Orientalism

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

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

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

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

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

Tuesday with Mori

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

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

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

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

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

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

Abraham Rice, struck by lightening, 1777
Framingham, Massachusetts

Lollipop modernism and other things

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

images of 2 columbus from Tom Fletcher's NY Architecture

** —— ** —— ** ——

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

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

cringe-worthy

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

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

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

Language Log makes this interesting connection, quoting another blogger:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anne
horny!

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

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

other choices, other rooms

Maybe I've become too attuned to 'New New Realism' in photography, fashion and otherwise? The flashlit anti-glamour of Juergen Teller for instance, or the mundane, affectless, almost documentary style of... well, if I knew slightly more about contemporary photography I could reel off the pertinent example. Martin Parr? Am I reaching here?: I was looking at real estate listings online and somehow ended up on Foxtons. (I am not looking for properties in the more far-flung reaches of Brooklyn so you get an idea, here, of how I waste my time.) The more I poked around, the more I was struck by the interior shots of each house. Presented without judgment, the rooms are neatened and posed as best they can be in all their beruffled (or benighted) glory. I think it's the naive aspirational quality mixed with a discomforting airlessness that I find interesting. It reminds me of a Sears studio portrait. Or perhaps its just the decor choices...

Addendum: "New York Loving Brit" (who under no circumstances should be confused with "New York Brit") writes that these scenes remind him of David Lynch. I can see where he's going with that. Although I wasn't initially seeing anything unnerving about these rooms, just a leaden unpleasantness, I've found a reference that seems to take things from the mundane to the menacing: Gregor Schneider.

Schneider, a German artist, has marshaled an ongoing 20-year work called "Dead House"– a transformation of his boyhood home in which he replicated and reconfigured spaces, creating false walls and dead end corridors. Another work Die Familie Schneider was an installation created in 2 identical houses in London's East End (image above). Members of the public were allowed to let themselves into the houses individually, by key, to view the homes and observe the inhabitants who went about their tasks– personal, unsavory, monotonous– unresponsive and unseeing. Schneider, as he is summed up: "Under his hand, the domestic environment becomes the site of an unrelenting existential confrontation." Amazing. I think I might have to get the book, if I can stand it...

Images, properties from Foxtons: Bed Stuy, Old Mill Basin, Cypress Hill, Marine Park, Sunset Park

for the repose of needles

February 8th marks the observance of Harikuyo, Japan's Festival of Broken Needles. A celebration thought to be several hundred years old (I've read it originated in the Edo period, or 16th century-19th century, and have also read that it stretches back to the 4th century AD!) Harikuyo is a memorial service and a ritual of thanks and respect for the tools of sewing. Broken sewing needles and bent pins that gave their "lives" during the past year are laid to rest in a bed of ritual tofu and buried or dropped at sea. Observed in shrines and temples across Japan, it reflects Shintoist traditions of veneration of the spirits of the dead and prayers said for the repose of souls.

Shintoism aspires to an ideal of harmony with nature and states that all things– living and nonliving – contains a kami or "spiritual essence" (sometimes translated as "god," "soul" or "spirit").

When a tool (in this case, a needle) has done its part– finished its valued service–it is relegated to a sacred place, and in some small sense, it is not forgotten.

image: "pin forest" by aleash, from worth1000.com

the tumultuous (18)60s

I recently finished This Republic of Suffering, the new book by Drew Gilpin Faust, about this country's relentless confrontations with death during the Civil War and its toll on the collective psyche. (That title is taken from–of all people–Frederick Law Olmsted and his description of the wounded and dying at Union hospital ships.) An unreservedly glowing review in last Sunday's Times surprised me a bit. While the book is a great achievement – it is thorough and rigorously detailed without being exhausting, it is sensitively crafted and intelligently presented– I still expected more.

Background: The Civil War's final tally stood at approximately 620,000 military deaths (I believe that figure does not contain what we would now call "collateral damage"), out of a total national population of about 31.5 million. It is no wonder that a Confederate soldier, quoted in the book, felt that, "death reigned with universal sway, ruling homes and lives." Nearly every household would have been mourning someone. Faust demonstrates, dramatically, that the experience of living through those years was limned by the presence of death—materially, politically, intellectually, and spiritually. Geoffrey Ward, in the Times review:

When the war began, the Union Army had no burial details, no graves registration units, no means to notify next of kin, no provision for decent burial, no systematic way to identify or count the dead, no national cemeteries in which to bury them....Fathers and brothers wandered battlefields in search of missing relatives.... So did wives and mothers dressed in black.

“The war’s staggering human cost demanded a new sense of national destiny,” says Faust. The lasting impact of that sacrifice “created the modern American union,” she writes, “not just by ensuring national survival, but by shaping enduring national structures and commitments.” It also, she posits, changed Americans' understanding of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. But the book largely documents, often in moving first-hand accounts, what I believe were immediate tangibilities of the time: the struggle to account for the losses, to attend to the casualties, to reconcile death with the act of dying "well" (ars moriendi, or the good Christian death). Faust even discusses the arcane rituals of mourning (though she doesn't define what the differences between "heavy", "full", and "half" mourning are). When I finished reading, though, I was left wondering why I didn't have a better understanding of the cultural and psychological impact of all this. (Perhaps I just need to read more about the war!)

America in the 1860s witnessed mass killing, assassination, racial enmity, political strife and rioting, what effect did that tumult have on literature, or social change or even religion? The shadows of events of that magnitude don't pass away quietly. They are absorbed, instilled, repressed, passed on or refuted. What did that generation of children without fathers grow up to think? This country was literally rent apart. What was Europe thinking at the time? That this Great Experiment was imploding, surely.

Americans saw actual photographs of war--the battlefields, the dead-- for the first time, not an artist's rendering. In 1862, Mathew Brady shocked the public with an exhibit in his New York gallery, "The Dead of Antietam." Within hours after it was confirmed on September 19th that the Confederates had withdrawn, Brady's cameramen Alexander Gardner and James F. Gibson began to record the aftermath and within a month the results were hanging on the walls. The New York Times said that if Brady "has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the streets, he has done something very like it... he has brought home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war."
(An interesting modern take on the "birth of photojournalism" on the battlefield at Antietam here.) How is it that religion and sentimentality became all the more entrenched in American society as a result? When the (mostly European, granted) wounded of WWI came back broken and disfigured 50 some odd years later their faces and bodies haunted painting, the graphic arts, and literature. Disillusionment, in some sense, propelled Modernity. How is it that this country faced the "terrible reality' of the Civil War and seemed to turn around.

The last Union body was recovered and reburied in 1871. The last Civil War veteran (though there is some dispute) died in 1956. In 2003 a man recounted stories about his father's experience during the Civil War for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. It is history, but not totally out of reach. Faust's creates a vividness from a compilation of incident and fact. The book that traces the social and cultural legacy of those moments, that's the book I'd like to read next.

Images: from Library of Congress, a very romantic portrait of Confederate prisoners at Gettysburg, July, 1863 (detail; Union casualties at Battle of Gettysburg, July 1, 1863; from old-picture.com, Civil War wounded, prepared by War Department, Surgeon General's Office.