CABINET

A quArterly mAgAzine of Art And culture issue 9 cHildHood Winter 2002/03 us $8 cAnAdA $13 uK 6

columns

ThE clEan Room / suPERFlY mE To ThE moon DaviD serlin

Race, physiology, and the culture of aerospace science

13 lEFToVERs / aT dEaThs dooRKnoB paul collins

The bloody-minded invention of Dr. Dibble

15 coloRs / sulPhuR THoMas Beller

Moody, toxic, light, and tasty

17 InGEsTIon / culInaRY landscaPEs allen s. Weiss

Antonin Carme, the Palladio of cuisine

maIn

21

ThE Wall and ThE EYE: an InTERVIEW WITh EYal WEIzman Jeffrey KasTner & sina naJafi

Architecture and negative planning in the West Bank

32 PaInT YouR TRouBlEs aWaY ricHarD fleMing

A wall with a view in an Israeli settlement

35 caBlE TVs FaIlEd uToPIan VIsIon: an InTERVIEW WITh daRa BIRnBaum nicols guagnini

Televisual activism and the revolution that never was

41 ThaddEus cahIlls musIc PlanT Brian DeWan

The Telharmonium and the promise of electrical music on tap

42 43 aRTIsT PRojEcT: To BE looKEd aT, FRom a dIsTancE, WITh EYEs cRossEd Dan Wolgers hEllo, nIcE To mEET You, do You WanT To Go To holland?: a conVERsaTIon WITh RoBERT Kloos and mnIca dE la ToRRE regine BasHa

How cultural attachs sell their countries

48 saVE YouR FamIlY Jay WorTHingTon

Readers photos, protected until 2047

chIldhood

51

FRBEl and ThE GIFTs oF KIndERGaRTEn norMan BrosTerMan

Cultivating the modern child in the garden of play

58 65 aRTIsT PRojEcT: school YEaR Helen Mirra WhERE ThE WIld ThInGs WERE: an InTERVIEW WITh lEonaRd s. maRcus DaviD serlin & Brian selznicK

The history of childrens literature from Orbis Pictus to The Rabbits Wedding
70 72 aRTIsT PRojEcT: a PacK oF BlInd snIFFInG doGs Byron KiM PIcTuRInG InnocEncE: an InTERVIEW WITh annE hIGonnET sina naJafi

From the ideal child to the knowing child

78 doEs a PRolETaRIan chIld nEEd a FaIRYTalE? alla rosenfelD

The Soviet Production Book for Children

83 aRTIsT PRojEcT: on REadInG WenDy eWalD

86

ThE doll GamEs sHelley & paMela JacKson

Thirty years on, a scholarly reconsideration of the Jacksons childhood world

92 homo Bulla: an InTERVIEW WITh saBInE mdERshEIm Kris coue

The trouble with bubbles

95 99 aRTIsT PRojEcT: dRaWInGs Marcel DzaMa FIndERs KEEPERs MicHael WiTMore

On the history of prodigies

102 104 aRTIsT PRojEcT: PRaxIs dR. KssEndRuP aura rosenBerg sKaBBETTI, PEas, aPPlE caKE, and IcE cREam anonyMous

A meal based on recipes by children

105 108 110 sPEcIal cd InsERT: juVEnIlIa curaTeD By Brian conley & cHrisTopH cox aRTIsT PRojEcT: sound oF musIc BarBara pollacK modEl chIld: an InTERVIEW WITh max BERGER JosepH r. Wolin

On being photographed. Constantly. By your mother.

112 somE RElIcs oF chIldhood roDney pHillips

Early works by Auden, Isherwood, Kerouac, Plath, and Shelley

116 119 aRTIsT PRojEcT: sculPTuRE FRom dRaWInG Billy & cHrisTo HalloWay ThE RouGh GuIdE: FaVEll lEE moRTImERs The CounTries of europe DesCribeD ToDD pruzan

A xenophobic travelogue for Victorian tots

and

PosTcaRd

Babies of the World, Unite!

cabinet
Immaterial Incorporated 181 Wyckoff Street Brooklyn NY 11217 USA tel + 1 718 222 8434 fax + 1 718 222 3700 email info@cabinetmagazine.org www.cabinetmagazine.org Editor-in-chief Sina Najafi Senior editor Jeffrey Kastner Editors Frances Richard, David Serlin, Gregory Williams CD editors Brian Conley & Christoph Cox Art directors (Cabinet) Ariel Apte & Sarah Gephart of mgmt. Managing editor & graphic designer Brian McMullen Art director (Immaterial Incorporated) Richard Massey/OIG Image editor Naomi Ben-Shahar Childhood image editing Brian Selznick Editors-at-large Saul Anton, Mats Bigert, Jesse Lerner, Allen S. Weiss, Jay Worthington Website Kristofer Widholm & Luke Murphy Production manager Sarah Crowner Development consultant Alex Villari Contributing editors Joe Amrhein, Molly Bleiden, Eric Bunge, Andrea Codrington, Christoph Cox, Cletus Dalglish-Schommer, Pip Day, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss, Dejan Krsic, Tan Lin, Roxana Marcoci, Ricardo de Oliveira, Phillip Scher, Rachel Schreiber, Lytle Shaw, Debra Singer, Cecilia Sjholm, Sven-Olov Wallenstein Research assistants Sasha Archibald, Amoreen Armetta, Christine Potts Prepress Zvi @ Digital Ink Founding editors Brian Conley & Sina Najafi Printed in Belgium by Die Keure Cabinet (ISSN 1531-1430) is a quarterly magazine published by Immaterial Incorporated, 181 Wyckoff Street, Brooklyn, NY 11217. Periodicals Postage paid at Brooklyn, NY and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send address changes to Cabinet, 181 Wyckoff Street, Brooklyn, NY 11217 Subscriptions Individual one-year subscriptions (in US Dollars): United States $24, Europe and Canada $34, Mexico $50, Other $60 Institutional one-year subscriptions (in US Dollars): United States $30, Europe and Canada $42, Mexico $60, Other $75 Please either send a check in US dollars made out to Cabinet, or send, fax, or email us your Visa/Mastercard/American Express/Discover information. To process your credit card, we need your name, card number, expiry date, and billing address. You can also subscribe directly on our website at www.cabinetmagazine.org with a credit card. Institutions can also subscribe through EBSCO and Swets Blackwell. Back issues available in the US for $12. For prices outside the US, please see back page or email us. Advertising Email advertising@cabinetmagazine.org or call + 1 718 222 8434. Distribution US and Canada: Big Top Newstand Services, a division of the IPA. For more information, call + 1 415 643 0161, fax + 1 415 643 2983, or email info@BigTopPubs.com. Europe: Central Books, London. Email: orders@centralbooks.com Cabinet is also available through Tower stores around the world. Please send distribution questions to info@cabinetmagazine.org Cabinet accepts unsolicited manuscripts and artist projects, preferably sent by e-mail to proposals @cabinetmagazine.org as a Microsoft Word document or in Rich Text Format. Hard copies should be double-spaced and in duplicate. We do not publish poetry. Please see www.cabinetmagazine.org for our submission guidelines. We can only return materials if a self-addressed, stamped envelope is provided. Contents 2002 Immaterial Incorporated & the authors, artists, translators. All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction of any material here is a no-no. The views published in this magazine are not necessarily those of the writers, let alone the cowardly editors of Cabinet. Erratum: We offer apologies to John Roberts. The first footnote of his essay The Logics of Deflation in issue 8 was also printed as the final paragraph of the text.

Cabinet is a non-profit 501 (c) (3) magazine published by Immaterial Incorporated. Contributions to Cabinet magazine are fully tax-deductible. Donors of $50 or more will be ackowledged in the magazine and further enriched by receiving some form of edifying tchotchke from us. Checks made out to Cabinet can be sent to our address. Please mark the envelope Donation. Not to be spent on doughnuts or other late-night junk food. Cabinet wishes to thank the following foundations and individuals for their generous support. The Flora Family Foundation The New York State Council on the Arts The Frankel Foundation The Peter Norton Family Foundation Debbie Yu Edward Wilson & Hesu Coue Kendall B. McGreggor Lydia Denworth & Mark Justh Ted Hartigan Corina Goulden

cover: The 19th-century French neurologist Duchenne de Boulogne applying electricity to stimulate a young girls individual facial muscles. Source: Duchennes 1862 book The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression page 1: Samuel Kastners drawing of the cover, 2002 opposite: Annika von Hausswolff, Girl with Chainsaw, 2002 courtesy Casey Kaplan Gallery

conTriBuTors
Ellen Band is a composer and sound artist based in Somerville, Massachusetts. Her first solo CD, 90% Post Consumer Sound, was released by XI Records in 2000. In 1994, she founded Audible Visions, a performance space for new music and sound art in Somerville. Regine Basha works independently as a curator, writer and co-producer of public projects. She is the former Cultural Affairs Officer for the Canadian Consulate in New York. Tom Beller is a writer and founding editor of Open City. He is based in New York. Max Berger, son of Barbara Pollack and Joel Berger, is a freshman at Brooklyn Tech High School. In 1998, he received a national photography award from the Boys and Girls Club of America. His next project, Maxs 15th Birthday Party, will be presented at Participant, Inc. in January 2003. New York-based artist and independent producer Dara Birnbaum has achieved international recognition within the arts, spurring some of the most controversial discussions in contemporary media exploration. She is the recipient of the American Film Institutes prestigious Maya Deren Award, among numerous other awards from international film and video festivals. Her work is part of renowned permanent collections both in this country and abroad. Philip Blackburn, a native of Cambridge, England, received a doctorate from the University of Iowa and has been senior program director at the American Composers Forum since 1991. Enclosures his 15-year project to publish Harry Partchs works in a series of videos, CDs and a book received an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award. Blackburn runs the Innova Recordings new-music CD label and co-founded the Sonic Circuits International Electronic Music Festival. Norman Brosterman is the author of Inventing Kindergarten (Harry N. Abrams, 1997). Paul Collins is the author of Banvards Folly and the forthcoming Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books (Bloomsbury). He edits the Collins Library (collinslibrary.com) for McSweeneys Books. Brian Conley is New York-based artist and a founding editor of Cabinet. Christoph Cox teaches philosophy and contemporary music at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. He is a contributing editor of Cabinet. Brian Dewan makes filmstrips, parlor music and mini-architecture in Brooklyn, New York. He also makes electronic music and plays electric zither in the Raymond Scott Orchestrette. Edmond M. Dewan has been a research scientist at Hanscom Field Air Force Base since 1957. His early work includes a theory of REM sleep and the first demonstration of a machine controlled directly by a human brain. Since then his work involves atmospheric bores, gravity waves, turbulence, and stellar scintillation. Marcel Dzama was born in 1974 in Winnipeg, Canada, where he lives and works. His work has recently been seen in a solo exhibition at Timothy Taylor Gallery in London and in the 47th Biennial of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Catharine H. Echols is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas, Austin. She conducts research on language acquisition. Wendy Ewald is artist-in-residence at the John Hope Franklin Center; a senior research associate at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University; and a senior fellow at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School University. Her collaborative works are in the collections of major museums and the subject of seven books, including Secret Games: Collaborative Works with Children 1969-1999 (Scalo, 2000). Bill Farrell is doing post-doctoral research in behavioral neuroscience at the University of Texas, Austin. Teddy Fire was born in the same year as Never Mind the Bollocks. In his late teens, he gave up music and poetry and now works in a record store in Boston. Richard Fleming records sound for documentary films and enjoys taking long walks. Currently he is writing Walking to Guantanamo, a book about crossing Cuba lengthwise. He lives near the water in Brooklyn. Ted Gannon is a composer, sound designer, and multi-instrumentalist based in New York. Nicols Guagnini is an artist and writer living in New York. He is also co-founder of Union Gaucha Productions, an experimental and independent film production company. Billy Halloway was born in 1997. He goes to school in New York City. Christo Halloway was born in Zimbabwe in 1953. He is a model-maker and the

founder of Clockwork Apple in New York City. Annika von Hausswolff is an artist based in Stockholm. She is represented by Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York, and by Andrhn-Schiptjenko Gallery, Stockholm. Anne Higonnet is a Professor at the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Barnard College. She is the author of Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood (Thames & Hudson, 1998) and Berthe Morisot (Harper Collins, 1990). Susanna Hood is a choreographer, composer, dancer, producer, singer, and actor based in Toronto. John Hudak, based in Dobbs Ferry, New York, creates sonic distillations of the sounds that surround him in his everyday life. The sounds that result from his manipulations retain the essence of the original sounds, but transform them into ghost-like afterimages. Pamela Jackson is an independent scholar. She is working on a book about Philip K. Dick. Shelley Jackson is the author of The Melancholy of Anatomy, a collection of short stories, and Patchwork Girl, a hypertext novel. Jeffrey Kastner is a Brooklyn-based writer and senior editor of Cabinet. Samuel Kastner is a Brooklyn-based artist, writer, and third grader. Byron Kim is an artist with a studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Lisa Sigal (also an artist), Emmett Kim, Ella Bea Kim and Adeline Kim live with him in Park Slope. Robert Kloos is Director for Visual Arts, Architecture & Design at the Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York. Julia Loktev is a filmmaker and video installation artist based in New York. Her feature film, Moment of Impact, was screened in numerous international film festivals and won the Directing Award at the Sundance Festival. Her video installation work will be exhibited at the Whitney Museum this spring. Leonard S. Marcus is the author of Ways of Telling: Conversations on the Art of the Picture Book (Dutton, 2002) and Storied City: A Childrens Book Guide to New York City (Dutton, forthcoming 2003). He lives in New York. Vincent Mazeau is an artist/designer living and working in New York. He is a founding member of Big Room, a New York-based association of artists and designers. Helen Mirra is represented by Meyer Riegger Galerie, Karlsruhe. She is senior lecturer in Visual Arts and Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Chicago. Sabine Mdersheim is Assistant Professor at the Department of German at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Gen Ken Montgomery is a sound artist who has lived and worked in New York since 1978. Montgomery was one of the original founders of Generation Unlimited and the Pogus Productions record labels, and in 1989 founded Generator, the first sound art gallery in New York City. He continues to produce concerts and recordings of his work and other sound artists. Email: genken@ generatorsoundart.org Luna Montgomery, born in Brooklyn, is an actress/singer/musician/ dancer/ performance artist and seventh grader. She has been seen in the Swans video Love of Life and in Zoe Beloffs 3-D film Shadowland. Her voice has been heard on the radio, on CDs and on answering machines between New York and Italy. Sina Najafi is editor-in-chief of Cabinet. John Oswald is a musician and sound/multimedia artist based in Toronto. Director of Research at Mystery Laboratory, he developed the art of plunderphonics, critical and creative audio cut-ups of popular music. Oswald is also an improvising saxophonist who has played and recorded with artists including Henry Kaiser, Derek Bailey, Jim ORourke, and the Canadian collective CCMC. Rodney Phillips is Director of Humanities and Social Sciences at the New York Public Library. He is the author, with Steve Clay, of A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing, 1960-1980 (Granary Books/NYPL, 1998), and his chapbook of poems, made in collaboration with the painter John Jurayj, has just been released by Granary Books. His poems have appeared in numerous journals, including the Paris Review and Fence. He lives in New York City. Barbara Pollack is an artist and writer who has had solo shows at the Holly Solomon Gallery, Threadwaxing Space and Esso Gallery, which represents her work. Her works are in collections of major museums; her upcoming shows include PG-13, a two-person show of video works at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan in February 2003 and an installation at Trans> in May 2003.

Todd Pruzan is an editor at Blender magazine. His writing has appeared in publications including the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, the Village Voice, the New Republic, and McSweeneys. He lives in Brooklyn. Aura Rosenberg is an artist who lives in New York City and Berlin. She is represented by Gasser & Grunert gallery in New York. Her book Berlin Childhood has just been released by Steidl/DAAD. She teaches at the School of Visual Arts and the Pratt Institute and her agency is Issue Management. Alla Rosenfeld, a native of Russia, is currently Director of the Department of Russian Art and Senior Curator of Russian and Soviet Nonconformist Art at the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. She is also a Ph.D. candidate at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Brian Selznick has written and/or illustrated many books for children, including The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins, which was awarded a 2002 Caldecott Honor. David Serlin is an editor and columnist for Cabinet. He is the co-editor of Artificial Parts, Practical Lives: Modern Histories of Prosthetics (NYU Press, 2002). He can be reached at david@cabinetmagazine.org Thuunderboy, born Ted Conrad, is now 31 years old and living in Queens. Mnica de la Torre is co-author of Appendices, Illustrations & Notes (Smart Art Press) and editor of the anthology Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry, recently published by Copper Canyon Press. Allen S. Weiss has been working hard on ingestion: He recently co-edited French Food (Routledge), and his Feast and Folly is forthcoming (SUNY). Eyal Weizman is an architect, based in Tel-Aviv and London, who has conducted research on behalf of the human rights organization Btselem on the planning aspects of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. Weizman is currently developing his doctoral thesis The Politics of Verticality: Architecture and Occupation in the West Bank into a TV documentary film and a book to be published next year. Gregory Whitehead is a playwright, radio artist and voice performer who makes frequent excursions into the occluded soundscapes of the dead. Recent works include O Monstrous Voice Like Mine and Everything I Know About Glossolalia. Michael Witmore teaches English at Carnegie Mellon University. His book, Culture of Accidents: Unexpected Knowledges in Early Modern England, was just published by Stanford University Press. Dan Wolgers is a Swedish artist living and working in Stockholm. Joseph R. Wolin is a curator and critic in New York. His most recent project, Royal Art Lodge: Volume 1, curated with Wayne Baerwaldt, will open at The Drawing Center in New York in January 2003 and travel to The Power Plant in Toronto and De Vleeshal in Middelburg, the Netherlands. Jay Worthington is a lawyer in New York City. He is also one of the founders of Clubbed Thumb, an independent theater company in New York, and editor-atlarge at Cabinet.

columns

 The Clean Room, David Serlins column on science and technology, appears in each issue. / Leftovers is a column that examines the cultural significance of leftovers or detritus. / Colors is a column where a guest writer is asked to respond to a specific color assigned by the editors of Cabinet. / Ingestion is Allen S. Weisss column on cuisine, aesthetics, and philosophy.

The clean Room / suPeRFlY me To The moon

DaviD Serlin
There was a good view of the Earth which had a very distinct and pretty blue halo. It had a smooth transition from pale blue, blue, dark blue, violet and absolutely black. It was a magnificent picture. Yuri Gagarin at his first press conference, 15 April 1961.

In early 2002, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) announced that it had cut $16 million from its annual budget originally earmarked for developing a smaller space suit for female astronauts.1 The decision, which angered women scientists and their supporters both inside and outside the space industry, came as a surprise to those who have witnessed NASA s commitment to gender equity expand over the past three decades. Prior to the 1990s, most space suits were custom-tailored to the individual physical measurements of (predominantly male) astronauts. But in recent years, in keeping with its mandate to make its gear reusable and cost-efficient for the long term, NASA has chosen to make available space suits in only three sizes: medium, large, and extra-large. According to NASAs own internal accounting, these three sizes work for about 90 percent of the men in the space program but only about 35 percent of the women, most of whom tend to have smaller chests and shorter arm spans than their male counterparts. Smaller sized suits, if built, could accommodate up to 95 percent of the female astronauts currently enrolled in the space program. Indeed, creating a smaller range of space suits would benefit all astronauts of smaller stature, regardless of their gender, as it would allow many individuals a greater degree of physical control prohibited by the larger suits. The demand by women astronauts for smaller-sized space suits highlights the relative homogeneity and uniformity of astronaut culture as it has evolved over the past half century. Until very recently in NASA s history, women and minorities were almost universally excluded, especially since airplane pilot training was typically the prerequisite for NASA s first roster of astronauts. The tacit emphasis given over to the needs of male astronauts, whether in space suits or in laboratory experiments, has obscured the needs of not only women but of women and men of varying sizes and physical characteristics. The privilege accorded to the male astronauts space suit by aerospace scientists and NASA administrators is, of course, hardly surprising: in the space sciences, as in the life sciences more generally, the male body is used as the uninterrogated base line of our species from which all variations and permutations emerge. Built upon centuries of passive assumptions and naturalized across a billion cultural exchanges, male privilege is the thin, alien oxygen that science sips to stay alive. The internal history of astronauts and their haberdashers suggests how the focus on physiology and the norms generated thereby have contributed to an exclusive culture of male, and specifically white male, aerospace science. Long before Yuri Gagarin or Alan Shepherd were ever catapulted into their lonely orbits, scientists in the aeronautics industries during the 1930s and 1940s chose young white men for their leadership potential or their technical expertise to be part of the vanguard of experimental aeronautics. In order to train pilots for long-range air activities, officers chose men who could endure high altitudes and fast speeds as well as extreme conditions such as heat, cold, fatigue, hunger, and sleep deprivation. Ross A. McFarland, who chaired the Harvard School of Public Health in the late 1940s and early 1950s, used the cream of military recruits to study the effects of alcohol, tobacco, and carbon monoxide on human performance. His laboratory studies pushed the bodys limitations and charted its circadian rhythms in order to understand and even predict the extreme conditions of

air travel on the human body. Nonwhite pilots, such as the famous Tuskegee Airmen, were kept isolated from the rest of the armed forces during World War Two and were naturally excluded from such tests, creating a shallow pool of applicants on whom to base the latest equipment designs or model the latest pressure suits. By the time NASA reorganized administratively for outer space explorations in the late 1950s, the culture of astronaut training followed from the studies conducted on a small, elite sector of Navy and Air Force pilots, most of whom were chosen because they fit the masculine ideal required of specialized military personnel. Notwithstanding thorny questions about race, physiology, and performance that continue to vex contemporary biologists and social theorists, the physical standards that gave rise to an exclusively white population of aircraft pilots in the 1940s dictated the selection process for astronauts in the 1950s and 1960s. An unproblematized belief in the relationship between high levels of performance and white male body types influenced every aspect of astronaut training from endurance tests and health care needs to ergonomic designs for cockpit interiors and space suits. Despite the inability of non-whites to participate as actual astronauts, the relationship between space and race in the 20th century was vividly imagined in both political discourse and cultural works. Both black and white visionaries used space as an arena for reimagining the possibility of social and political systems outside of the daily indignities commanded by prejudice, often configured as the transgalactic egalitarianisms seen in popular entertainments like Star Trek. Long before the arrival of Lieutenant Uhuru on the bridge of the starship Enterprise, however, black intellectuals and political figures adapted science fiction themes to challenge racial hierarchies. In the 1940s, for example, Elijah Mohammed, the originator of the Nation of Islam in the United States and former mentor to Malcolm X, explained the history of global race relations as a space drama of operatic proportions. Following an initial Big Bang and 66 trillion years of cosmic peace, an evil black scientist named Yakub was credited with having created the white race in a period of only 600 years. In 1991, Minister Louis Farrakhan, who assumed the Nation of Islams political leadership, announced that he had been taken aboard a wheel-shaped spacecraft currently in orbit 40 miles above the earth for a consultation with Elijah Mohammed. In addition, Farrakhan described a formidable battalion of fifteen hundred smaller space ships housed in the mother ship, though it is unclear exactly who or what is piloting these spacecraft. One wonders why the Nation of Islam keeps its astronaut training program surreptitiously hidden from public view. Black artists in the 1950s and 1960s were reliable proponents of space travel to imagined worlds. With the mainstreaming of the civil rights movement and the international rise of Black Power as a political force, space exploration could be used to investigate ideas of race pride, race neutrality, or the absence of race altogether. Many black musicians maintained a deep and abiding interest in space themes: Thelonius Monk, for example, rechristened himself with the middle name of Sphere, while Sun Ra claimed an intergalactic citizenship influenced by theories of space visitors to ancient Egypt. The angular abstractions of Monks and Sun Ras music, coupled with unconventional time signatures and arrangements, stood in stark contrast to popular music of the era, with the noticeable exception of The Tornadoes 1962 instrumental Telstar, a wordless though eerie paean to the unknown. International hits of the early 1970s like David Bowies Space Oddity, Elton Johns Rocket Man, and Klaatus Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft are, for all of their conceptual drama, basically solipsistic teenage fantasies of white alienation deeply
previous: Neznaika, hero of Nikolai Nosovs Russian childrens book, Neznaika on the Moon, 1965.

indebted to British high modernism. Eltons astronaut pines for his family, desperate to only connect like E.M. Forster, while Bowies Major Tom does a Virginia Woolf and disappears into the black void of space altogether. By contrast, when themes of space exploration and visitation occur in black popular music of the 1970ssuch as in concept albums by George Clinton/Parliament Funkadelicthey are community-based narratives filled with deft humor and social critique, tied inextricably to the house party dance floor rather than the isolated teenage bower. The racial barrier for black astronauts was finally broken at the end of the 1970s, three decades after the consolidation of a federally funded aerospace industry. Major Robert Lawrence, Jr., an Air Force test pilot who held a Ph.D. in chemistry, is often recognized as the first black astronaut though he never left the earth. Lawrence was killed in the crash of an F-104 fighter in December 1967 just six months after he was named to the Air Force's manned orbiting laboratory program, a short-lived precursor to NASA training that closed in 1969. Had he survived the crash, Lawrence would have been America's lone black astronaut until NASA chose three black trainees for the space program in 1978. Dr. Guion S. Bluford, one of those three black trainees, became the first African-American man in space when he was named to the crew of the space shuttle Challenger in 1983; coincidentally or not, it was the first space shuttle flight both to launch and land during the night. Dr. Mae C. Jeminson, the first African-American woman in space, made even more spectacular headlines when she flew aboard the space shuttle Endeavor in 1992. But the era of seemingly unlimited equal opportunity for astronauts is more deceptively complex than it might appear at first glance, challenging the narrative of immutable social progress at the heart of any civil rights agenda. In 2000, Russian officials announced the availability of space aboard its Soyuz 5 rocket for the small price tag of $20 million. One year later, and exactly four decades after cosmonaut Gagarins historic mission during the height of the Cold War, white American businessman Dennis Tito ponied up the dough and became a Soyuz 5 Nominated Space Flight Participant. Short, squat, and well above the median age of male astronauts of any nationality, Tito realized his life-long dream of space tourism, bypassing the regimentation of NASA s astronaut training program for post-communist Russias embrace of cold hard cash. More recently, Lance Bass of the boy band NSync negotiated and won available space aboard the first Soyuz rocket scheduled to depart in 2003 on a ticket paid for by Pepsi. Television networks, taking advantage of this new frontier of product placement, are preparing to launch new space-based reality TV programs, including one called Celebrity Mission which will follow Basss adventures. One imagines a succession of images of the maudlin singer giving, with Glasnost-inspired earnestness, a pearlytoothed, life-affirming thumbs-up for the umpteenth time to the on-board cameras. The whole enterprise will resurrect the pre-Warholian transmutation of ordinary people into extraordinary super-citizens reminiscent of popular Sputnikera television shows like Queen for a Day and This is Your Life. Future installments of Celebrity Mission will follow big-name (though obviously expendable) industry icons as they mawkishly writhe in zero gravity. In early 2002, at approximately the same moment that NASA had chosen to dismantle its program for designing smaller-sized space suits, Mark Shuttleworth of Cape Town, South Africa, became the worlds second space tourist. Shuttleworth, in the words of Nelson Mandela, assumed the stature of our first Afronaut. But reading Shuttleworths biography alongside his temporary title of Soyuz 5 Nominated Space Flight Participant, words like nominated and participant seem exceptionally awkward given the relationship between the light-skinned Afronaut and the apartheid society in which he spent his formative years. In the end, the twentysomething Shuttleworthwho made

his $600 million fortune by inventing the prototype for VeriSign, the encryption software used by millions of Internet retail sites around the worldfollowed the trajectory of least resistance by following the privileges of wealth rather than the triumphs of democracy. Riding on the Soyuz 5 enabled Shuttleworth to bypass the demands for racial and social justice still needed in his own home country as well as in other postcolonial nations. Multimillionaires, after all, have no need to challenge the gravity that weighs down the rest of us here on earth. The historical precedents that restricted mobility for astronauts of any color other than white are erased from popular consciousness once again by the 800-pound gorilla of capitalism: a creature which, despite its colossal size, undoubtedly has its own space suit.
1 See Andrew Lawler, NASA Decision Not Suited for Women, in Science, vol. 295 (1 March 2002), p. 1623.

leFToVeRs / aT DeaThs DooRKnoB

PaUl COllinS
Disposing of very large quantities of blood is an onerous chore. You can't give the stuff awaywell, perhaps you can, but few are willing to endure the stares that proving this point entails. Yet the slaughtering and butchering trade has long faced precisely this dilemma. London butchers in Newport Market during the 19th century were banned from tipping blood into the street sewers, due to the rats it attracted, though enough of them flouted this law that sewers under meat markets became commonly known as blood sewers. Among London sewer workers, toiling in these blood lines vied in unpleasantness with the caustic rivers that ran under soapmakers and the boiling drains beneath sugar refineries. Indeed, one of the better ways for meat merchants to dispose of cattle blood was by selling it to these sugar mills, which used it in their refining process.1 Recycling was already the order of the day: bones were ground up for phosphorus matches, tobacco ash was turned into tooth-cleanser, old wool sweaters shredded into wallpaper flocking, and it was discovered that desiccated fish eyes made delightful buds for artificial flowers. Unlucky stray dogs wound up as phony cod-liver oil, and tallow makers in Paris were not above fishing dead dogs and cats out of the Seine when production quotas demanded it. But blood and animal waste remained a perennial problem. New Yorkers found one promising use for it in the 1870s: they tried mixing blood with other discarded offal to manure their fields.2 But perhaps the most creative approach to blood disposal is one we might all still readily grasp, as this headline from the January 1892 issue of Manufacturer and Builder magazine attests:
Door Knobs, etc., from Blood and Sawdust.

Doctor W.H. Dibble, of New Jersey, had patented an exciting material for interior decorators: hemacite, he called it. Hemacite, the magazine explained, was nothing less than the blood of slaughtered cattle and sawdust, combined with chemical compounds, under hydraulic pressure of forty thousand pounds to the square inch. Sawdust back then had already found use in papermaking and as a filling for dolls, and desperate Swedes had also figured out how to distill brandy from it. But these base ingredients of blood and sawdust remained plentiful, and were wonderfully effective when combined together as an animal polymer, the bloods albumen binding with the wood particulate. Hemacite, noted the magazine, is susceptible of a high polish, is impervious to heat, moisture, atmospherical changes, and, in fact, is 13

practically indestructible. Starting out as brownish powder resembling snuff, hemacite could be molded into any shape and dyed to any color, and it became a popular and reasonably priced substitute for both wood and metal among architect and decorators. In fact, by the time of the Manufacturer and Builder article, the Trenton headquarters of the Dibble Manufacturing Company had been for some years producing hemacite house trimmings and drawer pulls, and it now had a catalogue of hundreds of designs of their most popular product, hemacite doorknobs. The doorknobs carried a guarantee for the lifetime of the door, because rather than having a separate knob and shaft to wear out, they were molded as one unbreakable piece. It was a successful enough product that Dibble eliminated his own name from the enterprise entirely: Trenton became the proud home of the Hemacite Manufacturing Company. Dibble branched out into products like hemacite cash register buttons and, quick to pick up on the latest fads, roller skates.3 To skate manufacturers and dealers, boasted an ad in the 11 October 1885 issue of the New York Times, the superiority of our Hemacite Roller over boxwood is now well known. The campaign seems to have worked: the 21 February 1903 Times carries an ad by the Siegel Cooper department store, hawking athletic supplies, and nestled among promotions for medicine balls and $12 Swedish Dogskin Coats (For sporting use or driving) is an entry for 75-cent roller skates with hemacite wheels, a more expensive option than skates with plain black wheels. Curiously, Siegel Cooper's ad appears over a plug for Plasmon Cocoa mixA blood-invigorating and muscle-making beverage of the highest order. Plasmons active invigorating ingredient? Albumen, which was also the organic binding agent behind hemacite roller skate wheels. W.H. Dibble was certainly an inventive fellow, having previously patented a dentists contraption to simultaneously pry patients mouths open while draining away their saliva, but his hemacite products were not quite the amazing innovation that he led others to believe.4 Like a true American, what he had really done was nick a foreign idea and improve upon it. Long before Dibbles 1877 application, the Parisian writer Francois Lepage secured an 1855 patent for what he called bois durci: a pressurized mixture of sawdust and cattle blood or, less economically, egg whites. Lepage founded the Bois Durci Company and exhibited its wares at the Great International Exhibition of 1862, back when Dibble was still tinkering with ways to suck the spit out of dental patients. Bois durci went on to turn up in a variety of 19th century inkstands, plaques, picture frames, and furniture; Edison even used it for the housing on early telephones.5 Even bois durci was not the first use of blood in buildings. Cattle blood had long been used in blood cements,as, for that matter, had albumen from eggs, milk, and cheese. One Chinese recipe called for 100 parts slaked lime, 75 parts bullocks blood, and 2 parts alum. Floors in South Africa gained a black marble-like polish with the use of blood, and an early London tennis court acquired its hard and glossy surface in the same way; it has even been used as an additive in roofing material.6 It seems there is no part of a house that cannot be manufactured, in part, from blood. Hemacite certainly captured the attention of Victorian architects. By the turn of the century, though, Dibbles firm had already suffered a factory fire, moved shop to a new building, and changed its name to Trenton Brass and Machine Company. The old Hemacite Company was as much a victim of changing times as fire: new plastics like Bakelite were in the offing, pushing aside the quaint notion of sawdust mixed with blood. The rechristened company soldiered on for many more decades, surviving the Depression and a postwar strike, and until recently still supplied fittings to plumbing contractors. But even Trenton Brass is gone now, and with it the last faint trace of Dr. W.H. Dibble and his Hemacite Company.7

But old hemacite house fixtures, strong and durable as they are, live on. So the next time you find yourself running short on bouillon, you may take this token of advice: consider boiling your doorknobs.
1 The varieties of London sewers are from John Hollingsheads splendid subterranean travelogue, Underground London (1862). 2 Recycling methods are from The Art of Utilizing, in Manufacturer and Builder, October 1871. Blood-manure and sawdust-brandy are described in Harpers New Monthly Magazine, January 1874, p. 304. 3 An unpaid bill owed to Hemacite by the August Cash Register Company is cited in the Business Troubles column of the New York Times for 14 February 1894. 4 See Dibbles Dental Apparatus, in Scientific American, 30 September 1865. 5 A description of Bois Durci is available at Plastics Historical Societys webpage at www. plastic-museum.com. 6 See Blood Used in Building, in Notes and Queries, Series 10 no. 2 (1905), pp. 34-35, and no. 3, p. 373. 7 See Edwin Robert Walker et al., The History of Trenton, 1679-1929 (Princeton: Princeton University Press and the Trenton Historical Society, 1929). Gary Nigh of the Trenton Historical Society provided valuable information on the companys history. The strike is detailed in the 16 March 1946 New York Times.

coloRs / sulPhuR
THOMaS Beller
Theres a butterfly called the Orange Sulphur (Colias eurytheme). Its the color of a lemon drop. Another butterfly is called the Cloudless Sulphur (Phoebis sennae). Its the color of a creamsicle. These are lovely colors, light and tasty. But theyre the bright side of sulphur. They dont address the feeling of unease that comes over me at the thought of it, something menacing and hidden beneath the surface. Sulphur is a substance, a color, a flavor, and a smell. For me sulphur is a smell first, then a substance, finally a color. Perhaps its a mood. What mood would be sulphuric? Pablo Nerudas poem, Walking Around, as translated by W. S. Merwin, contains this stanza:
There are birds the color of sulphur, and horrible intestines hanging from the doors of the houses which I hate, there are forgotten sets of teeth in the coffee pot, there are mirrors which should have wept with shame and horror, there are umbrellas all over the place, and poisons, and navels.

There is a bird that is, at least partially, the color of sulphur the Sulphur-Crested Cockatoo. It has above-average talking ability, apparently, and at the top of its precocious head is a fringe the color of light mustard. The Neruda poem brought me closer to the sulphur I was looking for, but it was his mood, not mine. What did I think about the color of sulphur? It escaped me. So I resorted to the tactic of the indecisive, the eager to please: I took a poll. Among friends after a meal I said, Sulphur! What comes to mind? Stink bombs! Something harsh and dangerous. Smelly, but not toxic. Maybe even good for you. Something lunar, spacey, airborne. Whats the color of sulphur? Mustard. Sex and suffocation. You have sex and then there is the sad post-coital lighting of a match, which is a sulphur smell. Why suffocation? Because a flame takes up oxygen. Why sad? Because its post-coital.

Moody sulphur. Sad sulphur. Asphyxiating toxic stinkbomb sulphur. Post-coital sulphur! Which was mine? Then it occurred to me that my first encounter with sulphur was happy. Almost ecstatic. It can be summed up in two words: Chemistry set. And within the chemistry set, test tubes. And within the test tubes, colored powders. The chemistry set was a gift from my father, who had come home from some far away place. Presents my father brought me were highly prized, even though the jigsaw puzzle hed returned with from his last trip lay in a jumble on the floor, unsolved, untried. I never did the puzzle, but I loved getting the present, the exchange of kisses, the coldness on his coat, his sandpaper cheek against my smooth one when he lifted me off the ground. The chemistry set felt more than just fun, though; it had the aura of progress and self-improvement. I was about eight years old. I imagined my room a laboratory filled with bubbling beakers, smoke rising in white puffs. My father was a doctor, and I knew this had some tangential relationship with chemistry. Both disciplines involved men in white smocks, experiments, charts. My father was a psychoanalyst. I sensed some abstract link between his profession and the chemistry set: the deeply embedded patterns, the interaction of potent substances, playing with fire in a controlled environment. There is an abundance of sulphur in the earths crust. Its especially abundant around volcanoes. Hot-springs smell of sulphur. Geysers. Sulphur forced to the surface. You could say sulphur is the fart of the earth. Perhaps sulphur is the unconscious of the earth. It lies unseen in the depths, but manifests itself in all sorts of day-to-day items. I took out the test tubes. In each was a different chemical, a different color. Sulphur did not stand out at first. I was excited by the ambience of precision, but it was only an ambience. I had no discipline. I liked to throw things out of windows. I was a consumer of textures: the coarse, granulated texture of Nestl chocolate milk mix, which I fed into my mouth in heaping portions on which I nearly choked. The melting, velvety texture of powdered sugar, which I fed into my mouth in heaping por tions on which I nearly choked. The bland, super-fine powder of straight flour, which I fed into my mouth in heaping portions and nearly choked. I probably wasnt the ideal kid for a chemistry set, not that I was going to eat it. But I was by then, also, a connoisseur of the dead silences of hallways and the little offices where schools keep the fixers and special helpers. Those were the days when I made the rounds of little offices at my school: the assistant principal, the school psychologist, the math tutor, the English tutor. I was given ink spots to stare at, blocks to play with. I was an expert at these interpretive games, but my handwriting was as legible as a Rorschach test. I needed a handwriting coach, and Mr. Murphy was that man. They had let him hang around after retirement to work with some special cases. His eyes, on cold wintry days, watered like crazy. If it wasnt for his smile I would have thought Mr. Murphy was crying. We met in a slightly musty boardroom with couches along the walls and a long polished table in the center where the trustees occasionally met and where disciplinary committees were often held. In later years, when appearing before various tribunals in that room, I would think it was lucky that Mr. Murphy wasnt around to see me like this. The year after those quiet sessions, I was brought up on fireworks charges, a trace of sulphur popping into the narrative. What do you do with a chemistry set? You sit there in your room, the box open, taking everything out gingerly. You have been instructed to follow the instructions. You make a brief attempt at the manual. But it isnt long before you get around to the smelling, the handling, the tapping of little bits
opposite: Advertisement hawking hemacite skate wheels in the 11 October 1885 edition of the New York Times.

from the test tube into your palm, or perhaps into another test tube, for some random mixing of components. You open the test tube called Sulphur and smell it. Almost all the other smells exist in the mouth, the back of the throat, or behind the eyes. But sulphur goes straight to the gut, like that magic trick with the handkerchief that is a deep lustrous purple with a little loop in one corner. From that loop you can pull through a bright pink handkerchief, the whole thing turning inside out as it emerges from your fist. In it goes as purple, out it comes as pink! The smell of sulphur goes all the way down to the bottom of you, then pulls you through your own ass and turns you inside out and oh my God! Put that cork back in the test tube! Then stare with horror and wonder that something could smell so bad. In other words, once you start fixating on a color, you remember it everywhere. It becomes a Zelig of colors. Sicily was the worlds provider of sulphur until the end of the nineteenth century, when a new method allowed for the mining of deposits in Louisiana and Texas. The most enduring image from a visit I made to Sicily a few years ago came late at the end of a day while driving along the southern coast, the sea to my left and open fields of cut hay to my right. Somewhere behind me was the islands volcano, Etna, which I had visited that morning. It was not yet dusk, and the late afternoon sun slanted sharply across a field of hay and made it look enchanted. It glowed as though lit from below. The yellow orange light was, looking back on it, the color of sulphur. And then there was that reddish brown earth that sat, a few years after the era of the chemistry set, in a lumpy pile next to my fathers grave: Werent there streaks of light brown, bordering on orange? Sulphur making a cameo.

InGesTIon / culInaRY lanDscaPes

allen S. WeiSS
One of the seminal texts in the history of European landscape architecture is the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili of Francesco Colonna, published in Venice in 1499. The tale consists of the phantasmatic quest of Poliphilus, presented as an initiatory drama couched in the form of a dream, recounting his experiences and tribulations as he searches for his beloved Polia. Beginning in the anguished solitude of a wild, dark, labyrinthine forest, he finally emerges, by invoking divine guidance, into a beautiful, sunny landscape of absolute perfection. Here he discovers a scene filled with gardens and palaces, containing enigmatic and emblematic monumental sculptures and ruins representing the arts of the ancient cultures of Egypt, Greece, and Rome, such as pyramids, obelisks, and temples, all evincing a perfection lost in the contemporary epoch. The archaic is brought into the service of the arcane. The allegory then thickens as Poliphilus continues his neo-Platonic quest toward love and truth, encountering five girls representing the five senses, a queen symbolizing free will, and finally two young women symbolizing reason and volition. After visiting the palace, he is taken to the three palace gardens, which are the ultimate expressions of human artifice: gardens of glass, silk, and gold. The craftsmanship was truly marvelous: All along the walls were flower-beds in the form of tubs, in which were planted a mix of box-trees and cypress, one cypress between two box-trees, the trunks and branches of solid gold, and the leaves of glass so perfectly imitated that one would have taken them for natural. [...] There were also herbs and flowers of diverse colors, forms and species, all made of glass, all perfectly resembling the originals.1 The brilliance and genius of this pure artifice incite Poliphiluss admiration and wonder; mimesis is revealed for its inherent artificiality. This imaginary garden of glass established a major aesthetic sensibility, serving as a model for the interweaving of two arts that had only recently received their muses: landscape architecture and cuisine. For while such 17

a garden of spun glass might never have actually been created, the history of cuisine attests to its influence in the fabulous inventions of pices montes of spun sugar, pastry, and candy which evoke such fragile fantasy worlds.2 Culinary history abounds in examples of such constructions, even predating Colonna. We might recall the details of a great feast given by Amde VIII, Duc de Savoie, as recounted in the 1420 manuscript dictated by his chef de cuisine, Matre Chiquart. The meal was an amazing spectacle, with the main course presenting a centerpiece formed by a miniature castle with a fountain of Love spouting rose water and white wine at the center of the courtyard, and a different dish at the foot of each tower. Every animal was highly decorated and spitting fire: a huge gilded boar, ornamented with the guests coats of arms; a suckling pig; a roast swan, replumed with its own feathers; and, there was, as described in detail, a huge pike cooked in three manners, the tail end fried, the middle boiled, and the head roasted, served with three different sauces. This dish, as well as the centerpiece that adorns the table, constitutes both a secular feast and a cosmic symbol, synthesizing incompatible victuals, contradictory modes of cooking, and heterogeneous symbols into a flamboyant totality. The taste for miracles and marvels certainly does not avoid its culinary instances, though one might suspect that the pleasures of mirabile dictu far surpassed, in many such cases, those of the palate. Very often, the visual aspect of a pice monte surpasses the gastronomic value of the dish itself, however antithetical this might seem regarding the gustatory goals of cuisine. For the most celebrated of French chefs, Antonin Carme (17831833), the decorative values of cuisine always existed on an equal level with its gustatory qualities. Indeed, Carmes decorative perfectionism often transcended his culinary aspirations, as when he created pices montes using inedible binding materials to guarantee their longevity; or even more radically, as expressed in the avertissement to the third edition of his Le Ptissier Pittoresque, he notes the extent of his passion for architecture per se: I would have ceased being a pastry-chef, had I blindly abandoned myself to my natural taste for the picturesque genre, such as I conceived it for the embellishment of princes parks and private gardens. This architect manqu would sublimate his untried passion into the some of the greatest manifestations of spun sugar edifices in the history of French cuisine. Consider, for example, his extraordinary moss-decorated grotto, described in Le Ptissier Parisien: The effect of this large centerpiece is very picturesque. It is round in shape and has four arcades. It is made of hard sweetmeat la reine, which must also be glazed: one part with rose-colored sugar, one with caramelized sugar, and the rest with lump sugar to which you add saffron; but in removing the hard sweetmeats from the saucepan, you form groups from five to eight and from ten to twelve, over which you sprinkle coarse sugar and chopped pistachios. The rock forms four arcades, which are made up of ring biscuits of almond puff pastry (which you powder with fine sugar sifted through silk). You simply line up these ring biscuits without attaching them at the vertical joints, which in no time produces a nice ridge of rocks. You surround it with meringues glazed and garnished with vanilla cream. The pedestal is made of German waffles; the garnish is Genoese pastries in rings, studded with sugar pearls. The bower is crowned with a small waterfall in silvery spun sugar.3 This miniature landscape certainly bears comparison with the Grotte de Thtis in the gardens of Versailles, or the blue grotto at Linderhof created for the mad King Ludwig of Bavaria. Carme, the architectural autodidact whom one gastronome referred to as the Palladio of cuisine, spent untold hours studying drawing, architecture, and garden design (notably works on garden folies) at the cabinet des
opposite: Dried splatter, non-toxic. Maybe even good for you.

estampes of the Bibliothque Nationale (Royale) in Paris. This is attested to by his volumes Le Ptissier Pittoresque (1815) and Le Ptissier Royal Parisien (1815), where it is evident that his inspiration was both classical and romantic, though his classicism syncretically responded to the aesthetics of many civilizations. His spun sugar creations in the forms of pavilions, rotundas, temples, towers, fortresses, mills, hermitages, and ruins of all sorts, were created in a great diversity of styles: Italian, Turkish, Islamic, Russian, Polish, Venetian, Chinese, Irish, Gallic, Egyptian, and so forth. All this was finally combined in an imaginative mlange whose results would transgress the historical limits of both architecture and cuisine. This conflation of styles and epochs is, in the case of both landscape architect and pastry chef, a fantasized, stylized reduction of historical detail to imaginative decorative fancy. The extreme instance of this architectural passion was not, however, restricted to the art of pastry making. Between 1821 and 1826 he published Projets dArchitecture, which included projects designed for the embellishment of both Paris and Saint Petersburg. For example, he proposed, for the place du Carrousel in Paris, a temple dedicated to glory of the French nation, which would display 48 lions heads, 12 trophies, 8 statues, and a pantheon of the names of the countrys great heroes. In fact, these projects are as much in keeping with the utopian architectural fantasies of Boulle, Ledoux, and Lequeue as they are with the art of pastry decoration. The actual gardens of the 18th and 19th century offered precisely the sorts of folies, pagodas, gazebos, kiosks, pavilions, belvederes, temples and minarets that inspired the books and the pices montes of Carme. And yet, however fantastic these projects may seem, Carmes books remain practical guides to pices montes, one which, it is hoped, may inspire some readers to create their own contemporary follies. A striking example of such architectural fantasy reveals a strange modernity at the core of Carmes classicism, one based on a curious hybrid of styles, materials and natural orders. In a dreamlike evocation, he describes, in Le Ptissier Royal Parisien, pices montes that would represent rivers, cascades, and the waves of the sea. This might be compared with another fantasy of edible architecture, eccentric and fascinating, from a text by Salvador Dali, De la beaut terrifiante et comestible de larchitecture modern style, which celebrates the oneiric and troubling nature of certain architectural creations, stressing an inexorable desire to to eat the object of desire. Specifically, describing two Art Nouveau houses that Gaudi designed on the Paseo de Gracia in Barcelona, he explains how one was inspired by the oceans waves during a tempest, and the other by the tranquil waters of a lake. These are real buildings, veritable sculptures of the reflections of crepuscular clouds in water, made possible by recourse to an immense and mad, multicolored and gleaming mosaic of the pointillist iridescence from which emerge forms of poured water, forms of spreading water, forms of stagnant water, forms of mirroring water, forms of water curled by the wind, all these forms of water constellated in an asymmetric and dynamic-instantaneous succession of bicyncopated, interlaced reliefs, melted by the naturalist-stylized nunuphars and nympheas concretized in impure and annihilating excentric convergences, thick protuberances of fear bursting from the incredible facade, simultaneously twisted by all the insane suffering and by all the latent and infinitesimally soft calmness equaled only by that of the horrifying ripe and apotheosic flakes ready to be eaten with a spoonwith the bloody, greasy, soft spoon of gamey meat that approaches.4 However surreal and nightmarish, this passage is an archetypally modernist continuation of the imaginary conflation of architecture and cuisine. In this context, we might note that, as befits his art, never does Carme actually describe the state of his pices montes after the meal is finished, veritable ruins of ruins! For to do so would be tantamount to admitting 19

the temporal and fragile nature of his art, as well as the inexorably mortal side of cuisine. One cannot help but remember the outstanding role of the table, often depicted in a state of extreme chaos, in pictorial representations of vanitas. Dali concludes this essay with the claim that, Beauty shall be edible or it shall no longer be. Is there any better argument to consider cuisine as one of the fine arts?
1 Translated from Francesco Colonna, Le Songe de Poliphile (Venice 1499; Paris, 1546; Reprint: Paris, Imprimerie Nationale ditions, 1994), edited and prefaced by Gilles Polizzi; 120. See Allen S. Weiss, Syncretism and Style, in Unnatural Horizons: Paradox and Contradiction in Landscape Architecture (New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 1998), pp. 9-42. 2 There exists a small museum of spun-sugar art attached to a restaurant, Le Grand cuyer, in Cordes-sur-ciel (Tarn, France). 3 Antonin Carme, Le Ptissier Royal Parisien (1815), cited in Jean-Claude Bonnet, Carme, or the Last Sparks of Decorative Cuisine, trans. Sophie Hawkes, in Allen S. Weiss, ed., Taste, Nostalgia (New York, Lusitania, 1997), pp. 176-77. Bonnets article is an excellent introduction to Carme. 4 Salvador Dali, De la beaut terrifiante et comestible de larchitecture modern style, Minotaure, no. 3-4 (1933), p. 74.

opposite: Two of Carmes drawings from his book Le Ptissier Pittoresque.

maIN

The Wall aNd The eye: aN INTervIeW WITh eyal WeIzmaN

Jeffrey Kastner & sina naJafi One of historys most fiercely contested landscapes, the 2,270 square miles of territory known as the West Bank was under the control of Jordan when it was occupied by Israel during the 1967 Six-Day War. Over the last 35 years, the area has become home to some 200,000 Israelis (400,000 including occupied East Jerusalem) who populate numerous, new, purpose-built settlements perched on its hilltops, overlooking long-established Palestinian lowland communities. This ongoing state-sponsored policy of expansion onto the high ground has been paralleled by the development, within the architectural and urban planning professions, of extremely particularized strategies for building on heights. Many of these draw on historical precedents; all are designed to provide basic municipal amenities within a context of highly refined, surveillance-based security. A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture, a catalogue and exhibition originally created by Israeli architects Rafi Segal and Eyal Weizman as their countrys official entry to the 2002 World Congress of Architecture in Berlin, is a groundbreaking examination of the character of building, planning, and community in the West Bank. Abruptly cancelled last summer on the eve of the Congress by its commissioning organization, the Israel Association of United Architects, the project has stirred strong opinions in Israel. Although it was dismissed by the associations president as one-sided political propaganda, A Civilian Occupation was praised as a a rare work in its power and importance for the community of architects and town planners in Israel by the daily newspaper Haaretz. Since the cancellation, Segal and Weizman have found other forums for the work they produced: the catalog is being reprinted by Babel Press in Tel Aviv and a version of the exhibition will be be mounted at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York, at the end of January and in the exhibition Territories at KunstWerke, Berlin, in May 2003. In the following interview, Weizman, a partner in Tel Avivbased Rafi Segal/Eyal Weizman Architects, discusses both the natural and built environment of the West Bank from the social, political, and religious history of the area to issues of photography and mapping to concepts of strategic building forms and settlement growth patterns. He also asks pointed ethical questions about Israeli architectural and planning practice and considerations of human rights, which he says are central to the research he and Segal continue to conduct. Weizman spoke by phone to Jeffrey Kastner and Sina Najafi from Haifa, Israel, in October 2002.
Your catalogue cites a 1984 publication by the Israeli Ministry of Housing that sets guidelines for the construction of new settlements in the mountain regions of the West Bank. Its very concrete: it proposes an inner ring and an outer ring of houses, discusses the idea of offering the maximal amount of views to the maximum number of settlers, which obviously also allows a maximum amount of surveillance of the Palestinian population beneath, and so on. This is interesting in light of the interview in your catalogue with the planner and architect Tho21 mas Leitersdorf about towns he has built in the West

Bank, where you get a sense that sometimes the government offers no guideline other than We need a town built here, and the architect is completely left on his own to do whatever he wants. So we have this severe set of guidelines versus no guidelines at all, apparently at the same time. When Leitersdorf built Maale Edumim in 1977-78 he was in effect setting the guidelines. Maale Edumim was essential in creating a benchmark standard for building settlements. In general, Israeli architects and planners had little experience of building in mountainous regions. Before the occupation, the Israeli population was located mainly in the valleys, except in Haifa, which is a mountain city, and in Jerusalem. The typical new Israeli settlements were the kibbutz and the moshav, cooperative agricultural and pioneering settlements built mainly on the fertile plains. It is only after the occupation, and following the political changes in 1977, that the mountain enters the public imagination people write songs about the mountain, talk about it, lecture on it, research it. Architects were starting to think about the mountain too, but they had little experience of building there. So this publication by the Ministry of Housing was incredibly important because it collected different precedents and for the first time set guidelines for how to build in the mountains. The mountain is important in understanding the ideological transition in Israel after 1977, when a messianic religious discourse entered the political debate with the right wing coming to power. Along with it came a decreasing emphasis on agricultural pioneering and its replacement with a new typology of the religious suburb, located on mountaintops and without agricultural space to cultivate. What are the historical sources for this relationship to the mountain? If you look at the geography in Biblical times, the Israelite settlements were primarily in the mountain regions of Judea, Samaria, and the Galilee, whereas the plains were inhabited by the Philistines. So there is a geographical reversal, a paradox: when the Zionists came back to their promised land, they initially settled in the places where Jewish history didnt happen within the land of Israel. The return to the mountain is a return to those sacred places, to the bedrock of Jewish identity. At this point, the mountain appears in many aspects of culture as a symbol and as an unfamiliar reality, and architecture is part of it. The government wanted to resettle the mountain and architects needed to learn how to build there, so the Ministry of Housing came up with guidelines that promoted the use of topography for the establishment of observation points. These were new urban typologies that maximized the potential of the mountain and made use of the precise morphology of the topography. Basically, if you look at the master plans of the settlements, the roads retrace the topographical lines that we charted on maps, so that each settlement takes the exact form of the mountain summit and is built around it as a ring that overlooks all directions. Its most clear in Maale Edumim, where there is not just one peak but many peaks and ridges. There you see the direct translation of topographical cartography into urban form.

overleaf: Nokdim to the right & Tekoa to the left. All aerial photos: Milutin Labudovic for Shalom Achshav (Peace Now), 2002

22

23

Since mountaintops are not suited to agriculture, presumably many of the settlers are commuting. Yes. Essentially, the settlements are built there because the mountains are not suited to agriculture. It is because Palestinians could not cultivate these hilltops, where the good alluvial soil has eroded, that they could be seized by Israel and declared state land. Its a complete reversal of the logic of cultivation. Obviously the settlers have to either rely on the main cities the metropolitan centers like Tel Aviv and Jerusalem or on industrial zones near the settlements, again on hilltops. Are those industrial centers subsidized? They are subsidized in the sense that you pay much lower income tax and council tax. You describe an important evolution toward a kind of messianic political ideology. What was going on in 1977 that specifically catalyzed this shift? The crisis point in Israeli history was 1973 and the Yom Kippur War. This was a time when the Israelis were fearing total defeat and old fears resurface. Until then, Labor Zionism was trying to reverse the traditional image of the Jew not as a victim, but as a strong, self-sustainable new man. This exemplified itself even in the way the Holocaust was portrayed and sometimes even glorified as an act of national resistance. The national day of Holocaust remembrance, for instance, is called the Day of the Holocaust and Heroism. In 1973, Zionism experienced the return of the repressed, with a renewed sense of doom, as the Egyptian and Syrian armies seemed to be driving toward the main urban centers, with only the incredible maneuvers of Ariel Sharon in the Sinai stopping them. But immediately after the war, with Golda Meirs government in ruins, you see the religious elements in Zionism taking control. One of the first settlements, Sebastia, was created by Gush Emunim, which is a kind of religious organization that has always pulled the government by the nose to build settlements, as if to uplift the gloom of the Yom Kippur War. It took four more years for the Labor government, which had controlled the country from its creation, to be replaced by the right-wing Likud government of Menachem Begin. And the whole settlement policy changed they discovered the mountain, sacredness, and archaeology again. By this point presumably the lefts political clout had been much diminished. Were the settlements presented as a fait accompli ? Was there a great deal of internal debate in Israel about this program of settlement building? It was always very controversial from its inception. But was it presented as a security issue or was it presented as an ideological, religious issue? Or are the two things so tied up together that you cannot pull them apart? You have all the reasons at play together; sometimes some are stronger, sometimes others. In the first 10 years after the occupation, 1967 to 1977, we had a Labor government. What they did mainly was to settle the Jordan Valley with kibbutzes and moshavs this is what they knew, frontier settlements on the plains. Between 1973 and 1977, it was Shimon Peres who was supporting Gush Emunim. Shimon Peres was 24 squabbling with Yitzhak Rabin for the hegemony of the

Labor Party and he aligned himself with the right-wing policy of establishing settlements just in order to embarrass Rabin. So Peres was actually the first person to promote settlements even before the beginning of the mountain ideology, before the reversal of power. As for security, up until 1979 the legal tools that the government used in order to seize land and build settlements were based on the 4th Geneva Convention, to which Israel is a signatory. The convention states that you are not allowed to build permanent settlements on occupied land, but you are allowed to build temporary interventions for security reasons. What the government was claiming was that the settlements were temporary paramilitary posts. This issue was debated twice in the High Court of Justice (HCJ ). There were petitions by Arab landowners against the confiscation of their land and the building of settlements. The first one was the case over the Beit-El settlement, which produced an incredible protocol, with the HCJ judges debating urban form in terms of military-strategic potential and speaking in terms of vision and observation. The HCJ in that instance allowed the construction of these settlements, with the Israeli High Court Justice Vitkon at one point declaring that, With respect to pure military considerations, there is no doubt that the presence of settlements even if civilian of the occupying power in the occupying territory substantially contributes to the security in that area and facilitates the execution of the duties of the military. One does not have to be an expert in military and security affairs to understand that terrorist elements operate more easily in an area populated only by an indifferent population or one that supports the enemy, as opposed to an area in which there are persons who are likely to observe them and inform the authorities about any suspicious movement. Among them no refuge, assistance, or equipment will be provided to terrorists. The matter is simple, and details are unnecessary. Here the court is clearly establishing the fact that civilians and residential settlements could have a security function that is normally attributed to the police and the army. The next case in 1979 was that of Elon Moreh, where the settlers practically shot themselves in the foot by claiming they were not there for security reasons but because it was their right and this was their God-given territory. This meant that the court could no longer authorize the settlement as a temporary military intervention.
They were testing this new theoretical definition of what a settlement could be, which was not related necessarily to this temporary security-based issue, but was related to some kind of divine right? Yes, the settlers felt that as long as the settlement project was judged only on strategic issues they were going to lose their credibility as an ideological-religious movement. And if other security arrangements were found, they could always be evicted. They chose a strategy but ultimately lost the case and the settlement was destroyed. But did that lay the foundation for future claims? The government had to opt for another legal tool because they could not build settlements and argue that they were temporary strategic military outposts. They said, OK, we can rely on Jordanian law and start a project of land registry. The West Bank had not had a land registry since Ottoman times, and

if you look at Ottoman land laws, you did not have real land ownership. You would just pay tax for what you cultivated. Nobody wanted to own anything beyond what he was growing on, because that is what you paid tax on. If someone fenced off a hilltop, he didnt register it because that would just mean more taxes. So basically Israel was collecting Ottoman tax documents to establish ownership and map out the extent of cultivated lands. Whatever land could be proven to be under continuous cultivation remained in private Palestinian ownership, and the rest was declared state land according to Jordanian law, which was based on Ottoman law.
But legally, didnt the Israeli government have to say that the West Bank is actually their land in order to then impose a set of rules on it, no matter where they borrowed those rules from? What they were saying was that these patches of land here and there, mainly the hilltops because the hilltops were not being cultivated, were State of Israel land. They were state land because they were not under any private ownership, and Israel was the ruler of the area. There were complaints at the UN that Israel could not use state land in the way they wanted to because it was still under temporary possession of an occupying power. But Israel claimed that the West Bank was not actually occupied land, because the UN never recognized Jordanian sovereignty over the West Bank. It was a very complex, self-contradictory and elliptical way of arguing. On the one hand, Israel accepted and relied on the Jordanian rules. On the other, it said something that is in fact true, that the West Bank was occupied by Jordan after 1948 but that the UN had never recognized its sovereignty there. You write about how after 1967 this contested land in the West Bank became one of the most photographed terrains in the world, where 3-D stereoscopic images were constructed using special double-lens aerial cameras. Are the new aerial photographs youve included in the catalogue similar to the ones the Israeli government took after 1967? Not at all. These are photographs taken by Milutin Labudovic for an organization called Peace Now in order to monitor settlement growth. They are taken at low altitudes we were allowed to fly at 6,000 feet over sea level. The stereoscopic images were essentially 3-D reliefs of the terrain taken at a much higher altitude in order to build topographical maps. Right after the occupation, the government needed to create a map very quickly, and it was difficult to physically get to all the places, so they used this stereoscopic technique in order to recreate the structure of the mountain. Before the occupation, there were no good topographical maps of the area there were some done by German and American evangelists who were mapping the Holy Land and some general ones done by the British mandatory power, but they were absolutely not good enough to plan and construct with. What interested Rafi Segal and me about the stereoscopic technology was that a methodology of design so clearly relied on a technical apparatus the stereoscopic images became the primary tool with which topographical lines were charted on maps and then provided the slate for the design work itself. The desire to map the West Bank immediately after the occupation showed 25 clearly that you dont just map things mapping is an

act of proprietorship and the whole settlement project is built upon those topographical lines, which were drafted on those photographs. Its as if those lines set the blueprints of the settlements.
Was it difficult to obtain permission to take your aerial photographs? It is very difficult now after operation Defensive Shield, but previously the Ministry of Defense was allowing us very narrow slots, over the air space the Israeli air force was using and underneath the national routes. Your aerial images show a number of striking things about the details of the landscape, which nevertheless need to be read with guidance. One was the politics of pine trees versus olive trees. The Ottoman rules were that the state could acquire any land that had not been cultivated for a certain amount of time. So now the Palestinians are rushing to plant olive trees and the Israelis are planting pine trees, which grow a lot faster. Thats true, but its not only that they grow faster. Another reason for planting pine trees is to make a difference from the olive tree as a separate national symbol. A third reason is that pines have an acidic drop on the ground. There are no bushes under pine trees, so grazing and shepherding is very difficult in these areas that have been planted with pine. Even if you cut the pine trees, the subsequent acidity of the land is such that it does not allow agricultural cultivation. Right now we are working on an enlargement of one particular image in a similar fashion to the kind of work that intelligence analysts do during wartime. They can see things that the untrained eye cannot. We try to reveal the hidden narratives engraved on the landscape. I think thats important because one of the things our editorial group discussed when we were looking at the aerial photos is the degree to which they aestheticize the information. It sounds like the project you are working on now is one of particularization putting specific information along with the images. That seems to make a strong case for these kinds of images that are very beautiful but with which the viewer has a strange relation in terms of the contrast between their aesthetic qualities and the information they contain. That is true, but beauty has an incredible political significance in the context of this conflict, and we tried to show it in these terms. When we talk about the panorama in terms of the picturesque and the pastoral, we claim that, in fact, beauty is thought of as both a commodity and a strategy in terms of the views from the settlements. It is there to draw the settlers in and ever closer to the Palestinian communities (which produce this beauty) like a moth to a flame. It is a guiding principle that the settlements are urbanistically laid out in order to maximize the view. There is a paradox in this beauty in that what is considered by the settlers to be a pastoral, romantic panorama is actually the traces of the daily lives and cultivation of the Palestinians, and the settlers both enjoy that view but simultaneously supervise it. The settlers obviously have a very ambiguous relationship to this. On the one hand, the view
overleaf left: Shaked, Jenin Region. overleaf right: Offra, and the Palestinian Village of A Taybe, Ramallah region.

creates for them a kind of biblical landscape that they admire, a way of life that seems to them more authentic. Yet they are, in fact, there to destroy and replace it.
It was also interesting to see the physical relationships of the settlements and the Palestinian towns how close they sometimes are to each other and how different the building forms were, although, in the more close-up photos you could see some similarities, too. When you look at a Palestinian village near a settlement, many times youll see that the houses that are very near to the fence nearest to the settlement imitate the red roofs of the settlement, usually with red painted asbestos placed on their flat roofs. So, for example, the architectural sign of a red roof, which for the Israelis is basically a rural, suburban idea of the home, is for the Palestinians a sign of progress, modernity, and luxury everything they strive for and want to emulate. It is very strange. When you drive through the West Bank, you see the great influence of settlement architecture on Palestinian architecture, and vice versa. In a sense there is a kind of disturbing mutual admiration stretched along the double-poled axis of vision. The settlers try to learn from the Palestinians how to live in nature; they see the Palestinians as the authentic component there, something that they would like to be but cannot. But in Israeli architecture, that trope of the red, sloped roof is itself a really displaced kind of beauty a borrowed European, almost Tyrolean, form that in its right context has a purpose but here is not at all suited functionally to the environment. It functions in the settlements as a sign. Many times, settlement building codes require that anyone building their own home must build with this red roof because its a sign that differentiates the us from the them. And I have heard of a residents meeting where settlers tried to resist the red roof saying its a misplaced European element, etc. while people from Gush Emunim, the main settler body, forced them to build them if only to show Jewish presence. Before the Intifada, when you could still go into the West Bank to Palestinian hummus restaurants, they would quite often have wallpaper of, say, a Swiss landscape on the whole wall. Out the window you could see an equally, or even more, beautiful landscape, but the ideal was somewhere else in Switzerland, somewhere in the West not where they were. In addition to the photographs, the catalogue has an aggregate map youve put together of all the different settlements. Is that information itself contested by the Israeli government? Or was the compilation the difficult part of the process? This map is a joint project between myself and the human rights organization BTselem that was done in the context of a human rights report on violations through architecture and planning. Nobody contests its accuracy, and some in the Israeli establishment even work with it. Ive recently heard that even some settlers organizations use it. Last summer we presented it to the American administration, to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to the State Department, and the Pentagon. They checked it and verified it and are now working 28 with it. That is a great achievement for us. Conducting

policy with this map is something we think is going to inevitably change the discussion.
Whose maps were used before? Did the Palestinians present their own maps of the settlements at the peace negotiations? Were there two competing versions of reality offered? The best source for mapping the West Bank was always the CIA. A few times a year they took satellite photographs of the West Bank and produced a kind of status report on the built fabric of the settlements. These were usually classified for a period of time and then released. The novelty in our map is that we actually took and were able to trace almost all the master plans for future settlement growth. These supposedly have to be published, but obviously the government and the regional councils do not have any interest in the Palestinians knowing the master plans. The government is bound by law to make the documents public, so they post them within the settlements, which the Palestinians obviously cannot enter. When we sent letters asking to review the master plans, the councils threw a lot of obstacles in our way and we finally had to threaten them with a petition to the HCJ . Then they gave us some maps, but always old maps, and then theyd say, Oh, sorry. What is the government worried about in terms of what the maps revealed? Well, the expansion of settlements is guarded almost like a military secret. So it was less a question of the identification of the settlements as they are than the projections of what the settlements will turn into? Exactly. This is a map of a possible future of the settlements and of the West Bank. What general conclusions did you draw from the map when you actually saw it, either ideologically or in terms of planning issues? Most other maps of the West Bank show the settlements as points. They show the location, perhaps the number of settlers in them. But by actually showing form, we were trying to make a connection between the very organization of matter across the landscape and human rights violations. So its not only the fact that settlements are there, but it is the forms of the settlements their shape, and size that are contrary to human rights. For example, if you look at Ariel, which is an urban settlement located west of Nablus, it has an elongated banana shape. This is something you dont see in a map where its depicted as a point. And you ask yourself, Why was the settlement built like that? If a student of ours came up with a plan of a city like that, we would say, You must be joking! It maximizes traffic, does not allow pedestrians to walk, does not serve the population. So there must be other considerations involved. You start breaking down the formative forces that operate on the form of this stain on the map. On the one hand, the settlement wanted to stretch itself as long as possible along Route 505, which is one of the most strategic east-west arteries, an artery that Israel believes would have an armed column going down it in the event of a Jordanian or Iraqi invasion from the east. So the settlement spreads thin as long as possible along that road. On the

other hand, it creates a complete wedge across the north-south axis and separates Salfit, which is a regional Palestinian center, from the villages to its north that rely on it for their economy. Another thing that it does is envelop Salfit and prevent it from growing in the direction it would like to. All these are done by formal manipulations, decisions taken by architects and planners something that shows that we have here a policy of negative planning. In architecture lingo, we call this weak form. Weak form reacts to a kind of force field that operates around it. Imagine a drop of water that is running on a particular surface and it reacts to the surface in this case, to topography, but also to the temperature of the surface, its slope, air flow, etc. There are many political and strategic forces that stretch the forms of the settlements one way or another. The very forms embody the momentary balance of forces that created it. What Rafi Segal and I did at our office was to try and read backwards from the form of the stain on the map in order to recreate and understand the forces that manipulated it. With this method of observation, you can see the objectives of the planner. This is our point: It is not only that the settlements are there. If that were the only case, you could argue that it is not the responsibility of the architect and only of the political decision that placed it. But when the form is designed in a particular way to achieve strategic and national goals bisect a Palestinian road, surround a Palestinian settlement, or to try to create a wedge the architect is engaged in negative planning, a reversal of his professional practice, like a medical doctor involved in torture. This approach establishes architecture, just like the tank, the gun and the bulldozer, as a weapon with which human rights could be and are violated. The mundane elements of planning and architecture are placed there in order to disturb and dominate, and when an architect is designing in order to disturb the growth of other things, hes not acting as an architect.
You would say it is unethical. This is completely unethical! And its not architecture. If there are violations of human rights in the plans the architect is proposing in the way he is designing the houses, in the orientation of the windows, in every detail on both the architectural and the urban scale then these actions are unethical and illegal. This incriminates the architectural profession. If the architect were just ignoring the Palestinians, it would look completely different. This is much worse. This is why there was a huge controversy here with the publication of A Civilian Occupation. Basically, the architects were like Leitersdorf liberal, educated, most often Labor supporters who see themselves as building in the West Bank in a way that best serves the Jewish population there. But that is obviously not true. And we were trying to break out the reasons for why the forms are the way they are and reflect from that backwards on the whole ethics of architecture in Israel. So when someone like Leitersdorf says, I was given no criteria, but I came back with three sites that took into account air pollution, traffic, commuter routes, and so on is it your opinion that all of those criteria hide some other criteria that hes not willing to confront? Obviously. If you look at the 1984 government guide29 book, it only speaks of the view. But what is this view?

Is it simply the pastoral, Biblical landscape that you want to provide every citizen? No, because when you read the larger scale master plans outlining regional strategy, you see how they value observational points, and that their plans lay out a net of visual control vis--vis the Palestinians, the roads, and the strategic arteries. The overall master plans of the army and the settlement body are at least more honest in their aims than the architects. The architects themselves are not willing to admit to it, so they internalize those regional principles but argue for them in a completely different way.
The wall-and-tower architectural model of the kibbutz that you discuss in the catalogue seems to be a precedent for the kind of visual mastery that the settlements strive for. The kibbutz in the plain was also an attempt to politicize the landscape and make it all into one homogenous field over which visual control could be exercised and over which territorial claims could be made. What is the relationship between that kind of architecture and what we see in the West Bank today? When we edited the catalogue we thought of it as an evolution. The wall-and-tower is argued by Sharon Rotbard to be the seed of Israeli architecture protective and observant at the same time. The reason it was built in that way was because they were building on a plain you didnt have the protection of the heights and you needed the wall, and the eye was centralized within the tower. Now the settlements are doing the same thing, creating both the wall and the eye within the very distribution of matter across the landscape. The mountain is both wall and tower. Yes. Planning and architecture has always been the executive arm of the Zionist state; the state has always used it in a very political way to set borders, to take land and to make the development and sustainability of Palestinian areas as difficult as possible. Apart from the controversy, what has the reception of the catalogue been like outside of Israel? Has it been seen as relevant to other situations in other places? Its incredibly relevant. Most of the contributors to the catalogue describe Israel as a kind of laboratory where elements of both modernity and tradition are played out in a very powerful way against each other in a very intense environment. If you think about the mountain and the creation of a suburban settlement, youll see its around the same time that Americans are inventing the gated community. Its essentially a local form of the gated community. What you see in the West Bank is basically the same phenomenon you see in Los Angeless Orange County, Brasilia, Mexico City, and other places but in a much more violent and extreme way. Its the end condition of those urban pathologies it shows the worst-case scenario of where those kinds of urban arrangements could be going. And I think the questions we are trying to pose in the catalogue about the responsibility of the architect are applicable everywhere. You have written that the geometry of the occupation can only be understood in three dimensions. There are questions of the underground sewage, archaeology, tunnels, the water reservoirs, the air space above, and so on. These are issues that

came up in the peace talks, of course. But the map you have produced is two-dimensional. What would it mean to map this conflict three-dimensionally? Its interesting to look at how, for example, an Israeli highway passes over a Palestinian road or look at how the tunnels intersect. I am currently working on a computer-based interactive threedimensional map of the West Bank with my colleague Reed Kram. The over-complication of the surface as shown on our map the fact that its no longer possible to draw a continuous line that separates Palestinians from Israelis made clear to the negotiating parties during the peace process that a twodimensional solution is no longer possible. Shimon Peress Oslo proposal was to give the Palestinians limited sovereignty on the land but to retain Israeli sovereignty of the subsoil and the air over it. So you have a kind of sandwich Israel, Palestine, Israel across the vertical dimension. Peace technicians the people who are always drawing new maps for a solution arrive at completely insane proposals for solving the problem of international boundaries in three dimensions. And when you have Jewish enclaves in Palestinian territory, you have to build either tunnels or bridges that connect them to each other. Both typologies were experimented with and proposed throughout negotiations. The most obvious is the proposed safe passage between the West Bank and Gaza that has a Palestinian road with Palestinian sovereignty that goes over Israels sovereign territory with the international boundary being the thermodynamic joint between the column and the road. We get into incredibly bizarre and dystopian solutions. Jerusalem itself, according to the Clinton plan, would have had 64 kilometers of walls and 40 bridges and tunnels connecting the enclaves to each other. Imagine an urban environment that operates like that. It would make L.A .s highway system look flat. This is the total collapse of the idea of territory as produced by maps. Nationalism and mapmaking were always bound together. You had a map and you drew a boundary. But what you see in the West Bank is that sovereign relations are attempting to play themselves out three-dimensionally. And that is obviously an unworkable absurdity. We do not think that there is a viable design solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The perfect line that brilliantly weaves itself through the terrain and answers in its path both national demands, the one line that everybody from Ben Gurion to Barak was looking for, simply does not exist. Nor does it exist in these three-dimensional boundary contortions. These just accentuate the exhaustion and the frustration of all possible lines on the two-dimensional plane. This territorial conflict is such that it must be addressed in a non-territorial and thus non-formal way. If you think of similar conflicts between a settling nation and a native nation, there is no historical precedent for the idea of partition. We think that the way to manage this conflict is not through the creation of another sovereign state but within the realm of law. Instead of thinking of two states side by side, something that our research shows is impossible without integration on the planning and infrastructure level, we would like to propose the idea of a simultaneous overlap: two states that are not lying side by side but overlap legally across the 31 same territory. This obviously entails a new definition of

national sovereignty, one in which a choice of more than one citizenship is available for the same area.
opposite: Settlement in Talmon, Ramallah Region, 1993. Courtesy Efrat Shvily and Sommer Contemporary Art

PaINT your Troubles aWay

richard fleming Built on high ground, like most West Bank Israeli settlements, Gilo is the largest neighborhood within the Municipality of Jerusalem that lies to the east of the Green Line. Since Israel took control of this hilltop in the 1967 war, more than 30,000 lower- to middle-class Israelis, largely Sephardic Jews and Russian immigrants, have settled there. For many of them, it is less a militant settlement born out of colonial ideology than a place chosen for its convenience, cheap rents, and spectacular West Bank desert views. Until the beginning of the Second Intifada, with the Green Line buried beneath a handsome new ring road that whisks commuters to the Jerusalem outskirts, the inhabitants of Gilo might have been forgiven for forgetting that they live in Palestinian territory. But one day their picturesque view across the olive groves to the Arab village of Beit Jala began shooting at them. Bullets whistled up the hill into the windows of Gilos 1970s apartment blocks. Outraged, the residents sandbagged their windows and demanded Israeli military action. Houses in Beit Jala were duly shelled and destroyed. A multi-million dollar scheme replaced many Gilo windows with bulletproof glass, but this was of little comfort to homeowners concerned about property values and relegated to living in the dark and windowless back 32 rooms of their apartments.

The idea of a wall was controversial. The residents wanted it, but the erection of a concrete barricade along the length of the exposed flank of Gilo would be an admission, unacceptable to the authorities, that the lands on the other side were beyond control. An encircling wall is defensive, not offensive, and a more militant settlement would never have allowed one to be built; the Gilo wall is at odds with the ongoing Israeli policy of containment and expansion. But each nightfall brought a hail of bullets, and the people who live in Gilo were not the sort of settlers eager to trade quality of life for ideology. They had, after all, been enticed to live here by glossy advertising brochures complete with photographs of the very vistas now assaulting them. People took extended vacations. Joggers could no longer run along the road overlooking the valley. In the winter of 2000, the military carted in concrete panels and installed them like a massive three-meter-tall highway median, obliterating the view. From below, down the hillside, which is to say from Beit Jala, the unpainted concrete wall snakes around the ridgetop, gray and foreboding, like a modernist fortress. A friend tells me that on the Gilo side the concrete panels were at first painted a jolly blue, but so much cement canvas was an invitation to political graffitists. According to the Jerusalem Post, the mural project was the brainchild of Shlomi Brosh, then the head of the culture department of the Municipality. He commissioned eight Russian immigrant artists to paint the

wall with the missing view, in an effort to alleviate some of the ugliness of the concrete slabs.1 Clearly the authorities wanted to diminish the sense of capitulation the wall represented. And what better way than to paint scenes of the now-hidden landscape over the concrete panels? The work on the wall is sitespecific camouflage. We did not want to part with the view, but they forced us to. So we copied the view, Brosh told the Post. Executed in the style of a Midwestern Italian restaurant fresco, the results are a sanitized simulacrum: the landscape beyond the wall captured beautifully, as painters like to say. But on close examination, the paintings do not amount to a realistic portrait. The long and winding trompe loeil slab is devoid of Arab inhabitants, and none of the buildings in the distance appears to have been shelled by Israeli tanks. The blurry, distant villages have been settlerized; a disproportionate number of buildings are painted with salmon-tiled gabled roofs, an architectural conceit unknown to the Palestinians, whose villages typically have flat white roofs. The Palestinian problem has not been whitewashed but painted out of view.
1 Etgar Lefkovits, Seeing beyond Gilo's Siege Wall, The Jerusalem Post Internet Edition, 23 August 2001, at www.jpost.com/Editions/2001/08/23/News/News.33240.html Photos: Richard Fleming

Cable Tvs FaIled uToPIaN vIsIoN: aN INTervIeW WITh dara bIrNbaum

nicols guagnini When Sony released its first portable video camera, the Portapak, in 1968, the three Ms McLuhan, Marcuse, and marijuana determined the political framework of Americas young intelligentsia. The first generation of video artists mapped and defined a utopian territory, voiced in the influential magazine Radical Software. The titles of two books written by contributors to Radical Software are enough to sample the ideological scope that a technological advent helped to foster: Paul Ryans Birth and Death and Cybernation: Cybernetics of the Sacred (1972) and Michael Shambergs Guerrilla Television (1971). The communitarian use of video paralleled the development of cable television. Control of the means of production, copyright, and distribution blurred the frontiers between activism, local news forecasting, and art-making. Media artist Dara Birnbaum witnessed this process unfold as she defined her own practice. Nicols Guagnini met Birnbaum to discuss some of the entangled sociopolitical and artistic issues of the 1970s and early 1980s.
In early video pieces, one structure repeatedly appears: camera/body/monitor. It started as an interrogation of the self and moved more towards playing with the audience and defining social spaces in pieces like Wipe Cycle (1969) by Ira Schneider and Frank Gillette, or in Dan Grahams works between 1973 and 1978. How did that development come about? From my own experience, I felt that early on there were two distinct developments evident. The one you first mentioned, camera/body/monitor, is best seen in the early tapes by Bruce Nauman or Vito Acconci. They were coming out of what became known as body art but also from a projection of an inner psychological state. But there was also another area of development, which was to create alternative forms to broadcast television. Here the concern was with relationships to and through the community, or a much more social self. Both fields overlapped. With regard to the self and the body, many works were developed in the isolation of the artists studio, such as Bruce Naumans 1968 Stamping in the Studio, where he inverted the camera so that to the viewer he appears to be walking on the ceiling. Even though he repeatedly stamps in a rhythmic, almost primitive pattern, he is not really participating in any social or communal rite. He remains individualized in his own studio. Acconcis Centers (1971) has the artist pointing at his own image on the video monitor, attempting to keep his finger in the center of the screen. He was pointing away from himself and to an outside viewer. In that work he introduces another aspect of video: using the video monitor as a mirror. The work also begins to take advantage of the self-reflexive potential of video by becoming more aware of the psychology of interpersonal relationships. Other artists, like Dan Graham, were producing works where this social awareness was evident, but they expanded this initial awareness by also providing for a way that the viewer could interact with their work, such as Grahams numerous delayed feedback/mirror installations. Wipe Cycle incorporated the viewers 35 image into delayed feedback loops. In Wipe Cycle, again

the importance was that the audience became participants by directly affecting the work and thus the viewer was no longer passive. Gillette and Schneider wanted to emphasize the process involved in a work. They were both members of Raindance Corporation, an alternative media collective that published Radical Software.
The technical device that prompted the explosion of video art was the Sony Portapak, and the theoretical framework was coming from Radical Software. Feedback was one of the main topics. Among the writers for Radical Software was Paul Ryan, who came up with topological models for feedback, quite influential in the works of Graham. Another of Ryans concerns was the application of those models to education. What was the relationship between education and the community concerns you mention in the early video groups? What the Portapak brought in was a high level of self-awareness. In 1965 Nam June Paik bought some of the first consumer video equipment on the American market. In the following years, there were so many art pieces that came out of literally living with the Portapak. There was a sense of amazement towards that apparatus that, unlike film, could reveal oneself in real time, or in slightly delayed time. Many pieces were diaristic and confined to a secure or isolated environment. The ones I am thinking about deal with being within ones home space. There was not really an extension outward. Think about Naumans anti-gravitational pieces, like walking on the ceiling; all these types of work were structured in an interiorized safeness. That is different from the methodology that Ryan applied. He seemed much more interested in pedagogical models and collective usages for video. Alternative television was trying to reach out, to permeate society. In addition, artists were discussing the portability of video, for example when Allan Sekula made reference to a group of workmen on strike how they utilized a Portapak powered with car batteries, which allowed them to both record spokesmens statements as well as to play them back again directly to the strikers who were assembled. That was more like agitprop. The most interesting experiment with education that I remember was done by students of the Irvine school system in California who were able to be tutored through open cable channels which linked different schools in the area. David Ross presented this at the Long Beach Museum of Art. It seemed natural to those students, who were then in high school, or grade school, to utilize the video systems like a telephone. Which other writers of Radical Software were influential, and how did the magazine circulate? The first issue of Radical Software came out in 1970 through the Raindance Corporation, which was run by Ira Schneider. Beryl Korot and Paul Ryan were also very involved. I remember that the first issue presented a proposal for a paperless society and an interview with Buckminster Fuller. The main thrust of Radical Software was that there should be an alternative to broadcast television, that television has the capacity of being a responsive medium and a valuable social tool. This approach was completely different from how broadcast television was being used. Also, there was the feeling that television should be open to all. Thus, the magazine would also frequently detail hardware

information, along with listing what were then considered counterculture videotapes.
As early as 1926, Bertolt Brecht proposed that the radio should step out of the supply business and organize its listeners as suppliers. Each new technology brings its own democratizing promise, and the Portapak did so as well. I dont think so. The Portapak was somewhat of a cast-off of the industry, and it was fortunate that there was someone out there to grab it. It was basically developed for electronic newsgathering. It is well known that in America everything gets old before its time. The Portapak promised nothing in and of itself. It was almost a throw-away from the industry and was taken up by people who had the insight to see its critical potential. For example, early on in Los Angeles, Michael Asher and his students at Cal Arts saw the opportunity to gather this portable equipment and use it in ways other than how the industry was using it. It was also utilized by Jon Alpert and Keiko Tsuno of the Downtown Community Television Center (DCTV ) in Lower Manhattan to give a voice to a community and events that may have never been covered by television. There was also the collective Top Value Television (TVTV ), whose well-known work Four More Years covered the 1972 Republican Convention. That work was one of the first documentaries to be shot entirely on portable video equipment. Later on, when Sony saw the broader appeal of the Portapak with its multiple applications, they intensified their marketing of it for home and individual use. They even ran many commercial ads showing how even a beautiful-looking young woman could carry and use this equipment without being encumbered. It is clear at this point how the Portapak promoted a sense of self-awareness that was not completely divorced from the basic levels of identification that showbiz quickly commodifies. Did it help to create any type of community? What you are looking at is the intersection of a moment in time in which there was a proliferation of available equipment and a lot of communities looking for an alternative lifestyle. The usage of all electronic equipment was also being redefined. Composer Peter Gordon talked about the portable audio tape recorder as a folk instrument. Some video makers consciously or unconsciously used their equipment in the same way. Groups like Videofreex at the end of the 1960s joined together in order to provide alternative models of television. Feedback was utilized, formally, as an alternative to the previous types of light shows at rock concerts. The attempt was to create a bioelectrical sphere. It was the amazement of being stoned through technology, and this also provided a sense of community. Video was easy, and easygoing. You could pass around the camera as you passed around a joint. It was also light enough so that women could lift it. And the collectives development took a different direction. Videofreex, reformed under the name of Media Bus, set up what could be considered the first pirate TV station in Lanesville, New York, in the Catskills. Their home-built studio was basically in defiance of FCC regulations. Therefore, it became the first unlicensed TV station in America. It was low-power television. It basically went down a lane, a couple of blocks, and many of their programs featured local people. This fostered a stronger sense of community. Of 36 course it only worked on a small, marginal scale.

Prior to McLuhans influence and hippy-ism, there is an American tradition of founding utopian communities for religious purposes, like the Shakers, or sociopolitical purposes, like the early-20th-century socialist community Llano del Rio on the outskirts of Los Angeles. This mirrors at a social level that interrogation of the self we were talking about. In many cases it is about setting a series of rules, and then living with those rules to push their limits and applications. At what point in the early 1970s was writing being done about each community having its own cable, with its own broadcast? What relevant experiments were carried out in that direction? In the early 1970s, while I was working for Lawrence Halprin, an environmental architectural firm in San Francisco, I remember doing a small side-job, which was to assist a friend involved in selling cable television. What I hadnt expected was that it had nothing to do with utopian ideas at that moment. It was simply a business, and the plan was based on selling and delivering television through cable franchises, which would provide better signal reception through an expanded network of cable. What happened was that through federal and state regulations those cable franchises had to give something back to the community. They had to deliver a basic operating studio with two cameras that had open access and people would then do their own hands-on television. The only stipulation was that the programming had to be deemed in the local public interest. There are very few remnants of this left, except for stations such as the Manhattan Neighborhood Network. It was innocent to believe that cable was not related to a capitalist notion of big business. For me, cable is not a failed utopia because it never was one. It was during its rise and expansion that room was left over for a multiplicity of programming. There was a need for software and for a moment it was possible to provide alternative forms of programming within those spots. From the Woodstock Nation on, there was a brief moment when you actually felt that a large alternative group existed that there were millions of us out there. But this was incredibly idealized. I was in Berkeley at the time, and what I found were a variety of attempts at alternative cultures or counter-cultures. I can remember Tom Wolfe lecturing in the early 1970s in the very same building where many student demonstrations happened. It was a turnoff to see the author of Radical Chic in a totally white suit that looked so elitist to us, especially because he then represented the total opposite of a blue-collar worker. And he said, You think that you are so different. Look at you. You are all so alike what you are reading, how you are dressing. The coding within that alternative society was as defined and strict as in the society we were rejecting. Are you also implying that it was rich kids having fun? No. Berkeley was then called Berzerkeley. It became a depository for people who were runaways from all different classes and types of families, and for people who felt alienated and thought that Berkeley would provide an environment with less pressure. There were amazing teachers at that campus of the University of California, such as Marcuse and Angela Davis. The free speech movement started there. It was one of the most politically active and aware places in the country. You could only say that it was unbelievable that America allowed itself that leisure, that privilege of consciousness, looking at it from

what I feel is now a much more conservative time.

Your disenchanted outlook on hippy-ism and the utopian ideas circulating among early video practitioners and collectives seem to me part of the critical vision that a second-generation artist has to bring into a field to mobilize it. Your early works Pop-Pop Video: Kojak/Wang (1980) and Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978/79) brought upon you the appellation the pirateer of images. You certainly pioneered the act of making copyright and distribution instrumental issues for the meaning and understanding of the work. How did you come up with the idea of cannibalizing television? What happened to me when I started working with video in the late 1970s was that I saw two distinctive roots to video art. One was television, which was being ignored, and the other was an extension of other art forms like body art and performance art. There was a proliferation of writing, especially coming from Europe, such as Screen magazine, which looked at America though the language of film countless articles and studies on Hitchcock and Film Noir, but nothing on television. And I felt that it was absolutely necessary to look into the most common language, and that was TV . 37 Wasnt Warhol a model already for that kind of

search? I was deeply affected by his work, perhaps mostly by his use of serial reproduction and what it seemed to reflect about mass production and the neutralization of signification that comes with it. When I was in Berkeley everybody was carrying a little red book Maos red book and when Warhol produced his portrait series of Mao in a very aestheticized way, it was a shock a good shock. The type of imagery and portrayal that was present in mass media affected many people around me at the time, like Jack Goldstein. These artists began to utilize aspects of the mass medias forms and modes of production. However, they were translating these images into other mediums, like Warhol. For me, from 1977 on, it was important not to translate this vocabulary into other mediums. By turning the medium of video/television on itself, the real dislocation took place by altering the iconography of television through changing its original structure and context. At a time when there were no VCR s available, I could capture Wonder Woman and disassemble the her from a seamless flow that provided viewers with the Pop glorification of her red-white-and-blue democratic iconography. Before the onset of home video recorders, that type of imagery was only coming one way at you.
above: Dara Birnbaum, still from Pop-Pop Video, 1980. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix, NY

TV was strictly controlled. The idea was to grab these images

that were part of my own landscape and not to translate their meaning by making objects, but to let it exist on tape or film. I wanted to place the work anywhere that it could permeate back into the culture. It was a way of talking back to the media.
Was that idea of permeating the monolith of mainstream culture, rather than neglecting or resisting it altogether, related to artists using cable? Yes. Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman was put on cable TV opposite the real Wonder Woman on network TV. So if you were channel-flipping, hopefully you could come across both versions which I felt could destabilize the meaning and intention of the original network program. The attempt to change context was very naive but very honest. We were trying to change things by permeating different territories. By 1979, Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger were also working in that direction in their artwork, but they were not invading the territory of television. I thought that this was the most important territory to invade. In the early 80s, many artists working directly with video thought of cable TV as different from broadcast TV . It seemed less regulated and controlled, even though it was already developing into a big business. Its structure was different in relation to commercial advertising and how that affected programming. The regulations that demanded that color camera studios for production be made available to the public, for local programming in the public interest, gave many people a basis for production without great expense. The other regulations that guaranteed programming time to such local and artistic production allowed a window for more experimental work and ideas. It was possible, for a moment, to live out a more Benjaminian ideal of becoming producers, rather than spectators. In addition, there was a terrible need for product software to temporarily fill the gap presented by these new spaces of transmission. Even though it was also a big business, at that moment it represented a potential space for art practice. Now it is much more difficult to tell cable and broadcast TV apart. Looking at it from today, do you think that works like Wonder Woman still have a critical potential? Or do they get absorbed in the logic of commodifying nostalgia? Well, it marks a moment in time when I felt I had to capture that idealized vision of a woman, with a perfect body, wrapped in the American flag. This was a horrendous image for me. In the year that I made the videotape, Wonder Woman bathing suits were the hottest-selling items for girls. I couldnt go and join Lanesvilles community television. I felt that I had to take on the task more directly. If Bush has his own axis of evil, then that image was mine. The reason why his recent quote of the axis of evil is so immediately assimilated is because it has the potential to resonate in all of us, as based upon a historical past. For me the evil was and is the industry an industry that men dominated, where they could form a commodified, corporate image of women. The feminist politics of the piece are very much alive, but this still does not answer the previous question. Both Kojak and Wonder Woman are today a 38 cherished part of many peoples childhoods.

The context of the piece evolved within the logic of the industry. A lot of the artists working in the late 1970s and early 1980s had a need for immediacy. I distinctly remember when someone smashed the storefront window of Franklin Furnace, angered by the aphorisms that Jenny Holzer had posted there. At that time her work was produced on cheaply photocopied, standard 8 1/2 by 11-inch paper. That type of immediate reaction, that immediate provocation, was exactly what I was looking for. The urge for immediacy had a lot to do with being the first generation to grow up entirely on television. It was an apparatus that was introduced in our houses like a gun. It was a weapon, and that is how I wanted to use it. I think those pieces hold up as markers of a certain moment in time, not unlike the original series that they come from. They give you a window into a specific preoccupation we had with mass media and our feelings of being controlled by it. We wanted to respond by breaking down the control of the industry and to allow for a space for altering views and representations. It was important to talk back and resist the passivity of reception, both in relation to the mass medias dominant forms and its ideologies. Of course, like everything else in this society, years later the tapes I made came down themselves to be saleable objects, and that is the way they are distributed now. I did not escape my own copyright.
opposite: Covers of Radical Software. Courtesy Paul Ryan and Davidson Gigliotti

40

Thaddeus CahIlls musIC PlaNT

Brian dewan

The trouble about these beautiful, novel things is that they interfere so with ones arrangements. Every time I see or hear a new wonder like this I have to postpone my death right off. I couldnt possibly leave the world until I have heard this again and again.

Mark Twain The new wonder that Mark Twain described was the Telharmonium, a pioneering and immensely ambitious electrical musical instrument, the first to synthesize sounds from electrically generated waves. Conceived in the early 1890s by Thaddeus Cahill whose original name for his invention was the Dynamophone the instrument produced sound with dynamos that generated alternating currents. Because the sound was generated electrically, it was possible not only to synthesize sound but also to transmit it over telephone lines, making it possible to provide music to thousands of hotels, restaurants, and home subscribers. Thaddeus Cahill was born in Iowa in 1867 and grew up in Oberlin, Ohio. In his early teens he was employed as a court stenographer, and he invented improved mechanisms for stenograph machines and typewriters, one of which he named a synthesizer. In addition he invented improved keyboard actions for pianos and organs. In his youth, Cahill had read Helmholtzs On the Sensation of Tone, and the analysis of musical timbre as combinations of tones in the harmonic spectrum excited his imagination. He conceived of an ideal instrument that possessed the virtues of all musical instruments and none of their limitations or, as he wrote, defects. Cahill patented the Telharmonium in 1897 and in 1902 he and his two business partners founded the New England Electric Music Company. The Telharmonium was first publicly demonstrated in Holyoke, Massachusetts, in 1906, and later that year he had it moved to New York City. It weighed 200 tons and required 30 boxcars to ship. Cahill installed it at Telharmonic Hall at 39th Street and Broadway, where visitors could sit on a plush circular sofa and listen to electrically generated renditions of classical music while the enormous dynamos whirred in the basement below. When Telharmonic Hall opened amidst much public excitement, one article declared, In the new art of telharmony we have the latest gift of electricity to civilization, an art which, while abolishing every musical instrument, from the jews-harp to the cello, gives everybody cheaply, and everywhere, more music than they ever had before. On the main floor at Telharmonic Hall, two to four musicians seated at the control console operated the Telharmonium. The console had uniquely arranged keyboards, each manual having four banks of 84 keys each, with 48 keys per octave. This made it possible to play using just intonation. The pressure sensitive keyboard employed an evenly alternating pattern of white and black keys, unlike a conventional organ keyboard. Below the manuals there was a pedal keyboard to be played with the feet. Timbre was controlled by adding harmonics in varying combinations. A separate musician controlled the volume in discrete steps from a piano keyboard and had a set of timbre controls and four expression pedals. The entire 41 floor below housed the electric power station that

generated the instruments tones. Each generator rotor produced a pitch, and the 60-foot chassis held 145 rotors. Cahill described his instrument as a Music Plant. Crowds were eager to hear the new instrument demonstrated. Inside Telharmonic Hall, eight telephone receivers fitted with paper horns were hidden behind ferns, Doric columns, and lobby furniture. One of the companys electricians suggested connecting the Telharmoniums current to the overhead arc lamps, knowing that the lamps would resonate with the instruments frequency and produce a singing arc. A spokesman for the Hall announced that trolley cars could have music piped into them using their overhead power wires. Cahill proposed that telharmony could even be used to relieve boredom in the workplace, and he advocated electric sleep-music in the home that could be switched on at any hour of the day or night to cure nervous disorders caused by modern life. Though the Telharmonium enjoyed immediate success, it was mired in difficulties. The special intonation keyboards were difficult for most musicians to play, and Cahill struggled to overcome the problem of robbing (the decrease in volume as additional notes were played at once) and diaphragm crack (a distorted percussive attack from the telephone receivers). The current required to drive the speakers was much greater than that of a regular telephone signal; consequently, there were frequent complaints about interference as the Telharmoniums music bled into telephone conversations through the wires. AT&T s head engineer, Hammond Hayes, though impressed with the instrument, decided that even with special circuits it would disturb regular phone service. In addition, because the technology was prohibitively expensive, investment in it would remain unprofitable. Hard economic times, and AT&T s reluctance to allow The New England Electric Music Company to use its conduits and manholes, turned the popular modern wonder of the Telharmonium into an untouchable business enterprise. Cahill and his siblings financed the endeavor themselves even after Cahills partners fled the company. The advent of radio at the end of First World War spelled the end for the Telharmonium. Before 1920 it was removed from Telharmonic Hall and scrapped. No recordings of it are known to exist today. In the mid-1930s, much to the Cahill familys consternation, Lawrence Hammond patented the first electrically amplified organ, which was a simplified Telharmonium in miniature. Hammond did not acknowledge the influence of his predecessor (whose patent had not yet run out), but in the 1950s electronic music pioneers Hugh LeCaine and Robert Moog regarded Cahills invention not as a failed business venture but as a seminal acheivement: not only did he create the first significant electric instrument, he had created the unprecedented art of music synthesis.
For further information, see Reynold Weidenaar, Magic Music from the Telharmonium, (Metuchen, N.J., and London: The Scarecrow Press, 1995).

opposite: Musician playing at the Telharmonic Hall. The photograph originally appeared in Gunthers Magazine, June 1907. Courtesy Reynold Weidenaar

To be looked aT, From a dIsTaNCe, WITh eyes Crossed

dan wolgers These pictures are from a photo booth with two lenses. If you try to meet my gaze in the two pictures by crossing your eyes, a third picture emerges in the middle. If you focus on it, it becomes three-dimensional.

hello, NICe To meeT you, do you WaNT To go To hollaNd?: a CoNversaTIoN WITh roberT kloos aNd mNICa de la Torre
regine Basha Having just completed two years in the position of Cultural Affairs Officer for Visual Art and Music at the Canadian Consulate in New York, Ive been thinking about the ambiguous role of the cultural attach and how foreign governments use culture to further national and political agendas. The following conversation grew out of several encounters I had with two of my former counterparts Robert Kloos, the Director for Visual Arts, Architecture and Design at the Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York, and Mnica de la Torre, the former Director of Literature and Visual Arts at the Mexican Cultural Institute of New York. Since we all have strong convictions regarding the limitations of our roles as cultural attachs, we compared the demands of our respective posts here in New York. There seems to be no global standard regarding the appointment of a cultural attach or the official presence of a cultural department abroad. Each country has its own agenda and approach that depends on the popularity and economic demand of each of its unique cultural products (i.e., Italy pushes fashion and food, Holland pushes design and architecture, Sweden pushes furniture, etc.). Here in the United States, the presence of a foreign governments cultural department is usually contingent upon that countrys economic strength and its own domestic cultural priorities. For instance, because many European countries (such as Holland, Sweden, Germany, France) have historical systems of government support for the arts at home, their foreign policy includes a stronger cultural diplomacy effort abroad. Of course, some countries might choose to direct their cultural promotion toward countries other than the United States. For instance, Canada puts more effort into self-promotion in France and England than it does in the US (budgets are higher, there is a gallery space, etc.). Japan has as much presence in Australia as it does in the US . In the cases of countries with less economic reach, culture may not have been given a special envelope of funds (or special status); it tends to be part of the trade department along with other exportable products and is handled by a generalist rather than a specialist such is the case with New Zealands Trade Office in New York, for instance. As the hegemony of US culture spreads throughout the world, the desire of other countries to protect and disseminate their own cultural agendas on American turf becomes all the more urgent. These sanctioned assertions of national cultural identity tend to compete on the island of Manhattan. The question, then, is how effective are they and how does the cultural attach negotiate this role? Through our discussion we found that the role and effectiveness of the cultural attach is shaped almost entirely by the personality of the individual occupying the position. In some cases, they are hired locally (as dual nationals or citizens) rather than from their own countries in order to develop dual allegiances. This proves to be a more cost-effective plan for the department, since the local officer does not need to 43 relocate. It also relieves the ever-present danger of

diplomats going native a derogatory term for when a diplomat relinquishes his or her post and becomes a resident in said country (official diplomats are supposed to rotate every 3 years or so to other countries, the location of which is unknown to them). The idea is that local employees, most of whom are professionals in their fields, can better guide the department locally and provide valuable built-in contacts.
RB: When were your departments installed in New York and

what were the agendas?

MT: The Mexican Cultural Institute of New York was established in 1991 along with thirteen other institutes in various

cities in the United States as part of a program to build official links with Mexican immigrants abroad. As stated in the Institutes annual report, its main purpose was to nurture a sense of national identity among people of Mexican origin living in the US by organizing events that celebrated Mexicos history and traditions an idea that came directly out of the administration of former president Carlos Salinas. It was said that there might have been an electoral motive to the foundation of these Institutes whose primary function was to reinforce patriotism. Over the years the Institute evolved into a cultural center that catered to a very different audience than the one originally conceived.
RK: Traditionally, the Dutch Embassy in Washington and the

Consulates in several cities had so-called Press and Cultural Affairs Departments staffed by career diplomats with little or no background in the arts. In 1990, The Ministry of Foreign Affairs struck an agreement with the Ministry of Culture to create a new office that would work nationally through New York and be staffed by people with specific cultural backgrounds in all the arts disciplines. Over the years the agenda has changed from importing pre-packaged projects to the United States (such as exhibitions, concert series and the like) to a way of working where we try to stimulate American institutions to make their own informed selections of Dutch artists and/or exhibitions produced in Holland. You could say that we changed our job description from salesmen to information brokers and matchmakers.
RB: As for Canada, officers for culture in its foreign missions began taking posts as early as 1966, but these early positions

were taken by career diplomats. It was really the culture-savvy Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau who understood the importance and value of cultural affairs abroad and left a legacy that lasted from the late 70s well through the 1980s. His efforts even supported a consulate-run gallery, The 49th Parallel, from 1980 to 1992 in New York. Yet by the early 1990s, the Department of Foreign Affairs suffered serious cutbacks and had to close the gallery space. So now that we all seem to have an official cultural policy or cultural diplomacy, what does that mean for your job?
RK: The involvement of governments and governmental bod-

ies such as consulates and embassies in international cultural exchange has traditionally been a complicated issue. Often it is not clear what the main goal is: furthering the exchange of

the arts, which is quality based, or using the arts to propagate national identity in a day and age of globalization, where countries feel the need to protect their cultural heritage. Our office supports professional artists from all over the world who have been living and working in the Netherlands for at least three years. For example, in the recent past we were mostly involved in projects with artists that are not Dutch nationals, such as Carlos Amorales (Mexico), Meschac Gaba (Benin), Moshekwa Langa (South Africa), Ebru Ozsecen (Turkey), Fiona Tan (Indonesia), etc. Artists will undoubtedly bring baggage from their cultural backgrounds, but it is the current locality that has become much more important for the understanding of their work. I would like to shed the windmill, tulip, and wooden shoes mentality, and focus on the art itself.
RB: Yes, there are issues about how to guage the degree of the

artists nationality: Should it be by years spent in any given country? By citizenship? By visibility and virtual presence in that country? What seems to happen at a certain level is that the notoriety of an artist translates into an opportunity for the country to brand itself. The artists or personalities then turn into cultural products, almost like logos, regardless of where they are based. For instance, in Canadas case, someone like the news reporter Peter Jennings has been out of Canada for years, but the Consulate still points to him and announces that hes a Canadian and includes him in high-profile official events whether he considers himself one or not. Or take, for example, Jeff Wall, whose work has come to epitomize Canadian art in a way: dry, conceptual, classical. These traits tend to parlay into positive stereotypes when placed in the context of cultural policy. I wonder how much of that has influenced the funding flow for him and for other Canadian artists who follow suit. You could say that there is a strange consensual agreement going on and it can become very convenient for artists to participate. So when is it appropriate for the Consulate to accentuate nationalist traits?
MT: What youre saying reminds me of a strange thing that

used to happen to me when Id find out about certain events in New York that took place without us, the Institute, knowing. My personality would split; I clearly developed an institutional persona, from which Im glad to have freed myself. When there was some prominent event with Mexican artists (an exhibition or reading, for instance) happening without my involvement, Id actually feel like the people organizing it were chipping away at the Institutes territory. Id even say that the Institute itself got competitive about it. Of course the opposite happened as well. Many times we tried to avoid having our logo associated with certain events. Once there was a tribute to Octavio Paz celebrated at the National Arts Club; on the stage hung a poster of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Before the poetry reading some dancers performed an Aztec dance. Paz must have been rolling over in his grave! On the other hand, there might have been certain instances in which artists preferred not to involve any Mexican officials. Id understand if theyd feel embarrassed to have the Mexican Consul offer a speech at their opening. We shouldnt forget that in the case of Mexico, where there has been a lot of political turmoil in the last decade, culture 44 is not easily disassociated from politics. At some point

around 1999 there was a group of pro-Zapatista activists based in the South Bronx, I believe, that frequently organized protests outside of the Consulate. When things heated up, the Consul General at the time responded in typical Mexican fashion. Theres a reason why the PRI managed to stay in power for over 70 years! He decided to organize a symposium, in conjunction with the Mexican Cultural Institute, about the pros and cons of the Zapatista uprising. The leading voices representing both sides were brought from Mexico. The panels took place at The New School, a neutral space. The auditorium was packed. The Consulate presented a view of Mexican institutions that was very open and democratic; by doing this it neutralized opposition. If Im not mistaken, protests did diminish, in part because the Consuls move paralleled the way the Mexican government in general began dealing with the Zapatistas. As we know, in the end this didnt work for the PRI. When Fox won the presidency in 2000 a sense of hope about the possibility of true dialogue was kindled.
RB: Yes, thats cultural diplomacy. Certainly there were times

when a particular cultural project made the Canadian Consulate nervous, especially when it seemed overtly political. Last year, when the Americas Summit opened to huge crowds of protestors in Quebec City, an officer at the Consulate wanted to invite the controversial author Naomi Klein, an anti-globalist, to give a talk in New York. Of course without ever saying it directly, the Department of Foreign Affairs expressed discomfort in regard to her politics and put up barriers to the realization of the program. In the end she came anyway, but was forced to counterpoint with another Canadian right-wing journalist in order to deflect any possible accusation of biased politics on the part of the Consulate.
MT: I have a question before you go on. What is Canada in a

the idea of being a friendly, helpful neighbor to the US (but not as market- or consumer-driven as the US ), a vast, resourceful country with a more open immigration policy than the US , possessing a dry humor somewhere between British and American. Internally, though, there are of course thorny, unresolved issues especially with Quebecs Francophone identity vis--vis English Canada and the autonomous rights of First Nations, or indigenous people. The relationship Canada has with the US is very strange: on the one hand, there is a strong desire to distinguish itself from the US; on the other hand, there is constant emulation, especially on the part of corporate Canada and Canadian pop culture. The reality is that many artists leave for the US and are not interested in being called Canadianthis is called the brain-drain and you wonder if for some, its just a citizenship and not a nationality. So, a few years before I had started, there was a new envelope of funding that was designated as Public Diplomacy. It was basically a glorified PR budget, not the usual support grants that we would give to venues and individual artists. It was supposed to be used for the highest-profile New York events and promotional material big names only. It was used at one point to enlist a PR firm to shape an image for the Consulate. The PR firm developed the image of the Can-Apple: a green apple, symbolizing New York, with a red Canadian maple leaf on it.
MT: Yes! I know that apple very well. We used to receive the

Canadian Consulates newsletter and, better yet, it was our model for how things should be. The press office at the Mexican Consulate produced a monthly newsletter with listings of cultural events that unfortunately would not get to people until the middle of the month. So tell us more about the apple.
RB: An artist was commissioned to build a three-dimensional

Suitcase?

RB: Actually, the idea for this conversation came up because of

Canada in a Suitcase. When I started at the Consulate, there was a certain kind of acclimatization that took place. After that I came to realize that the Consulate is basically a PR firm in disguise.
RK: And you went into shock! RB: Yes, it was a culture shock! In Canada, I dont recall having

this need to promote Canadian-ness in any way. In my job at the Saidye Bronfman Centre for the Arts in Montreal, if visitors came in from abroad, there were no added implementations to justify whats Canadian or not. Also, because government funding for the arts is a given in Canada (as with Mexico and Holland), there wasnt much need to promote the government in general. Here it was very evident that there were strategies in place to define what Canadian-ness is in a unified, generalized way and to import it, package it, and promote it to the US which felt to me like a very American thing to do.
RK: So what are those characteristics?

version of the apple out of the Public Diplomacy budget. Its transported to events like a mascot of the Canadian Consulate. It once went to an event and got damaged (the leaf chipped) so the Consul General decided to make another one a proxy apple that would travel while the original would stay at the Consulate. The apple, by the way, has already appeared on scarves, coasters, mouse-pads, and ties, which are given away as gifts. The Consulates newsletter is called The Uppernorthside, the idea being a friendly neighborhood within New York next to the Upper East Side or Upper West Side. Included in the listings are famous Canadian celebrities that appear in New York regularly and dont really need our publicity or funding. As for Canada in a Suitcase, basically it is a cardboard box fashioned into a suitcase that contains a video, mini-flag pins, tourist pamphlets, and general information about Canadas resources, economy, diverse cultures, and arts. One is expected to take this around on outcalls (meetings).
MT: What seems really weird to me is that this apple is present-

ing the institution and not Canada.

RB: Thats exactly right! The criticism was that it serves to pro-

mote the Consulate itself as if it were a venue, and its not! I mean, if there was a space maybe.

45

RB: To the office here, its a certain political neutrality,

RK: In the beginning I thought I wanted to have an exhibition

space to present Dutch art, but pretty soon I changed my mind. It would not provide the necessary context and environment for the work. It segregates it from the regular New York art scene and underlines the Dutch-ness of the work. Id much rather see Rineke Dijkstra presented at Marian Goodman than at a venue that only presents Dutch art. These promotional tools you are mentioning are misguided. First of all, they are not about cultural promotion but about national promotion. The newsletter heaps all kinds of unrelated information together and disperses it among an indiscriminate audience instead of a target audience. Also, it gobbles up a lot of money that could otherwise be used for the support of the arts. A few years ago I devised a system that we call the factfile project. It contains a database and archival system that maps the cultural field in the United States and records information about organizations, their mission, programming, and interest in international exchange. Furthermore, it documents the work history our office has had with these organizations, what projects we collaborated on, etc. Initially I conceived of this system to prevent the huge information loss that occurred every three to four years when diplomats are replaced with a newcomer that has to reinvent the wheel. We do not use general communication tools such as brochures, websites, publicity kits, and the like, but instead favor one-on-one contact and direct dialogue.
MT: Going back to the issue about whether its good or not to

RK: But even these trips need to be thought out more. It is not

enough to support a curators visit to a country once and think that he or she, from that moment on, has a perfect understanding of what is going on there. Its tempting to fall into the Hello, nice to meet you, do you want to go to Holland? trap. I want the curators to come more often and to stay longer and enter into a serious dialogue with Holland. On the one hand, I cannot deny that I have to carry out my countrys national cultural policies, but on the other hand, I would rather have my role be superfluous. I am constantly trying to find a balance.
MT: One can think of our roles in terms of infiltration, in the

sense that you first trace this map and know more about them than they think. Then you make yourself a prominent figure in the art world, but you never overtly push any artists or anything. You become someone who people can trust. Of course this is much more effective than walking around with catalogues or slides in your portfolio.
RB: But the position itself demands that you be a double-agent;

to the artists of the country you must, by default, promote and service their needs, while to the local institutions you are the provider of funds. It is unnerving to be in that double role.
opposite: Canada in a Suitcase. Photo: Regine Basha

have an exhibition space, Id like to say that in principle I do agree with you, Robert, that its better not to have one. But Ill tell you what the rationale is. Perhaps you didnt have this problem, but if youre at the Mexican Cultural Institute in NYC , do you know how many Mexican artists show up at your office every week? Some of those artists we couldnt immediately dismiss. Sometimes we had to, or we wanted to, help them show their work in New York but didnt feel that there were many chances that a mainstream gallery or museum would be interested in it. The art market plays by its own rules and many artists either cant or simply dont want to adjust to them. We thought that by giving these artists a show in our own space we could do something good for them and for others by expanding the range of things that get shown in New York. This might have been idealistic, but we never thought that our job was comparable in any way to that of a Chelsea dealer. Also, in 1999 we moved to a new building that had a pretty good gallery space. We decided to start a new exchange program that consisted of inviting independent curators to come up with exhibitions for the gallery. In some instances we also gave them grants to go on scouting trips to Mexico and meet with different artists. If they needed lists of artists to meet with, we would provide them, but we never told them whom to see. They could include whomever they wanted, if they at least included a couple of Mexican artists. This was inspired by a series of very successful exhibitions we had done in Mexico City and New York curated by Kenny Schachter. These programs worked well because they truly promoted lasting ties between artists of both Mexico and the United States.

46

save your FamIly

Jay worthington In the last issue of Cabinet, we invited readers to send in family photographs taken by photographers who died before 1933. These images were your responses, and their contributors can sleep easy because under current American law these photographs are now copyrighted until 2047. Had they not been published by the end of this year, they would have entered the public domain on January 1, 2003. Who cares? Probably nobody. Given that few people knew that these images existed before we published them here, there was little demand to make copies of them an irony of this provision of copyright law is that it will release into the public domain only unpublished work, the sort of material its hard to imagine the public gaining access to, or even being aware of, in the first place. By the time this issue is distributed, it will be down to Americas libraries and archives to get busy and let us (the public) know what we have actually been given. But what about all the unpublished writing of someone famous, like Mark Twain? For students and publishers of such celebrated writers, the release of old unpublished work into the public domain may well be meaningful. The Mark Twain Project, however, is as aware of copyright law as we are, and last year they published a three-microfilm set containing an estimated 500,000 pages of (mostly) unpublished writing by Mark Twain. The microfilm set is not cheap actually, at $50,000 each, nobodys bought one yet but they are published. Until 2047, then, anyone wishing to pen the definitive Twain biography will have to obtain the Twain Projects permission. Oh well.
Thanks to: Ariel Apte, Ibrahim Ba, David Berqvist, Denis Blot, Doris Brickhouse, Robert and Lynn Burress, Samantha Cranko, Sarah Crowner, Michael Hargrove, Sara Harris, Jason Hashmi, Peter Johnson, Ronald Joseph, Jane Melamed, Katie McMullen, Edward Nostrand, Frances Richard, Peter Rockefeller, Richard Sawka, Phillip Saxe-Coburg, Ayal Shlomo, Debra Singer, Robert Smith, Agnes Vertucci, Bonnie Williams, Cherma Wildman, Jay Worthington, Charles Yabba, and Josephine Zywicki.

48

columns

maIn

chIldhood

Frbel and the GIFts oF KInderGarten

NormaN BrostermaN Kindergarten has been around so long, and is so thoroughly familiar, that it is natural to assume personal expertise on the subject. But kindergarten for us, and for most of the generations born in this century, is a distortion, a diluted version of what Friedrich Wilhelm Frbel (1782-1852) originated as a radical and highly spiritual system of abstract design activities developed to teach the recognition and appreciation of natural harmony. Kindergarten has always included singing and dancing, as well as observation of the workings of nature the growth of plants, the symmetries of crystals and seashells. Ones teacher was usually a woman and she led the class in activities that would have been considered play outside the school. But long abandoned, and thus hardly known today, is the practical and philosophical heart of the system Frbels interconnected series of twenty play gifts using sticks, colored paper, mosaic tiles, sewing cards, as well as building blocks, drawing equipment, and the gridded tables at which the children sat. The son of a Lutheran minister, Frbel was born in Oberweissbach, a forest town in central Germany. A lonely boy with a neglectful stepmother and distracted father, he formed an unusual kinship with nature that blossomed into spiritual exaltation during the height of the Romantic era. The works of his contemporaries Goethe and Schiller added to Frbels intuited cosmology, and he fashioned a personal philosophy of Unity embracing the spiritual potential within a person, relations between people in a free society, the place of the individual in relation to the nature that surrounds and includes him, and the life force that controls growth in all things as both a permanent goal and working gauge. The names Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and Christian Weiss may ring no bells today, yet through the agency of their mutual pupil Frbel, their influence was profound. Pestalozzi (1746 -1827) was one of the first educators to abandon the standard instructional practice of interminable lectures followed by student recitation in favor of more active, hands-on activities and what he termed Anschauung object lessons, or direct, concrete observation. At the school he opened in Yverdon, Switzerland, in 1804, Pestalozzis success with orphans and the previously disenfranchised children of the working class altered the course of modern education. The traditional educational activity of drawing was greatly emphasized at Yverdon, as Pestalozzi considered it of primary importance in the teaching of writing and comprehension of form. Recognizing that children manifested a natural taste for drawing, and just as commonly, an aversion to the study of letters, Pestalozzi developed techniques that incorporated a combination of both. In their joint publication of 1803, ABC der Anschauung, his assistant Johannes Buss went so far as to construct an experimental alphabet of form consisting of various segments of lines drawn in the squares of a gridded matrix.1 Abstract and unintentionally iconographic, the ABC was a tool developed to facilitate observation and the learning of writing by fragmenting letters and pictures into their basic components. Pestalozzi hoped to create a 51 method whereby any series of letters called out to little

children would be immediately comprehensible in specific visual form. So, for example, L2B3 might mean a short diagonal followed by two long horizontals. Like quirkily-coded versions of Sol LeWitts wall drawings, the system was inherently confusing and short-lived. Frbels first visit to Yverdon was in 1805. Two years later, after acting as a private tutor in Frankfurt, he returned to teach under Pestalozzi and stayed until 1810. At Napoleans defeat in 1814, after stints as a forester, teacher, and soldier, Frbel took an assistants job at the Mineralogical Museum of the University of Berlin under Professor Christian Samuel Weiss (1780-1856). From 1811 to 1815, coincident with Frbels tenure in the museum, Weiss was in the process of formulating the theoretical parameters and objective techniques of modern crystallography, changing the field from a branch of natural philosophy to an exact mathematical science. Before the 20th century, when the existence of atoms was finally confirmed with the invention of X-ray diffraction, the naturally occurring forms of crystals were correctly assumed to be external manifestations
above from top: Unknown kindergartners paper folding album. Philadelphia, ca. 1875; Eighteenth gift (papers for folding), Milton Bradley Company, Springfield, Mass., 1920; J. Hemmelmanns paper cutting album, Germany, ca. 1875; Abbie A. Herricks paper Beauty forms. Westfield, Massachusetts, 1875; Thirteenth gift (papers for cutting). Milton Bradley Company, Springfield, Mass., ca. 1920. All images except overleaf are from Inventing Kindergarten 1997 Norman Brosterman. Published by Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York. Used with permission. All rights reserved. overleaf: Vasily Kandinskys Composition 8 from 1923, recreated with kindergarten gifts number 7 (paper parquetry), 8 (sticks), 9 (rings), 14 (weaving), 15 (slats), and 16 (jointed slats)

52

53

of the regular arrangement of minute particles in threedimensional matrices. It was the genius of Frbels mentor Weiss to recognize that the number, type, and relative direction of a specimens observable geometric symmetries distinguished its unique internal structure, and would ultimately reveal its specific chemical composition. Frbel worked each day for almost two years in a locked and perfectly quiet room organizing the diverse and dazzling samples of the mineralogical museums splendid omnibus collection.2 The shapes of crystals in particular the systematic variations in the design of their forms, planes, and symmetries provided an obvious structure for the categorization of mineral classes, ultimately leading to Weisss discoveries. For Frbel, inclined as he was to view nature as a great work of design by a higher power, this intense and prolonged occupation with the geometric handiwork of God had a profound and lasting impact. He began to perceive transforming, developing energy in the smallest fixed forms of natures infinite palate and learned to recognize people, plants, and crystals as equivalent consequences stemming from the same laws of growth: And thereafter my rocks and crystals served me as a mirror wherein I might descry mankind, and mans development and history. Nature and Man now seemed to me mutually to explain each other, through all their numberless various stages of development.3 What once seemed obvious to Frbel about living things that their essential growth was governed by fixed laws from above now also resonated in mere stones. Furthermore, and more significantly for the generations to follow, he discovered forms of symbolic unity that could, with pencil and straightedge, be transferred to paper and bound into books. Simply put, Frbel postulated that since the shapes of crystals combinations of triangles and tetrahedrons, squares and cubes are the outcome of the same natural laws that also result in the growth of children, people, and entire societies, handling these forms correctly would reveal 54 and illuminate the mind of the creator itself.

In 1816, Frbel declined a professorship of mineralogy in Stockholm in favor of founding his first small school for children. After teaching around Germany and Switzerland for another 20 years, he concluded that when many children began school at the officially mandated age of seven, a rigid dullness was too often already fixed within them. In 1837 in the spa town of Blankenburg, Frbel opened his first institution for the very young. Two years later, he exultantly fixed upon a brand-new word to describe his revolutionary invention, kindergarten, which encapsulated in a single clever neologism two related ideas: its organizational model (the childrens garden) and its spiritual foundation (the garden of children). After formulating the explicit lesson of kindergarten (growth and interconnectedness), Frbel designed physical tools (models of natural crystals, or the gifts) that he theorized would lead to its comprehension. He simultaneously created a methodology that when properly utilized, provided children with an infinite number of conceptual links between the two exercises in what were usually called the Three Realms. In short sessions of directed play, the geometric gifts were used to create pictures or structures that fit loosely into each of three fundamental categories forms of Nature (or Life), forms of Knowledge (or Science), and forms of Beauty (or Art). Unlike the building blocks, mosaic toys, and traditional crafts that were their forbears, the gifts were never available for entirely free play. Always tethered in some fashion to the forms of the three realms, their use was subordinate to the greater whole, which was Unity. The life forms were tangible: chairs, trees, people; the knowledge forms mathematical: 2x4=8, 4+4=8; the beauty forms were usually symmetrical patterns, as Frbel felt symmetry was most comprehensible as beauty to little children. Equivalency was kindergartens foundation and it was expressed in all things and at all times. For four-, five-, and six-year-olds, transforming the very same materials into something new each day, as the class shifted from gift to gift and from realm to realm, the ultimate lesson of kindergarten was straightforward. In slightly different guise, the world, mathematics, and art were interchangeable, and their perceived borders were misleading, artificial constructs. A chair might become numbers, numbers art, and art either or both. With extremely simple means, former crystallographer Frbel effectively assembled all the components of the universe into his training program for infants. Children could make anything they saw, perceived, or imagined, and while doing so would enter the world and it would enter them. The original kindergarten spread successfully around the world in the decades after Frbels death in 1852. It was particularly popular in Holland, Italy, France, Switzerland, Great Britain, Japan (the first school opened in 1876), Canada, and the United States. Publicly banned in Germany as a result of the failed revolution of 1848, it was maintained there in private, liberal, and Jewish schools until its complete acceptance in the early 20th century. Through the efforts of missionaries, it soon
top (clockwise): Perforating cushions, Milton Bradley Company, Springfield, Mass., ca. 1900; Kindergartner Ginas (last name unknown) Nature forms made by pricking paper. United States, ca. 1900; Kindergarten teacher Abbie A. Herricks Beauty form, Westfield, Mass., 1875. Photograph: Zindman/Freemont

became a fixture in almost every country on earth, and the German word kindergarten is still found in the dictionaries of a great number of totally unrelated languages. The original function of Frbels system as a spiritual guide to the music of the spheres was bastardized in some countries and certain schools from the time of its inception. Yet all of the gifts remained essentially unchanged and in general use until at least 1910, and in some areas, well after. From 1860 on, millions of little children in Europe, North America, and Japan began their education in Frbel classes, and significantly, their parents did not, so that the generation that came to maturity before World War I was comprised of the prime recipients of the original crystalline kindergarten, before a few of them grew up and invented abstract painting and modern architecture. Because 19th-century children in countries from Austria to Australia were required to learn a new form language as a requisite of kindergarten, the systems proliferation resulted in unforeseen consequences tangential to, but significantly removed from, Frbels explicit lesson of Unity. By connecting the gift plays to an abstract mode of expression, the early kindergarten pedagogues in effect created an enormous international program designed specifically to alter the vision of
above: Childrens garden, unidentified kindergarten, Los Angeles, ca. 1900.

the general populace. While focusing on kindergartens many educational and social benefits, they overlooked a potentially radical outcome of their efforts that is obvious in retrospect kindergarten taught abstraction. In its explicit equivalency of ideas and things it taught abstract thinking, and in its repetitive use of geometric form it taught a new way of seeing that was utterly unfamiliar to the preceding generation. In 1882, Marie Matrat, the Inspectrice Gnrale of the French national kindergarten system, or coles maternelles, declared in exasperation:
Even the best headmistresses have visible form as their first concern! Rather than resorting to a few random exercises, which might even be called improvised, they have made it into the dominant portion, and the actual objects surrounding the children remain forever forgotten. In a word, these games, rather than being preparation, are the actual teaching. Three little sticks held like a fan is a vase of flowers; a collection of triangles, laid out according to a given pattern, is a factory, a tomb, a log, the mechanism of a windmill, a hundred things the child has never seen, which he cannot represent using these trinkets, except by using fantasy. Such representation so little resembles the real object that even with the best of intentions, for me it was impossible to ever recognize the object.4

56

While it is probable that Frank Lloyd Wright began his kindergarten training years before his mother supposedly discovered the gifts at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial, there is no question about the systems profound effect on his architecture. As one of the few kindergarten kids to write about his early experiences, Wrights words are extremely valuable:
Mother learned that Frederick Froebel [sic] taught that children should not be allowed to draw from casual appearances of Nature until they had first mastered the basic forms lying hidden behind appearances. Cosmic, geometric elements were what should first be made visible to the child-mind. Taken East at the age of three to my fathers pastorate near Boston, for several years I sat at the little kindergarten table-top ruled by lines about four inches apart each way making fourinch squares; and among other things, played upon these unitlines with the square (cube), the circle (sphere) and the triangle (tetrahedron or tripod)-these were smooth maple-wood blocks. Scarlet cardboard triangle (60-30) two inches on the short side, and one side white, were smooth triangular sections with which to come by pattern design by my own imagination. Eventually I was to construct designs in other mediums. But the smooth cardboard triangles and maple-wood blocks were most important. All are in my fingers to this day. Also German papers, glazed and matte, beautiful soft color qualities, were another one of the gifts cut into sheets about twelve inches each way, these squares were slitted to be woven into gay colorful checkerings as fancy might dictate. Thus color sense awakened. There were also ingenious constructions to be made with straight, slender, pointed sticks like toothpicks or jack-straws, dried peas for the joinings, etc., etc. The virtue of all this lay in the awakening of the child-mind to rhythmic structure in Nature giving the child a sense of innate cause-and-effect otherwise far beyond child-comprehension. I soon became susceptible to constructive pattern evolving in everything I saw. I learned to see this way and when I did, I did not care to draw casual incidentals of Nature. I wanted to design.5

If Wright were the only important 20th-century respondent to the kindergarten pedagogy, we would still owe a debt to Frbels persistent dream. But there were others. Vasily Kandinsky attended one of the very first Italian kindergartens in Florence, where he was living with his parents in 1870. Frbels twenty gifts, which deliberately deconstructed nature from solid to plane to line to point and back, bare a close resemblance to the components of his Bauhaus paintings. Johannes Itten, first Master of Form at the Bauhaus and creator of its revolutionary Vorkurs, was a Frbelian kindergarten teacher in Vienna before Walter Gropius invited him to Weimar in 1919. In 1889, at the age of 17, Piet Mondrian won his license to teach drawing in Dutch primary schools like his father before him. Pedagogical drawing for little children in Holland at that time entailed the systematic construction of increasingly complex geometric designs on right-angle grids. It was identical to the netzzeichen (net drawing) Frbel first proposed in 1826 as a response to Pestalozzis ABC der Anschauung. It was also kindergarten gift number ten, in public use in Holland along with the rest of the system since 1860. On 1 September 1891, even before his fourth birthday, Charles-douard Jeanneret, 57 the future Le Corbusier, began his studies in the Ecole

Particulaire of La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland run by one of the first graduates of the new state-mandated Neuchtel Frbelian Normal School, Mlle. Louise Colin. After three years in this private kindergarten, Jeanneret took the equivalency examinations that allowed him to enter the public primary school, which, as per an 1889 law, was also structured along Frbelian lines.6 The grid of the kindergarten table became a very real model of a type of inquiry that drew from multiple sources, cut across and connected seemingly divergent data, and had the potential to result in more than one correct conclusion. In its tacit acceptance of abstraction, kindergarten taught intellectual diversity and the value of unconventional reasoning. And due to the configuration and particulars of play with the gifts, the daily activities in any average kindergarten exhibited affinities with nothing so much as an introductory course in the mechanics of art and architecture. The children thus exposed might have been expected to eventually focus these primary experiences toward art, and some definitely did. Yet paradoxically, while mimicking some of the traditional activities of real art making, the specific forms of the kindergarten were inherently ill-suited for actually emulating European art and architecture of the late 19th century, or for that matter, any other epoch. But crowded around the grid of the kindergarten table in their lace and velveteens, what the first great kindergarten generation could do well, and what they all did to some degree, was to systematically transform the gifts into the kind of crystalline expressions associated with another art; a new art that would become the next art, early modernism, the art of their future. The Victorian childhood of the seminal Modernists coincided with the development and widespread embrace of a radical educational system that was a catalyst in exploding the cultural past, and restructuring the resulting intellectual panoply with a new worldview. It was never fodder for artistic argument over absinthe and Gauloises in Montmartre cafs, nor was it taught at the tradition-bound academies. It has been largely ignored because its participants three- to seven-yearolds were in the primary band of the scholastic spectrum. It was the seed-pearl of the modern era and it was called kindergarten.
1 Johannes Buss & Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, ABC der Anschauung, oder AnschauungsLehre der Massverhltnisse (Tbingen: J. G. Cotta, 1803). 2 Friedrich Froebel, Autobiography of Friedrich Froebel, translated and annotated by Emilie Michaelis and H. Keatley Moore (Syracuse, NY: C. W. Bardeen, 1889). 3 Ibid. 4 Marie Matrat, Les Ecoles Gardiennes de La Hollande, in Revue Pedagogique (1883), p. 312. 5 Frank Lloyd Wright, A Testament (New York: Horizon Press, 1957), pp. 19-20. 6 See Marc Solitaire, Le Corbusier et lurbain: la rectification du damier froebelian, in H. Allen Brooks, ed., La Ville et LUrbanisme aprs Le Corbusier (La Chaux-de-Fonds: Editions dEn Haut, 1993).

opposite top: Unknown kindergartners beauty form made with the fourteenth gift (paper weaving), US, ca. 1890. Photo: Zindman/Freemont. opposite bottom: Kindergartner Alice Hubbards beauty form made with the fourteenth gift, Providence, United States, ca. 1892. Photo Zindman/Freemont.

school Year
HeleN mirra Artist Helen Mirras project uses Friedrich Frbels eleventh (perforating), fourteenth (paper weaving), and eighteenth (paper folding) gifts for kindergartners.
pages 59-60: Fall - paper folding, orange leaf, 2002 pages 61- 62: Winter - paper pricking, white branch, 2002 pages 63- 64: Spring - paper weaving, green bud, 2002

58

59

60

61

62

63

64

Where the WIld thInGs Were: an IntervIeW WIth leonard s. marcus

DaviD serliN & BriaN selzNick Childrens literature or more specifically, writing categorized as childrens literature is often described as a benign (if often commercially aggressive, as in the case of the Harry Potter phenomenon) enterprise that revels in escapism and fuzzy feelings, offering a comfortable buffer zone between innocence and experience. But as Leonard S. Marcus, a leading authority on the history of childrens literature, describes, the history of childrens literature is complex and often contradictory, full of misanthropic philologists, modernist image-makers, and fanatical librarians. Marcus is the author of Ways of Telling: Conversations on the Art of the Picture Book (Dutton, 2002) and Storied City: A Childrens Book Guide to New York City (Dutton, forthcoming 2003). David Serlin and Brian Selznick spoke with Marcus in September 2002.
Historically, is there a moment when childrens literature as we know it emerges as its own separate category? The work often cited as the first book written deliberately for children is a non-fiction book by Johannes Amos Comenius called Orbis Pictus, which was published in Nuremberg in 1662. It was a cross between a picture dictionary and a picture encyclopedia. There were little illustrations of things to be recognized, like a key or a dog, and the word that corresponded to the picture was printed along side it in both German and Latin. Thirty years later, in his Thoughts Concerning Education, John Locke wrote that children respond more readily to illustrated texts than to unbroken blocks of type. That observation became one of the basic principles for childrens literature. Orbis Pictus was a very popular book, and was published in the Englishspeaking world in the 18th century. In London in the 1740s, John Newbery was the first person to make childrens books a viable commercial enterprise aimed at the entertainment as well as the education of young people. Newbery was a printer, bookseller, publisher, sometime writer, as well as a seller of patent medicines, which was not unusual for the time since merchants very often had two or more trades. Newbery printed, published, and sold his own books, and commissioned writers like Oliver Goldsmith to write for him. More than Germany, England is where childrens literature as we know it got started. As the epicenter of the Industrial Revolution, England had the largest numbers of new middle-class parents who were eager for their children to be educated and get ahead in the world. It sounds as if the emergence of childrens literature is roughly concurrent with the emergence of what we think of as the modern novel. Its interesting because we see a splitting off between what was considered childrens literature and what were considered appropriate kinds of storytelling for adults. For example, at the beginning of the 19th century in Germany, the Grimm brothers collected their very well known fairy tales. But the first edition was not published as a childrens book. The Grimms 65 were not thinking of children as their audience; they

were scholars. One of them was a philologist; the other was a librarian. They were interested in delving into the origins of Germanic culture, of recording it and capturing the part of it that was disappearing as Germany turned into a literate society. As sometimes happens, you publish a book with one audience in mind but it finds a different audience instead, and the Grimms fairy tales were received by the German middle class as a work primarily for children. The adults were not all that interested in reading about things that could never be, because they were very focused on succeeding in the modern world.
Scholars who study 19th-century literature often describe it as the golden period of the novel. Is there an equivalent golden or classical period of childrens literature among people who study childrens literature, or among childrens writers and illustrators themselves? You can talk about different periods that were particularly good for the different kinds of books that fall within the larger category of childrens literature. In England, for example, Edward Lear published his Book of Nonsense Verse in 1845; in that same year, in Germany, the book known in English as Slovenly Peter, by Heinrich Hoffmann, was published as well. Lewis Carroll published Alices Adventures in Wonderland 20 years later, in 1865. What those three authors had in common is that they were reacting to the didactic how to be a good little boy or girl kind of literature which was dominant at the time. They believed that children were reasonable beings and that perhaps what people most wanted at that time in their lives was a chance to laugh at and question authority, including their parents, teachers, and all of the people who stood over them. So the middle of the 19th century was a golden time for what is often called nonsense literature. For a variety of reasons, the mid- to late 20th century, in the US , turned out to be golden age of realistic fiction for children, and of the picture book. Is there a connection or parallel development between theories of what kinds of books are appropriate for children and various theories about childrens education, child rearing, or child development? You can trace a connection, all the way back to Comenius, between theories of education and the kinds of childrens books that were being published. In the early 1800s, Louisa May Alcotts father, Bronson, ran an experimental school in Bostonuntil he was closed down for bringing in a black girl. Alcott was aware of the European theorists of education of his own and earlier times, and their ideas found their way into childrens magazines of the day with which the Alcotts were associated. You can trace the influence of those ideas directly to what happened in New York City starting in the 1910s at the Bank Street College of Education, which is where, among others, Margaret Wise Brown, the author of Goodnight Moon and many other picture books, got her training as a writer for children. Edward Steichen was inspired by Bank Street to create two unusual photographic picture books for children. These books, although well reviewed, did not become especially popular in their time. The Whitney showed some of the photographs at an exhibit about ten years ago and has collaborated in the re-release of the one called The First Picture Book.

Theres a clear resemblance between some of Steichens commercial work and his photographs for the childrens books. He was working from the Bank Street theory that one- and two -year-old children are most attuned to their immediate surroundings, respond to images of things they already know, and feel validated by the experience. He photographed toys, telephones, clocks things that would be found in almost any home, in a straight-on way with a minimum of shadow. Theres no chiaroscuro effect going on; he was pretty much eye-to-eye with the object, placing each of those pictures across from a blank page that was left for the child to do with as he or she pleased. Nearly all contemporary board books, which are printed on durable cardboard for the very youngest children, follow from the concept and design of that book, whether knowingly or not.
There seems to be a relationship between the kinds of work that Steichen was doing for these childrens books and other kinds of modernist techniques or themes that we would identify in much more experimental, adult works. Thats true. Steichen would photograph a seashell in order to reveal a universe in the swirls of the shell. Edward Weston would do a close-up of a machine to show that traces of the infinite could also be found in man and in the things of man. Of course, its also a major theme of 20th-century experimental art that the child is a kind of touchstone for seeing the world as it really is. The child as primitive, and the dream life of children, were ideas that mixed and merged in the minds of some of these artists. Andr Breton talks directly about children in his Manifesto, and claimed Lewis Carroll as one of the proto-Surrealists. Quite a few Magritte paintings appear to be based on scenes from Alice. When I taught childrens literature at the School of Visual Arts here in New York, I gave a slide lecture in which I illustrated Alice entirely with paintings by Magritte and Dali, M. C. Escher graphics, and collages by Max Ernst. By the 20th century, there seems to be a split between those who want to create art to empower childrens imaginations and those who prefer to sentimentalize children as vulnerable beings who need protection from their own desires. Do you think that those two attitudes are in some kind of dialogue with each other? Thats a good question. Around 1900, in the US , public libraries began to hire specialists in childrens literature and to open special reading rooms for childrens use. You can think of those rooms as secret gardens. They were walled off from the rest of the library. One reason why libraries created those rooms was to keep children away from the adult literature that they didnt want them to have access to. If you think of the musical The Music Man, the townsfolk use Balzac as if it were a dirty word. The fear is that the children of River City are going to play pool and read Balzac and turn into lecherous, Europeanstyle perverts! The River City library was too small to have a childrens room, but thats what was happening around the United States at that time. This had the effect of cordoning off childrens literature itself from the rest of literature. You find, after the turn of the 20th century, very few major literary
Illustrations courtesy The Donnell Library, The New York Public Library

publications showing any interest in childrens books, whereas in the 19th century The Nation and The Atlantic Monthly reviewed childrens books on a regular basis. But this is all a little hard to pin down. Youll find one of the most powerful of the librarians the New York Public Librarys Anne Carroll Moore showing those protective and very proprietary tendencies some of the time but also loving a new childrens book by Gertrude Stein, which in 1939 was pretty far-out.
We know that there was a tradition of proletarian childrens literature in the former Soviet Union going back to the revolution. Was there a similar tradition of childrens books written by people in the United States who identified as socialist or communist? Publishing was so connected to the library world, up through the 1960s and 1970s, that very often the editors at publishing houses were former librarians, and the largest part of the childrens market was the library market. So publishers were making books for the libraries more than for anybody else. There wasnt a whole lot of interest in politically radical literature. In the 1940s, Jerrold and Lorraine Beim wrote picture books about friendship between black and white children, and did so from a consciously political perspective. The Beims career is pretty much forgotten now (and in fact their books have only an historical interest today, not a literary one). But their work filled a certain void. An important childrens book editor of the 1940s and 50s, Elisabeth Hamilton, was a pioneer in this regard and certainly was not politically nave. She was trying to change society through the books she published, first as an editor at Harcourt Brace and then as the founding editorial director of the childrens book imprint at William Morrow. Hamiltons father, Louis Bevier, had been the dean of Rutgers University during the time when Paul Robeson was admitted there, and he took Robeson under his wing. Hamilton published the Beims as well as North Star Shining (1946), the first childrens history of the Negro people, by Hildegarde H. Swift, and illustrated by Lynd Ward. Hamilton also discovered Beverly Clearly, so there is a really clear line of social concern. Is there a connection between these kinds of works and some of the social realist books for young adults published in the 1970s like Dinkey Hocker Shoots Smack! or A Hero Aint Nothin But a Sandwich? The 1960s were a turning point for childrens literature. For one thing, it was then that most editors and librarians finally realized that most childrens books were about the life of the white middle class. An article in the Saturday Review of Literature in 1965 entitled The All-White World of Childrens Books caused a lot of people to think about what they had been doing. Until then, the childrens book world had been so selfenclosed, with middle-class book publishers selling their books to middle-class librarians. A few years earlier, in 1962, a picture book called The Snowy Day, by Ezra Jack Keats, had been published for very young children. It was set in Brooklyn and showed a little black boy walking out in the snow and having a great time. It had nothing to do with being black, but the fact that he had dark skin made it unique for its 67 time. Other books followed, and suddenly picture books

seemed, to a very limited extent, to become more integrated than before. There was a new psychological realism in childrens books, too. Remember that it was during the 1960s and 1970s that psychology for the first time became a popular course of study at the undergraduate level. More people were finding it acceptable to go into therapy than ever before. It was against that background that the insights of psychology and psychoanalysis began to find their way into childrens books.
Can you give me an example of a childrens book that was directly influenced by psychoanalysis? Well, Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak, for one. Having a story about a small child throwing a tantrum for the benefit of his mother was not a story you were going to find in childrens literature before the 1960s, because children werent supposed to yell at their mothers. The idea that children experience rage and that its a natural part of their psyche was a new idea to childrens picture books. This is why some people were afraid of Where the Wild Things Are when it was first published. It was initially quite controversial, a fact many people have forgotten since it was given the Caldecott Medal that year. About a decade later, in a bizarre twist, Bruno Bettelheim condemned Where the Wild Things Are in his column in Ladies Home Journal as being too violent for children. He said that children of three and four would be too upset to be given a story in which another child was deprived of food. He thought it was a damaging story. I think these comments of his were more a reflection of Bettelheims confused psyche than of his theories. They dont hold true to the central argument of his book The Uses of Enchantment, which was published not long afterward, in 1976. How does the collectors market for childrens books or the illustrations created for childrens books compare to the collectors market for art and books in general? Until recently there werent many collectors who took childrens books seriously apart from those books from the more distant past. People didnt attribute value to them, and were generally dismissive of the art and writing in childrens books. There was little awareness of a connection to the rest of art and literature. In the 1940s, a medical doctor living in Washington, D.C. named Irwin Kerlan began collecting original art from contemporary picture books and founded the Kerlan Collection at the University of Minnesota. In those days, there was no market for contemporary original art of that kind. An artist who met Dr. Kerlan and got one his fruitcakes for Christmas was very likely to feel like giving him the stuff just because he was someone who really appreciated it. Thats hard to fathom, that the art from even a successful childrens book would not be recognized as even worth a nominal amount. Well, think about art photography. In the 1950s, the Limelight Gallery in the West Village was the only gallery in New York City that sold photographs. You could buy the best photograph by Edward Weston or Ansel Adams for between 1025 dollars. And the woman who ran this gallery had trouble

paying her rent! So photography is another art form that used to be valued differently than it is now.
Is there a book that gets the gold star for being the most controversial, or among the most controversial, childrens book ever published? Slovenly Peter, published in Germany in 1845, became one of the most popular childrens books in history throughout the world. There have been at least 600 editions of the book, as well as numerous parodies; it was translated into English at least three times, including once by Mark Twain. Its a kind of litmus test or perhaps a Rorschach test in that about half the people who have read the book or had the book read to them as children think of it as hilarious, and the other half think of it as scary as hell. Slovenly Peter is either a cautionary tale meant to scare you into behaving properly, or its a send-up of a cautionary tale, and people disagree as to which of those two things it is. For that reason, its a very controversial book. I dont know outside of Germany how widely read it is read anymore but for many years it was a book that was hotly debated. Garth Williamss The Rabbits Wedding is a picture book, published in 1959, about a black rabbit and a white rabbit who fall in love and get married in the end. Williams denied that he intended a message about racial matters but the book was banned in the south and for a while made international headlines. Its kind of hard not to read it as an allegory. The Story of Ferdinand, published in 1936, was controversial because it came out during the Spanish Civil War and some people interpreted it as a pro-Franco fable advising, Dont fight! Dont resist! Again, the authors denied that they were commenting on the situation in Spain, but some people were convinced otherwise. Even Goodnight Moon was controversial. Many librarians hated it because there was no story, and for them a good picture book was one that you could read during story hour at the library to a hushed audience. Until recently, librarians didnt want very young children coming to the library, so they werent very attuned to books for very young children. Some saw it as a list of words; they didnt recognize it as having literary merit. Plus, it grew directly out of the Bank Street theories about small children being interested in their immediate surroundings as opposed to fairy tale, never-never land. It was one of the archetypal works that drew people to one side or the other in the debate about realism versus fantasy. I think that often what happens with childrens books is a by-product of the distillation that is required to reach their primary audience. I was reading the fourth and most recent of the Harry Potter books out loud to my nine-year-old son and theres a supernatural figure called Voldemort who is the center of evil in the book. We were down to the last forty pages of the book on September 11. The section we were reading turned out to be about the return of Voldemort, this violent, terrible figure rising up out of the ashes to come back and haunt the good guys. Without my intending it, the book seemed to comment on some of the things that were happening in the world just then. Obviously, the author couldnt have intended this. But childrens books have a way of resonating with real experience in unexpected ways. And the childrens books we remember make sense in precisely that way.

a PacK oF blInd snIFFInG doGs

ByroN kim Addee: I just farted. Lisa: Congratulations. Ella: You win the Nobel Prize! Ella (sniffing Emmett upon his return from a sleepover): You smell like Emilio. Zane (Addees best friend, walking up the stairs at the start of a playdate): Something smells. Addee: Thats my room. It stinks. My family is obsessed with smells, especially our own. You stink, passes for a term of endearment in our home. Adeline (four years old and known as Addee) frequently holds her nose, not with her fingers, but by blocking the air passage through her nose with her glottis, a kind of olfactory denial. She does this most frequently during her long trips to the toilet which inevitably end with the announcement, Daddy, Ibe dud!, which means, Im done, which really means, Daddy, come wipe me. Adeline has a comprehensive term for the conditions that cause her to hold her nose. The word is sniffy. It has no direct correlative in standard English, though its first definition would have to be stuffy. The origins of sniffy can be traced to a warm day circa late spring 2000 in our cluttered sedan when baby Addee, firmly secured in her claustrophobic car seat, exclaimed, Roll dowd by widdow! Its sdiffy! And so, after some minor translation, it was established that cars are sniffy, except in the dead of winter. Sniffiness is synesthetic. It is essentially a sense of dwindling space brought on by warmth and stale odors. When I was asked to collaborate with my children for this issue of Cabinet, my mind immediately went to scratch n sniff. What better way to bring smell to print? I thought I would turn the kids on to a bunch of unidentified scent samples and ask them to create visual counterparts. Alas, scratch n sniff turned out to be too costly. And as I tried to come up with another project, it was also becoming clear to me that the last thing I wanted to do with my children was some sort of project. I discovered this while working with Ella (six years old), who loved the idea of putting something in a magazine who just loves making stuff, period. Whenever we set aside time to make something, it didnt quite work. She tried her best, and that was just the problem. Our attempts were too intentional, too full of effort. I found myself foisting my ideas on Ella, and she, in turn, kept trying to make Art. For artists with one child, it often seems the child itself is a project, an object of artistic doting. Maybe these kinds of families can make art together, but with three kids, forget it. Again, the last thing I wanted was art, because everyone knows that what children do is especially beautiful because they arent really trying. As I write this, I am in the middle of four weeks at UCross, an artists residency in rural Wyoming. I left New York a few days after school started; the day after I arrived was Addees fourth birthday. The next day was the first anniversary 70 of September 11. The last of the sage bloom has put me

in a histaminic haze. To the extent I can smell anything here in Wyoming, it smells too clean, altogether too aired-out. I miss my family, our sniffy, claustrophobic world. My wife Lisa told me a few days ago that Addee has been saying that I am dead. Yesterday, I climbed about 450 ft. up to the top of a nearby butte (the only place I can get a strong phone signal) and asked to talk to her. Usually, a phone conversation with Addee lasts a matter of seconds before she gets distracted or her sister elbows her offline. Yesterday we talked a solid thirty-five minutes. I stayed on until she was good and ready, until I had been resurrected from the dead. She told me about her new pet fish Sweetheart (a birthday gift), about Kelly, her new best friend, about how she didnt cry today after nap time at her new school, about Ellas first piano lesson and latest soccer exploits. Mostly she wanted to know if I really climbed a mountain just to talk to her and did I really leave a message for her the other day from the top of that same mountain. And, of course, she was worried that I might fall off. I have been hoping to work with the kids remotely. Asking them to send me their renditions of Sweetheart, the Red Fish. And especially trying to establish e-mail correspondences with Emmett and Ella. Predictably, it isnt working out. The new school year has its demands, and its becoming clear that my kids can sniff out and kill anything resembling a project with Pops. So this may seem like a cop-out, but my collaboration with Emmett, Ella and Adeline has turned out to be the same collaboration we have every day. We just follow each other around like a pack of Brooklyn waterfront dogs. Its astonishing how much stuff our kids lives produce. Lisa and I throw virtually all of it out when theyre not looking. So I sniffed out a few choice scraps along the way and forwarded them to the magazine. I wonder what theyll choose and I wonder if theyll follow through on my request to toss the stuff once theyve made 6000 copies of it. All except for that fine piece of needlework I made. That shit is art.

PIcturInG Innocence: an IntervIeW WIth anne hIGonnet

siNa Najafi At no time in history have pedophobes had it worse than now. Images of children are everywhere; on calendars and Christmas family cards, in advertisements for banks and toilet paper, on keychains and in office cubicles. Grinning at us in that saccharine way that profitmakers love, these images speak of an age of innocence not yet tainted by politics, economics, moral failure, disappointments, class frustrations, ill health, and, worst of all, knowledge of ones mortality. The sheer numbers of such images are staggering. Of the 25 billion photographs taken in the US every year, about half of them feature the very young. According to the Wolfman Report of 1992, 38 percent of amateur photographs deemed important enough to be framed were of children.1 The ubiquity of images of children may not tell us anything about the variety of images we produce and circulate but it is symptomatic of contemporary Western obsessions with childhood. In her book Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood, Anne Higonnet, professor of art history at Barnard College, traces the history of the images that helped shape this contemporary relationship to children as it first emerged in the 18th century. Sina Najafi spoke to her by phone.

Your book sets out to do two things. First, you trace the history of the Romantic paradigm of the innocent child that emerged in the 18th century. Second, you show how we are today witnessing the breakdown of this paradigm in favor of an alternative relationship to childhood which you call Knowing Childhood. What was at stake in this two-fold project? The two-fold approach was necessary to make particular arguments. One issue was to estrange us from images of children, photographic and otherwise, that seem natural, normal and real, and the other was to present a set of alternative possibilities, the greatest and most cumulative of which is happening now: an extremely widespread cultural alternative being presented first and most confrontationally in the art world. I started the book project with a question that came out of the current political situation, a child pornography case called Knox v. the United States. The legal problem of Knox hangs on the question of whether you can legally define the one true meaning of a photograph, which made me understand that what I thought was an art historical question was more fundamentally in the present a legal question. However, I also understood that as an art historian I had a kind of argument to make about child pornography that was not being made even at the level of the Supreme Court, which is the historical contingency of any image of childhood, including the most basic assumption about the absolute innocence of childhood. I knew from the most cursory examination of differences between 17th- and 18th-century art that in the 18th century a set of very talented and academically eminent artists led by Sir Joshua Reynolds engaged in a brilliant visualization of new concepts of childhood that were radically different from concepts of 72 childhood before.

When did historians first examine these shifts in the conception of childhood? The model of a rupture in the 18th century was first set out in 1973 by Phillipe Aris in Centuries of Childhood. It has been contested since by other historians who ask that we understand that there are elements of continuity in the history of childhood as well as epistemic ruptures. Even at its moment of conception, this new concept of childhood seems to have been suffused with nostalgia. A very powerful force shaping our ideals of the innocent childhood is the force of nostalgia. Its about adults who want to look back on a time before their own lives which was supposedly less complicated, more pure and worthy, and one of the symptoms of that is how repeatedly an ideal childhood has been cast with the signs of a time past in relation to the present. For instance, childrens fashions for a very long time were the most nostalgic and most resistant to change of all Western dress. Even back in the 18th century, one of the iconic paintings of childhood was Gainsboroughs Blue Boy, which became, not coincidentally, the worlds most famous painting in the 19th century. Already in the 18th century, the blue boy is dressed in 17th-century costume and is a figure of nostalgia, both social and personal. What was the conception of childhood preceding Romantic childhood, and why is there this shift in the 18th century toward the Romantic innocent child? The crucial dimension of the pre-Romantic notion is that the child is born into sin and gradually learns to become pure and righteous. Moral purity is attained, not something one is born with. The overwhelming majority of children are introduced into the sexual and working world of adults right from the moment of birth. People from different fields tend toward different explanations of why the shift occurred. There is a demographic explanation. In a brutal sense, a model of childhood prior to the 18th century is one of likely death. As infant mortality begins to be curbed, parents develop expectations that the child will live and they attach a greater emotional significance to each and every child. There is also a very significant religious shift that goes on in the 18th century as a more evangelical and personally spiritual Protestant religion spreads; the idea of an innocence here on earth becomes increasingly important as a spiritual concept so that the Catholic concept of a child born into sin is replaced by a much more Protestant concept of an innocent childhood. By the 19th century, those who speak about childhood Lewis Carroll is a very good example speak of it as a golden innocence before the shadow of adult sin. Another factor thats pointed to, at least in terms of the increasing pace with which the issue of childhood becomes important, is the one that Freud points to if not in some kind of transcendentally analytical way, at least in a locally descriptive way. As the family becomes more intensely nuclear, the emotional issues around parent-child relationships become increasingly important in society. Its not just that you have a change in the concept of childhood but that the whole notion of what childhood is becomes increasingly important. 73 You can say that Freud in a way is both the describer of

that and the proof of that, because so much of his theory is based on the importance to the psyche of what happens in childhood, even though Freud is debunking the notion of a childhood sexual innocence. But Freud is also the person who tells us about denial, displacement and repression, which is how the idea of absolute childhood innocence is still maintained.
Have Marxist historians addressed the 18th-century redefinition of childhood? You point out in your book that paintings by people like Gainsborough and Reynolds are also working to eradicate the class component of previous portraits of children. I think what a Marxist would say is that the notion of innocent childhood is a means by which the middle class at once represses any awareness of the conditions of working-class life and simultaneously consolidates its own identity. As the middle class became by far and away the dominant class in AngloSaxon culture, the concept of childhood became correspondingly more important. One explanation for the idea of innocent childhood being so predominantly Anglo-Saxon is that it is precisely a middle-class concept. In the 19th century one sees the way that progressive reforms wider than childhood find a rallying point in this notion of childhood innocence. Some of the most effective early labor reforms are demands for the elimination of child labor. Some of the most effective reforms of the judicial system in the 19th century are demands for a separate justice system for children and for adults. One of the surest markers that we are entering into yet another dramatic change in the notion of childhood is that the concept of a separate justice or different standard for children is now being called into question in the US , as the majority of states are now demanding that many children be tried as adults. But there is also a paradox insofar as child pornography laws are structured to increase the chasm between adult sexuality and childhood innocence. What one could propose is that much of the anxiety and guilt over issues about the boundary line between childhood and adulthood is being crowded, overcrowded, into the domain of the visual. My job then became to fill in the gap between the 18th century and the present and to figure out what happened. It turned out that all of the high art images to which I would have instinctively turned to explain the history of the image of childhood have become decreasingly relevant. I learned that as the 19th and 20th centuries went on it was popular and mass-reproduced images that increasingly acquired the ability to define cultural assumptions of what childhood looked like. Is that a simple question of those kinds of images reaching more people? Most basically, yes, but there is also a gender factor involved. In the 19th century, women were tracked toward the representation of childhood because it was considered suitably feminine and so what happened in the 19th century was that a disproportionate share of artistic talent was being devoted, paradoxically, to the simplification and popularization of a commercial
opposite: Maud Humphrey Bogarts 1900 drawing of her son, the future Bogey.

image of childhood. By the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th, there are some extraordinarily gifted women who find themselves creating an extremely culturally powerful visual ideal.
To understand how widely images circulated before the appearance of the modern media, is it possible to state who would have seen a painting like The Blue Boy, for example? In the 18th century, it would have been known through very small-scale but public painting exhibitions. These exhibitions were free. Then in the 19th century, the painting hung in an aristocratic collection that was sometimes open to the public. The middle class could have seen the painting if they made an effort. The Blue Boy then begins to be reproduced in the form of prints. By the second half of the 19th century, you can talk about a mass reproduction of prints; then at the beginning of the 20th century the painting is sold to the American collector Henry E. Huntington, and that sale is the occasion for tremendous media exposure which brings out the way in which the picture taps into ideas about childhood, as well as the way the terms of popular culture are ceasing to be controlled by Europe and are being taken over by the US. If you track the most popular and influential images of childhood, you can see in the 19th century that those images are overwhelmingly European, in particular English, whereas in the 20th century they are overwhelmingly American. As are some of the major challenges to the traditional representation of innocent childhood. When Sally Mann started contradicting stereotypes of childhood in the late 1980s, she was like a one-woman force and everyone rightly focused on her as someone who was breaking all the rules about the representation of childhood. As it turns out, a decade later, she is completely vindicated; she turns out to have been announcing a kind of widespread change in how people think about childhood. Her work belongs to a very particular and crucial moment. There are many people working in that field now, but one of the things Sally Mann was up against was the claim that not only that her images were wrong, but that the subject was trivial. Your book discusses at length the role that women illustrators like Jessie Willcox Smith and Kate Greenaway played before and during the Golden Age of Illustration (1880s-1920s) in producing images of children. Were there men in the field? Yes, there were some great 19th-century childrens book illustrators who were men: Randolph Caldecott and Arthur Rackham, for example. The whole commercial image-making realm opens up in the last quarter of the 19th century because of technological changes in printing as well as the development of a child audience for books. There is a lot of debate as to whether there is such a thing as a child consumer, particularly in the field of childrens literature, and about whether it is all about their parents tastes. But certainly a child audience develops at that time. So there are new ways of making a
above: Kate Greenaway, Ring-a-Ring-a-Rosies, 1881. opposite: Hipgnosis and Hardie, detail of cover of Led Zeppelins Presence, 1976.

living as an artist that did not exist before. That is one of the reasons why women are attracted to the field. There are ways of making a living in the field that are less closed to them than the high-arts realm of painting and thats how you get a disproportionate share of female talent working on the subject of childhood.
Do the women receive their training as painters at art academies or do they go to specialized schools for illustrators? Both. Some receive the academic art training and some go directly into an illustration training school. A place in the States where a woman would be trained in the high arts and then would be shunted off for commercial work would be the Pennsylvania Academy of the Arts. Thomas Eakins, who taught there, was very active in encouraging women, but some of them ended up working in illustration. And then there was the Brandywine School of Illustration coming out of the Howard Pyle School of Art in Wilmington, Delaware. The school produced Jessie Willcox Smith, Violet Oakley, Elizabeth Shippen Green, and also N. C. Wyeth, the first of the great Wyeth line. In general, women went wherever there was a teacher who would accept female students. The financial success these female illustrators were having is astonishing. Your book mentions that when Maud Humphrey Bogart, future mother of the actor, married in 1898, she was making $40,000 a year doing illustrations of children. But what is even more surprising was the critical success they were accorded by people like Ruskin, who was a great supporter of Kate Greenaways work. For many critics, this was a very happy outcome for a gender dilemma. Women were being given an outlet for their talents

and yet they were not threatening any gender conventions. On the contrary, their talents were being used to confirm an identification of women with maternity. Every single one of these women illustrators said they were very strongly encouraged to specialize in the subjects of maternity and childhood.
But then something must have happened in the period since the late 18th century because Reynoldss or Gainsboroughs representations of childhood were presumably considered masterpieces of the first order. Absolutely. Childhood was becoming simultaneously popularized, commercialized, and feminized by the late 19th century. It is kind of odd that this would not have already happened by the 18th century. Prior to the 18th century, maternity was one of many diverse occupations and obligations that fell to women. As you get the split between consumption and production in the Industrial Age, women become increasingly relegated to the home and that home becomes the site of a much more nuclear family. The mother-child relationship became increasingly close and idealized in the course of the 19th century. By the time the women of the Golden Age of Illustration are active in magazines, there also seem to be many more products on which the motifs could be replicated. There are things like kitchen towels, tablecloths, greeting cards, etc. Now we are getting to a chicken or the egg question between technology and ideology. Only when you have the mass production of goods and the mass reproduction of consumable images can you even begin to conceive of a popular commercial image. Once those images begin to be produced, once you have what we call tie-ins to books and visual advertisements for products, then the process begins to feed on itself and one generation of commercial illustration is the foundation on which the next will work. Commercial imagery becomes based on its own tradition of imagery, and less tied to a high art tradition. Your book delineates five major visual archetypes for representing the Romantic child that the illustrators picked up from art history and which are still with us today. Yes, it is really astonishing to see how every single image of childhood to which we still cling at the beginning of the 21st century was invented or perfected in late-18th-century England and was already in place in the popular but unique oil paintings of mid-19th-century Victorian culture. All five types in some way proclaimed the innocence of the child, which meant concentrating on the body paradoxically in order to diminish its corporeality. The categories are mother with child; child with pet; child dressed up in a fancy costume; angel child; and children posing as adults. How does illustration lose its primacy as the medium for representing children? Between the 1880s and 1920s, illustration had a gigantic audience compared with any other previous audience for images and had very little media competition. But as it became possible and affordable to reproduce photographs, commercial illustrations were slowly replaced.

From the start, women had more opportunities in photography than they did in the more traditionally prestigious media. In fact, that was even more true with photography than it was with commercial illustration. From the very start there were women like Julia Margaret Cameron who demanded that photography be considered a fine art. There was a niche for women, going all the way up to art photography and even up to the present. The single most successful image-maker of children today is Anne Geddes. It remains true that an overwhelming number of people who address the subject of childhood seriously are still women. The representation of childhood and the relationship between masculinity and femininity are always to some extent tied together. It is only in the 19th century that childhood begin to be associated with maternity and takes a conventionally feminine role. However as the 20th century unfolds and feminism makes demands for femininity to be reconceived, the tension between the sexual feminization of children and the infantilization of adult women has become one of the most fruitful subjects for contemporary artists to address. I would also say that while women are under the strongest cultural pressure to believe in a happy, idyllic notion of maternity, there are aspects of their personal experience that lead them to question that conventional, stereotypical image of childhood. There is nothing like being with a toddler 24 hours a day to make you think that toddlers are not always angels.
Even though you think that the crisis of ideal childhood is coming to a head now, you also provide historical examples of images of childhood that we can now see already implied a different relationship to children. Lewis Carrolls photographs are an obvious case, but you also include someone like Julia Margaret Cameron. Julia Margaret Cameron began photographing when her children were already grown up. The camera was given to her by one of her children in an attempt to console her for her empty nest. However you interpret Lewis Carrolls relationship to children, it was certainly very intense and ongoing, whereas Julia Margaret Camerons photographs were in a way nostalgic images of relationships to children. Some sensitive photo historians like Carol Armstrong or Carol Mavor now think that Cameron and Lewis Carroll produced equally complicated images of childhood. Lewis Carrolls photographs have been discussed in terms of the desire of the photographer for the child but we also need to address the sexual knowledge of the child him- or herself, of what you call the knowing child. What is the relationship between these two desires? That is a very important issue because, in our efforts to protect children from adult society, weve relied for a great deal of time on this idea of childhood innocence. The way the rationale went is: Children are innocent, and in particular they are sexually innocent; therefore they deserve to be protected. Once we all start listening to Freud or looking at Calvin Klein ads, we might say, Maybe children are not so sexually unknowing, and maybe adults have very complicated sexual feelings about children. Does that mean children no 76 longer deserve to be protected? I think that the most

well-meaning opponents of child pornography use that as their strongest argument: We need to defend the idea of absolute sexual innocence in order to justify any kind of protection of children. I feel so strongly that children should be protected from the consequences of adult society that I dont believe the sexual feelings of either children or adults should in any way compromise the protection of children.
Of course it is easier to legislate adults than to control children themselves. Yes, but my feeling is that our judicial system should be vigilant about real things that adults do to children. The alternative conception of childhood acknowledges the complex relationship that children have with the world around them, and that adults have with children. But the sexual dimension of that complexity is something that capitalist culture seems to have sniffed out very quickly and we now see many ads that feature the post-Romantic knowing child. For one thing, children are being sexualized at speeds and in ways that are astonishing. This is where I would like to substitute the word objectify for the word sexualize. To the extent that the sexualization of the child is an objectification of the child, it is a strategy of a consumer culture that leaves children vulnerable, and which I think is exploitive. However, I do not believe that all sexualizations are objectifications. I think there are many different kinds of sexualization and some forms endow a subject with a sense of power and personhood, which is the opposite of objectification. Some of Nan Goldins images of children are subjectified without being sexualized. And I think we all know examples of children who have been objectified through their innocence. That is just as insidious as any other kind of objectification. My other comment is that this issue is so culturally and historically subjective that while one, at every moment in time, can try to defend the welfare of some very young people, I think it is extremely difficult to do so on the basis of some transcendental definition of childhood. Here is one tragic example. Human rights organizations try to address the global sexual traffic in children, as well as the use of children as soldiers. Of course they come up against culturally different notions of childhood, which makes us want to enforce an absolute definition of childhood, for a change. How does one square the cultural knowledge you bring to your book and the kinds of decisions needed to put legislation in place? Once weve understood the complicated relationship between adults, children, and the representations we produce of them, then there is no certain place we can go to. That is a two-pronged project. First, you leave representations alone because they belong to the province of free speech, and you concentrate on action. And then some admittedly arbitrary decisions will need to be made on the basis of age. The recent Supreme Court case, Ashcroft v. The Free Speech Coalition, overturned large parts of the Child Pornography Protection Act of 1996, most importantly the sections banning any virtual images that 77 implied that a minor was engaged in a sexual activity.

Can you comment on this? I hope I accurately predicted in my book that the issue is an increasing strain between real actions perpetrated against real children and completely fictionalized situations. It seems to me that a case about completely artificially created images should be easy to decide, because real children are not at stake. To me, that clarifies the pornography controversy insofar as there is a categorical, philosophical, and, I would hope, judicial difference between representations, on the one hand, and actions against real children, on the other. This is a difficult moment in which peoples anxieties over radical change are causing them to make very hasty and dramatic decisions and this is a period of great anxious flux. Of course I hope and believe it will all sort itself out soon, but I dont believe these things progress in a linear way.

opposite: Glen Wexler, cover for Van Halens Balance, 1994.

does a ProletarIan chIld need a FaIrYtale?: the sovIet ProductIon booK For chIldren
alla roseNfelD In the aftermath of the 1917 Revolution, the Bolshevik regime regarded childrens books as major vehicles for transmitting Soviet ideology and influencing the new generation. Childrens literature would impress upon young readers of the postRevolutionary epoch, many of whom belonged to the working class and peasantry, the need to become active participants in the building of the Communist state. On 1 November 1917, the Peoples Commissariat of Education (Narkompros) decreed that the Soviet state should achieve general literacy as soon as possible by introducing obligatory and free education.1 As discussed in The Forgotten Weapon, published in a February 1918 issue of Pravda, childrens literature would serve an important function in the class struggle:

In the great arsenal with which the bourgeoisie fought against Socialism, childrens books occupied a prominent role. In selecting cannons and weapons, we overlook those that spread poisonous weapons. So focused on guns and other weapons, we forget about the written word. We must seize these weapons from enemy hands.2

The issue of childrens literature engaged Communist Party leaders at the highest levels, including the Commissar of Education, Anatoly Lunacharsky, and Lenins wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya. It also captured the imagination of leading Soviet avant-garde artists, such as Vladimir Lebedev, El Lissitzky, Aleksandr Rodchenko, and David Shterenberg. Throughout the 1920s, such figures designed highly experimental childrens books that embraced the principles of contemporary art movements such as Suprematism and Constructivism, and were not only propagandistic tools but also innovative artworks in their own right. Discussions about childrens books were carried out within the broader context of the spectacular transformation of the Russian educational system in the aftermath of the Revolution. American pragmatism, in particular the theories of John Dewey (1859-1952), greatly influenced the Russian school programs of the early 1920s. The Soviet adherents of Deweys theories claimed that the task of the school was not to educate but to create the conditions for the development of useful skills. Courses in religion, ancient languages, and ancient and medieval history disappeared from the curriculum. In the pre-Revolutionary era, childrens literature primarily consisted of fairytales, legends, and fantasy stories. However, as if in response to the tremendous social changes that accompanied the Bolshevik upheaval, the years following the Revolution saw a rapid, marked decline in such themes. While folk legends and fairytales constituted approximately 25 percent of all childrens books in 1918, they represented only 5 percent of them the following year. The appropriateness of fairytales for Soviet childrens books was a subject of intense debate during the 1920s and 1930s. Many Soviet educators deemed fairytales incapable of accomplishing the tasks assigned to childrens literature in the new epoch, while others defended their social value. The former condemned the fairytale as emblematic of the old regime, regarding it as a literary genre that contained elements of mysticism and religiosity and led children into the world of dreams impediments to the goal of introducing young readers to the themes and subjects of contemporary life. Opponents also believed that fairytales reflected the ruling-class ideology of the eras in which they were created. Since many tales preached loyalty to kings and included religious superstitions, numerous Soviet pedagogues regarded it as virtually criminal to introduce proletarian children to ideals that had no place in a socialist society. In her 1925 book Does a Proletarian Child Need a Fairytale?, the pedagogue E. V. Yanovskaya, one of the leading authorities on preschool education, focused on the fairytales role in child development from the perspective of class consciousness. She argued that the fairytale acted as an obstacle to the childs understanding of historical materialism and called for the abolition of the genre. Describing fairytales improbable (occasionally impossible) plot developments old men turning into young men, stupid people turning smart, and poor men becoming rich she concluded, The bourgeoisie needs these fairy tales to support their exploitation. Fairytales are needed so children who are hungry and cold can escape into the world of fantasy and feel imaginary happiness.3 Criticizing 79 the story of Cinderella, for example, Yanovskaya argued

that it was a political catastrophe in the upbringing of a new generation for children to have a sympathetic attitude toward this heroine.4 To replace the disgraced fairytale, Soviet writers introduced a new genre: the child-oriented production book. The production book addressed themes that reflected the importance of modernization in Soviet society, focusing on science and technology, the central components of the First Five Year Plan, construction and urbanization, and the conquest of nature. Several thematic groups developed within this genre, including stories about mass production, various professions and trades, different types of machinery, and agriculture. Many Soviet critics argued for the social importance of the themes. The most highly regarded theme was industrial development, while topics such as the production of cosmetic powder or womens fans were dismissed as unworthy of treatment in book form. Another requirement for production books was that they celebrate technologys progressive potential. This feature would help distinguish Soviet publications on modernizing, industrial themes from their pre-Revolutionary predecessors and Western counterparts, which, the Soviet critics of childrens literature presumed, described the oppressive and alienating labor of capitalist societies. In 1935, the Soviet critic G. Eikhler wrote:
The first and primary requirement for Soviet childrens books on science and technology is a clear demonstration of the principal difference between socialist and capitalist technology. The blast furnace of the Communist state is totally different from the one of capitalist society since in the West it furthers the exploitation of the working class while in the USSR it is a means of strengthening Socialism.5

During the second half of the 1920s, the production book became one of the most important art forms of the Constructivists, many of whom, unable to implement their innovative ideas in industry and architecture because of material scarcities, turned to graphic design. Their works combined ideas from abstract painting with experimental typography to create a new visual language of Soviet childrens book design. Among the first successful experiments was the work of two Moscow-based artists, Galina and Olga Chichagova, who in the 1920s were students of Aleksandr Rodchenko at VK hUTEMAS (Higher Artistic Technical Studios). Between 1923 and 1929, the Chichagova sisters produced around 20 books, many in collaboration with the writer N. G. Smirnov. Often created with a
opposite (counterclockwise from top): Cover of Patrols of the Harvest (Moscow: Detgiz, 1934), Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts (RGALI), Moscow. Design for Moscow Has a Plan (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia/OGIZ, 1932), Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts (RGALI), Moscow. Cover of Moscow Has a Plan (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia/OGIZ, 1932), The Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union, The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum (ZAM), Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Illustration for Morozhenoe (Ice Cream) (Leningrad: Raduga, 1925), The Riabov Collection , ZAM, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Acquired with the Irene Nintzel Memorial Fund.

compass and ruler, the sisters designs embraced the Constructivist machine aesthetic, featuring straight lines and schematic, elementary forms that resembled technical drawings and corresponded to mechanical printing. In the 1924 book Where Do Dishes Come From?, they depicted the stages of dish production. Although the workers are mentioned a number of times in the text, they are absent from the Chichagova sisters illustrations, which focus on machinery and production tools. While one contemporary reviewer described the book as quite boring and lifeless,6 another reviewer, Anna Grinberg, herself a childrens author, praised it as precise and to the point, devoid of sentimentality, and capable of holding a young readers interest without resorting to fables.7 Another Smirnov-Chichagova book, The Newspaper Explained to Children, describes the process of newspaper production and features the front page of an actual issue of the Soviet newspaper, Izvestiia. The books illustrations, which

are strongly reminiscent of Rodchenkos advertising designs, adhere to the typographic principles developed by the Constructivists, employing a rigid geometrical organization, asymmetry, and sans serif lettering. Only one of its images features a specific individual rather than a generalized type a photo-portrait of Leon Trotsky woven into the text that mentions his name. The illustrations of Vladimir Lebedev, another Soviet artist who produced important childrens books related to technology,

emphasized the two-dimensional nature of the page. In his 1927 illustrations for Samuil Marshaks How the Plane Made the Plane, the artist reveals the structure of the planes parts: some of the instruments are depicted in cross-section to show their interior components and demonstrate their uses or processes. In the cover design, the topographical character is dominant to the exclusion of any decorative feature. Yesterday and Today paradoxically uses the form of the fairytale to address the industrialization of Soviet society and the victory of progressive technology over traditional ways of life. Lebedevs illustrations for the book promote modernization, featuring poetic images of the new objects that are produced by contemporary technology to replace the old ones. Lebedev supervised a group of artists working at the Leningrad State Publishing House for Children (Detgiz) who completely changed the face of the new Soviet childrens book design. These artists included Evgenia Evenbakh, who

promoted during the later 1920s and 1930s, a time when many publishing houses organized business trips for their artists to industrial centers and collective farms. The artists Olga Deineko and Nikolai Troshin participated in these excursions, making the preliminary drawings for their production books directly at the factories they visited. Deineko and Troshins books informed young readers about metric units or explained where their cotton clothes, bread, shoes, and sugar originated. Soviet childrens book illustrators commonly employed found photographs as figurative elements, often utilizing the avant-garde technique of photomontage. For his illustrations to Nikolai Mislavskys book, Dneprostroi, which demonstrated via short stories and numerous photos the ongoing construction of a hydroelectric station, Lantzetti appropriated various archives of press photographs. The most successful production book for children about the First Five Year Plan was written by Mikhail Ilyin in 1931 and illustrated with photomontages by Mikhail Razulevich. This book, entitled Moscow Has a Plan, explained to its thirteen-yearold readers the processes of Soviet Socialist construction, representing the events described in the book through documentary photographs. Ilyin consistently compares the capitalist and socialist systems in favor of the latter. For example, one chapter of the book, entitled Crazy Country, criticizes the overproduction of food and consumer goods in the American economic system. A caption under a photograph depicting a pile of smashed cars reads: Among this pile of used cars there are perfectly good ones. These used cars were bombed from an airplane so they would become totally unusable. It happened in Chicago, USA . Those benefiting from burning the harvest, throwing out food, and destroying used cars are Mr. Fox and Mr. Pox, Ilyins fictional American capitalists. In contrast to these greedy, wasteful figures are the Soviet workers and peasants, who are pictured as happy individuals, proud of their active participation in the building of socialism. The latters portrayal is enhanced by Razulevichs cover design, which depicts workers as towering, powerful figures seen from below in the manner of Rodchenkos photographs. A whole generation of Soviet children received their introduction to socialist and capitalist economics by reading Ilyins book. The book was translated into English, Chinese, and Japanese, and published in over 20 countries. It caused somewhat of a stir in English left-wing circles. Other important subjects of photo-illustrated childrens books of the 1930s were the struggle for the collectivization of Soviet agriculture, the protection of the harvest, and the Young Pioneers important role in the achievement of these goals;
opposite (counterclockwise from top): Cover of How the Plane Made the Plane (Leningrad: Raduga, 1927). The George Riabov Collection of Russian Art, The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum (ZAM), Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Acquired with the Irene Nintzel Memorial Fund. Cover of How Beets Become Sugar (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatelstvo, 1930). Cover of The Newspaper Explained to Children, 1926. Photomechanical illustration (after a photograph) for Dneprostroi (Leningrad, GIZ, 1930), The George Riabov Collection, ZAM, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, David A. and Mildred H. Morse Art Acquisition Fund. Illustration for Where Do Dishes Come From? (Moscow/Petrograd: Gosizdat, 1924).

based many of her illustrations on close observations of objects and production processes. When Evenbakh worked on a cover design for the 1926 book Market, she bought a pike at Leningrads Andreevsky market and made many sketches of it. In order to create her illustrations for the book Porcelain Cup, Evenbakh carefully studied the process of porcelain production at the Lomonosov Porcelain Factory in Len81 ingrad. This type of intimate engagement was widely

these themes are presented in P. Postyshevs Patrols of the Harvest (1934). The books cover image contains a photo-portrait of a Young Pioneer intensely watching a collective farm field. The Pioneers facial expression exemplifies the political atmosphere at that time, with the constant search for enemies of Soviet people. As early as 1927, the Committee of Childrens Literature prohibited the release of 81% of the childrens books by Raduga, the most experimental publishing house, since, according to the Soviet authorities, they were contaminated by harmful bourgeois ideology. In 1934, the First Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers in Moscow mandated Socialist Realism as the only acceptable artistic method for Soviet literature and art. For book design, this signified a return to traditional, nonexperimental typography and design. In the following year the Communist Party issued a decree that placed all publishing houses specializing in childrens literature under the supervision of the Central Committee of the Komsomol (the Young Communist League), which established a system of strict censorship over childrens publications. The 1936 Pravda article, About Artist-Doubters, initiated a severe reaction against avant-garde experiments in childrens book design and forced them to employ more realistic and figurative styles.8 That same year, an editorial in the Childrens Literature journal severely criticized Lebedev for his formalist approach: Instead of concrete images of realistically rendered distinguished workers of the Soviet Union, Lebedev depicted schematic lifeless mannequins. In his drawings, the images of dull monsters have nothing in common with the most productive workers of the Soviet Union.9
A previous version of this paper was presented at the Museum of Modern Arts symposium The Russian Avant-Garde Book, 1910-1934 on 30 March 2002. 1 Sbornik dekretov i postanovlenii rabochego i krestianskogo pravitelstva po narodnomu obrazovaniiu (Moscow: Izdatelstvo APN, 1947), p. 156. 2 L. Kormchy, Zabytoe oruzhie, (O detskoi knige), Pravda (Moscow),17 February 1918, p. 3. 3 E. V. Yanovskaya, Nuzhna li skazka proletarskomu rebenku? [Does a Proletarian Child Need a Fairytale?], (Kharkov: Knigospilka, 1925), p. 35. 4 Ibid. 5 G. Eikhler, K voprosu o nauchno-tekhnicheskoi literature dlia detei, Detskaia literatura (Moscow: Izdanie kritiko-bibliograficheskogo instituta), no. 3, 1935, pp. 1-3. 6 Z. Dreizin, Retsenziia: Otkuda posuda? N. Smirnov, G. Chichagova i O. Chichagova in E. I. Stanchinskya and E.A. Flerina, eds, Iz opyta issledovatelskoi raboty po detskoi knige (Moscow: Doshkolnyi otdel Glavstsvosa, 1926), pp. 44-45. 7 Anna Grinberg, Knigi byvshie i knigi budushchie (dlia malenkikh detei), Pechat i revoliutsiia, nos. 5-6 (JuneSeptember, 1925), pp. 252-253. 8 O khudozhnikakh-pachkunakh, Pravda, 1 March 1936; Quoted in Detskaia literatura (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia), no. 3-4, 1936, pp. 40-42. 9 Editorial, Protiv formalizma i shtampa v illustratsiiakh k detskoi knige, Detskaia literatura (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia), no. 3-4, 1936, pp. 43-44. clockwise from top: Cover of Porcelain Cup (Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatelstvo, 1925), The George Riabov Collection of Russian Art, The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Illustration for The Travels of Charlie, (Moscow/Leningrad: Gosizdat, 1924). Cover of Vchera i segodnia [Yesterday and Today], (Leningrad: Raduga, 1925), The Riabov Collection, ZAM.

on readInG

WeNDy eWalD I have a son who is learning to read. Like any parent, I am fascinated by his development. At what point would those marks on a book page turn into a readable pattern? What if that didnt happen so easily? What would that mean? What would we do? When I was an ArtConText artist-in-residence at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum recently, Michelle Silvia, a special education teacher at Carl Lauro Elementary School in Providence, invited me to become a member of her class. Most of her third- to fifth-grade students struggle with reading and writing. I asked each of them to read for me in a makeshift studio in the literacy coachs office. I was interested in seeing the students physical reactions as they tackled a new book. We rigged my sons bicycle helmet with a tiny video camera, which was pointed at the students eyes as they read. Afterwards, each drew a web describing what reading means to them.

the doll Games

sHelley & Pamela jacksoN This excerpt from the Jacksons unfinished collaboration is edited and introduced by J. F. Bellwether, Ph.D. The Doll Games are a ground-breaking series of collaborative improvisations by Shelley and Pamela Jackson that took place in a private home in Berkeley, California, in the first half of the 1970s. The Doll Games cannot be precisely dated. 1970 and 1976 are generally understood to mark the limits of the period of greatest energy and invention, though any attempts to identify an inaugural moment are defeated by the nebulous nature of the phenomena under discussion. The Doll Games did not spring fully formed out of a Mattel box, but evolved by degrees out of earlier games (stuffed animals, Kleenex dolls, Kiddles). When did the Doll Games begin? As Babette Jackson has said, That depends on how you define the Doll Games. The ending point of the Doll Games is easier to locate, though too much weight has been placed on Shelley Jacksons famous dictum (1976): People are more interesting than dolls.1 The Games themselves, as well as the numerous documents and artifacts they generated, borrowed freely from literary and consumer culture. To make up a cast of characters comprised of swashbuckling heroines, tender heroes, bumbling he-men, whores and rous, the Jacksons used whatever material came to hand with bold directorial instincts and a sense of identity fluid in the extreme. Barbies kid sister Skipper got a butch haircut and later, clay breasts, and became the dashing heroine Aina; baby dolls were reimagined as obese adults; Little Red Riding Hood, sporting a moustache, became the lecherous wolf Harvey, the Doll Games enduring antihero. Similarly, the Games highly conventionalized narratives, employing stock scenarios such as pirates, the orphanage, the rebel princess, and running away, appropriated and remixed elements of the epic, comedy, romance, and farce. (Tragedy and gothic horror, though deliberately excluded from the doll world, visited the Doll Games from without, a point I make in Laurie Reborn: Death, Resurrection, and the Chaste Hermaphrodite in the Doll Games of Shelley and Pamela Jackson.2) Giving the postmodern pastiche a comradely nod but eschewing its cynicism, the Doll Games have confused some critics. Never afraid of acknowledging wish-fulfillment as narratives primum mobile, the Doll Games presented a resolutely cheerful Weltanschauung, leading some scholars to dismiss them as nave. However, this scholar would argue that this optimism was a radical gesture, given that the values the narratives affirmed were in stark contrast certainly to playground norms, but also to those of the larger society around them a contrast of which the artists were very much aware. The Doll Games emerged in Berkeley, California, at a time when gender, politics, race, and sexuality were fiercely and publicly debated. Indeed, as the dolls were taking their first steps toward literary history, the artists family was opening a feminist bookstore just down the street from Peoples Park. The Doll Games privately staged confrontations between androgynes and dainty ladies, their outlaw utopias and anarchic 86 child societies, and their uncompromising moral vision,

cannot be understood without reference to the larger public discourse in which they took place. The Doll Games held up a funhouse mirror to their times, and what survives of them are historical documents of a wobbly, comical sort. But the Doll Games transcend their epoch. Intricate, obsessional, moral, violent and sexual, funny and tragic, the Doll Games propose doll games as a true folk art form, renewing itself with every performance. Obedient to no rules except those its practitioners invented for themselves, completely collaborative, the Doll Games was a genuinely interactive art form. In this theater of two, every audience member was a co-creator. The Doll Games is also the title of a project the adult Jacksons undertook to document their childhood collaborations. It was conceived at different times as, variously, a multimedia art extravaganza, a work of postmodern cultural criticism, an open-to-the-public celebration of and clearing house for foul-mouthed ex-little girls, and a collection of thoughtful and rather poetic autobiographical essays. It is no wonder that it became none of these things, but languished as a collection of poorly copyedited fragments in the files of the Jacksons, while they went on with less ambiguous projects until I, as a tenacious admirer and scholar of the original Doll Games, persuaded them to abandon their files to the ministrations of my jiggling keyboard. As an independent scholar I have studied the Doll Games for some years; I feel immensely privileged to introduce this curious little world to a new audience. It is up to the reader to say whether a Doll Games configured and, yes, perhaps disfigured by an epigone can succeed where, by their own admission, the adult Jacksons own Doll Games failed. That abandoned project has been for some years a ruined edifice housing a ruined edifice: a mystery inside an enigma. It has haunted me. This fossil, this derelict, I have done my best to disensepulcher, and even, in so far as it is possible for one not privy to the secrets of the Doll Games first hand, to restore. I consider myself in the light of an archaeologist working two sites at once: a ruined city, and the ruined city it was built upon. Perhaps this work of mine will itself fall to ruins and become the object of a future archaeologists course of study, and perhaps the opus that results from that study will fall to ruins in turn and await a still more future scholar of endeavors past, and so on. Or perhaps in my own investigations I will penetrate so far into these worlds within worlds that I will find myself examining the back of my own head, having come full circle. Not the least peculiar object that has come down to us from that late, decadent period of the Doll Games so particularly rich in artifactual droppings, is a doll-sized mirror. A crude moustache, eyebrows, and shaggy do have been cut from electrical tape and arranged on the face of the mirror in such a way that a doll (or her handler) sees her face transformed. This influencing machine, fashioned with who can say what degree of knowingness about the theatricality of gender, this allpurpose Duchamp, is already tremulous with the implied moustache of Harvey, but mise en abyme when Harvey himself is the Narcissus, becomes delirious with the double spectacle/specularization of the moustache-implicit antagonizing and defeating the moustache-explicit. Which latter, to add exquisite layers of irony, is itself a disguise and a supplement, so that the transfigured Harvey in the mirror might

look to him/herself, if you will pardon this fancy that bestows sight on a doll, rather more feminine than usual, in his/her reduplicated facial decorations, because more like any other female in a false moustache, and therefore both less like him/herself (Harvey) and more like him/herself at once, restored to the Little Red Riding Hood that is hidden inside every wolf. As, in my minds eye, I look at a little girl looking at a doll looking at a reflection of a doll disguised and unveiled in the candid duplicity of this most extraordinary mirror, I may be excused, I hope, for experiencing a moment of vertigo, especially if I inform the reader that I too have a moustache, and for a moment seem to glimpse my own image in the glass. Is it possible that I am neither the critic nor the audience, but just the latest dummy of the Jackson girls that those pint-sized ventriloquists are throwing their voices out of the past, not to reveal their secrets, but to play yet another Doll Game? J. F. Bellwether, Ph.D.
1 I argue this point at greater length elsewhere; see Did the Doll Games Ever End? Postmodern Culture, MDXIXVIIIIIX. 2 Per/forma 11, Summer 1998.

87

Aina

Laurie

Josh McBig

Barbie

Aina Presented to S. Jackson under the name Fluff in Christmas of 1970 or 1971, Aina became the Doll Games first and finest heroine. A cheeky tomboy with cropped hair and a wide smile, Aina led the games through most of their finest years together with Laurie, her sidekick and romantic partner, playing such roles as runaway princess, orphan girl, and pirate apprentice with pluck and panache. Aina acquired a second head some years after the first, and alternated between the two thereafter. She was supplanted by identical twins Mara and Melanie in the later Doll Games; this is generally considered to mark the beginning of the decadent era, and of the Doll Games eventual decline. Laurie The Doll Games most beloved boy hero and its martyred saint, born into the Barbie family as little sister Skipper, passing into the hands of P. Jackson on Christmas of 1970 or 1971, and recast soon thereafter as Laurie, androgynous twin and chaste lover of Aina. Sensitive, lithe, comely, with flowing hair, Twist N Turn body, and poseable wrists, Laurie embodied the Doll Games romantic male ideal. Tragically mutilated during a makeover, the circumstances of which remain shrouded in mystery, his body, and perhaps some part of his spirit, lived on in his sometime rival, Jesse.

Josh McBig The Doll Games archetypical manly man with action arm, originally used to chop a plastic log (now lost). His name seems to gently parody his original identity as brawny lumberjack, Big Josh. In spite of his muscled torso, moustache, and the mature bulge in his plastic underwear, all of which marked him as masculine other to the youthful androgynes Laurie and Aina, and no doubt to the young Jacksons, Josh had a vulnerable quality. His legs dangled weakly from his loosely jointed hips, and later began to loosen and fall off, as did his hands and even eventually his left foot, making him a source of comedy, especially in the late farces, but also transforming him, in the end, into what we can only see as the Doll Games sorrowful, suffering Christ. Barbie Long snubbed by the Doll Games, a found Barbie was finally admitted in the late classical period, on the condition that she suffer her trademark blonde hair to be dyed black, and her legs to be amputated just below the knees. Unfortunately, the offensive blackface and ungainly leg stumps that resulted from these operations made her a laughingstock, and she never found a lasting place in the Doll Games; her name, if she was given one, has been forgotten.

Dawn

Harvey

Matron

Jesse

Dawn Dainty, wasp-waisted, and vain, reviled for her showy breasts and cheap feminine allure, Dawn was cast as the trashy bitch/slut of the Doll Games. Insinuating herself into the chaste plots of the virtuous heroes and heroines in order to seduce them into vice, Dawn was ritually vanquished and put in her place as the Doll Games cheerful moral order reasserted itself at the end of each game. A tendency, in keeping with her crass exhibitionism, to split in half, leaving her hips and legs naked on the ground, was deterred by a thick bandage of medical tape wrapped about her waist.

Matron The Doll Games Sadean baby doll, a cruel voluptuary who presided over the orphanages and boarding schools of the so-called nasty games, corrupting virtuous boy dolls and jealously tormenting rivals Aina, Mara, and Melanie. At once mother-substitute and gargantuan infant, Matron was a key element in the Doll Games studies of the maternal grotesque as well as the infant whore, while the surrogate families she ruled became Oedipal laboratories in which the Doll Games conducted many of their boldest experiments. Jesse

Harvey Poet and libertine, the Doll Games horny fop was originally a Little Red Riding Hood doll of unknown make. The combination of delicacy and swollen obscenity we see in his curious physique was matched by his personality: Harvey was at once tenderly lyrical and crudely predatory, both a hapless Romantic with perfumed hair and a goatish lout. His eternal amorous pursuit of the unreachable Mara and Melanie, interrupted by ferocious rutting with the likes of Dawn and Sue, was one of the great comic motifs of the late Doll Games.

Dreamy, gentle Jesse entered the Doll Games as a disembodied head, plundered along with Ainas second head (or Aina2) from a matched pair of Scandinavian costume dolls. Initially sharing Lauries body and taking turns with him, just as Aina2 shared the body of Aina1, Jesse took over Lauries body and his role at Lauries death. Much remains to be examined in the original foursome, that intriguing set of doubly matched pairs in which we can see the twinning motif of the Doll Games worked out in its most complex and fatal form: one of these four blonde lovers/rivals, the lamented Laurie, perished in an attempt to dye his hair black that was seemingly motivated by the wish to differentiate and decouple him from his siblings.

1 Bathroom commodities in molded plastic wood decorated with magic marker to resemble name brands, including Desitin lotion (in pump dispenser), Stridex medicated pads, Secret deodorant, Noxzema, Band-Aids, Johnsons Baby Cream, Suave Shampoo, Johnsons Baby Powder, Coppertone, Sucrets, Johnsons Dental Floss, [brand illegible] nasal spray, Buffered aspirin. Emblematic of the way the Doll Games consumed the larger culture, transforming and reconfiguring it for its own purposes, these jewel-like miniatures, none more than half an inch tall, are the products of thoroughly American dreamers. 2 Single platform sandal of blue styrofoam with straps of yellow and blue telephone wire securing the toe with an X but loose at the ankle, up which they are possibly intended to be crisscrossed, Roman style. This artifact exemplifies the Doll Games strategic appropriation and ironic framing of elements of the dominant culture (in this case, popular styles of the disco era). The care put into crafting an article that would have been spurned by the Doll Games androgynous heroines shows the complex interplay of desire and scorn in the Doll Games ongoing interrogation of femininity. Just whose foot did the cobbler have in mind? Like the bewildered prince in the fairy tale, we are left with a shoe and a question. 3 Lot of three daggers. 1. Steel dagger made of a round-headed nail, half of which has been hammered flat to make a straight, narrow blade; the sheath is faux leather, folded and stitched up one side with telephone wire, the end of which is left loose to serve as a strap. 2. Aluminum dagger made of a length of wire hammered flat. 3. Bamboo dagger, whittled flat and tapered toward the tip. The grip is colored green on one side; a short hand-guard is affixed to the blade with white medical cloth tape. The blade fits snugly inside its sheath, which is real leather folded and joined with more cloth tape. A thin strip of fraying green cloth is taped to the top of the sheath; this once formed a loop for hanging, but is torn close to the sheath on one end. Daggers, not all of them as finely crafted as these, were de rigueur for the heroes and heroines (above all the spunky Aina) of the Doll Games Pirate and Outlaw scenarios.

4 Padded bra of molded white gum adhesive covered in white medical gauze, with straps of yellow telephone wire. The practice of building prosthetic breasts and penises out of clay probably arose in response to the needs of the sexy games of the early late classical period, rather than out of a more general concern with anatomical correctness. Either way, clay parts were nearly universal in the later Doll Games, as no male doll was originally endowed with a penis, and female leads Aina, Mara, and Melanie had the smooth torsos of the pre-adolescent Skipper and Fluff. This removable prosthesis is particularly interesting for the way it highlights the fundamentally theatrical nature of gender, which like this breastladen bra can be donned or discarded at the dictates of desire and story line. 5 Camera. Rectangular block of wood painted black with a white strip accenting the front, where a nut and washer together form the lens. The viewfinder window is indicated on this side by a small rectangle of silver metallic paper or tape inset in the white strip and outlined in black. On the top of the camera the head of a small nail driven most of the way into the body of the camera represents the shutter release. On the back of the camera a small strip of yellow paper is glued to the center. On it is printed 1 1 to represent the exposure number. This camera, loaded with self-reflexive implications (and a full roll of film), also points to the voyeurism/exhibitionism so characteristic of Doll Games plots. 6 Eight assorted handbags, one purse and one backpack. The Duracell purse, semi-transparent purse on small brass bead-chain, was made from a container for hearing aid batteries. All others are of faux leather, most stitched with telephone wire. Two contain paper money, white rectangles each bearing a circled numeral 1 in pencil/black marker. Paradoxically, although the Doll Games showed a utopian disregard for money and a high scorn for the conventional appurtenances of femininity, purses were manufactured in quantities rivaled only by daggers. Was the vaginal pursepictured here in an almost military arraywaging a war with the phallic dagger over the contested territory of the Doll Games?

7 Tin SUCRETS box containing the assembled writings of the dolls in various styles and formats, including literary efforts (Dawns A true-life romance, Harveys Moments with Mara and ParakeetA flash), self-help publications (Dieting the Easy Way, by Dawn, Madame Dotrovthniles Hairdressing Book), and romantic ephemera from Dawns busy love life. Sucrets, a throat lozenge, was popular with the orally fixated Jacksons for its candy-like sweetness. Note that the only written texts generated within the primarily oral tradition of the Doll Games are preserved in what one might call a voice box! The resemblance of Sucrets to secrets will not escape the attention of the careful reader. 8 Moments with Mara by Harvey Poem printed in pencil (verse) and red magic marker (chorus) on inside of folded index card and signed by Harvey in pencil. On the other side of the card is a vivid semi-abstract mixed-media drawing (pencil, magic marker and white-out) with distinct sexual overtones, signed in purple marker by Harvey and with the title, Mara and I printed on it in red marker, as well as a redundant legend in purple identifying this as a picture (abstract). The poem is a stellar example of that combination of sentimentality and ribaldry so characteristic of Harvey. Displaying his gift for drawing as well as poesy, and signed on both sides, this may be the most precious item in the collection. Ah... Mara... to feel you, warm and yielding against my strong chest, is bliss Ah... Mara... The glorious oneness I feel with your innocent lips upon mine, which I never feel otherwise, (except when its Melanies, Dawns, Philisses, annes [sic] or Jennys lips) Ah... Mara... to feel warm and peaceful, after fucking long & vigorously with you, is an experience I will never forget Ah... Mara... My fair queen of love... I adore you.

homo bulla: an IntervIeW WIth sabIne mdersheIm

kris coue The year 1789 was revolutionary in more ways than one. It was the year that Andrew Pears arrived in London to start manufacturing and selling soap through his shop on Gerrard Street in the fashionable London suburb of Soho. But his soap was not only less abrasive on the skin: it also produced bubbles that lasted longer. Blowing bubbles had long been a childhood pastime but the longer lasting bubbles of Pears soap made bubble blowing more worthwhile. A century later, street peddlers and pitchmen were selling bubble-blowing kits as toys. At that time, the most common instrument used was a pipe. The well-known modern instrument a circle on a stick attached to the jar cap was pioneered in the early 1940s by Chemtoy, a chemical company that manufactured cleaning supplies. Chemtoy was acquired by a larger company, Tootsietoys, who put the bubble making toys into full-scale retail distribution by the latter part of the same decade. Bubble solution is still one of the best selling toys in the world today. Bubbles are made of very little, almost nothing, and it might seem that these evanescent, translucent nothings are not appropriate vessels for a range of heavy metaphysical meanings. But Sabine Mdersheim, professor in the German department at the University of Wisconsin, has been examining the very different meanings that bubbles have had in art and cultural history in the past three centuries. Kris Coue spoke to her by phone.

How did you become in interested in the theme of bubbles? I was interested in how the playing child is depicted in emblem books and other items that have emblematic or allegorical content. My research stays in art history and cultural history, though. It ends with the Pears soap advertisement from the late 19th century, the first time an artwork depicting a child blowing bubbles was used in an advertisement. When do children and their games enter art history? Children were depicted in artworks from the 15th century on. Its the Renaissance that pays attention to children for the first time. Children are depicted in earlier times but they are not shown as children; they are not shown playing. So the child as a theme comes very late in art history, mainly in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries. And even then, its more as an allegory of life or one stage of life. For the early modern period, there is a very circular and static idea of history or the circle of life; childhood is a very defined moment in the order of the world, in the cycle of life. For the early period as well the Middle Ages and the early modern period, the child is actually a small adult. The child would have been considered deficient in the qualities that define an adult or an adolescent. All the qualities are there but theyre still weak so their qualities and characteristics have not developed, although it would be inappropriate to use the word develop because thats a later concept that comes into pedagogy in the late 18th century through people like Rousseau and through reform pedagogy of the late 18th century. What we find, especially in the late 18th century, is that

92

people start thinking of childhood as a different, enviable stage of life where civilization has not yet regulated the persons life: its carefree and innocent, and that plays into the depictions of children. We have a dramatic change in the fabric of the family at that time. Earlier, children were a part of the adult world. They would just be around and learn whatever they had to learn but they were part of that environment. What we see in the late 18th century, with the families becoming smaller and, most importantly, with the fathers occupation being separated from the house so that the workshop is no longer in the same place as the house, is that we have a separation between the lives of the women, mothers, and children and the fathers who provide for the family. Thats a radical shift that takes place in the 18th century in terms of how we see motherhood and childhood. Now children have to be schooled; they have to learn how to interact and they have to learn all the skills they used to learn by doing and watching.
Was playing in general considered in a negative light? It was. It was seen as idleness and we dont yet have the modern idea that children learn through play. Most children wouldnt have had proper toys. They would find a stick or something. For example, in Dutch genre paintings, we see peasant and burgher children using things like pigs bladders, which they would fill with little peas and stones to make a rattle. The manufacturing of toys starts much later and proper toys are something that only the upper classes are able to afford. That is why soap bubbles were popular. They were available and cheap. How do these shifts affect the way bubbles are represented in the various periods? In 16th-century art and especially in Dutch 17th-century painting, bubbles are a moralizing emblem. The child is actually not at stake. The bubble blowing activity is what is important and the bubble is an allegory. Its very telling and probably surprising for someone today to see how children and bubbles were initially connected to death. The emblem was used as an allegory of fleeting time and the shortness of life, and as a reminder of futility and death. This is the emblem of Man as a bubble, homo bulla, which stems from the Roman adage coined by Varro and Lucian and adapted by Erasmus for his famous collection of proverbs Adagia, published in 1572. The proverbial saying refers to the brevity of the individual human life compared to Creation, history, and eternal life in the eschatological sense. It is a very common motif and you find example after example on its own or as part of a larger vanitas still life. The motif begins to show up all of a sudden but there are some prominent examples. Hendrik Goltziuss engraving Quis Evadet (1594) is typical of the genre: It shows a putto, leaning on a skull, who is blowing bubbles one of them already bursting with a small pipe in his hand that is stretched out into the air, holding a shell with soap water in the other hand. Smoke is rising from an altar in the background, and the inscription Quis Evadet (Who escapes?) is on a stone that looks like a gravestone.
opposite: David Bailly, Still Life, 1651 above: Sir John Everett Millais, Bubbles, 1886 below: Jean-Baptiste-Simon Chardin, The Soap Bubble, c. 1739

When are bubbles relieved of this heavy metaphysical burden? The shift is clearly marked by the Chardin painting The Soap Bubble from 1739. Its much more about personal melancholy, mourning ones own childhood being gone rather than the general idea of vanitas and fleeting time. This is a melancholy that was not possible in the 13th century, say, because childhood was a stage of deficiency that had to be overcome as quickly as possible. It was very common at that time to have a copperplate engraving made after a painting for larger distribution. The French copperplate of the Chardin has an inscription and a poem. The poem is far more conservative than what the picture allows. Its not clear who chose the apparently anonymous poem but it tries to make sense of the painting in the old way as a symbol of futility. But the shift is already there. The painting depicts children at an age where they might start regretting that their childhood is over. Thats already built into this painting. And is the Pears soap advertisement the culmination of this revaluation? Yes. The ad used Bubbles, an 1886 painting by Sir John Everett Millais depicting his own grandson. The painting was never meant to be commercialized but it was bought for publication in a newspaper and then sold to the Pears Soap company. The company sought permission from the painter to use it in an ad. Some artist historians say it was the first time an artwork was used for a mass advertisement. There was a moral outcry on the part of other artists that Millais was selling out, blurring art and commerce, etc. Its hard to say what Millais thought. He pretended at least that he didnt want this to happen but he did give his permission. Pears also wanted to enter a soap bar into the painting so that there are two versions of the painting. I think they used the original as a model for a new painting. We still have the original without the soap bar. How successful was the advertising campaign? Immensely. It is a very clever combination of two motifs. You have the childhood motif and nostalgia; the little boys clothes are actually from the late 18th century. But it was not too melancholic. Its one of the paintings where you see the shift to the depiction of childhood innocence. And the advertisement is still available today as a poster so its appeal has not worn off.

pages 95-98: Marcel Dzama, untitled drawings, 2002

95

96

97

98

FInders KeePers
micHael Witmore Whenever I look at rare book auction catalogues, I feel an odd, sentimental kind of despair. Old volumes appear in inventories like basketed children, newly delivered from some ancient stream. Just as the bundles come within reach, they disappear into the anonymous hands of a collector or the stacks of a research library. They go on to careers as precious objects or simply sit there in the rushes, waiting for someone to pick them up. As an academic, I am used to this feeling. I dont buy old books; I read them. But that doesnt mean I dont occasionally want to pluck them from the stream, especially when they are as fabulous as the book I saw up for auction recently:
BEAUCHASTEAU, FRANOIS MATHIEU CHASTELET DE. La Lyre du jeune Apollon, ou la Muse naissante du Petit de Beauchasteau. Paris: [Nicolas Foucault] for Charles de Sercy & Guillaume de Luynes , 1657. Two parts in one volume, 4, [45] leaves (including engraved title, engraved frontispiece representing the author at age 11, and printed title in red and black), [1] leaf (half-title), 280 (numbered 262) pp.; [4] leaves, 143 (numbered 127), [1] pp., [9] leaves, and 26 engraved portraits, one half-page allegorical plate and two armorial headpieces. Modern full calf blindtooled in period style; mounted on title verso is the armorial bookplate, dated 1701, of Algernon Capell, earl of Essex, Viscount Maldon, and Baron Capell of Hadham; the Lucius Wilmerding copy (his sale, New York, 29 October 1951, Lot 84). One quire browned due to quality of paper. FIRST EDITION of this remarkable collection of poems in praise of the most eminent men and women of the time, composed by the author between the ages of 8 and 12.

poet who had had his day in the sun and then toppled off the map before reaching the tender age of 15. Later it was rumored that Le Petit de Beauchasteau made his way to Persia, which for Enlightened Europeans stood nearly at the vanishing point of myth and history. The book, on the other hand, still exists (and has not, as far as I know, been purchased). For a mere $2,500, you can own what Cromwell could never quite get his hands on: the legacy of a youth who possessed both virtuosity and courtly fame. In doing so, you would join an illustrious line of keepers who may have pondered the mystery of the childs disappearance while studying the engraved portraits of 17th-century worthies that are interspersed among the poems. Particularly striking is the brightly colored frontispiece that depicts the author, at age 11, as the young Apollo surrounded by adoring (if somewhat startled) muses. In the background, just to the right of the childs strangely glowing head, one can glimpse the stand of Olympian woods through which Le Petit de Beauchasteau must have crept on his way to oblivion. The possibility of true disappearance, forestalled by the existence of this pretty little book, was just as real for other child prodigies of the age. Christian Henri Heinecken, for example, the wunderkind from Lbeck, was only three and a half when he amazed the king and queen of Denmark with his elegant disquisitions at court. At the time of his death (age four), Christian had studied sacred and profane history, geography, genealogy, anatomy, French, and Latin. In an image commemorating his demise, the young genius sits at a writing desk while a skeleton reaches over his shoulder to grasp a paper that reads: vivitur ingenio, cetera mortis erunt (through genius one lives, all the rest will pass away). Like the young Apollo, the child from Lbeck is destined to fade into the mist, but perhaps the legend of his accomplishments will remain. With a little help from death, he will hop off the high-backed chair and step smartly into the garden behind him, never to return.

When you want a book, the argot of its description becomes irresistible in its clinical precision. Leaves, frontispiece, quire, and prepare yourselves, bibliophiles a period, full calf cover that has been blindtooled. (I imagine some Tiresian artisan-sage working steadily in his bookbindery) At this point, it doesnt really matter that one quire is browned due to the quality of paper. The author of the volume, known in French as Le Petit de Beauchasteau, was one of the most celebrated child poets of the 17th century. I came across the description of his book by accident while doing research on child prodigies in 17th- century England. The French craze over Le Petit de Beauchasteau was matched, it turns out, by his enthusiastic reception in the English court in 1658. Apparently the child, then 13, was one of the favorites of Lord Protector Cromwell, the Puritan general who governed England during the aftermath of the Civil War. The English court invited the child (along with his father or perhaps an ecclesiastical keeper) to visit London that year, where the boy flattered his hosts by abjuring the Catholic religion. Cromwell was deeply impressed with the boy and wanted to keep him in London. But Le Petit de Beauchasteau slipped through his fingers and returned 99 to France. Three years later he disappeared, a young

Children, like legends and rare books, are often on the verge of disappearing, and it is for those who have left the kingdom of childhood that high-walled garden whose gate has always been left swinging in the background to wonder where theyve gone. Perhaps this is why a book like La Lyre de jeune Apollon commands such a high price today. Granted, prices for 17th-century books are already high because of their obvious historical value. But La Lyre is of particular interest to cultural historians because it documents another ages fascination with marvelous events and persons. Seventeenth-century libraries were full, in fact, of books and pamphlets breathlessly describing fiery armies gathering in the sky, corpses speaking out against their murderers, and children prophesying in the middle of the night in strange tongues. The 17th century was not afraid of marvels; they were the tabloid stuff of gossip as well as the elevated subject of scientific inquiry. It is said, for example, that King Charles I was thrilled to examine a man who had been brought to court to prove William Harveys theory of the circulation of the blood. The mans chest had been blown open in battle, but the wound had healed without entirely closing. At the direction of Harvey, the king carefully placed his fingers inside the wound to feel the beating

heart, which thanks to a paucity of nerve endings was virtually anaesthetized. (The story may be apocryphal.) We also hear stories of Robert Hooke a celebrated member of Londons Royal Society combing the woods for pieces of glowing tree bark in order to demonstrate the phenomenon of phosphorescence. Prodigies of all sorts were the prizes of curious minds, a reward for looking beyond the usual course of events for something truly spectacular. A man whose beating heart can be touched with the hand. A piece of bark that glows in the night. A child who writes and rhymes like an adult. Such phenomena were not so different for early modern Europeans. Child prodigies were yet another example of the way in which nature (via human reproduction) could occasionally surprise observers by producing something unusual. Like comets in the night sky, ultra-precocious children were a startling aberration from the usual course of nature, even if their overzealous parents were the most visible cause of their appearance on the world stage. But it seems that such extraordinary talents were destined to fade. While many prodigious children grew up to become even more talented adults witness Mozarts dizzying ascent in the European courts any particular childhood would always be on the wane. How long can a child prodigy remain a child? Le Petit de Beuachasteau may have been destined to disappear into an imaginary Persia, since it was only there that his fabulous talents could be preserved without parallel. But, just as easily, his childhood could have been understood as already passed, since prodigious children were already adults in crucial ways. As one of his admirers wrote in the volume: A le voir, on le croit enfant, A lour, on voit sa vieillesse. [To see him, one would think him a child, But hearing him, one recognizes that he is old.] The idea that children already possessed the knowledge and experience of those far older was already ensconced in the literature of the middle ages. Centuries before Wordsworth declared the child father to the man, medieval writers were celebrating the character of pueri senes or wise children who had superior powers of reasoning and theological discernment. Quite often it was the young Jesus who was the source of this image. The adolescent deity, confidently lecturing his skeptical audience on the steps of the temple, illustrated for medieval readers the sovereignty of knowledge when it was uncorrupted by sophistry or greed. A series of child preachers and prophets would follow in the God-childs ancient footsteps throughout the late 17th and 18th centuries. When rural Protestants in France lost their nerve and converted to Catholicism, for example, their children berated them in the middle of the night with long sermons about righteous long-suffering. Like conduits for unconscious guilt, the rustic Enfants de Dieu or Children of God lectured all comers in several languages during their midnight trances, denouncing their parents to crowds of onlookers and, eventually, to doctors and ecclesiastical 100 authorities sent from the city to investigate.

Another child prodigy, Jacqueline Pascale (sister of the mathematician Blaise), made her way to religion later in life. Also known as Sister Euphemia because of her piety in the convent at Port Royal, Jacqueline Pascale began as a poet who wrote her first epigrams and rondeaux at the age of twelve. Anxious to see her charge advance, Jacquelines benefactor financed the publication of a collection of her poems (now lost) entitled Vers de la petite Pascale [Poetry of the Little Pascale] (1638). As proof of her talents, the collection is said to have included several epigrams that the girl had composed in an ante-chamber while waiting to meet queen Anne of Austria. Suspected as an imposter, the young poet was asked to demonstrate her talents to the ladies of the court at St. Germain before she could be presented to the monarch in person. She acquitted herself handily with the following poem, composed spontaneously for a Madame de Hautefort: Beau chef-doeuvre de lunivers, Adorable object de mes vers, Nadmirez pas ma prompte posie. Votre oeil, que lunivers reconnot pour vainqueur, Ayant bien pu toucher soudainement mon coer, A pu dun meme coup toucher ma fantasie. [Beautiful masterpiece of the universe, Adored object of my verse, Do not admire my impromptu poetry. Your eye, which the world recognizes as its conqueror, (Able to strike suddenly at my very heart) Was able, in the same stroke, to touch my imagination.] Once admitted to the royal audience, Jacqueline became the darling of the royal couple and her verses survive in letters describing her exploits. She also proved a charming actress, a skill which proved invaluable a year later when while acting in a child troupe for the powerful Cardinal Richelieu Jacqueline utterly charmed the man who had recently taken measures against her father for sedition. Voil la petite Pascale, the Cardinal exclaimed when she approached him (somewhat timidly) after the performance. Standing before the great eagle-eyed prelate, she recited the following poem: Ne vous tonnez pas, incomparable Armand, Si jai mal content vos yeux et vos oreilles: Mon esprit agit de frayeurs sans pareilles, Interdit mon corps et voix et mouvement, Mais pour me render ici capable de vous plaire, Rappelez de lexil mon miserable pre. [Do not be shocked, excellent Armand, If I have not contented your eyes and ears: My soul, troubled with incomparable fears, Has inhibited my body, voice and gestures, But if I am capable of pleasing you here, Recall from exile my miserable father.] The voice of the young poet apparently melted the Cardinal, who ended up inviting her father to return from hiding without fear of harassment. (Why dont the publicly disgraced enlist children in

101

the project of public rehabilitation today? Where are the cherubic defenders of Martha Stewart and Kenneth Lay?) Jacquelines remarkable encounter with Richelieu can be repeated only because it appears in books the true keepers of childhood. Books grow old but they stay the same, and like the impromptu poetry of La petite Pascale, they lead their keepers back to the unsupervised nurseries of legend. Perhaps this is why Jacqueline, Henri, and Matthieu de Beauchasteau became more poignant as child prodigies when their exploits were connected with lost volumes or rare editions. Those volumes became pathways, lines of flight: swinging gates to ancient gardens that had been summarily abandoned. But what of the adults who read, write and collect these books? These exiles from the garden are an inverted form of the wise child aged in years but precociously infantile, attached to desires that cannot be fulfilled in the wide, wide world of adulthood. Consider, for example, the life of Victor Cousin, a 19th-century philosopher and scholar who collected all available records of Jacqueline Pascales performances and assembled them in a volume entitled, Jacqueline Pascale: premires tudes sur les femmes illustres et la socite du XVIIe sicle [Jacqueline Pascale: first studies of famous women and the society of the 17th century]. Cousin was as an intense man who, according to some, was romantically obsessed with one of his older and more risqu 17th-century subjects, the Duchess de Longueville, also known as the sinner of the Fronde. Once the editor of the works of Descartes and Plato, Cousin spent the later years of his career chronicling famous and infamous females of the 17th century. The Paris wits registered their disdain of Cousins barely concealed longing with the mock epitaph: Here lies Victor Cousin, the great philosopher, in love with the Duchess de Longueville, who died a century and a half before he was born. Perhaps he should have stuck with lecturing on truth and beauty.

In the albumen print portrait of Cousin that resides in the Getty collection, any trace of whimsy or sentiment has been banished. The philosophers right hand is tucked, like the Emperors, into the side of his buttoned suit. He is the visual opposite of the child prodigy: aging, grim, marked by the knowledge that life is short and scholarly work is long. Like Richelieu, Cousin seems to possess an implacable, probing eye. Here is the finder of lost words, the curator of childhood past. Whatever is lost in childhood his expression seems to say, can be found again. But found where? In books of course, like the one about La petite Pascale. When Cousin sits down to write his biography of young Jacqueline, he is creating an object that has already, in some crucial sense, gone missing. Books, like any particular childhood, are precious because they are only passingly present. They are written, in fact, at the moment when their contents are about to disappear. Which is why Cousins attempt to retrieve Jacquelines life and poems is so beguiling, even if it is ultimately misguided. He knows that books are tangible things they have blindtooled covers, glorious illustrations, faulty bindings and missing pages whereas childhood and memory are not. In the face of oblivion, the facts of youth must be gathered, accounts must be made. La petite Pascale will reach out to her audience once more, he thinks, this time from the bending leaves of a philosophers tome.
Bibliography Franois Mathieu Chastelet de Beauchasteau, La Lyre du jeune Apollon, ou la Muse naissante du Petit de Beauchasteau (Paris: [Nicolas Foucault] for Charles de Sercy & Guillaume de Luynes, 1657). For sale by E. K. Schreiber. Victor Cousin, Jacqueline Pascale: premires tudes sur les femmes illustres et la socite du XVIIme sicle (Paris: Didier, 1869). Victor Cousin, Madame de Longueville: la jeunesse de Madame de Longueville (Paris: Didier, 1853). Victor Cousin, Du Vrai, du beau et du bien (Paris: Didier, 1853). Michle Sacquin, ed., Le Printemps des genis: les enfants prodiges (Paris: Biliothque Nationale/Robert Laffont, 1993).

above: Frontispiece of Beauchasteaus book showing him as Apollo surrounded by the Muses. overleaf: Aura Rosenberg, Praxis Dr. Kssendrup, 1999.

103

sKabbettI, Peas, aPPle caKe, and Ice cream: recIPes bY chIldren

Skabbetti 41 41 41 41 41 sausages as big as your ear meatballs not as big orange potatoes or tomatoes skabbetti clean oil

Ice Cream 6 inches of cream 6 inches of milk Put everything in a box. Put it in the freezer for one whole half a hour. Then it starts turning into ice cream because thats how its made. Then you could eat it, but I wouldnt. I would put it in a truck and bring it to a milk store, and I would sell it to all the people for real money.

First you decide what will it be tonight sausages or meatballs? When your father tells you which one, then you cook. Mix the sauce in the blender so your elbows dont hurt. When the skabbetti is done from the cooking in the broiler (2 degrees or maybe 3), get it in the silver pan with holes in it by your spoon with holes in it. Then spread out the sauce. It serves your whole family and all your fathers friends.

Apple Cake 10 pounds of white food coloring 1 gallon of lovely good cake frosting 2 gallons of sugar 2 and 3 gallons of milk 1 gallon again of water 1 nice apple cake from the store Put them all together in a bowl. Mix it with a spoon on a long stick so you dont get your hands down in the dip. Stir it for a gallon long. Pour it in a round pot, and put it on the right side of the stove till the big hand is on the six. Then take them out and put them all together and well have cake. It makes the number of pieces for a party or for dessert because remember the cake is the same size as the pan. Note: If you dont like the frosting just scrape it off and no fussing!

Peas 3 2 1 2 2 potatoes big chickens (30 pounds) roast beef packages of corn big pumpkins

Cook them one at a time.

Source: Smashed Potatoes, ed. Jane G. Martel (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). The book is a compilation of recipes by children at the Francis J. Muraco Elementary School in Winchester, Massachusetts.

JuvenIlIa

a series of Maoist experimental films, featured the twins in his film Poto and Cabengo. Gorins film includes this excerpt from a hospital observation film, in which Grace (Poto) and Virginia (Cabengo) are heard speaking to one another while playing with utensils and baking pans. 7 HOLIDAZE, WHAT ARE YOU AFRAID OF? (1:52) The band Holidaze was formed by Gen Ken Montgomery to keep himself entertained when he visited his family on holidays. With the exception of Ken, the oldest member (Ann Marie, the lead singer) was 8 years old. The band jammed and made noise, creating songs as they went along. What are you afraid of? was created on the spot the genius of children. Ann Marie Kling (vocals), John Kling (percussion), Tina Kling (noise), Gen Ken (guitar). Recorded in 1982. 8 JULIA LOKTEV, DADABABIES (EXCERPT) (5:42) Excerpt from a radio adaptation of Tristan Tzaras First Celestial Adventure of Mr. Antipyrine, Fire Extinguisher (1916) read by a group of 12- and 13-year-olds under the direction of Julia Loktev. For this piece, the dadababies rewrote portions of the text and added stories, fragments, and sound effects of their own. Produced in 1991 for CKUT Montreal. 9 GREGORY WHITEHEAD, SCRATCH PEACE (5:10) A lone voice out of the dark. The song fragment was recorded on an old wax cylinder, and found its way to me through a series of accidents and digressions. The tone is ruptured innocence, with undertones of dread. Whos there?

cD curateD By BriaN coNley & cHristoPH cox

1 CATHARINE ECHOLS, BABY BABBLE (1:41) I made this recording primarily because my 14-and-a-half-month-old daughter Tessies babbling was so expressive. I conduct research on language development and find the babbling interesting from a scientific as well as from a personal perspective. One reason that period of babbling (researchers describe it as jargon) is of interest is that babbling exhibits influences of the native language during that period, both with regard to contour (i.e., prosody) and the particular vowel and consonant sounds; these effects are fairly subtle, however, and wouldnt necessarily be apparent to the average person. Additionally, I find that type of babbling intriguing because it sounds so much like a real conversation, but without real words. It seems as if children get the conversational patterns (or tune) of language even before they have words. Moreover, there seem to be individual differences, such that some children produce that type of babbling for a longer period of time and actually may be particularly focused on the tune of language (what one researcher has described as a gestalt approach to language learning), whereas other children seem to focus more on producing individual words (an analytic approach). I was curious about where Tessie might fall into those classifications as her language developed, and indeed she did show some tendencies associated with the gestalt pattern, though, like most children, she fell between the two extremes. 2 LUNA MONTGOMERY, WASHING MY HAIR (2:58) Three-year old Luna Montgomery recorded in Pennsylvania in 1993. This piece was later incorporated into Washing The Hare, which appeared on Psychogeographical Dip (GD Stereo, 1998). 3 QAUNAK MARTHA MEEKEEGA & TEMEGEAK PITAULASSIE, ASSALALAA (0:37) Assalalaa is an Inuit childrens game in which the participants wiggle and flop their limbs about while holding their breath. The one who lasts longest wins the game. Performed by Qaunak Martha Meekeega and Temegeak Pitaulassie of Kinngait (Cape Dorset) and recorded by Nicole Beaudry in 1974. Originally released on Inuit Games and Songs (UNESCO, 1991). 4 ELLEN BAND, SWINGING SINGS (EXCERPT) (3:31) Ellen Bands compositions often feature recordings of everyday sounds that are layered and orchestrated to produce what she calls a sonic surrealism. Swinging Sings uses the sounds of squeaking swings as the raw material for violin improvisations by Band and Adele Armin. Originally released on 90% Post Consumer Sound (XI Records, 2000), www.xirecords.org 5 EDMOND DEWAN, KIDS AT A RESEARCH LAB CONSOLE (2:39) Edmond Dewans son Brian explains: The tape was recorded by my father Edmond in 1969 at a research laboratory in Massachusetts. The children at the console are myself, my brother Ted Dewan, Scott McLeod, and Philip Petschek. The machine was not made to be a musical instrument; it was an apparatus used in a speech lab. The children, 5 to 8 years old, threw switches and turned knobs willy-nilly. The recording is the fruit of this activity. 6 POTO & CABENGO. PUTAYTUTAH (1:05) In 1977, at the age of 6, identical twins Virginia and Grace Kennedy were brought to Childrens Hospital of San Diego for observation. Their parents reported that, while the girls clearly understood both English and German (their mothers native tongue), they spoke only to one another and in what seemed to be a private

10 GEN KEN MONTGOMERY 1998, MASSIMO (MAX) (2:46) From a 1998 recording made at La Scuola, New York City, documenting a workshop for 2nd graders. Here, a boy enacts a miniature sonic drama, complete with sound effects and dialogue. Originally released on Sound and Silence in the 2nd Grade (ATMOTW Records), www.generatorsoundart.org. 11 TEDDY FIRE, HOMEWORK (2:03) Boston native Teddy Fire composed Homework as a response to a third grade assignment that called for students to compose two haiku. His first effort received no comment from the teacher, the second only the admonishment: Try harder! In 1987, 10-year old Teddy set his poems to music, backed by his half-brother Pablo Cuba on percussion and Phil Scher on guitar and bass. Homework first appeared on Teddy Fires debut 7 record, released by Eary Canal Plates in 1989. 12 JOHN OSWALD & SUSANNA HOOD, ALPHABIT (1:56) Susanna Hood performs an alphabet song, produced by John Oswald, that crosses a childrens insult song with the phonic contortions of sound poetry. Recorded in 2002 at the Mystery Lab in Toronto, Ontario. 13 THUUNDERBOY, AND THEY CALLED IT PUPPY (3:13) A dual turntable improvisation by 22-month-old Ted Conrad, a.k.a., Thuunderboy, recorded by his father, Minimalist music pioneer Tony Conrad, in 1973. The piece features Teds then-favorite record, Donny Osmonds chart-topping hit Puppy Love. Originally released on Thuunderboy! (Table of the Elements, 2002). See www.tableoftheelements.com. 14 LUNA MONTGOMERY, ANSWERING MACHINE MESSAGE (1:17) Eight-year-old Luna Montgomery calling from Coney Island, New York, to relay her adventure with a jellyfish. Recorded in 1998. 15 LANGLEY SCHOOLS MUSIC PROJECT, SPACE ODDITY (5:24) In 1976 and 1977, grade-school music teacher Hans Fenger recorded hundreds of students in a gymnasium in rural British Columbia, performing poignantly flawed

105

language. A year later, French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin, who had recently arrived in San Diego after working with Jean-Luc Godard on

renditions of pop classics by the Beach Boys, Paul McCartney, the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, and others. Here, the Langley kids give what David Bowie deemed an earnest, if lugubrious rendition of his 1969 meditation on extraterrestrial alienation. Produced for commercial issue by Irwin Chusid on The Langley Schools Music Project: Innocence and Despair (Bar/None, 2001). For more informations, see www.keyofz.com. Track courtesy Bar/None Records. 16 MAGGIE GREY & JESSIE TOMASSIE, AQAUSIQ AND KATAJJAIT (1:30) Katajjait (singular: katajjaq) are competitive throat games performed by the Inuit of northeast Canada. Two performers (usually women) stand close to one another, their faces almost touching, and volley words or vocables into each others mouths. The game is over when one of the performers laughs or stops for breath. These games are often played in groups; and performers are evaluated both on their endurance and on the tone quality they produce. Each of the two kattajait presented here are based on the aqausiq (childrens song) that precedes it. They were performed by Maggie Grey and Jessie Tomassie of Kangirsuk (Payne Bay) and recorded by Denise Harvey in 1975. Originally released on Inuit Games and Songs (UNESCO, 1991). 17 HELEN MIRRA, PAPER INTERLACING (3:08) In the 1830s, kindergarten inventor Friedrich Frbel created a set of materials and activities that he called gifts, basic natural and geometrical forms (spheres, cylinders, rings, cubes, sticks, needles, strips of paper, etc.) intended to foster discovery through experimentation. Helen Mirra uses Frbels gifts as sonic and musical devices, recording the sounds of the activities themselves and interpreting them on musical instruments (guitar, cello, nyckleharpe, and kemene). This piece, centered on the activity of folding a long strip of paper, features Mirra on guitar and Fred Lonberg-Holm on cello. Originally released on Field Geometry (Explain, 2000). 18 BILL FARRELL, RAT PUP ULTRASONIC VOCALIZATIONS (SLOWED DOWN) (2:53) Vocalizations recorded from 6- to 8-day-old infant rats during isolation from their mother and littermates at 15 degrees centigrade. These vocalizations are typically 40 to 50 kHz in frequency and hence fall well outside of the human hearing range. Mother rats, however, can hear these sounds. Here the sounds are played back at approximately 1/20 their normal speed, rendering the vocalizations audible to humans. 19 CATHARINE ECHOLS, STIMULI (0:49) These sounds are from a study in which Im investigating how infants extract words from the stream of speech. Thats a task that doesnt seem especially difficult to adults; we tend to think of spoken language as being like written language, with pauses between words. Speech actually is continuous (of course there are pauses between sentences and sometimes within sentences, e.g., when the speaker takes a breath, but certainly not between each of the words in a sentence). One gets a better sense of this when one listens to an unfamiliar language; its difficult to tell where one word ends and another begins. I have argued that infants may break into the task of identifying words in speech by first extracting the most salient syllables and ignoring the rest, rather than trying to identify boundaries between each of the words in a sentence. To test the prediction that stressed syllables are particularly likely to be extracted from speech and stored by infants, 9-month-old infants hear two sentences of nonsense words. (We use nonsense words to make sure that it really is a segmentation task for infants, that is, so that there is no way that they can solve the task by recognizing previously heard words.) 20 MINH HU & NHU QYNH, QUANG HA, CAO BANG (1:47) Along the rugged, mountainous northern border with China, Ty, Nng

Yao, Snh Chi, HMng and people of other tribes coexist. They are often seen throughout the region planting rice in the rocky terrain or coaxing their horses and carts to market. To pass time when things get slow, the Nng have developed a dialogue game (sli) as a form of public entertainment. One or two couples sing and engage in coy flirting back and forth all afternoon while a crowd gathers to admire the double entendres and potential for embarrassment. H Leu is a repertory of five two-voiced melodies to which new lyrics are improvised on the spot. Since the new texts are sung simultaneously, there is a gap between verses while the singers whisper to each other, conferring to decide the next lyric. Skilled singers are quick at inventing new words and can be devastating when their wits are sharpened. In this recording, made by Philip Blackburn, a pair of seven-year-old girls have learned H Leu in the traditional way, from their parents who have taught them standard phrases, before learning to invent new texts. From Stilling Time: Traditional Musics of Vietnam (Innova Recordings, 1994), www.innova.mu. 21 JOHN HUDAK, MUSIC FOR BABIES (10:00) My son, Kaspar, was born on July 1st, 1997. I had been listening to a lot of classical music, and wanted to make something that would be static and calming to play while I was sitting with him . . . something that wouldnt excite him, but would be interesting enough for me. I started recording some short sequences with a toy piano I had bought at a church sale. I then pieced together parts of the sequences into loops, so they repeated in similar, but varying patterns. The resultant piece wound up having what I would call a timeless center . . . where it could go on and on, ad infinitum. I also wound up playing the piece a lot for my daughter, Ursula, who was born on July 18th, 2000. Recorded in July 1997. 22 EGNEKNS DAUGHTER, THOSE MYSTERIES (5:00) Written by Ron and Russel Mael. Engineered by Bob Schaeffer. Luna Montgomery performing vocals, Michael Evans on pots, pans, and backing vocals, Lary 7 on toy pianos, bass, and backing vocals, Gen Ken Montgomery on laminator and backing vocals. Recorded at Plastikville in 1999.

CD engineered by Daniel Warner. Thanks to Maria Blondeel, Irwin Chusid, Jean-Pierre Gorin, David Scher, Walter Wilczynski, and Neil Young. CD photograph found on a street in Brooklyn.

106

model chIld: an IntervIeW WIth max berGer

josePH r. WoliN In 1998, Max Berger starred in his fifth-grade production of The Sound of Music. His mother took pictures of the performance. This would have been unremarkable save for the fact that Maxs mother is New York-based photographer Barbara Pollack, and this was merely the latest in a series of works that take Max as their inspiration. Pollacks signature photographic style all blurred movement, disorienting lack of focus, and saturated, almost lurid color seems to embody an uneasy relationship to the world. Her vision is myopic, verging on miasmic. That vision has developed over the course of the last decade and a half or so, as has Max. The Family of Men, an installation from 1999, portrayed a pre-school Max and his father, Joel, as a suffocating family unit. Dance Party (2001) captured the awkward interaction of his middle-school dance. Pollack has also made Max the subject of her videos. We see him as a small boy hounded by his camerawielding mother in Game Boy (1996/2001), as an adolescent intent on video-game murder in Perfect Dark (2001), and as a teenager, dissing Britney Spears with his friends, in Stronger (2002). Max, who just turned 15 years old, was interviewed at his home in Greenwich Village on 30 September 2002.
So, The Sound of Music was four years ago. What grade were you in? Fifth grade. It was the leaving-school school play, graduation school play. Because you went to middle school after? Yes. And you were the star? I was the guy star. And did you know that your mother was going to photograph you when you were in the play? Well, I thought she was going to take some pictures, which were like pictures that you put in a family photo album and say, Oh, he was so cute, not the kind-of blurry pictures. Do you think the pictures are a good representation of what you experienced being in the play? Well, I dont think any pictures of the play would actually show what the play is really like. It doesnt capture the nervousness of the kids. It just shows a still of the play. If you saw one still of a movie could you really know what the entire movie was about? No, but I think that the way your mother takes pictures gives you a feeling of being nervous in a school play, a lot more than a regular, in-focus photograph would. Well, yeah, I guess thats true. Its just that a normal still wouldnt really show nervousness, but since she has the blurriness in there: blurriness, sweating. The truth is, the 110 lights in The Sound of Music were really, really hot.

And during the parts where we had to be really close up to the hot light, people would be melting. The makeup would be drooling down their faces. The last scene, were all singing, The hills are alive with the sound of music, and were all kneeling in the light in front, like the lights they use for portraits in photographs. Imagine that right up in your face. And were all really sweaty, and really melting. Were all done, and then, then you get to take your bow. Bowing is nice. I like the bowing. Cause then youre done.
When your mother comes to your school and does a series like The Sound of Music or Dance Party, what happens? Well, at the time she photographed Dance Party, some people would point around and say, Hey, Max, is that your mom? And Id say, Yeah, Ive got no clue what shes doing here. And then Id go up to her and ask, Mom, what are you doing here? And then shed answer, Oh, Im just taking photographs for this project. Just pretend Im not there. And then shed continue taking pictures of me. And then Id say, Well, if its supposed to be a project of the dance, why dont you take pictures of other people at the dance besides me and my friends? Why dont you leave me and my friends alone? So then, of course, she would take lots and lots of pictures of other people. But then when it came down to eliminating the pictures, it usually ended up being the ones of me and my friends. And when you saw those pictures what did you think of them? I thought they were pretty cool. I mean, I like the way how all the light and hectic-ness of the party all goes into the pictures, like the glowsticks and the lighting effects and all those dust and smokescreen and all that stuff gets all blurred into one. But you still see the people. Do you think in general your mothers pictures represent your life? Oh, yeah. When I see the pictures, I think about a lot of stuff in my life. Because also it seems to me theres one show per era of my life. So, her first show, Family of Men, thats before I was in school. And the next show, The Sound of Music, thats elementary school. And when I see those pictures, I remember all my friends and all the people I knew from elementary school. Then theres Dance Party. It shows all the hectic-ness of middle school. Then I see all my friends from middle school. And I only assume that maybe sometime therell be a show on high school, probably. Do you remember when you first became aware that your mother was taking pictures of you? Oh, that goes way back when. Maybe four years old, I pieced it all together. I figured out that she had this system where I would always crawl out my crib and I would open the door to get into my parents room. And then when I opened the door, immediately a flash of light would go off in my eyes. Like she knew I was going to be there. And then later, my mom would be taking
previous page (left): Barbara Pollack, Sound of Music #6, 1999 previous page (right): Barbara Pollack, Sound of Music #1, 1999 opposite: Barbara Pollack, Sound of Music #5, 1999 Courtesy Esso Gallery

me to these things, which later I learned were called openings, and there would be pictures of me about to open a door, with a flash in my eye!
And did you think that was unusual? Well, I didnt think it was that unusual. I thought it was just normal pictures. Why is it, you think, that you inspire your mother so much? Because she created me. I came from her. She went through nine months of pain and suffering, so That was fifteen years ago. But youre still a compelling subject for her. Why do you think that is? Because. What would she rather take pictures of than her own son?

some relIcs oF chIldhood

roDNey PHilliPs Saved by mothers, fathers, siblings, teachers, and by accident, the letters of children are ubiquitous and almost never interesting. Never, that is unless the child evolved into an adult of genius. Then they seem endlessly fascinating, immediately attractive documents, predicative of the future and redolent with the talent that was to be, or poignant indicators of later tragedy or psychopathology. Paper relics, they sometimes hold an almost holy remembrance of golden ages, better times, funnier faces. Let each child have thats in our care/ as much neurosis as the child can bear, quipped W. H. Auden, who as a wistful grownup was always conscious of his happier childhood as a sort of Eden in limestone. Baudelaire, of course, felt that genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with mans physical means to express itself. Others would look at the relationship between childhood and art (drawing, writing, painting, etc.) as less useful, or even entirely hindering. Samuel Butler, in his appropriately titled The Way of All Flesh, was extreme in his association of childhood with the less-than-perfect: Could any death be so horrible as birth? Or any decrepitude so awful as childhood in a happy united Godfearing family? In equally merry misanthropy 300 years later, Dorothy Parker exclaimed: All those writers who write about their childhood! Gentle God, if I wrote about mine you wouldnt sit in the same room with me. In any case, writing and childhood seem inevitably entwined, arising from a common source, which is not quite the same as believing everything is everything. It is much more hopeful. There is probably no more perfect specimen of all this than the child/poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was indeed a privileged example of both conditions, being the only male among five offspring of Sir Timothy and Elizabeth Shelley, newly wealthy Sussex landowners. Some might claim that Shelley remained a child until his early, tragic death by drowning at age 30. And there are many who would aver that this is a good thing (remaining a child, not dying) and the source of his powerfully affecting art. The earliest surviving poetry by Shelley is a piece entitled A Cat in Distress, written, according to a note on the extant manuscript (penned by his sister Elizabeth), at 10 years of age. Elizabeth, who would have been eight at the time, drew the illustrating cat as well. The poem comes down to us through a younger sister, Hellen, who described it in a letter to Thomas J. Hogg, Shelleys friend and early biographer: I have in my possession a very early effusion of Bysshes, with a cat painted on the top of the sheet, I will try and find it: but there is not promise of future excellence in the lines, the versification is defective. Perhaps, but there is evidence of the themes and variations of his later work, including a somewhat imperious, radical concern with the welfare of the local tenant farmers. The young poets interest in the fauna of the country estate is reflected, as are his budding republican feelings. That this poem was addressed to one sister who copied it in order to give the copy to another sister not only adds charm to the document, but is representative of the of the close-knit family of siblings, of whom Shelley was the oldest. In 112 fact, before the age of 10, when he was sent to a boys

school at Syon House Academy, Shelley was exclusively in the company of women, in particular his adoring sisters who (like his wife Mary afterward), occasionally collaborated with Shelley on his projects. Elizabeth was the Cazire of the book they published together in 1810, at ages 18 and 16, Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire. Amusements of the young Shelleys included storytelling and ritual fires for ghost summoning. Shelley was also given to using his sisters in a variety of scientific experiments, including curing them of colds and flu by passing electricity through their bodies. (Mary Shelleys Frankenstein was inspired, in part, by a parallel interest in galvanism.) In his later years, this prodigy of freethinking was given to writing democrat, great lover of mankind and atheist after his name on hotel ledgers. Its not a great leap from Shelley to Christopher Isherwood, as Isherwoods childhood was in many ways similar to Shelleys, including adoring parents, an Elizabethan mansion, and education at elite boarding schools. Like Shelleys, Isherwoods childhood was beset by visitations of ghostly figures and a secret, haunted attic. Perhaps this explains the eerie drawing of his baby brother, Richard, in Christophers letter of January 1912 to his mother. The eight-year-old was writing from Marple, his grandparents estate, where at least two of his early visions occurred. His landscapes of the frozen park are smartly, if a little dissonantly placed to liven up the letter to his mother, who was presumably visiting Isherwoods father at the military base in Ireland where the family was soon to move. In 1914, Christopher left Ireland to attend St. Edmunds Preparatory School in Surrey, where the next year he met the grubby Wystan Auden. For his part, the young W. H. Auden was an inveterate rambler and hiker in the landscapes of Surrey. In any number of photographs of the young Auden and his brother, they are posed in a field, near a tree, beside a cliff or in another natural environment. Audens childhood was, like Isherwoods, generally happy, and included a mother who kept journals and notes about her children. She was a great encourager of her son, writing down his first works (The Adventures of a Daddie and Mummie: I and II) for him when he was four and five years old. In another journal, written in the spring of 1917 on a trip to the Isle of Wright with her two sons, Constance Rosalie Bicknell Auden has pasted her handmade Programme for a Grand Concert. on 24 April 1917. The program includes a series of piano works, played by the ten-year-old Auden, and several duets with his mother. The earliest extant piece of Audens writing is also in the same notebook. On another plane altogether, the childhood of Jean-Louis Ti Jean Kerouac in Lowell, Massachusetts seems gruesomely American. The child of French-Canadians Leo and Gabrielle Kerouac, his upbringing was strictly working class. Kerouac wrote his first novel at age 11, probably in February 1933. He also created horse-racing newspapers and a complex group of records and statistics surrounding his own fantasy baseball league. Obsessively devoted to his mother, to whom he sent many handmade valentines, Kerouac describes his relationship with her and his brother in the introduction to Lonesome Traveler, a collection of road-trip related pieces: Influenced by older brother Gerard Kerouac who died at age 9 in 1926 when I was 4, was great painter and drawer in childhood (he was) (also said to be saint by nuns) (recorded in novel Visions of

Gerard). My father was completely honest man full of gaiety; soured in last years over Roosevelt and World War II and died of cancer of the spleen. Mother still living, I live with her a kind of monastic life that has enabled me to write as much as I did. The earliest surviving example of his writing is a crayon valentine to his mother, February 14, 1933. He was 11, the age at which he wrote his first novel. He also created horse-racing newspapers and a complex collection of records surrounding his own fantasy baseball league. These include a group of team cards, drawn in pencil and colored pencil on paper sometime in 1936. Kerouac was 14 when he created these cards, but had been playing the game for years, and was to play it until the end of his life. The names of the players, like those of the teams, appear to be fictional except for Pancho Villa, whom Kerouac placed on the Boston Fords in center field. His story about a rookie pitcher, Ronnie on the Mound, which appeared in Esquire in May of 1958, even included names of fantasy baseball league players and managers. Kerouacs obsession with the Fords and Cadillacs seems to fit his literary personality, but it is hard to imagine Sylvia Plath as a child drawing large cats. The cat and dog she drew (at an age between 10 and 12) for her brother Warren, who was apparently sick in bed, seem neither comforting nor comfortable. On the other hand, there is ironic awareness in her self-caricature as one who smiles and is polite. She was at this point, still the perfect A student and perfect daughter, despite that her fathers death in October of 1940 must have nearly destroyed her childhood world, transmuting her early years into a beautiful, inaccessible, obsolete, a fine white flying myth. This drawing was made sometime during the period when the Plath family lived in Wellesley, probably the most difficult time of Sylvias childhood. Her mother had her 114 put back a grade, believing that she didnt make friends

easily and was too intense in her studies. Of course the fivefoot-nine-inch fifth grader was taller than most of the boys in her class, and she went on to a triumphant series of accomplishments during her years at Philips Junior High School and Bradford High School. But the neurotic child remained, to reach her apotheosis as Ariel.
Sources W. H. Auden, Letter to Lord Byron, The English Auden: Poems, Essays, and Dramatic Writings, 1927-1939 (New York: Random House, 1978). Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, section 3, LArt Romantique (Paris: Calmann-Lvy, 1885). Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh, first published 1903, (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1964). Thomas Jefferson Hogg, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley (London: Edward Moxon, 1858). Jack Kerouac, Lonesome Traveller (New York: Grove/Atlantic, 1972). Dorothy Parker, interview in Writers at Work, First Series, ed. Malcolm Cowley (New York: Paris Review, 1958). Sylvia Plath, Ocean 1212-W, 1962, first published in Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (London: Faber and Faber, 1977).

previous page (above): Christopher Isherwoods letter to his mother, January 1912. previous page (below): Percy Bysshe Shelleys A Cat in Distress, ca. 1804. Courtesy The Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and his Circle, The New York Public Library.. above: Sylvia Plaths drawings, ca. 1943. opposite (left to right): Kerouacs Valentines Day card to his mother, 14 February 1933; Team cards from Kerouacs fantasy baseball league, ca. 1936; Portrait of the Beatnik as a young boy. All images courtesy The New York Public Library.

sculPture From draWInG

cHristo & Billy HalloWay As a professional modelmaker, I have spent 25 years turning other peoples two-dimensional drawings into three-dimensional objects. When working with an artist, my job is often to interpret his three-dimensional intention from a two-dimensional sketch. Working with my son Billy was exciting for me for many reasons, especially because he is an extension of myself. I have watched him draw and create things over the past few years, and the rate at which he develops is phenomenal. I try to not dominate or influence his choice of project or medium but instead provide as many options for him to work with as possible. He has a wide array of interests, but his staples seem to be trains, whales, ships, planes, and dinosaurs. Billy will frequently start work on one project only to have it transform into another. For example, he will begin to draw an engine for a new variety of train but it will transform into a dinosaur. At the end of the day, however, the dinosaurs have actually become whales in disguise, and the train has become a new, more technologically advanced Concorde plane flying to the moon. Because of our close relationship, there is a lot of exchange of ideas. He is very outspoken and stubborn about his likes and dislikes. Once I finished the sculpture, he knew exactly how it should be painted black with red spots. I disagreed. Christo Halloway The drawing is of a T-rex. His name is Tirano Terry Ferry. He used purple because the marker he found was purple and he wanted Tirano Terry Ferry to be purple. He likes the sculpture but not the final color. He would like to do this again, possibly of a blue whale. He plans to be a paleontologist, a marine biologist, a train engineer, or a policeman when he grows up. He is looking forward to seeing the magazine so he can show it to his teacher and friends. Billy Halloway, as related by Christo Halloway
Cabinet wishes to thank Vincent Mazeau for coordinating this project.

116

118

the rouGh GuIde: Favell lee mortImers The CounTries of europe DesCribeD
toDD PruzaN Great Britain has boasted countless offbeat childrens authors over the centuries Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear and C.S. Lewis come to mind but today, few scholars know much about the one who may have been the very weirdest of all. In the mid19 th century, Favell Lee Mortimer published 16 bestselling educational, evangelical books, eventually selling millions of copies, and terrifying Protestant children in 38 languages. Her innovative second-person voice evoked the Sunday lecture of a severely absolutist teacher, and her mission teaching Protestant children about their world, and spreading Jesus Christs word was offset by a worldview that today seems intolerant, and even cruel. How kind of God it was to give you a body! I hope that your body will not get hurt, Mortimer admonished in the opening chapter of 1833s The Peep of Day, her first and bestknown book. Will your bones break? Yes, they would, if you were to fall down from a high place, or if a cart were to go over them. If a great box were to fall on your head, your head would be crushed. If you were to fall out of the window, your neck would be broken. Such passages led Mortimers own grandniece, Rosalind Constable, to recall The Peep of Day in The New Yorker in 1950 as one of the most outspokenly sadistic childrens books ever written. The Peep of Day and its 1837 sequel, Line Upon Line, are the only Mortimer titles widely available today. The text of Peeps 2000 edition, published by the Scottish house Christian Focus Publications, is still true to Mortimers hair-raising original. Ive had a little chuckle myself at one or two things, notes Catherine MacKenzie, childrens editor at Christian Focus, in an e-mail. But it was written for children from a different century. Her material is Biblically accurate. The same cannot be said for three guidebooks Mortimer published later in her career, blasting the foolish customs and filthy habits of virtually every culture in the world in 1849s The Countries of Europe Described, 1852s Far Off: Asia and Australia Described, and 1854s Far Off: Africa and America Described. Her you-are-there format belies the evidence that she never set foot beyond Englands green hills, but she offset her lack of reporting skills with an unassailable authority about Christs love even for the poor Negro slave, the wild Indian, and the stupid Hottentot. Mortimers writing on Europe (later retitled Near Home) might amuse adults unearthing rare copies today; even contemporary kids, weighed down with global trivia, might find Mortimer more entertaining than frightening: drollest people in the world. They are very kind and goodnatured when pleased, but if affronted, are filled with rage. The poor men are fond of drinking, and keeping company with their friends; but they often quarrel with them, and then they call them names and throw things at them, and cover them with bruises. You see they are passionate; though they wish to be kind, they forget themselves and act in a very 119 wicked manner.
IRELAND . What sort of people are the Irish? The merriest,

GERMANY. The ladies are very industrious, and wherever they

go, they take their knitting. They are as fond of their knittingneedles as the gentlemen are of their pipes. The number of stockings they make would surprise you. How much better to knit than to smoke! When they are at home, the ladies spend a great deal of time in cooking; they also spin, and have a great deal of linen of their own spinning, locked up in their great chests. Can they do nothing but knit, and cook, and spin? Yes, they can play on the piano, and the harp, and sing very sweetly. But they are not fond of reading useful books. When they read, it is novels about people who have never lived. It would be better to read nothing than such books.
ICELAND . In the country, as you travel along, you will often see

a farm-house, with a church, and a few huts near. The farmhouse looks neat outside; but if you go into the house, you will soon wish to run out again it is so dark and dirty. If you grope along the dark passage, you will come to a room at the end full of beds, and full of litter. The people heap wooden dishes, spinning-wheels, and old clothes in confusion upon the beds; and they never dust the furniture, nor scrub, nor even sweep the rooms. The little windows in the roof, not bigger than your hand, will not open. The house is never aired. What an unpleasant place!
ITALY. What sort of people live in Italy? They are very dark,

because the sun shines so much. They have dark hair and eyes, not those bright, merry, black eyes you see in France, but more sad and thoughtful eyes. They may well be sad, for their country is in a sad state. It is full of fine houses and palaces empty and going to decay but that is not the worst part the people are ignorant and wicked. Their religion is the Roman Catholic. It is dreadful to think what a number of murders are committed in Italy. Even boys, instead of fighting with their hands, take up stones to throw at each other, and men take out their knives and cut each other. Others, instead of showing their anger at the time, keep it in, and watch for an opportunity of murdering their enemy. The houses are very dirty, especially the staircase and the doorway; but the Italians think more of painting their ceilings and placing statues in their halls than of keeping their houses clean. The English think a clean home is better than a pretty one.
PORTUGAL. No people in Europe are as clumsy and awkward

with their hands as the Portuguese. It is curious to see how badly the carpenters make boxes, and the smiths make keys. The carts are very ill-made; they are drawn by two oxen, and as they move slowly along, the wheels make a loud creaking noise, which almost stuns people of other countries; but the Portuguese do not mind the sound, and say it is of use, for then there will be no danger of two carts meeting in the narrow roads.
opposite: Emil from Germany. next page: Deta from Switzerland. Dolls by Annette Himstedt. Photos: Enver Hirsch. More nationalities available at annettehimstedt.com

Portugal, like Spain, is filled with robbers; the laws are not obeyed, and the wicked often escape without being punished. The religion is Roman Catholic, and the people are very ignorant. A traveller once sat down by a stone fountain close to the road, that he might talk to all the people who came there to draw water. He went there every day, and talked to a great many; and he found that few had ever heard that there was such a book as the Bible, and none had ever seen it. How ignorant people must be, who have never been taught what God says in the Bible! They do not know who can keep them safe, or make them happy.
TURKEY. This land is very different from all the other countries

Even Englands increasingly urban Protestants could not escape Mortimers harsh glare. Her intentions of bringing religion to ragged children may have been pure but today, the world her guidebooks brought to young readers seems to have been a very lonely planet.

in Europe and this is the reason: it has a different religion. All the other countries are called Christian, but Turkey is a Mahomedan country. What is that? Once there was a man named Mahomet, who told people he was a prophet sent from God; but he was a false prophet, and a wicked man. He wrote a book called the Koran, and filled it with foolish stories, and absurd laws, and horrible lies.
THE JEWS . The Jews are not idle like the Poles, but try in

every way to get money. It is they who keep all the inns and wretched inns they are, because the Jews are very dirty. See that large shed under which horses and carts are kept. At one end there is a sort of house. It is the inn. Go in at that low covered doorway, taking care not to hit your head (unless you are only a little boy or girl). The floor has no carpet, nor even boards no nor bricks it is the bare earth. There are boards in one corner with some straw on them. Would you rather sleep there or in that little dark room beyond? Look in; it is full of dirty beds, and children of all sizes. When will the Jews believe in Him who came into their land eighteen hundred years ago? It is because they do not believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, that God allows them to be so unhappy. Mortimers distrust for those who worshipped differently betrays her fear of the unknown, a phobia that extended beyond religion and actually embodied Britains 19th-century industrial-agrarian tensions. Mortimer, born into society, was ill-suited to the country life she chose. In the Times of London in 1933, her nephew recalled how her eccentric care killed several animals at her western England orphanage: She once tried washing a donkey by driving it into the sea (with its cart attached), and later dried a freshly bathed lamb by burying it up to its nostrils in sand. Still, Europes increasingly urban destiny horrified Mortimer particularly near home. Is London a pleasant city? she instructed her young readers. No; because there is so much fog and smoke. This makes it dark and black. The poor people live in narrow alleys or streets, and in close places called courts, into which no carriages can drive. There are schools for little ragged children such as could not go to a neat Sunday school. These children have been taught at home to steal, and lie, and swear; but some of them listen to their kind teachers while they are telling them about God, and Christ, 120 and heaven and hell.

121