Orientalism

"Orientalism... is a complex idea, made up of history and scenery, suffused with imagination... We frame to ourselves a deep azure sky, and a languid alluring atmosphere; associate luxurious ease with the coffee-rooms and flower gardens..." Thus an anonymous author in The Knickerbocker, June 1853, attempted to set out a definition of the term, with further visions of fountains and minarets dancing in his head.

Orientalism: A fascination with the East (more Near than Far*) by the West as manifested in the arts. That is how I define the term, anyway. I associate it squarely with the 19th century and the Victorian Imperial vision of a dreamy Romanticized land of caravansaries and hookahs. Think of all those "harem" and "Turkish Bath" paintings that gave artists the chance to depict pretty ladies in dishabille or the exotic photographic landscapes of Frith or Du Camp. Orientalism, which got a big boost in the 20th century from the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb in 1924, connects the dots between Lawrence of Arabia (the person), and The Mummy (the movie) and Camel cigarettes.

The New York Historical Society is presenting a small but worthy show of choice Orientalist tidbits: Allure of the East-- Orientalism in New York, 1850-1930. Included are a Gerome painting, Tiffany lamp, a Zoave costume, posters and tobacco advertisements among other items. The exhibit space is rather effectively transformed into a vest pocket Moorish arcade and all is accompanied by a graphic identity of unabashed pastiche by yours truly.

*The preoccupation with things Japanese that flourished after Japan opened trade with the West in 1853, seems, to me, a thing apart. The West wanted Japanese lacquer, vases, metalwork– but no one seemed to have the desire to be Asian. Japonisme mimicked and adapted Japanese asymmetry and spareness to Western decorative arts, Europeans liked the "alien" approach to line and space, but no one dreamed of inhabiting Asian landscapes or fantasized acting out tales from Japanese history. The Orientalists, meanwhile, engaged in a fair bit of projecting and playacting. From creating Hajji Baba Clubs to themed fancy dress balls the West seemed to envelope itself in dreams of Pashas and swordplay. I would think this distinction of coveting a style at arm's length vs appropriating an interpretive cultural identity has something to do with the imperial/colonial contact with and subjugation of the Near East. Not having read Edward Said's book on the subject I cannot say whether I have just discovered the color of Napoleon's white horse.

Bottom photo: Mrs. Arthur Henry Paget (1853-1919), dressed as Cleopatra for the 1875 Delmonico Ball.

Highlights from the Collection (part 7)

Part of an ongoing series–from my storage to your screen.

Flags of All Nations-- a keen bit of chromolithography I picked up years ago. Ganged together across several disbound pages, the flag tableaux are small, approximately 1.5" x 2.75" each, but surprisingly detailed. (I am particularly fond of the otherworldly view of Iceland: ice- bound ship, two gratified seals.) The inclusion of a flag for "Washington Territory" tells me, with a little help from Google, that this collection is from some time before 1889.

My small cache of pages doesn't even remotely cover "All Nations" but I do have regalia for a good many territories/principalities/parcels of land that would make, I think, even a cartographical historian pause. There are surprises, to me at least, like flags for Tuscany and the Ionian Islands. There are the expected instances of 19th century exotica such as Zanzibar and the Transvaal. And then there are the complete mysteries, like the Society Islands and Heligoland. (George Plimpton and Mrs. Astor didn't die, they retired to the Society Islands! National staples: petit fours and Champagne )

Chromolithography was a wildly popular color reproduction process in the 19th century. I can't understand how it became so commonly used because it sounds like an almost unfathomably cumbersome and complicated process. An image is drawn onto a stone slab– in reverse–with a grease-based crayon. A separate stone was drawn for each color, and as many as twenty stones were used at times. Each stone was inked in an appropriate color on a press and imprinted onto the paper. (A glimpse at engravers drawing on the stones, below. The fellow on the left, Leonetto Cappiello, is working on, I believe, the tremendous poster you see in the background)

Paper would be passed through for each color – each pass having to be aligned and registered exactly. A good example of what progressive proofs in the process of printing looked like here. Perhaps the work ethic was stronger in the 19th century-- or the tolerance for tedium higher.

The bottom color image is a close up of Sicily showing the layers of color and wonderful tiny stippling detail.
(Is that Scylla or Charybdis about to wreck that boat?)

Museum day

Recently I went up the the CooperHewitt to see the Rococo show. What I like about that museum is their usually adventurous curatorial take on whatever subject they tackle. In this case it is establishing the Rococo style in its own time period and then interpreting and teasing out Rococo "revivals" and influence in decorative fashion up to the present. While I was interested in Rococo more than, say, Baroque, I was not prepared to be so completely enamored by this stupendous silver Meissonnier covered tureen (top) from about 1735. It may strike you as a a blob of molten swirls in this photograph but I tell you it is one of the most heart-stoppingly peculiar and wonderful things to behold in person. A fantastical whirl of meticulously rendered mushrooms, carrots, shells and leaves, with a lobster peeking over the top and a dead pheasant or quail laid on for good measure. Second row above shows a couple other 18th century favorites including the delicate, almost icy Chinese-style Rococo mirror at right. English-made, in 1755, the mirror is one of several later international interpretations of the original French court style. It's interesting to see the variations. In the English version you can see the Chinese fancies thrown in, and the spindly spidery characterisitics sometimes incorporate Gothic as well.

Often dismissed as highly sophisticated nonsense, the style's whimsies, linear and intricate, are more suited for "mere" decoration rather than transformation into things more substantive like architecture. But at its best, rococo throws together astonishing realism and unsettling surrealism. The representation of nature-- shells, leaves, water–is startlingly realistic, but the manner in which items are swept up together, as if in tumult, puts everything in flux. It's a beautiful representation of disturbance. The style becomes, at times, unhinged from any semblance of underlying framework and all is swirl, asymmetry, accretion, and encrustation.

A surprising notion I took away from the show: some of the characteristically "Victorian" bombast of mid-19th century interior design, like the hilarious Belter settee shown (third row), could be considered Rococo Revival. Hmmm. I'd never heard that one. But its an interesting insight into "what were they thinking."

Fourth row down is the exquisite Belgian "Heatwave" radiator that I've been eyeing from afar since its unveiling in 2003. Below that is a poster by illustrator/designer Marian Bantjes.

Two other small Cooper Hewitt exhibits are not to be missed are the Campagna Brothers curator's choice selections off the main hall (whence the wonderful and spidery chairs) and Multiple Choice, a display of samples and sample books, on the lower level (two delicious porcelain color samples-- if they do not produce a set of these plates, as is, it is criminal) .

Tuesday with Mori

Oh sorry, that title's a really bad pun. I've already thought through and choked on two other post topics so I decided to just go with it as it comes to me.

Yesterday I came across the Farber Gravestone Collection, a photographic resource of 13,500 images documenting the sculpture on old gravestones and my heart did a leap. Oh so long ago I made a little book about gravestone carving for my senior project. It was mainly a graphic design exercise on the changing iconography of gravestones, but the text came out of a paper I wrote for a history class. What a help this collection would have been! Of course the photos existed (most images the Farbers, a husband and wife team, took were from the 70s and 80s) but they were on a shelf somewhere in the American Antiquarian Society and without the power of the internets, I was Farberless.

I knew that formally, Colonial graves had headstones and footstones, like a bed for the occupants' everlasting repose. This idea also lent the markers their distinctive headboard shape. What I learned was that they typically had carving on the outer sides of the stones, so the visitor-reader would not tread on the grave. Also, graves were positioned with occupants' feet to the East, so that come Judgment they would stand to face the rising sun...

Skulls, Death's heads, cherubs, hourglasses-- the symbols were often copied directly from engravings that came over from England. These were then copied again and again by dedicated stonemasons or itinerant carvers, mostly without the benefit of reference to the original design. Changed, embellished, streamlined and mutated, by skilled intent or by lesser hands, the imagery is at once repetitive and wildly divergent. Truly bizarre figures emerge. Wings become decorative swirls, collars, mustaches. Leering Death's heads become benign cyphers, cherubs morph into strange stupefied-looking sexless trophy heads. Once the Puritan ethic loosens its grip, attempts at portraiture get added into the mix and things got really interesting. When the fashion for Neo-classicism trickled down to the gravemarker, winged messengers were supplanted by urns, willows, swags and often, a disembodied hand pointing skyward.

The inscriptions, too, can be fascinating in all their mangled phonetics and "ye Olde"-iness. Sometimes creepily elliptical ("RB. di'd 1712"), or filled with florid religious boilerplate, they can sometimes stop your heart with personal, real, specificity: at top, little Aaron Bowers, aged 2 years 10 months, was "instantly kill'd by a stack of boards" on September 12, 1791. And there he is, splayed out behind two planks.

My Trembling Heart with Grief overflows,
While I Record the death of Those;
Who died by Thunder Sent from Heaven,
In Seventeen hundred and Seventy Seven

Abraham Rice, struck by lightening, 1777
Framingham, Massachusetts

Lollipop modernism and other things

I was surprised by the impassioned-- dare I say a wee bit hysterical-- tone of the Ourousoff piece in the Times earlier last week. It was on the proposed demolition of several buildings belonging to St. Vincent's Hospital in Greenwich Village, including the singularly unmistakable "O'Toole Building," at top. I gradually realized the actual thrust of the article is rather alarming: permission from Landmarks and the City to raze a group of buildings within a historic district.

The piece should have set up the danger of that precedent much more clearly– that real message was seriously hampered by the O'Toole building focus. Most readers, including this one I admit, thought "it looks like suburban mall parking. And the problem is...?" Essentially, we all got waylaid razzing that truly unlovable white elephant on Seventh Avenue and missed the point: historic districts are created to preserve an urban fabric, a collection of buildings that might not include any individual landmarks but taken collectively, mean something. Ourousoff rightly says,

The designation ...was intended to protect humble structures like these...the city’s character is rooted in the small grain of everyday life.

The O'Toole building is part of a series of 14 (!) structures Albert C. Ledner created for the National Maritime Union. His other notable Maritime work in NYC is what is now the Maritime Hotel on Ninth Ave. The late and lamented (by some) 2 Columbus Circle, third pic down, is NOT by Ledner, but it could be!

I am no fan of Ledner's (btw. an article on the house he designed for himself, in New Orleans, here and some other images of Ledner's work in Regional Modernism's Flickr pages) but I do have a soft spot for the Maritime. I was interested that the article refers to these buildings as "expressive modernism." That was a new term to me. If pressed I would have said the swooping, evocative structural form of the TWA terminal= expressive modernism; the decorative portholes-aplenty of these three= Lollipop modernism. I look at these buildings and see Courreges and white gogo boots...possibly some Islamic decorative notes too, especially on 2 Columbus.

The problem in this particular Landmarks case is no one cares a whit about any of these structures-- a motley group that includes a wan 1920s nursing facility and a bleak 1980s hulk. Take a look at the Municipal Art Society's Flickr set of all of 'em. I realize this is a dangerous incursion on Landmarks.... but one could argue the St Vincent's set doesn't add a thing to the Greenwich Village Historic District. I'm not sure how much they embody the "city's character" the first place...

Ironic that I'm so unconcerned about the St. Vincent's group since I really felt the tragedy of what is now a blighted stretch of 6th Avenue in Chelsea. When, after the earlier unlandmarking of an officially landmarked building the entire character of the streetscape was wiped away.... more on that next post.

images of 2 columbus from Tom Fletcher's NY Architecture

** —— ** —— ** ——

Was it The Art of Memory Matt who left me this wonderful link, the Masterpiece Next Door? I envy the focus, diligence and clarity of purpose of this guy: he is documenting and photographing each building on the New York Landmarks list...

Speaking of clarity of purpose-- I thought I'd be returning to blogging with some, but alas I don't think so. So much for the notions of rebranding and repositioning.

official notice...

temporizing, again

distracted. busy. can't wrap my head around a coherent post.
soon.

Image: a glimpse from a long ago 42nd street--the inside of this barber shop, once a fixture of the subway entrance near Eighth Avenue, c. 1994.

book tag

Thanks to Mr. Trigg at Side Effects I guess I'm "it."

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.

I'm having trouble adhering to the rules already. Book nearest me is the one I just got from the library, Mayflower, A Story of Courage, Community, and War. It's got one of those awful Marketing Department subtitles that tries to simultaneously create an air of intrigue and give the shelf-stockers at Barnes & Noble an idea where to put the book. Unfortunately page 123 yields an uncharacteristically brief, uninformative and deadly boring three sentences.

The next book nearby is actually a journal. And page 123 is a photograph. Am I cheating by posting from page 124? It does give me a reason to post some 19th century beefcake though.

"He was a writer, a publisher, an award winner, an antiquarian, and a man whose commitment to his craft nearly cost him his life. Gurney's work was commissioned by thousands of patrons during his remarkably long career and in return, it became the subject of many articles and the devotion of collectors. Hundreds of his images can be found in the New-York Historical Society's Library, but not all in one place."

This from Painting with the Sunbeams of Heaven. Jeremiah Gurney, Photographist by Sandra Markham, in The New-York Journal of American History (the bulletin of the New-York Historical Society, Fall, 2004).

Jeremiah Gurney was a prominent and prolific New York City "photographist." His main competitor was Mathew (sic) Brady, and like Brady, he was a consummate entrepreneur and self-promoter (take a look at his "100 (and 89) Gurney's Premium" advertising flier for one of his earlier studios. He rented rooms at 189 Broadway from 1840 to 1852). So successful was his business that in 1858 he built himself a three-story white marble studio at 770 Broadway; "J. Gurney's Photographic and Fine Art Gallery" was open til 9 pm every night. Along with his son, Gurney created singular (literally) daguerreotypes as well as mass-market cartes des visites of celebrities, noted actors, respectable families and quasi-scandalous lady gymnasts til about 1874.


I will do my best to keep the tag going although it feels awfully like I'm heaving some virtual chain letter/albatross onto the next sucker... I'll nominate Le Divan Fumoir Bohemien, Morbid Anatomy, Sit Down Man You're A Bloody Tragedy, pathetica, and Daily Poetics.

Images: American Youth, 1852-1856, by Jeremiah Gurney, from the Getty; Gurney premium, c.1840s, from Grand Monde; Parmly and Ward Families and Friends, April, 1862, from N-YHS.

cringe-worthy

I'm surprised I hadn't thought about this before: word aversion (also called "the moist panties phenomenon.") My friend Clay brought it to my attention that a fair number of women, in particular, express disgust at the sound of the word "moist." This was the first I'd heard of it. And it was not until I focussed on it did I begin to find something unpleasant about the word. I hadn't really had an aversion to "moist", but if pressed I'd say there was something icky about the oleaginous "oy" coupled with the prissiness of "st."

Language Log stresses these are not words that are taboo, or commonly taken to be offensive, nor are they words subjected to widespread misuse, which triggers a somewhat-related "word rage." Rather, this is purely subjective opinion based on sound, divorced from definition.

I like the idea of word aversion. I mean, I'd already made lists of words and names I liked, independent of meaning. Why not words I am repelled by? Off the top of my head, words that make me wince are "veggies" and "yummy." I also hate "tummy." I notice these are all "ee"-sounding, informal words. Dare I say Americanisms? Perhaps not. I wonder, though, if it's more the connotations that these words bring with them-- annoying, entitled parents I come across in my neighborhood, say--than the words themselves. I am disappointed by the word periphery. It's got a sexy definition that I like, but the sound of it doesn't evoke anything remotely appealing. It is unsatisfying to say and it is ever-so-slightly inelegant– the "p" - "ph" and "eri" - "ery" seem reduplicative but they're not. The "phery" in particular seems weak and awkward-looking.

Language Log makes this interesting connection, quoting another blogger:

I really just don't like those words. I don't dislike their meanings, but phonetically they conjure up all sort of unpleasant textures. 'Baffle' sounds fibrous and tough like a mat of hair, and 'Cornucopia' is too much like 'corpulent'. I won't get started on 'squab'.

This reminds me somewhat of the way that people talk about synesthesia -- I wonder whether there's any connection.

For some of us I think there is definitely a connection. I agree with the above about "baffle" although I dont' find that word bothersome. When I read "lobe" I think of wet, blubbery, custardy things. I would not say I'm a synesthete but I often have textural or other visual connotations with sounds. I would, for instance, opine that "two" could never be blue-- its more of a warm-colored number. I have never experienced taste or smell in relation to a word....

I queried some of my friends about disliking words. I'll update as the answers roll in.
Matt says:
veggie for sure
cheeses
soups
for some reason these plurals bother me

Steve:
I won't use "munchie" either. I don't use "scarf" either but i accept scarf.

Doug:
Oh I hate veggie!
..."dangle" would be one...

Maria:
i'm not crazy about brassiere, crayfish, minge

my mother:
guru "I even hate the way it looks" said she

Anne
horny!

Update: I recently got an email from a potential date that used the word "tummy" prominently and it nearly made me physically ill. I still get a shiver of disgust just thinking about it. (don't worry its not someone who would know that I'm referring to him).
The word "goodies" also gives me pause.

In reading the comments I like that Brooklyn Brit is throwing flaps into the mix...