Category: Outsider Logic

Found Dadaist Art–Floating Eyes and Ears, 1650 & 1807

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 857

I’ve
written a few times in this blog (here, here and here) about what I think is
found/unintentional antiquarian Dadaist art and would like today to continue
that thread with the following two unusual pieces of art.

The first
is a detail from the title page of Joseph de Casanova’s Primera parte del
arte de escrivir todas formas de letras (1650). This is not the Casanova (Giacamo,
1725-1798) who most people would initially think of—the seductive womanizer of
the 18^th century—but another, earlier, Spanish Casanova (1613-1692)
who was important in the history of round hand script and the lettera bastarda. Joseph Casanova ‘s evolutionary handwriting
style was considerably lighter and easier than most styles, and his influence
in changing handwriting practices was substantial. What is interesting for me is the detail at
the bottom of the engraved title page for his book, the emblem containing “Labore et Constantia”. Labor and consistency, decorated with a hand
and compass, ever watching and listening with ears and eyes above and below.

[This
design comes from (at least) one earlier source—the printer’s device for Christoph
Plantijn (Antwerp,
1583), though without the eyes (below).] I like the floating aspect of the disembodied
body parts, floating in their little sea of constancy, ruled by a compass.

The
second image has another set of disembodied eyes/ears (among other things) and
has all the flavor of the dada/surrealist flourishes of the frammenti of Piranesi.
This comes from Bernhard von Montfaucon’s Greichische,
Romische und andere Alterthuemer… (Nurenberg, 1807). When taken out of
context, as a disembodied image, the von Montfaucon certainly has a dadaist taste
for me, especially if you edit the image a little.

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Art History — Iconography — Outsider Logic — Perception — Perspective
A Smiling Man at Work in a Smokey Fire, 1788

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 834

There’s not much that I can say at this point about C.J.
Leroux, the author of the work in which
this magnificent engraving was published, Decouverte
contre les incendies…¹ Without a pretty good library to hike to Leroux’s
efforts remain a mystery to me, except for what I can deduce from the
image. The shack in the image is burning,
and the man inside is fine, evidently protected from the fire by a special suit
made of fire-resistant materials. It is
an interesting idea in protecting people from fire—sidestepping the issue of
making the house more fire resistant by making the people in the house
resistant to fire. I suspect that the
inventor/designer/theorist of such a gown had in mind the sale of millions of
such things—that way if a fire struck a house in a dense section of Paris the entire
neighborhood would don their suits and escpae the flames. The neighborhood might not survive, but the
people would. That might not be the
chief interest of the royals at that time who I am sure would be more
interested in the physical plant and the real estate than the people crawling
around inside it. This display also begs
the question of manufacturing the house so that some portion of it would be
fire resistant which would (perhaps) save neighboring dwelling.

Be that as it may, it really didn’t matter, as the materials
for creating such a suit as the test man is wearing didn’t yet exist. Certainly
nothing existed at the time that would allow someone to read, write and work through
smoke and flames in a fiery furnace (“fournaise ardente”) all the while
with no inconvenience (“en etre incommode”)². The large mushroom-shaped cap would be a supply of oxygen, I guess; the smile on the face of the suit must betray a secret knowledge as to why the paper and pen are not on fire.

It seems to be a nice piece of different
thinking.

Notes:

1. Full title: Découverte contre les incendies, les dangers des eaux, de l’air méphytique ou contagieux et de plusieurs autres maux qui affligent l’humanité, avec un supplément contre les dangers des voyages et des chutes. Par C. J. Leroux Published and printed by the author in 36 pages in Paris, 1788.

2. The legend reads: “ Experience d’une personne qui lit, ecrit, travaille, &c. dans une fournaise ardente, au milieu des flames et de la fume, ans en etre incommode.”

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Architecture and Building — Outsider Logic
Odd Art Department: Art Brut in Advertising?

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There’s not much in this illustration–the entire back page of an oversize pulbicity tourist pamphlet–to suggest any sort of professionalism, or training, or, well, ability. But there it is, badly drawn, with unusual (if not bad) coloring, trying to entice people to visit this seaside resort in New Zealand.

Maybe this is more “outsider art”
than Art Brut. Art Brut was a term used by
Jean Dubuftet to describe raw/rough art produced by non-artists (and those
mostly mental asylum residents¹). Art
critic Roger Cardinal coined “outsider art” as a English-language adaptation of
the Dubuffet term², and has since come into use to describe unusual,
technically naïve and unschooled Otherness of artworks. This cover illustration is certainly bearing
a pretty good-sized helping of otherness to it, from its pale, weird coloring
to its basic inability to draw. Somehow
though it is attractive to me, and ultra-calming when it is not troubling. It is just one of those peculiar works that
is good and bad at the same time.

Notes:

1. A spectacular and early example
of Art Brut is found in the phenomenally detailed, insightful-of-other-worlds
work of Adolf Wolfli.

2. “Those works created
from solitude and from pure and authentic creative impulses – where the worries
of competition, acclaim and social promotion do not interfere – are, because of
these very facts, more precious than the productions of professionals. After a
certain familiarity with these flourishings of an exalted feverishness, lived
so fully and so intensely by their authors, we cannot avoid the feeling that in
relation to these works, cultural art in its entirety appears to be the game of
a futile society, a fallacious parade.” – Jean Dubuffet. Place à
l’incivisme (Make way for Incivism). Art and Text no.27 (December 1987 –
February 1988).

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Art History — Outsider Logic — Perception — Perspective — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at
The Library of One Book

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Is this an image of a librarian carefully reaching for a carefully
placed book, carefully arranged in a carefully-odd Borgesian-style library
housing only books of the same height and thickness? Or is this a librarian in a Library of the
Same Book, housing thousands of copies of copies of the same book, climbing the
ladder to make sure that he had a copy of just the copy that was requested (“a
copy held at least 5 feet from the ground, near a side window though not
touching a vertical piece of wood”)?

Neither. These are
shelves filled with nothing but uncut sheets of playing cards, housed for the
playing card factory somewhere in Paris (?) “during the reign of Louis XIV”. Playing cards, which were introduced to
Europe via Marco Polo from China
or traders coming from the Middle East or etc., are much older in Europe than one would think, I think, and by the time
this print was made, playing cards were already quite popular there for two
centuries.

I can’t identify all of the activities of all of the twelve
tables of card preparation here, though some seem pretty obvious: the trimmer working near the pressman, the
sorters and assemblers of decks of cards at the lower left corner, the paper
preparer (?) just to the right of the man on the ladder, the pair of men
preparing the type trays at middle-bottom, and that’s about it. I’m not sure what everyone else was
doing. I’m not even so sure what’s going
on with the sheets of cards on the bookshelves, the target of this post—it can’t
be for drying purposes, as the sheets are too close together…perhaps it is just
for storage of different sheets of cards for different decks.

In any event I’m right or I’m wrong on this guess, about the same odds as being dealt “nothing” in a game of five-card poker (almost 1:1 odds), but that’s fine: I just like the composition of the print.

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Outsider Logic
The Hidden Beauties of Barrels, Pig Bristles and Forgotten Escalators

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I wonder what is was like to be a traveling salesman hauling
around hundred-pound barrels of pig bristles?

We don’t really find out the answer to that question in Origin and Development of the Paint Brush (1938),
but that remarkable, far from the maddening crowd question does present itself in
the text. And that is why I love
pamphlets like these.

Spending my professional life with the book, and being a
reader, I’ve come into contact with and have been exposed to a good, solid, Big Number of books, a Big Book of Big Numbers of
books. And so when the unusual creeps in
or is stumbled upon, they shine like little novas in my book-sky. And the ones that shine with their own
special light are the titles come in three favorite flavors: the Sublime Mundane, Outsider Logic, and
Fantastic (and Impossible). Today’s
selection are from the first category, and exhibit titles and texts that look
like non-luminous and uni-dimensional but turn out to be anything but mundane.

Earlier in this blog I’ve written on pamphlets entitled Flagpole Painting, School Safety Pioneers, Fortunes to be Made with Frogs, Where are the Dead?, How to Repair a Zipper, Mud’s Romantic Story, Soap in Everyday Life, The Fine Art of Squeezing, Salt Salesman’s Manual, Know Your Groceries, The Book of Envelope Facts (and others),
and they’ve all shown a terrific inner quality that is completely hidden by
their so-sleepy and yet strangely-compelling titles. Like the paint brush history pamphlet. Here are a few other new examples:

The Otis Elevator
pamphlet (1947) is efficiently designed beneath its semi-bizarre cover,
floating in odd typeface, completely lifeless design, mannequin humans, and
washed-out pastels. The Chinese coloring
book style of its covers hides a superior content, complete with schematics and
beautifully supplied with photos of elevators long-since removed from sight and
memory.

The Hooking pamphlet is not about its obvious contemporary
counterpart, but is a luminous, luxurious introduction and stylizer to the
science of hooking large objects to cranes via giant hooks and chains, and especially
about how to keep yourself from being
crushed by tons of steel not hooked properly.

The Mystery of Filters
charm is wholly in its title and cover design, its text describing nothing
but camera filters. It is still a cool
cover, nonetheless.

Elevators,
published by Travelers’ Insurance Company, tried to protect themselves a little
further by ensuring safe practices of elevator operation, mostly in industrial
settings. This was published in 1926 and
was already in its seventh printing from its inception in 1913 when the
elevator was just in its second decade of popular, relatively widespread usage.
The haven’t-given-this-cover-design-a-moment’s-thought hides a thorough (and
bland) treatment of elevator safety; too bad, the cover photosnap-art promises
something more. Its not there, except
for this beautiful photo of an industrial elevator op with a tie.

And coming back to wood barrels that are not necessarily
filled with pig (or wild boar) bristles but with something else less advanced
comes this manual on making wood barrels.
Everything is there, everything you’d need to make a barrel (and a good
one at that), and I admire this sort of fantastic dedication to what is
essentially (to our modern mind) mundane—except that it is as dry
as well-cured barrel wood. But I admire
it still, as I do the Elevator pamphlet,
because, well, they’re done right.

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Impossible Books — Outsider Logic — Title Page Art, Beautiful
A Stone-Cold Masterpiece of Naive Art: Teresa Ottalo, ca. 1860

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As a collector of naive art–particularly produced with letters or numbers–and as a person generally interested in naive and outsider (and art brut and letterist and found )art, I was astonished to find this spectacular work by Terea Ottalo (ca. 1800-1870). First of all, I make this to be about 200 lines long, and about 50 inches tall. The words are, well, minute.

Secondly: this magnificnet thing was EMBROIDERED. Breathtaking, really.

I haven’t yet found out anything about Ms. Ottalo, except some basic references of her affiliated “school” of art.

I do know that this, whatever it is, is a masterpiece.

And an unfortunately smudgy detail, such as it is–I cannot offhandedly find a good, clear, high resolution image of anything at all by Ms. Ottalo. This will have to do for now, but I think it gives a reasonable idea of the fineness of this work (found in Michek Thevoz’s Art Brut, Skira, 1976)–this sample detail represents less than 10% of the overall image:

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Art History — Outsider Logic — Perception
Weird Questions and Weirder Answers Department: Curing Insanity

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Dr. C. Sterling Cooly wrote an incredibly-titled pamphlet of slim means called Should Insanity be Cured? How could anyone proceed further than this? Dr. Cooley wasn’t a eugenic apologist, nor was he an accountant for a life insurance firm—he was advocating a drugless cure for all different sorts of “insanity”, which was a term he doesn’t really stop to identify and classify, which of course is deeply problematic.

Or it is so until you hear how one can treat the insane via his new drugless method: chiropractic. I didn’t see that one coming. “An insane mind is a sick brain, a sick body is an insane body” writes Dr. Cooley with leading confidence, claiming that chiropractic can release “the power within…marvels of healing are performed not only in mental cases but in virtually ALL forms of disease”. That’s a lot to live up to in theory, let alone in practice.

Dr. Cooley was evidently a deeply important founder father of modern chiropractic, with a 50 year career in the area (1908-1957), and who was also very prolific–this is one work that he probably should’ve edited out of the publishing phase.

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Outsider Logic
Connections: from Plugging Gibraltar to Shakespeare’s Memories in One Step

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“Simply the thing I am shall make me live.”

–from Jorge Luis Borges, “Shakespeare’s Memory”

It is interesting to pursue a loose thought to its not-necessarily
logical end. Such is the case with the
Paneuropic ideas of Hermann Soergel (1885-1952). Soergel was a Bauhaus
architect and author of a number of works on design and far more ethereal,
floating-castle ideas. His most spectacular contribution—incubated in the
mid-1920’s and still clinging by its fingertips as an idea among some current
thinkers—was to put a dam across the straights of Gibraltar. The dam would generate electricity of course,
but most importantly to Soergel, it would also empty an enormous amount of
water from the Mediterranean leaving vast new
expanses of land to be developed and colonized over generations into the
future. The master plan at work was that
the world would be divided into three economic spheres in the future, all
beginning with the letter “A”: American,
Asia, and the new land to be created by Soergel, “Atlantropa”, which was the
former Europe expanded into the new dry beds of the Mediterranean and North Africa. And also
of course Egypt,
which would be covered with canals and semi-submerged by the new borders of the
meandering sea. This would be the way
for Europa to compete with the rest of the world in the future.

Perhaps it is actually three steps to get from the idea of
damming up the straits of Gibraltar to the osmosis of Shakepeare’s memories into
someone else’s brain—a squinting acquiescence of the middle touch being the
brilliant Jorge Luis Borges. You see it
was in the Argentine master’s last published story, “Shakespeare’s Memory”, that
we meet Herr Soergel (as Hermann Sorgel) again.
But so far as I can remember Soergel exists only as a fictional
character, with no reference to his real-life self. In this wonderful story, Soergel inherits the
memories of William Shakespeare—these bits come to him slowly but surely, until
they start to conflict with his own memory, and things get difficult. The man with Shakespeare’s memories winds up
phoning strangers on the telephone, giving them away at random, until Soergel
is left with his own mind again.
Superior as Bill’s memories were, they still weren’t Hermann’s, who
wanted his own life back in the end.

And so from the titanic, pan-europic technodream of
Bauhausian Hermann Soergel to the dead brains and living memories of William
Shakespeare, all through the fingers of the beautiful Jorge Luis Borges.

I should point out that the image above comes from the Illustrierte Zeitung (Leipzig) for August 1931, and is a drawing by an artist named “AS. Christ” after Soergel’s Panropa’s ideas.

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Bad Ideas — Outsider Logic — Technology, History of
Pale Horses and the Lake of Fire: a Map to the End of the World

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There are, in my experience, very few antiquarian images
depicting the end of the world in which we see the entire globe exploding or in
pieces or in flames. This sort of image gets more play in the 20^th
century, especially after 8 August 1945, but prior to that it is really very
scarce. I own a few images that appear
in the 17^th and 19^th centuries, and another from 1929 (Das Weltbild which show a “giant ice
ball” colliding into and completely destroying the earth). . Then there is this new find, S.L. Lacy’s The End of the World, (necessarily) self-published
in West Point, Virginia, in 1941. It is a short and stocky, and bound in orange
wrappers—its spine title (The End of the
World) begs the casual reader to pull it from the shelf. It’s a simple
book—studying the Bible prophecies and revelations on the end of all things—and
it annoys and is insulting but doesn’t disappoint.

I
started to breeze through the book (back-to-front as always) and opened the
book to Chapter XIII, finding this delicious chapter heading: “The Chronological Order of Final Things”,
this being a full page pre-PowerPoint summation of the time-shrinking fireball
that is rolling inexorably towards us all.
To say that one is able to put a period at the end of the world’s flow
of time, that someone is able to identify the point in the future where the
future is no more, is “presumptive”–this in the most understated
fashion as to offend even the highest of high-Victorians’ sense of restrained
propriety. Wrapped in a comfortable
Christian chrysalis of pre- and post-apocalyptic religious certitude, Mr. Lacy
delivers his interpretation of biblical prophecy for the coming of the end,
hustling it to the front of the religious line of things to come.

It seems that in 1941 the end was beginning, and Lacy saw
all of the images implied by prophecy that were necessary to announce the
glorious final days of broad retribution. This includes the list if the ten
things indicating “the sign of The Times”, one of which (Number 5)
was “The Automobile” and another (Number 7) was “Increased
Knowledge and Travel” (announced by Nathum 2: 3,4 and old dependable
Daniel. 12:4, respectively. There’s
nothing that doesn’t fit into Daniel’s visions or revelations, though Mr. Cash
has certainly made a lovely song of them.)
When everything fits perfectly into a predictive model with no possibility
of falsification (or of proof or disproof), then the model has no validity
outside of a belief system in itself. Very tidy.

It is an annoying, cloying minor treatise, promising little
more than The Lake of Fire awaiting almost all of us, even the sleeping dead,
who would be scraped from their graves to be spit into this burning
tragedy.

Lacy does a lot of inspired interpretation and
philosophizing, much of which he doesn’t seem to bother separating from
biblical quotations—I don’t think it is intentional, just bad writing. A random
find in Lacy’s thinking dislodges the following nugget:

“Satan is in the atmosphere above the earth, with access to
heaven and earth with a circumscribed power over the atmospheric elements and
the earth including the inhabitants”.

Oh dear.

But enough of this nonsense. What brought me to this work is
the folding schematic map at the front of the book. It is a slightly complex jumble of
semi-circles and circular reasoning, and I have no interest in straightening
out this jumbled linguine. What has my interest is the dissolving Earth part of
the diagram, a part of the dead earth that comes between Calvary
and Heaven-on-Earth. What makes this
image different from the others though is that the Earth reappears—different from
its former self having been vanquished and cleansed by all consuming fire, but
the Earth nevertheless. Or something
like it. Or nothing like it.

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Bad Ideas — History of Dots — Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking — Outsider Logic
Bizarre Titles with Real Content: the Fine Art of Squeezing

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The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, This Side of Paradise, Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, In Praise of Folly, the Divine Comedy, Pride and Prejudice.

Sometimes magnificent titles of books deliver magnificent things.

Then there are the uneven, unruly titles hiding great works like Aristtotle’s On Youth and Old Age, On Life and Death, On Breathing; Das Kaptial, On the Origin of Species, Paradise Lost, Brothers Karamazov, Tractatus Logico-Philosohicus.

There are badly-titled books that are just bad–we don’t need to get into that right now, wounding the wounded.

And then sometimes a book title promises a lot and delivers it–but not the “a lot” that you expected. The Fine Art of Squeezing, god knows, is a title that demands attention. I thought, well, I’m not sure what I was expecting–possibly it would actually be on squeezing things. (I’ve seen many examples of this sort of bizarre title/content continuity, so I thought it a possibility.) But the story here is delivered by the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey and details their properties being nationalized–squeezed–by the government of Mexico in 1938. It is one of a series of pamphlets, and it evidently sucked up every bit of creativity at Standard Oil: The Question of Subsoil Rights in Mexico and The Accustomed Practices in Cases of Expropriation and Confiscation are two titles that deliver the contents’ good accurately and dryly. This singluarly-titled work also has chapter headings that equally lovely and bizarre: “The Revolutionary Squeeze”, “The Constitutional Squeeze:, “The Concession Squeeze”, “Strangling the Goose “and other fortifies the reader with the possibility of a surreal experience. It is not, of course–it is a competent and direct summation of Standard’s deal with Mexico.

Soap…in Everyday Life is another one of those lovely naive titles, though it only hides a very accurate and authoritative display of Soap Knowledge, published by the Colgate-Palmolive-Peet Co. The draw to this pamphlet for me stops as soon as you open it. (It is a happy little soap-making theme on the cover, though.)

Thirst is another disappointment–weird title and design, and was written in 1937 (and self-published) by Elzoe Prindle Stead. The joy of the title is quickly dissolved by the content, with chapter headings such as “Born Once”, “Once to Die”, “Going to Hell”, “For Him of the Second Death”, “Forgotten or rejected Savior”, and “Jesus goes to the Cross. Its a major proselytizing vehicle which defines itself with the last chapter title, “Why Not”.

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Bad Ideas — Books–title pages, beautiful — Fantastic Titles — Outsider Logic