Author: JF Ptak

Emerging Patterns and Hidden Visible Art

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Even when I know
that this picture is coming, when it is rounding the bend, I still can’t see it
for the portrait it is supposed to be.
The lithograph is by Berthold Loeffler (1874-1960), a prolific Viennese
designer, artist and professor at Kunstgewerbeschule (1907-1935) whose prodigious
commercial

output covered about every other letter of the artistic alphabet. This work is a portrait of his mostly-forgotten
fellow-Viennese writer, Peter Altenberg¹ for the Kabaerett Fledermaus of
1909. The portrait is all squares and
one big button to me, and I have to consciously look for the rest of the
picture in spite of knowing that the stuff is there.

It is an unusual picture of emergent art—for me not quite
like, for example, the cover of the pamphlet Cinema by J. Epstein, where the letters are a jumble for just a
moment and then snap into view. The
Loeffler portrait is much more densely hidden in a much more straightforward
manner, and fools my mind every time.

Notes

1.Altenberg is probably a product of his time, or a time of
his product. Described as the bohemian’s
bohemian, he lived an outre lifestyle in little cafes and bars, wearing capes
and broad-brimmed hats, and was evidently something of an effeminate womanizer
with a very deep interest in very young girls.
There you go. Altenberg stood
quite high in that world, as Alban Berg put some of his postcard-poetry to
music in his Five songs on picture postcard texts by Peter Altenberg,
which caused a near-riot in its premier, abruptly stopping the performance
which would not see the light of day again for another 40 years.

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Art History — Perception — Perspective
Found Images Within Images: Dropping Your Hat in the Punic Wars

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There is a
particular class of illustration in which, among the secondary figures of the
image, there is a small happening, an everyday trifle, that has been captured by
the artist and included in the overall communication for no necessary
reason. (for example, see here and below¹). I’ve written about this a little
before on this blog in posts about finding images-within-images: the
unecessaries among the unnecessaries, the bits and pieces of everyday human existence
that in and of itself is not worth commentary but which nearly everyone
experiences. Small bits, they are, of a
tremendous human nature, the things that are done in private, or are so
universal but inconsequential that they are shocking to see when illustrated in
print.

Titus Livius (59
BCE-17 ACE), better known to the English-speaking world as Livy, was a superior
among superiors of Roman historians, writing on the history of his city and
country. His work, Romische Historie…,
published in Mainz by Johann Schoeffler 1450 years later in 1514, was one of
the most beautifully illustrated books ever produced in that city. This is a considerable statement, as Mainz was the birthplace/hotbed
of moveable type printing, being home to Johann Gutenberg and a number of other
early presses.

And in looking at
this fantastic work by Livy, I am a little embarrassed to find this spectacular
bit of human tendency displayed in this woodcut depicting a naval engagement
during the Punic Wars. It is a beautiful
thing, this scene of warfare depicted on tranquil seas and ribbony waves,
determination in every face. But what I
noticed in the small boat at bottom right is a man reaching out into the water—not
for a dropped oar, or to help a man overboard, or to catch his falling
sword.

He was reaching for
his dropped hat.

I have reason to
doubt that during the Punic Wars there may have been an unwritten chapter, “On
the History of Dropped Hats During Warfare”.
Surely soldiers dropped their hats during the history of roman conquest,
but I’d say that retrieving the headgear was more important at the Battle of
the Bulge in protecting your noggin from badly splintering trees traveling at
you at 180 mph and other such places than a wool cap dropped from a ship in pitched
battle two hundred meters from shore.

I like this so
because it is probably the first reaction that most of us would have—just a
habit, battle raging or not—and just utterly human. Just a little piece of back-history that
doesn’t go anywhere and is lost to experience.
I’m sure that Herr Gutenberg dropped his hat at odd times, as did the
unknown artist of this print. Just an
odd bit, like the first things printed on Gutenberg’s press being religious indulgences
for people paying their way past Purgatory (and worse). The fact that the indulgences preceded the
great bible by several years doesn’t really matter, and neither does retrieving
a dropped hat in a sea battle—but they do make interesting stories.

1. Some other Found Images posts:

Found Images: Penny Lane and the Inexpensive Treat, London, 1896

Found Images of the Great Wheel, 1895

Finding Hidden Images in Antique Prints: 18th
Century Forensic Social X-Rays of Florence
by Guiseppe Zocchi

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Art History — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at
Bad Ideas Department: Really Big, Really Bad–Mussolini’s Monster.

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“Building
skyscrapers is the nearest peace-time equivalent of war. In fact, the analogy
is startling, even to the occasional grim reality of a building accident where
maimed bodies, and even death, remind us that we are fighting a war of
construction against the forces of nature.” -Col. William A. Starrett, Skyscrapers and the Men Who Build
Them (1928)

Indeed! I wonder if Starrett (whose book, or at least
its cover, is beautifully designed and a roaring bore to read) had this
proposed building (below) in mind—if so, we could’ve skipped right past WWII
and declared WWIII.

It’s a good thing
that the Roman skyline isn’t punctured here and there by skyscrapers—especially
those that would’ve been built during the Fascist era. Take, for example, this planned 1100-foot
monster, proposed in 1925, in the third year of Mussolini’s government. This is an idealized cityscape of course,
created to show height comparisons with famous buildings, but this thing
(looking very much like Moscow
University) would’ve
created a hole in the sky and thrown a suffocating, shadowing presence all over
the city. Granted it isn’t as monstrous
as many of the international style buildings could’ve been had they been a fifth
of a mile high–that work was left to the cobbled hand of Philip Johnson in
America—but it is still horrible enough all on its own. More horrible to think that it could’ve
swallowed whole the seven biggest buildings in Rome, and was taller than the seven greatest architectural
wonders of the ancient world stacked one on top of the other.

It is curious to
note that this spaceship-like building was drawn for The Illustrated London News (24 January 1925) by Chesley Bonestell
(1888-1986), an artist and designer, and known as “the Father of Space Art”. The best thing that this building could’ve
done was to light its afterburners and take off.

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Architecture and Building — Art History — Bad Ideas — Future, History of the
Out of Context Department: Artists Taken by the Devil, 1620

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Mark Twain said that Adam only took the apple not because it was delicious or attractive but because it was forbidden. I wonder why this operative of Satan was so interested in this artist (pictured below), who was seemingly and boringly making his way through a standard portrait of an imagined vision of the Holy Mother. She and the other holies (some of whom appear to be “simply” human and clerical compared to the rest of the iconic foundations of Christianity) are being bathed in pure holy light; an angel at left, seemingly with nothing else to do, unnecessarily points to the main attraction, making sure that the artists knew that it was the folks with the halos who were to be painted. . [It would be surreal and interesting to imagine a short sequence in which we see these two artists working busily on their unseen canvases, sweating as the oils fly, recording the celestial scene before them, golden and glowing people illuminated by the light of the creator; finished, the artists reveal their work, one painting the holy congress, while the other turns his godless landscape canvas featuring the odd tower at right-rear. “I could never paints hands” he might’ve said.]

The engraving is the work of Bortius a Bolwert (1580-1643 and a pupil of the much better-known Abraham Bloemaert) for A. Suquet’s morality and Heaven/Hell peepbook, Den wech des eeuwich levens…which was printed in 1620. I don’t know what the original message was for this image, unless it was something simple, some punishment for a less-than-pure artist painting purity; perhaps the devil took the artist at death, showing the reader that not only is death available to call at any time, but that the devil was right there, too, to whisk you away to the lake of fire even while your oily hommage to the creator was wet on your easel. It might well simply be in the dance of death tradition–so beautifully and haltingly executed by people like Albrecht Durer–showing Death visiting people of all ranks and professions, the moment of extinction coming at the time most perfectly illustrating the deathee’s station of life.

Also appearing under such titles as Ars moriendi, Memento mori, Vanitas, Dancs Macabre, the Skeleton Dance, la Danza de la Muerte, Totentanz, and the Chorea Machabæorum, among others, the idea of the Dance of Death existed as morality plays and in literature for many centuries. In the years before printing in Europe, there were many versions of time’s massacre in frescoes in churches and chapels all across Europe (see here for an interesting chronological listing) as well (of course)as in myriads of manuscripts. In addition to Durer, some of the early post-Gutenberg masters of this genre included Konrad Witz, (1460); Bernt Notke, (1463); Hans Holbein the Younger (1538), Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki,r Johann Elias Ridinger. (See here for an introduction to and explanation fo the Holbein cycle.)
In music too the Dance of Death scenario is seen many times: the Danse Macabre (by Camille Saint-Saëns, 1874); Songs and Dances of Death, (by Modest Mussorgsky, 1875); Dance of Death in Symphony No. 4, 2nd Movement (by Gustav Mahler, 1901); Mattasin oder Toden Tanz, (by August Nörmiger, 1598); (Dance of Death), in Ballad of Heroes, (by Benjamin Britten, 1939); Dance of Death, in Trio in E Minor, op. 67 (by Dmitri Shostakovich, 1944); Totentanz ( by Franz Liszt, 1849 AND Felix Woyrsch in 1905 AND Arnold Schoemnber in 1914 AND Wilhelm Kempff in 1931, and on and on. I didn’t mean to go on about this, but just wanted to make the point that the Looming Nature of Death really was so in Medieval and Renaissance Europe–and where death as waiting at virtually every turn, the Devil wasn;t too far behind.

(Also, see Bibliodyssey for a wonderful woodblock book of the dance of death.)

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Art — Art History
Blank and Empty Series: Oliver Cromwell’s House

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And so it came to pass under the vengeful gaze of the restored
Charles II that the nicely-buried Oliver
Cromwell was dug up from his monarchial pit, brought to the light, and then
hanged, and once twice-dead, was beheaded.
To make matters worse for Cromwell, his body was tossed into “a deep pit
under the gallows” and his head displayed on a spike at Westminster Hall. I guess that his eyes at that point would’ve
been happy to see some more comfortable dirt.

I’m just relating that story as part of the impression I got
from this 1824 woodcut of Cromwell’s house at Whitehall.
It is an odd, forbidding scene:
walled, dark, and with several uncomfortable characters, it feels cold
and empty, as empty-looking as a house could be. Perhaps that is a butcher with a slab of meat, and a dry-goods hawker with a wagon-full o fgoods, and a pair of drinkey buddies. Maybe not–but whatever they’re doing and whomever they are, its just a little David-Lynch-odd.

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Blank and Empty Things; A History of
Relief as Pleasure–William Burroughs and the Sleep Cure

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William Burroughs—one of America’s
great 20^th century humorists (closer to Bierce/Mencken than
Thurber/Woollcott, like Twain with a rainbow coalition of nasty addictions and outré
social habits)—wrote this cookbook article of drug addiction in the British Journal of Addiction in
1956. Considering it is only twenty-two
pages long, it is an Encyclopedia Brit-burroughanica for its quick
contents.

“Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs” is crisp
and concise, a clinical horror story of addiction and cure. I say “and cure” because of the low trials
Burroughs went through in some of the ten attempts/cures he experienced to
clean himself up. (Burroughs had already
been using narcotics for twenty years by 1956.
By a mixture of good genetics and miracles Burroughs (1914-1997) made it to his 83rd year.) Burroughs describes one of the treatments, the “prolonged sleep” cure, (excerpted below),
in singular terms, revealing a particularly gruesome adventure into lost
health:

“Prolonged Sleep.–The theory sounds good. You go to sleep
and wake up cured. Industrial doses of chloral hydrate, barbiturates,
thorazine, only produced a nightmare state of semi-consciousness. Withdrawal of
sedation, after 5 days, occasioned a severe shock. Symptoms of acute morphine
deprivation supervened. The end result was a combined syndrome of unparalleled
horror. No cure I ever took was as painful as this allegedly painless method.
The cycle of sleep and wakefulness is always deeply disturbed during withdrawal.
To further disturb it with massive sedation seems contraindicated to say the
least. Withdrawal of morphine is sufficiently traumatic without adding to it
withdrawal of barbiturates. After two weeks in the hospital (five days
sedation, ten days “rest”) I was still so weak that I fainted when I
tried to walk up a slight incline. I consider prolonged sleep the worst
possible method of treating withdrawal.”

If as Burroughs says, all pleasure is nothing but
relief, then this cure didn’t offer any, and certainly must rank high in the Bad Ideas Department of Caustic Non-Cures.

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Bad Ideas — Blank and Empty Things; A History of
AirplaneTrainer: Sailors in the Air, 1911

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Just three years after the Wright Brothers arrived in Europe to revolutionize European flying, and following an order of magnitude series of advancement and achievement, the British Navy was already beginning to train classes of sailors as aviators in dynamic flight-free devices. This idea of simulating flight enabled the training (and more importantly, the selection) of aviators before anybody actually got into a plane, speeding the process of determining who was fit for flight and who was not, quickening the British pace to form a fighting force in the air.

This interesting graphic appeared in The Illustrated London News for 29 July 1911, and was entitled “Jack Goes Aloft–New Style…Trying to Keep a Stationary Machine Steady in a Wind; Sailors Practicing with a Dummy Aeroplane”. This was five months before the establishment of the Royal Naval Flight School, but more importantly, just a few months after the historic flight of Eugene Ely, who took off in his aircraft from the deck of the USS Pennsylvania in the Mare Island Navy Yard–of more profound interest perhaps is the fact that Ely landed his plane on the same restricted deck space. (In a way the primitve stopping mechanisms use by Ely are sort of in use today. ) I am sure that few naval people missed the significance of this event–I know that across the ocean Winston Churchill was instantly at work on the idea of using aircraft on ships. But it seems that after all of the initial successes in the U.S. that when everything was said and done, the Brits took the lead in modernizing their navy to include aircraft.

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Aviation & flight — Technology, History of
Vermeer of the Tars: Found Art in Photographs, 1918

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In England, women
were welcomed to the (paid) workforce during the years of the First World War
(1914-1918)—their employment in traditionally male positions enabled those they
replaced to go out to the front and die for their country. Thus the women
seen here in the News Photo Service Agency photograph (taken in 1918), working
at spraying tar in the streets of London, were appreciated,
and tolerated. For women in England the War blasted away the contrivances of
formally scheduled employment: something like 12% of fall women in England were
working as servants and house cleaners. Come the War, women were
offered jobs of revolutionary stature in a wide range and variety of
work. The Civil Service employment for women went from 33,000 in 1911 to
102,000 in 1921, and trade union membership rose 160% (357,000 in 1914 to
1,000,000 in 1918 (with men showing a 44% increase at the same time); for the
most part, though, employers took advantage of the situation, and the women
still generally earned less than half of the salary as comparable male workers
did (or the men they replaced).

When the end of the War came, so did the appreciation for the women
replacement workers—there was bitter feelings in the post-war period because of
the weak British economy and a scarcity of jobs. So the women who took
the jobs of men to help the country’s war effort and free up hundreds of
thousands of men for war service became an atavistic action, “taking” the jobs
of men who had gone out to fight for their country. This of course cost many
women their jobs, but the damage had already been deeply done to the pre-1914
British world of the sexual politics of business-being-done, though it would
take World War II to really ingrain the appearance of women in the workforce
into the national psyche.

I’ve liked this photo for a long time, seeing things differently in it over the years. It struck me just yesterday that the woman in foreground-right–whose close-up reminds me too of a Madonna, a Mona Lisa of the Tars–looks like a Vermeer character from 400 years ago. Or at least the position of her body does.

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Photography, history — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at
Poe and the Internet, 1845

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In one of his essays¹Edgar Poe wrote about the power of
writing for what he saw as a revolutionary form of information distribution—anastatic
printing. He was wrong about its instant
application in releasing the writer from the habits, time, expense and editing
of the printing process; he was wrong that it was the greatest achievement
since Gutenberg; and he was wrong about most everything else about the (real)
process. He was right though in his vision
for the distribution of information. I’m
participating in this vision right now, except there was no way that even the
supremely gifted Poe could have envisioned the way in which information was
being shared on 20^th November 2009.

Anastatic printing was a simple way of reproducing
handwritten documents for a mass audience.
The problem was though that the process tended to destroy the
original. Highly problematic. But Poe wasn’t interested in those aspects of
the technical problems of the process—it was the possibility of relatively
immediate distribution of the written word that had his attention. He wrote:

“The tendency of all this to cheapen information, to
diffuse knowledge and amusement, and to bring before the public the very class
of works which are most valuable, but least in circulation on account of
unsaleability — is what need scarcely be suggested to any one. But benefits
such as these are merely the immediate and most obvious — by no means the most
important.”

And so materials saleable and unsalable would have equal
access to a reading public, which is an enormous concept, to think that all
sorts of information could be made accessible regardless of the tastes of the
buying public. Exceptionally low
production costs would also make dissemination feasible for and to a wider
range of people—since the cost of production would be lower the cost of the final
product could/would be as well, making things within the reach of the working
poor (perhaps). This also means that
anastatic printing could also give voice to the working poor as well—a class of
writer little know before the time of Dickens.

Better yet if the manuscript was actually legible. In Poe’s mind, the importance of legibility
and prettiness was of a high order since your manuscript was the final product.
Poe writes:

“This consideration will lead to the cultivation of a neat
and distinct style of handwriting — for authors will perceive the immense
advantage of giving their own manuscripts directly to the public without the
expensive interference of the type-setter, and the often ruinous intervention
of the publisher. All that a man of letters need do, will be to pay some
attention to legibility of MS., arrange his pages to suit himself, and
stereotype them instantaneously, as arranged. He may intersperse them with his
own drawings, or with anything to please his own fancy, in the certainty of
being fairly brought before his readers, with all the freshness of his original
conception about him.”

Again, Poe was wrong about the medium but would be right
about the message. Perhaps his mind was
filled then with the very-new telegraph, imagining instantaneous communication
over distances and carrying that development sci-fi-forward. The telegraph (1837-1845) followed by the
telephone (1876) and then wireless telegraphy (1898) and television (1905-1927)
all would have enormous impact on our description of reality. But no technological change would encompass
Poe’s vision until 1979 (+) with the development of the internet. Poe’s technology was wrong, but his thought-prognosis
was pretty spot-on.

1. “Anastatic Printing”, in the Broadway Journal, April 12, 1845.

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Future, History of the — Technology, History of
The Truth Behind Cuckoo’s Nests–Ken Kesey

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This post nominally belongs in the Blank and Empty Things thread, but barely.

Robert Burton’s Frontispiece

Many years ago a friend at PEN/Faulkner let me impersonate
an usher at a Ken Kesey evening so that I could be the last person to see the
man before he disappeared into the night.
He was lovely and charming and entertained the evening, winding up
signing books at the end. What I wanted
from the man was to hear him recite the nursery rhyme that formed the title of
his first book, One Flew Over the
Cuckoo’s Nest. He wrote it in 1962,
an odd book coming from an odd man—Kesey had been in academia on the high-end
at Stanford, buddying up with Larry McMurtry and Robert Stone and getting
instruction from Stegner and Cowley; he became something different, a figure
with literary studs while bouncing between the beats and the rad ‘60’s. Anyway I read the book when I was young and
liked it a lot, and still do.

So I approached the tired Kesey and made my request. He was amused that I only wanted to hear him
recite something rather than sign a book—honestly I just wanted to take the
memory with me into the future. And as a
matter of fact, I had/have a nice first edition of the thing but didn’t have it
that day, forgetting it at home, or not thinking to take it with me. Just before leaving for the event, I stopped
at Olsson’s Books in Georgetown
and bought a paperback copy of OFOTCN, sticking it in my back pocket just in
case.

So. Kesey was amused,
and asked if I’d like a copy of his new kid’s book, Little Tricker the Squirrel…. (published 1991), from which he had
just done a very animated reading. He
pulled a copy out of his sack, opened a gold magic marker, and signed the book IN
GIANT LETTERS to my very-soon-to-be-wife
Patti Digh, “Dear Patti, sometimes ink can be a great potion” (alluding to his
classic book, Sometimes a Great Notion). Fabulous. Kesey then started to talk about the fairy
tale and cuckoos and what a nasty habit they had of laying their eyes in other
birds’ nest to have their young be “raised by strangers in a strange land”. He recited the version he had heard from his
grandmother.

I finally brought out my paperback copy of his book, and he
signed it with the final flourish from his version of the old poem. The man was very gracious.

Another version goes like this:

“Tingle, Tingle, Tangle Toes
She’s a good fisherman
Catches hens, puts’em inna pens
Wier blier, limber lock
Three geese inna flock
One flew east, One flew west,
One flew over the cuckoo’s nest
O-U-T spells out
Goose swoops down and plucks you out.”

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Blank and Empty Things; A History of