning across the United States. Having
graduated from such institutions, art teachers K-12 and elementary teachers K-6 then use
DBAE to guide their teaching of art to children. DBAE involves four disciplines—aesthetics, art
history, art criticism, and art production. Content and strategies for teaching these four
disciplines are key components in most programs. However, quality art education programs,
must also include the following topics: child development in art, the history of art education,
17

teaching and learning standards in art education (national and state), current art education
issues, information about and strategies for teaching students (K-12) with special needs, writing
and implementing curriculum, teaching strategies and techniques, including multiculturalism
within the curriculum, student learning styles, classroom environment and management,
developing teaching aids, art materials and ordering supplies, safety issues, evaluating art
outcomes, displaying artworks, careers in art, applying for art education positions, and field
experience observations. Individual institutions will of course have some other topics added to
the list, but a quality art education program will at least include these components.
There is a great deal of information that needs to be covered in teaching future art teachers. In
the past, most institutions have done a fairly good job in teaching the above information
including child development in art, safety issues, and ordering art materials; but now
institutions must try to include teaching the four disciplines of art as well. Thankfully art
education programs can rely on the studio and art history faculty to teach the content in two of
the four disciplines. The art educator must, however, teach future teachers strategies for
teaching the content covered in these courses to the appropriate grade levels. Teaching the
content and strategies for teaching the content in the areas of aesthetics and art criticism are
usually left up to the art education faculty. Large enough art education programs sometimes are
fortunate enough to support an entire course to teaching these two disciplines, smaller
programs are often not so fortunate.
For a better understanding of what is actually involved in including Disciplined Based Art
Education in an art education program the following is offered. DBAE is a theoretical approach
rather than a curriculum. It can be configured in a variety of ways to meet the instructors goals
and resources. In 1992 The Getty Center for Education in the Arts published The DBAE
Handbook: An Overview of Disciplined-Based Art Education by Stephen Mark Dobbs. This text
includes chapters on definitions, features of DBAE, curriculum, teaching, evaluation,
implementation, and resources. The definition given in this text states that “Disciplined-based
art education is an approach to instruction and learning in art that derives content from four
foundational disciplines that contribute to the creation, understanding, and appreciation of
art.” (p. 9) Because DBAE is an approach and not a specific curriculum, it exists in a variety of
forms. However, all versions of DBAE have the following features in common:
Art is taught as a subject within general education with a written and sequentially organized
curriculum consisting of lessons containing content drawn from four foundational art
disciplines. The lessons build a body of cumulative knowledge, understanding, and skills in art
that can be appropriately evaluated.
Students’ abilities are developed to make art (art production); analyze, interpret, and evaluate
qualities of visual form (art criticism); know and understand art’s role in society (art history);
and understand the unique nature and qualities of art and how people make judgments about it
and justify those judgments (aesthetics). (p.10)
Using a DBAE approach to curriculum, students must learn how to write lesson plans
appropriate for each grade level and coordinated with other grades. The curriculum needs to be
sequentially organized and reflect learning simple concepts before complex ones so that
students may build their knowledge, skills, and understanding in a logical fashion. Works of art
by adult artists from many cultures are central to the organization of the curriculum. Mature
18

artworks motivate and inspire students own art products. The amount of time and attention
spent on each of the four disciplines depends on the students’ learning and developmental
level, instructional resources, and program emphasis. DBAE can be adapted to meet the
gender, economic, and cultural needs of the students being taught.
The National Art Education Association has established national standards for teaching art.
While these standards are not mandated, they do act as guidelines for many state curriculum
frameworks. The national standards are based on teaching curricula that includes the four
disciplines of art. Most state guidelines also include the teaching of these four disciplines in
various formats.
Hopefully this brief overview of what is involved in teaching an art education program that
includes DBAE gives you a better perspective of the difficult and sometimes overwhelming job
of teaching art education in institutions of higher learning. If an art education professor is
surrounded by other art education faculty he/she has a built in support group. If, however, the
art education program consists of one art education faculty member, as is the case in many
institutions, that faculty member truly needs the support of the other faculty members housed
in the department. Some art education programs are housed in the school of education, but
more often than not, the art education program is housed in the art department. As noted in
the beginning of this paper, either way, a lone art education faculty member housed in either
department can feel isolated and rejected. The following are three major problems that may
exist when an art education program is housed within an art department and some suggestions
for solving these problems.
Problem: The art education faculty may feel isolated from the studio and art history faculty.
Suggestion: Art education faculty need to participate in faculty shows, attend meetings, or be on
committees when invited. Studio faculty need to accept and encourage art education faculty to
participate in such activities.
Problem: Art education faculty are often out of the art building during the week. They may be
either in the education building preparing documents, attending meetings and conferences, or
working on committees; in the library doing research; or observing art education students in
field experiences or student teaching.
Suggestion: Art education faculty need to inform their colleagues of their duties outside the
confines of the art building. Studio faculty need to respect the art education faculty’s efforts
spent away from the art department.
Problem: Often the art studio and art history faculty, and the art education faculty do not know
what or how the other area’s curriculum is being taught.
Suggestion: Art education faculty need to inform studio and art history faculty, and visa versa,
about the curriculum being taught in their area. For example, art education faculty need to
know what content is being taught in studio and art history courses, not just a list of course
titles, so that they can plan curriculum that offers future teachers strategies for teaching
students K-12 the content they are learning in these courses. Another example is that art studio
and art history faculty need to be aware of the impact of President Bush’s mandate that no
19

child shall be left behind on the art education program. The state of Washington, as I am sure
are other states, is taking this mandate seriously. Soon students majoring in education will no
longer pass student teaching unless ALL the students they are teaching learn the content being
presented. This puts a lot of responsibility on the teaching faculty as well as the students
student teaching to make sure that ALL students will be able to learn the content that is
presented to them. In the central part of the state of Washington many students are Hispanic or
Native American in origin. Some of these students are transient and do not speak or
understand English. In high school these students are sometimes placed in art classes when
they have little interest in art because counselors feel these students will have a better chance
of success in a class that emphasizes a more kinetic or visual curriculum rather than a verbal or
written one. These counselors have little understanding of the rigger that is included in a
DBAE art education curriculum. This is just one of the many problems now facing art
education faculty and student teachers in art education.
In closing, I would just like to suggest that those attending this talk will, on return to their
institutions of higher learning, seek out faculty in the art education program and talk to them
about what they do. We are all teachers and is for the betterment of our students that we learn
about what each other is doing. Building on that knowledge we will be able to better educate
students for whatever field they pursue.
20

VERS COLLAGE: THE REMEMBRANCE WORK OF POETRY
Beverly Schneller
Millersville University
The term “collage” derives from the French word for “pasting.” In art, the first collage was
created in 1912 by Pablo Picasso when he glued a piece of oilcloth to the painted canvas of
“Still Life with Chair Caning.” In music, collage is experienced with musical quotations and
“Variations on a Theme”; while in literature, collage is achieved through learned citations,
quotations, and intertextual allusions. The term lends itself to other applications as well. For
example, the Berlin City Museum for Art, Photography and Architecture recently completed
the Lebenscollage of Dadaist Hannah Hoch (1889-1978) in six volumes of materials associated
with her life ranging from recipes to gardening hints to artwork, diaries and newspaper reviews
of her shows. 1
The subject of this paper is vers collage, a term I coined to describe a post-modernist approach
to literary allusions. In a vers collage poem, multi-vocalism is achieved through a combination
of direct quotes or the creation of secondary, complete voices in the poem that form a dialog
within the poem itself yielding at least two interlocutors addressing the same subject in one
poem. Unlike collage in art or music, vers collage does not attempt to create a narrative line, or
an organic unity, from the different materials. Instead, its effect is to jar or distance the reader
by its overtly rhetorical stance, as it, unconventionally, addresses a topic, not a theme, in the
poetry. As such vers collage is a unique medium for “remembrance” in that the borrowed
materials remain as they are in the new work. Contra Elizabeth Butler Cullingford who says
that the postmodernist’s use of allusions is nothing more than a “commodity fetish”
functioning only to show off without maintaining a “meaningful historical sense.” Hence, vers
collage produces a unique type of non-linear intertextuality, balancing two discrete texts in
collocation, not reconciliation. 2
To illustrate the technique of vers collage, I selected three recently published short poems by
contemporary authors — Turner Cassity, Dana Gioia, and Frederick Turner — and paired them
with what could be seen as their predecessors in the works of W.B. Yeats, Weldon Kees, and
W.H. Auden. Each poet and poem engages the ancestor in a dialog which challenges the
reader’s ability to “make sense” of the new poem before them. Cassity’s “Selling to Byzantium”
from his 1998 collection, Waiting to Go Under, deploys the learned allusion aspect of vers
collage as the poem is rooted in a dialog with Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium.” Dana Gioia’s
“Elegy with Surrealists Proverbs as Refrain” is in open imitation of Weldon Kees’ collage poem,
“Round”; while, Frederick Turner’s “After a Poet’s Encounter with Certain New York
Apologists for Terrorists” favorably compares with W.H. Auden’s “The Shield of Achilles”. 3
Gioia and Kees offer the clearest instance of non-linearity in vers collage and Turner and
Auden use aesthetic artifacts, a poem and a work of art, to “embody and reflect cultural beliefs”
through specific appeals to the senses, which is another aspect of the vers collage technique. 4
While honors for the first vers collage poem belong to T.S. Eliot and “The Waste Land,” it is
not the model used by these poets. Rather, each invents an individually specific response in
each poem to historical causation and textual metaphors to destabilize or obscure the
“meaning” of the poem while preserving the originality and integrity of the poem’s collage
21

elements. 5 The appeal of the vers collage poem to the reader resides in the way it challenges
the fundamental desire we share to arrange our experiences into a hierarchy to create order. A
form of play, the vers collage poem forces us to adjust our essential “cultural stances” or
patterns of knowledge reception and formation, as well as our biases and beliefs. 6 As we shall
see, each of the pairs of poems addresses both social and literary knowledge in their form and
content relationships.
Mr. Cassity Questions Mr. Yeats
Turner Cassity uses W.B. Yeats’ 1927 “Sailing to Byzantium” as his underlying grammar in
“Selling to Byzantium” representing the ability of vers collage to use the energy of the
historical material to create a “new and original source of interplay between artistic expression
and the experience of the everyday world.” 7 “Selling to Byzantium” contemporizes Yeats’
approach to “cultural rituals” to address the theme of power, which is only implied by Yeats,
but assigned by Cassity to time.
“Selling to Byzantium”‘s concreteness “interrogates” Yeats’ characteristic abstractness as
Cassity’s speaker asks, “Philosopher aside, who ever drowned in symbol?” As Stephen Pfohl
describes it, the collage technique, used here by Cassity, “disinFORM[s] as much as it shares
knowledge”. Readers are disarmed of their “knowledge” of what literary allusion is supposed to
do when they cannot use “Sailing to Byzantium” as the key to “Selling to Byzantium,” and
ultimately, “may find it impossible to master” the poem. 8 If Yeats’ speaker is enchanted with
the possible utopia of Byzantium, Cassity’s is distinctly disenchanted, seeing only loss in the
ruins of the city. Moreover, Cassity’s poem is replete with irony apparent to historians as the
descriptions balance the characteristic Byzantine experimentation with shapes and forms
against its turbulent history. What Yeats’speaker becomes eager to escape in a rite of passage,
Cassity’s is ready to embrace, ultimately creating a schism between not only the form but also
the content of the poem.
Cassity fragments Yeats’ rhymed octet stanzas with his unrhymed lines, while still making
“Sailing to Byzantium” relevant, just not reconciled to “Selling to Byzantium.” Cassity needs
“Sailing to Byzantium” as his “text of origin” without which he could not create a vers collage
in its “new whole [and] different totality.” 9 Nowhere is this more clear than in the ending of the
two poems. Yeats’ final stanza reads:
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
Cassity evokes the tone and meter of the characteristic Yeatsian line, but for a different ending:
Confectioner invent delights.
The small clear stream whose culvert undermines the walls
22

On that day when the wall is breached will run as clearly:
Only in the chronicles must it run in blood.
Not that the conqueror will not lop off his heads.
(Most head, to their discredit, will accommodate).
No eminence that does not fall before it falls.
Already we have mosques in use within the gates. 10
Cassity’s stanzas read closely enough to suggest a similarity to Yeats’ pacing, but the visions are
distinctly different. Thus, Cassity’s poem as a collage of Yeats’ at once embraces and distances
itself, offering only the appearance of intertextuality and of linear narrative.
GOING A “ROUND” WITH KEES AND GIOIA
Jacques Derrida suggests written language is “marked” by its form, purpose, and content with
literature “re-marked” or signaled by its author to operate “with unusual forcefulness and to
produce unusual pleasure in doing so.” 11 Dana Gioia’s approach to vers collage illustrates the
remarking of language aspect of the technique. In fact, Gioia has several poems that qualify as
vers collage, but his “Elegy with Surrealist Proverbs as Refrain” from his 2001 collection of
poetry, Interrogations at Noon, shows the advances he has made in vers collage with this poem
built through direct quotations from Surrealists arranged into stanzas incorporating two refrains
from a 1925 collection by Paul Eluard and Benjamin Peret.
Both Gioia, and his mentor-model in collage writing, Weldon Kees, reflect what Max Ernst said
about “coupling” or representations of “realities irreconcilable in appearance upon a plane
which apparently does not suit them.” 12 Kees brings together seventeenth-century British poet,
Andrew Marvell, nineteenth-century French religious historian Ernst Renan, Paul Cézanne,
and American newspaper reporter Royal Cortissoz, who wrote the inscription for the Lincoln
Memorial, with the first-person speaker of “Round” who seems to be falling apart. The poem’s
first stanza sets up the collocated materials upon which the poem builds:
“Wonderous life!” cried Marvell at Appleton House.
Renan admired Jesus Christ “wholeheartedly.”
But here dried ferns keep falling to the floor,
And something inside my head
Flaps like a worn-out blind. Royal Cortissoz is dead.
A blow to the Herald-Tribune. A closet mouse
Rattles the wrapper on the breakfast food. Renan
Admired Jesus Christ “wholeheartedly.”
Stanza two advances with the presence of Cezanne exclaiming, “Le monde, c’est terrible!”
juxtaposing the flapping blind with the dying fern. The third and final stanza brings Renan,
Cezanne, and Cortissoz back in again and the poem ends with a repetition of the first line.
Gioia, for his vers collage, unites the surrealists Breton, Apollinaire, Picasso, Duchamp, Eulard,
and Ball, for a lament on the impotence of art and the emptiness of verbal expression. As was
evident in the Cassity and Yeats vers collage, irony plays a role in these types of poems. True to
vers collage, the Gioia poem strives to interrogate the readers’ sense of “logic” by creating new
“imaginary practices” in language. 13 This is evident in the organization of the poem that
23

presents different definitions of art, collocated with images and historical materials. For
instance, stanza two reads:
Wounded Apollinaire wore a small steel plate
Inserted in his skull. “I so loved art,” he smiled,
“I joined the artillery.” His friends were asked to wait
while his widow laid a crucifix on his chest.
Picasso hated death. The funeral left him so distressed
he painted a self-portrait. “It’s always other people,”
remarked Duchamp, “who do the dying.”
I came. I sat down. I went away.
Because the reader remains unsure how to interpret either “Round” or “Elegy” they present an
atmosphere of language-based playfulness, summed up in the second refrain of the “Elegy”: “I
came. I sat down. I went away.” The remarking of the artists’ words in “Elegy” gives the reader
pleasure without the corresponding demand to make sense of them, making the verse seem
absurd. 14
At the end of the first stanzas of “Round” and of “Elegy” it is clear the reader must abandon all
expectations and beliefs about what poetry is “supposed to do.” Though “Round” appears to
move through time, there is really no unity despite the variations achieved in repetitions. As
the reader seeks information from “Round” it becomes evident that the poem is really about
deconstructing the way poetic meaning is usually grasped, through the form and content
symbiosis. Aptly named, “Round” goes round on itself, enclosing itself narcissistically in its own
language.
Cleverly, Gioia realizes this in the opening line of “Elegy with Surrealist Proverbs as Refrains”
when he chooses: “‘Poetry must lead somewhere’ declared Breton.” The stanza then continues:
He carried a rose inside his coat each day
to give a beautiful stranger — “Better to die of love
than love without regret.” And those who loved him
soon learned regret. “The simplest surreal act
is running through the street with a revolver
firing at random.” Old and famous, he seemed demonde.
There is always a skeleton on the buffet.
In the “Elegy,” Gioia captures the sentiment of the Berlin Dadaists that art should produce “‘a
chaotic, explosive image, a provocative dismembering of reality’.” 15 Throughout the poem,
Gioia selected quotations from the surrealists that illustrate this using metaphors of selfdestruction,
“running through the streets with a revolver firing at random”; “My glory is like a
great bomb waiting to explode”; and “ Burn all the books.” The recurring skeleton on the
buffet is more than an image of death and artistic powerlessness; it is absurd in its
“performative effect” as an “artifice” which appears with the companion refrain, “I came. I sat
down. I went away” as an “objective” truth for the poem. 16
The “Elegy”‘s form with its unrhymed stanzas, and occasional metrics, misleads the logic of
poetic form, while emphasizing the ritualistic, mantra like power of certain words, if repeated
24

often enough to become a social truth. The “not knowings” as Pfhol calls them dismember the
“the socially patterned possibilities” 17 inherent in the act of reading to interpret a poem. These
poems, as collages, are literally glued together into stanzas using other people’s words or
paraphrasing of historical materials. Thus, Gioia’s vers collage, following and expanding on
Kees’, collocates signs and/as language; images and/as interpretations; and the realistic and/as
the absurd to test the ends of remarking language for no real purpose. Pushing back from the
table, the reader can also say, “I came. I saw. I went away.” going forth with an emptiness in
realizing as Peggy Lee sang:” That’s all there is” to these poems.
The Shield of Language: W.H. Auden and Frederick Turner
In its third iteration, the vers collage of W.H. Auden and of Frederick Turner achieve the
maximum range by collocating two separate poems into one inorganic whole. Anthony Hecht
describes Auden’s 1955 book, The Shield of Achilles as “the most clearly and formally
composed volume Auden ever produced” 18 and no where is this more evident than in the title
poem. In “The Shield of Achilles” Auden composes the poem in two different forms, using four
octet trimeter stanzas for the description of the shield, and five seven line rhyme royale stanzas
for the contemporary sections which create the tension in the poem. The shield stanzas show
turbulence in their metrical substitutions while the modern time stanzas are all regular. The
poem is visibly collage, and addresses the changing perceptions of warfare and heroism across
time. Auden offers a double poem, for a “double reading” showing the two sides of the shield
of Achilles and its war and peace images. In this he illustrates how collage makes no attempt
to merge disparate materials or elements beyond a “temporary [re] composition” 19 on the
canvas and on the page.
As vers collage, the two poems in two forms, interrogates itself. Thetis, who commissioned a
shield to protect her son Achilles, has a different interpretation of war from the blacksmith,
Hephestos, who is forging the shield. To her, war always ends in victory, as evidenced in her
vision of a pastoral empire performing ceremonial rituals of peace. What she is confronted with
on the other side of the shield is a barren “weed-choked field” (Stanza 3, line 8) foreshadowing
Achilles’ death (Stanza 4, line 8). Within the four shield stanzas, Auden uses the couplet that
ends each to propel his theme of fantasies versus the realities of war.
The five contemporary stanzas question the ideal of heroism. Readers are told “a crowd of
ordinary decent folk” has gathered either passively or submissively for the firing squad
execution of three men who are shamefully humiliated by their captors before their deaths:
What their foes like to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.
An apparent witness, “the ragged urchin,” attempts to and fails to kills a bird with a stone
about the same time. Steeped in violence, he has “ . . . never heard/Of any world where
promises were kept/Or one could weep because another wept.” As a post World War II poem,
“The Shield of Achilles” uses a work of art and a set of cultural beliefs in parallel acts of
remembrance. The poem appeals to visual and tactile senses, as its aims to “disinFORM” or
disabuse the reader of any sense of surety; just as Thetis is forced to question her assumptions.
Frederick Turner extends the Audenesque vers collage as he, too, unravels “an existing
25

assemblage” of cultural beliefs to capture a moment of fragmentation in socially accepted ideas
of honor and heroism. 20
“After the Poet’s Encounter with Certain New York Apologists for the Terrorists” is dated
March 25, 2002 and set at LaGuardia airport. It features eight quatrains with alternating
rhymes, XAXA, and a closing couplet. There are three pentameter lines followed by one
tetrameter line per stanza, giving a distinctive form to offset the tension of the ideas of the
poem. Like Auden, Turner adjusts the form to present the best sounding expression of the
content. As vers collage, Turner’s speaker uses artifacts of material culture — the fallen World
Trade Center Towers, the experience of being search by airport screeners before boarding a
plane, the apologists for the terrorists he hears, and the inspirational words of Hungarian poet
Miklos Radnoti, a victim of the Nazis, as his tools for “investigating [the world] similar to the
[cultural anthropologist]. 21
As the speaker listens to those who want to “understand” and “forgive” a “space is cut open or
reopened” in the speaker’s mind which makes room for the exact words of Radnoti calling on
him to “find a renewed source of energy for resisting” the “magic rituals . . . of explanation.”
[that] promise to bring order out of chaos. 22 Radnoti’s poem, “Just Walk On, Condemned to
Die” is italicized at the key moments and used whole in the vers collage, pasted in for
counterpoint. Applying Radnoti’s invocation to the collage of reality, emotions, and
interpretations of history, creates a new causality built through the textual metaphors in the
poem. After detailing the current situation with the collapsed towers, the military planes flying
overhead, and the sense of loss, the speaker reflects and then hears the voice of Radnoti, in
these final four stanzas:
And can this city, with its million shops,
Its vital eyes, its fertile trade,
Outlive the abstract treason of its clerks,
The dead black of their masquerade? —
O poet, may you live as clean as those
Hill-dwellers in their windblown snows,
As free from sin as baby Jesus in
An ikon where the candle glows;
Speak to your city, poet, comfort her wounds,
Drink up the poison they prepare,
Transform their gall to milk, forgive, forgive
The pale-faced ones in their despair;
O live as hard as the great wolf that goes
Wounded and bleeding through the snow. 23
The speaker, after the manner of the Berlin Dadaists, Hannah Hoch and John Heartfield
“[mixes] the language which noticeably demands real social change with a mode of artistic
investigation” 24 manifested here through Radnoti’s cautionary voice. As Auden had in the
1930s and 1940s, the speaker of Turner’s poem “[is] struggling with the question of the poet’s
function in a world consumed by war and political and social injustice” as he attempts “to
26

define his identity and function in a chaotic time.” 25 Finding himself unable to do it alone,
Radnoti is pasted in to converse with the speaker and to interrogate his reactions, urging him to
avoid rashness and to recognize the inevitability of just walking on. The two texts, like two
people walking are parallel and unreconciled, as it is unclear after the collocation if the speaker
will adopt Radnoti’s vision.
* * * *
Vers Collage is a form poetical expression that breathes new life into literary allusions through
the application of Dadaist and Surrealist techniques of non-linear, multivocal composition.
The poets who compose vers collage use traditional stylistic means of intertextuality—allusion
and quotation — and recompose them to reflect contemporary cultural beliefs and practices.
Each author is burdened by a remembrance of the past and out of an anxiety to “get it right”
this time or to solve a problem, they create opportunities through the collage elements to
simultaneously “[fragment] and juxtapose” a conversation about “cultural values.” 26 Just as
collage in art attracts and destabilizes the viewers’ expectations, vers collage prompts the reader
to come, to see and to go on their way. What happens next, how far we will go as a “wounded
and bleeding great wolf”—if we do anything at all- remains for each reader, for each of us, to
decide.
NOTES
1. Robert Rigney, “Dadaist Details,” ARTNews October 2002:68. The purpose of the
lebenscollage is to let viewers see what Hannah Hoch “was really like” according to the
article.
2. Cullingford, “Reading Yeats in Popular Culture,” in Ireland’s Others. Gender and
Ethnicity in Irish Literature and Popular Culture (Cork: Cork UP, 2001): 193-212.
3. Frederick Feirstein discusses the tension/ release of tension factor in Turner’s dramatic
lyrics in “Expansive Poetry: After the Revisionists” Pivot 54 (Summer 2002): 18.
4. Jules David Prown, Art as Evidence. Writings on Art and Material Culture. (New Haven:
Yale UP, 2001): 73.
5. Peter Gay in Art and Act: On Causes in History- Manet, Gropius, and Mondrian (New
York: Harper and Row, 1976) describes historical causation as composed of craft
(tradition); culture (present day influences and beliefs) and privacy (what happens in the
mind of the creator). James Fernandez in “The Mission of Metaphor in Expressive
Culture” Cultural Anthropology 15:2 (June 1974): pp. 119-145 distinguishes between
structural metaphors that illuminate the physical world and textual metaphors or words
designed to capture the emotional states of daily existence.
6. Prown: 71 and 79-83.
7. Stephen Pfohl, Death at the Parasite Café Social Science (Fictions) and the Postmodern
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992): 97. My thanks to Dr. Judith Halden-Sullivan for
making me aware of Pfohl’s book.
8. Pfohl, p. 100.
9. Pfohl, pp. 102-103.
10. Turner Cassity, Waiting to Go Under. (Edgewood, KY: R.L. Barth, 1998) and W.B. Yeats,
Collected Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1959).
11. This is elaborated on by Derek Attridge in Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature (New York:
Routledge, 1992): 15-17.
27

12. Others are “After a Line by Cavafy,” “The Next Poem,” and “Lives of the Great
Composers.” The “Elegy with Surrealist Proverbs as Refrain” appears in Interrogations
at Noon (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2001) and “Round” in the Collected Poems of
Weldon Kees (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1976). In a note on “Elegy” Gioia
identifies the sources of the two refrains giving the proverbs as they first appeared in
French. He states, “All of the incidents and quotations in the poem are true” (71).
13. Pfohl: 98.
14. Pfohl: 103.
15. See Carol Kino, “The Key to Dreams” Art and Auction May 2002: 63-73.
16. Pfohl: 98.
17. Pfohl: 102.
18. Anthony Hecht, The Hidden Law. The Poetry of W. H. Auden. (Cambridge: Harvard UP,
1993): 372. See also, Joost Daalder, “W.H. Auden’s ‘The Shield of Achilles’ and its
Sources,” A.U.M.L.A.: The Journal of the Australian Universities Modern Language
Association. Vol. 42(August 1974): 186-198; Bill Mahire, “W. H. Auden’s ‘The Shield of
Achilles’: A Note on Source Criticism”, A.U.M.L.A. Vol.58 (November 1982): 164-169;
and Claude Summers, “ ‘Or one could weep because another wept’: The Counterplot of
Auden’s ‘The Shield of Achilles’” in Journal of English and Germanic Philology Vol.83
No.2 (April 1984): 214-232. Lillian Feder in Ancient Myth and Modern Poetry
(Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971) explicates the “Shield of Achilles”, pp. 336-7, noting
“Nowhere else does Auden use myth more effectively to arouse emotions through illusion
and ironic contrasts.” Eva Brann in “Hephaestus’ World: The Shield,” American Poetry
Review November/December 2002: 41-42 describes the images on the shield as a
platform for interpreting its use in Auden’s verse. She states “ What Auden’s great
revision of Hephaestus’ shield teaches by contrast through its godless and heroless space
(which is no world, just a level expanse) is this: The Homeric world, the poet’s and the
artisan’s world, is in its visible surface indefeasibly beautiful, no matter what happens
within it” (42). The poem comes from W. H. Auden, The Shield of Achilles. (New York:
Random House, 1955): 35-37.
19. Pfohl: 100.
20. Pfohl: 99.
21. Prown: 71.
22. Pfohl: 99.
23. Turner, emailed copy of poem to me. For a brief account of Radnoti’s life and his impact
as a poet, see the special feature “In America: Translation, Please”, Poets & Writers
Magazine (November/December 2002): 50-51. This interview with translator, Emery
George, mentions Radnoti’s metrical virtuosity in particular: “Radnoti writes with a
special predilection in classical and other established meters: the actylic hexameter line
and the alexandrine are two special favorites of his” (51).
24. Prown: 83.
25. Pfohl: 98.
26. Pfohl: 98.
28