If the Eskimos, as the old saw goes, have a hundred words for "snow," I must have nearly as many for "tired." I'm weary, enervated, blah. So it was no coincidence that I finally got around to reading American Nervousness 1903 which had been stalled in my mental books-to-read cue for quite a while. An exploration of neurasthenia, an affliction that took on epidemic proportions at the end of the 19th and turn of the 20th centuries, the book inspired my visual collection of ennui, above.
Neurasthenia was a nebulous mental and physical diagnosis that covered a lot of territory from hysteria, anhedonia, and "brain collapse" to premature baldness, fatigue and hot flashes. There was a whole constellation of debilitating symptoms for which fainting couches, air baths, nerve tonics, electric trusses and the like purported to relieve. The concept of nerve disease was introduced as a medical condition in 1869 but became more prevalent as the 19th century drew to a close. George M Beard published one of first full-length studies of neurasthenia in 1881 and called it “American Nervousness.” He and other neurologists of the time developed theories of health and disease which were based on folk beliefs of bodily energy, and were expressed 'economic' terms.
“The idea of “dissipation” thus is based on a notion of dispersed rather then directed nerve force, spent without any possible return on the investment. Dissipation eventually led to “decadence,” the death and decay of nerve centers in the individual, and the death and decay of civilization at the social level.” The end result of processes of dissipation, or of any unwise nervous investment, was disease.
Conversely if patients were sensitive and refined enough to begin with, neurasthenia could be brought on by simple exposure to the hectic pace and excessive stimuli of modern life. Paradoxically, the disease could thus be a sign of moral laxity–or extreme moral sensitivity. It was seen as a particularly American syndrome, made manifest in this country as it roared into the 20th century-- straining at the continental frontiers, overrun by waves of immigration, stretched by imperialist expansion and bristling with industrial might. But certainly any thinking man (or woman) of the Mauve Decade could be struck by taedium vitae or acedie. I always saw it as the purview of European aristocratic families in decline, or Europeans anyway– from the relative vigor of Wilde's jaded drawing room wits, through Huysmans' languid decadents, to Egon Scheile's stricken husks...
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Some saw it as practically the natural given state for women. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's famous short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, portrays the worsening mental state of the narrator as she endures the "rest cure," enforced inactivity and seclusion based on real-life prescriptions of the well-known 19th century physician, S. Weir Mitchell. Gilman theorized that a proscribed daily existence made women feel their own backwardness–cramped and useless. "Confined to the home," Gilman says, "she begins to fill and overfill it with the effort of individual expression... and overfilling the house, like the overspending of energy is unhealthy." Hmmm. Interior decorating as neurotic displacement...
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Next up in my mental book cue: the intriguingly titled "Philosophy of Disenchantment" by decadent wit and aesthete, Edgar Saltus.Images: Ennui, 1914 Walter Sickert; The Lute, 1903 Thomas Wilmer Dewing; CMS Reading by Gaslight, 1879 William Stott; Woman in Plaid Shawl, 1872 Susan MacDowell Eakins; Yellow Scale, 1907 František Kupka; Tree of Nervous Illness, 1881 George Beard.
I've always liked the Haughwout Building. I remember in the early '90s when it was ghostly and blackened and the clock face stood out sharply; I had sort of liked it that way. The original color of the building, as described in a contemporary account, was "Turkish drab" though now its a brilliant warm ecru. Today I went and took a few photos.
The store, numbers 488-492 Broadway, was built at the corner of Broome Street in 1856 for retailer Eder Vreeland Haughwout (evidently pronouned "HOW-out"). It was designed by John Plant Gaynor, who was inspired by the Sansovino Library in Venice, although if I'd read he'd been inspired by French pastry I would believe that, too. The facade, one of two of the earliest surviving examples of cast iron architecture, is constructed from components fabricated by Daniel Badger's Architectural Iron Works and it is completely self-supporting. With 5 floors above ground, and 2 below, the building featured the first safely viable passenger elevator, by Otis. The elevator has long since been removed.
Like many of the retail "palaces" lining Broadway in the 19th century the store not only displayed and sold luxury items, it manufactured them as well. Haughwout's offered silver, antiques, bronzes, Parian statuettes and other goods on the main floor, glass, mirrors and china on the second , chandeliers on the third. Upper floors housed part of the manufactory with scores of women gilding and painting china, and men working on metalware. According to this site, Mary Todd Lincoln shopped at Haughwout's in 1861 and bought a set of custom china for the White House– an American eagle surrounded by a wide mauve border.
Saved from the path of Robert Moses' Lower Manhattan Expressway nightmare, the building was landmarked (surprising early) in 1965.
Top two illustrations from Art and the Empire City, New York 1825-1861, Yale University Press and Metropolitan Museum; b/w images from Tom Fletcher's NYC architecture
I've been bogged down. I've been thinking about what it is, exactly, I want to say about collecting. Rather, about living with, and amongst, clutter, stuff, things. Historically, I have not been a collector so much as a diffuse acquirer– flea market paintings? of course, 19th century paper ephemera?, yes! pottery? green please, antique shoe lasts, why not, mysterious wooden tools, pieces of bone and horn, hotel silver... and on and on. Each item, at time of purchase or discovery, feeling like an imperative. Each item inspiring a sense, too, of self-important grandiosity: This must come home with someone who understands the significance! someone who appreciates the singular peculiarity! This, this, is the possession of someone who rejects decor from a catalog!
Yet lately I've had to confront increasingly ambivalent feelings about these acquisitions and my life amongst them. What do these things say about me? What does it mean to live in... a display?
Meanwhile, I had a wonderful visit from my friend Robert, collage artist, Master Printer at Bowne & Co., and quasi-magical personage (that's R, above, who came calling armed with scissors, a bone folder and a large bag). "Oh, your apartment! It's like a Joseph Cornell box!" he exclaimed and part of me was overjoyed. Robert, I should explain, is the King of Things. He has a hidden studio in the West Village where he works, amidst piles of oddments, on his collages. A stop there, as described in a previous post:
A highlight of the evening was a chance to see Robert Warner's basement workshop in the Village. Though there was a little hesitation on his part-- too many people? delicate sensibilities likely to be offended? embarrassing things left in view? rat poison? -- we prevailed. Down the stairs, through a door, along a narrow dilapidated corridor, right, through another door, out into a small rear courtyard and to the left, by the wooden stairs. We all crowded into the workshop past jars of lamp black and springs, boxes marked "marbles" or "better photographs", piles of papers, Howdy Doody heads, books, toy eyeglasses, drawers open and quietly exploding, and an ample sprinkling of glitter.
During his visit with me Robert extracted from his bag, one by one, some of his recent works-in-progress and we proceeded to discuss:
"Oh, chandelier crystals?"
"Yes, glitter is perfect there."
"Perhaps a postcard, instead?"
"I'm not sure about Myopia"
He pointed to virtually every detail of my apartment, obvious and not so, that had thrilled me when back I first saw it (way too many) years ago. He picked out, without prompt, each of the prized objets that I had framed, hung, piled, leaned or fussed over. Then he brought out a box for me filled with antique bits, collage pieces and inspiration. Right then, and for a while after, I felt an unequivocal joy for things.
Its been several months since the last highlight and one might say its long overdue.
Here, an unintentional collection of library cards. Each remained, long after its obsolescence, tucked in a book I borrowed or bought. I like that they show a range of data-recording technology--from hand-written to type-written, rubber stamp to various arcane punch card configurations. Each of the printed cards gives off a blustery officiousness with their "do not remove"-s and their penalties. The red-edged card at upper right is positively bristling with overly involved methodology and procedure.
The "Alluring Problem" with its red accent and boldly graphic star is irresistible but I think my favorite is the small printed and punched ticket at lower left. The holes give a delicate visual syncopation to the printed statements which, although they are emphatically not, remind me of a haiku.
There's something quietly affecting about the card on lower right. Each month and year stamped and noted, each entry a remnant of long-ago readers whose paths crossed ever so lightly at that point--with that book. Had that card lain dormant in the back of Fashions in American Typography, in the basement of the Brooklyn Library, since June 29 or so, 1950, until I requested it be retrieved?
Am I waxing too poetic-- too precious --to think of each of these little pieces of paper as a small lifeline, an attempt to safeguard their charge when released out in the world?
Devotion to the past [is] one of the more disastrous forms of unrequited love.
Susan Sontag "Unguided Tour," quoted in The Past is a Foreign Country David Lowenthal
I was rereading an article from the April 16th New Yorker about an Amazonian tribe living in virtual isolation for thousands of years. Their language is, in certain respects, bafflingly "simple" and does not seem to adhere to current linguistic paradigms. They have no numbers beyond 2 or 3, no fixed color terms, no abstract ideas, no descriptive clauses, no perfect tense, no deep memory. That's what caught my attention:
Everett pointed to the word xibipío as a clue to how the Pirahã perceive reality solely according to what exists within the boundaries of their direct experience...“When someone walks around a bend in the river, the Pirahã say that the person has not simply gone away but xibipío—‘gone out of experience,’ ” Everett said. “They use the same phrase when a candle flame flickers. The light ‘goes in and out of experience.’ ” ...Everett...called it the “immediacy-of-experience principle.”
Essentially, they live eternally in the present. If something goes out of vision, it is out of experience and no longer of concern. This strikes me as humorously appealing only because, well, I need a little of that. It's very self-help and Power of Now, no?
In my endless preparation/procrastination for another post I've been lightly trying my hand at some Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History, on recommendation from the frighteningly erudite Dylan Trigg of side effects. Although the reading is for my next post, this seemed particularly apt for me, right now:
The person who cannot set himself down on the crest of the moment, forgetting everything from the past, who is not capable of standing on a single point, like a goddess of victory, without dizziness or fear, will never know what happiness is.
The more reading I do, the more my once-discreet ideas on collecting, on the nature of the "museum", and on the past--personal, psychical--are now collapsing inwards and piling up. How ridiculous: to be caught in a stasis formulating ideas about the Past for some time in the future...
The incredible portraits of Pirahã, at top, by Martin Schoeller seemed so 'timeless' they, ironically, reminded me of the inscrutable 2500 year old "archaic smile" of Ancient Greek art (kouros, and a figure from Ephesus)
When the blackout occurred a couple years ago I was not altogether unhappy with the thought of spending time by candlelight. The street was thrillingly dark that evening (the street light normally filling my apartment with an insistent yellow glare having been temporarily extinguished) and I was rather excited to get out the few candles I had, group them in front of a mirror, and try reading...
In the back of my mind, I'd always wondered about the centuries played out in relative darkness. What would life by candlelight or gaslight have been like? Before gaslight, once night fell, the vast majority of people lived tethered to a small circumscribed orbit of light. A light fueled by a list of substances that must have been frankly repellent in practice–animal fat, whale oil, bacon skimmings, dried manure, fish oil, kerosene. The smell and the wavering and sputtering flame and...dear God, the smell! An entire room would never never have been fully lit and the ceiling and corners would be perennially in shadow. What about color? Paintings, decor, textile--all had very different properties viewed under pre-incandescent light.
I came across a fascinating exhibit that was produced jointly by Carnegie Mellon and the Van Gogh Museum in Holland in 2001: "The exhibition displays Vincent Van Gogh’s Gauguin’s Chair (1888), consecutively lit with the spectra of daylight, an open gas flame, gas light with a mantle, and the light of an electric arc lamp, demonstrating how the different light sources alter our perception of the painting’s colors."
Blue, he remembered, takes on an artificial green tint by candlelight; if a dark blue like indigo or cobalt, it becomes black; if pale it turns to grey; and soft and true like turquoise, it goes dull and cold... The pearl greys lose their blue sheen and are metamorphosed into a dirty white; the browns become cold and sleepy... (Des Esseintes ponders the effects of light on color in Huysmans' Au Rebours)
Gas was introduced as public street lighting in London, on January 28, 1807, and it was a revolutionary thing. (Baltimore was the first US city to employ gas, in 1816.) It freed the night. Occasionally, I still notice the stubs of former gas "outlets" in Brooklyn brownstones and wonder what indoor life was like under those hissing fixtures.
An article in the New Yorker a couple months ago, "The Dark Side", discussed light pollution and the fact that most people, especially in the eastern US, have never truly experienced nighttime darkness. The "perfect" 'pre-industrial' night is designated Class 1 on something called the Bortle Dark Sky scale. That elusive state is described with this striking detail: "certain regions of the Milky Way cast obvious diffuse shadows on the ground." The Milky Way-- which I have never seen-- casting a shadow sounds magical and nearly impossible to visualize. In that setting I can imagine a full moon's light could be stunningly luminous-- which renders the nighttime landscape, above, as not all that fantastical. "The very darkest places in the continental United States today,"according to the New Yorker article, "are almost never darker than Class 2 ... The sky above New York City is Class 9." To see the night sky as Galileo knew it (or as anyone pre-1820s or so would have known it) one would have to travel to the mountains of Peru or the Australian outback....
And what about that evening during the blackout, when I lit my candles and put the mirror to clever use? I'd love to say I found it soothing and meditative. Instead I reflexively kept getting up to turn on a light. I ended that little experiment early and went to sleep feeling slightly claustrophobic with a hint of panic.
Addendum: today's New York Times reports on the renovated Wrightsman Galleries of French Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan, which sound amazing...
In some rooms the light is lowered to an almost nocturnal darkness in order to show how Rococo artists used reflective, shiny surfaces — gilded metal ornaments; gold-leafed, carved elements; mirrors; polished lacquer — not only as luxurious objects but also to make the most of candlelight.The darker rooms appear to be lighted only by candles, with realistically flickering bulbs in chandeliers and sconces.
images: La Tour, Magdalene, 1636; Heimbach, Men in a Studio; Hogarth, Night, 1738; Joseph Wright of Derby, Dovedale by Moonlight, 1784, Heimbach, Nighttime Banquet, 164o; Degas, Interior, 1868/9
I was not aware of Carlo Bugatti when I saw (a version of) this desk (top) at the Art+Design Show at the Armory this past Thursday. The name was vaguely familiar–race cars wasn't it?* or motorcycles? But not furniture. Certainly not this slightly disturbing crenellated fantasy in walnut, copper, vellum, and mother of pearl. Why disturbing? because it was almost animalistic. And I couldn't place it– definitely Arts and Crafts-ish, sort of Eastlakean, but as though interpreted by an alien. Japanese? Indian Raj? Moorish? Arab? Yes!
Bugatti was born in Milan in 1856. He studied at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts and began making furniture in the 1880s. The earlier furniture's rectilinear asymmetry and exotic materials--encrusted and embellished--recalled the Orientalism of the time; the later sinuous forms were influenced by Art Nouveau. But the aggressively hybrid vision was truly, singularly his. Gaudi is the only other designer of the time I can think of who was as profoundly bizarre.
Bugatti gained international attention at the Exposition of Decorative Arts in Turin in 1902 with his "Snail Room." The tantalizing but maddeningly indistinct photo directly above is all I could find of the exhibit. His "Cobra chairs" (above the Snail image, right), created for the Turin exhibit, are entirely covered in vellum-- as was much of his later furniture. At some point his furniture also graced the Waldorf Astoria’s Turkish Salon, where, it is said, coffee was served by an actual Turk complete with a boy attendant...
Extravagant, daring, bewildering, excessive and fascinating, Bugatti's work was renowned for meticulous craftsmanship and eccentricity but was never truly popular. Perhaps because, as the Cleveland Museum of Art notes, it was extremely "challenging."
His design star was occluded by the time he died, in relative obscurity, in 1940.
*His son Ettore went on to found the automobile company.
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Bugatti's designs are like ceremonial furnishings for some alien royal court. Something about the spikey "tribal" regalia draping many of Bugatti's pieces reminds me of Frank Frazetta.
If the Eskimos, as the old saw goes, have a hundred words for "snow," I must have nearly as many for "tired." I'm weary, enervated, blah. So it was no coincidence that I finally got around to reading American Nervousness 1903 which had been stalled in my mental books-to-read cue for quite a while. An exploration of neurasthenia, an affliction that took on epidemic proportions at the end of the 19th and turn of the 20th centuries, the book inspired my visual collection of ennui, above.
