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CABINETA quArterly mAgAzine of Art And culture issue 9 cHildHood Winter 2002/03 us $8 cAnAdA $13 uK £6 columns 9 ThE clEan Room / suPERFlY mE To ThE moon DaviD serlin Race, physiology, and the culture of aerospace science 13 lEFToVERs / aT dEaTh’s 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 Carême, 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 TV’s FaIlEd uToPIan VIsIon: an InTERVIEW WITh daRa BIRnBaum nicolás guagnini Televisual activism and the revolution that never was 41 ThaddEus cahIll’s “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 mónIca dE la ToRRE regine BasHa How cultural attachés sell their countries 48 saVE YouR FamIlY Jay WorTHingTon Readers’ photos, protected until 2047 chIldhood 51 FRöBEl 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 children’s 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 mödERshEIm 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. Wolin On being photographed. aPPlE caKE. Constantly. Kerouac. 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. Isherwood. and Shelley 116 119 aRTIsT PRojEcT: sculPTuRE FRom dRaWInG Billy & cHrisTo HalloWay ThE RouGh GuIdE: FaVEll lEE moRTImER’s The CounTries of europe DesCribeD ToDD pruzan A xenophobic travelogue for Victorian tots and PosTcaRd Babies of the World. KössEndRuP aura rosenBerg sKaBBETTI. By your mother. PEas. 112 somE RElIcs oF chIldhood roDney pHillips Early works by Auden. Plath. Unite! . translators. To process your credit card. For more information. Allen S. 2002 courtesy Casey Kaplan Gallery . Mexico $60. 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Blackburn runs the Innova Recordings new-music CD label and co-founded the Sonic Circuits International Electronic Music Festival. New York-based artist and independent producer Dara Birnbaum has achieved international recognition within the arts. She is senior lecturer in Visual Arts and Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Chicago. Jim O’Rourke. Ted Gannon is a composer. Catharine H. Vincent Mazeau is an artist/designer living and working in New York. including the Paris Review and Fence. CDs and a book – received an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award. 2002) and Storied City: A Children’s Book Guide to New York City (Dutton. Dick. Director of Research at Mystery Laboratory. In 1994. Christoph Cox teaches philosophy and contemporary music at Hampshire College in Amherst. She is the author of Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood (Thames & Hudson. John Hudak. spurring some of the most controversial discussions in contemporary media exploration. D. He is a contributing editor of Cabinet. Her collaborative works are in the collections of major museums and the subject of seven books. son of Barbara Pollack and Joel Berger. based in Dobbs Ferry. Echols is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas. a senior research associate at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. sound designer. Jeffrey Kastner is a Brooklyn-based writer and senior editor of Cabinet. Max Berger. 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. Sabine Mödersheim is Assistant Professor at the Department of German at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Austin. Samuel Kastner is a Brooklyn-based artist. His next project. and by Andréhn-Schiptjenko Gallery. Threadwaxing Space and Esso Gallery. but transform them into ghost-like afterimages. has just been released by Granary Books. He edits the Collins Library (collinslibrary. Bill Farrell is doing post-doctoral research in behavioral neuroscience at the University of Texas. of A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing. His poems have appeared in numerous journals. parlor music and mini-architecture in Brooklyn. Ella Bea Kim and Adeline Kim live with him in Park Slope. and Patchwork Girl. Her video installation work will be exhibited at the Whitney Museum this spring. Her first solo CD. a collection of short stories. Philip Blackburn. Nicolás Guagnini is an artist and writer living in New York. a book about crossing Cuba lengthwise. he developed the art of “plunderphonics. Christo Halloway was born in Zimbabwe in 1953. He is based in New York. on CDs and on answering machines between New York and Italy. Julia Loktev is a filmmaker and video installation artist based in New York. Austin. an experimental and independent film production company. Wendy Ewald is artist-in-residence at the John Hope Franklin Center.conTriBuTors Ellen Band is a composer and sound artist based in Somerville. creates sonic distillations of the sounds that surround him in his everyday life. 2000). a hypertext novel. She is the recipient of the American Film Institute’s prestigious Maya Deren Award. He is the author. In his late teens. Byron Kim is an artist with a studio in Greenpoint. She is the former Cultural Affairs Officer for the Canadian Consulate in New York. Susanna Hood is a choreographer. where he lives and works. She is represented by Casey Kaplan Gallery. among numerous other awards from international film and video festivals. Stockholm. He is a founding member of Big Room. and actor based in Toronto. Inc. She is working on a book about Philip K. Brian Dewan makes filmstrips. Her voice has been heard on the radio. Lisa Sigal (also an artist). turbulence. England. a New York-based association of artists and designers. Rodney Phillips is Director of Humanities and Social Sciences at the New York Public Library. was released by XI Records in 2000. Norman Brosterman is the author of Inventing Kindergarten (Harry N. producer. He lives near the water in Brooklyn. is an actress/singer/musician/ dancer/ performance artist and seventh grader. the first sound art gallery in New York City.com) for McSweeney’s Books. Brian Conley is New York-based artist and a founding editor of Cabinet. Architecture & Design at the Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York. Barbara Pollack is an artist and writer who has had solo shows at the Holly Solomon Gallery. received a doctorate from the University of Iowa and has been senior program director at the American Composers Forum since 1991. was screened in numerous international film festivals and won the Directing Award at the Sundance Festival. made in collaboration with the painter John Jurayj. Marcus is the author of Ways of Telling: Conversations on the Art of the Picture Book (Dutton. and third grader. Michigan in February 2003 and an installation at Trans> in May 2003. writer and co-producer of public projects. Canada.C. and multi-instrumentalist based in New York. Anne Higonnet is a Professor at the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Barnard College. and the Canadian collective CCMC.” critical and creative audio cut-ups of popular music. he received a national photography award from the Boys and Girls Club of America. Pamela Jackson is an independent scholar. Billy Halloway was born in 1997. Annika von Hausswolff is an artist based in Stockholm. forthcoming 2003). He is a model-maker and the founder of Clockwork Apple in New York City. Derek Bailey. He goes to school in New York City. Moment of Impact.org Luna Montgomery. He is also co-founder of Union Gaucha Productions. Tom Beller is a writer and founding editor of Open City. 1990). Edmond M. “Enclosures”– his 15-year project to publish Harry Partch’s works in a series of videos. Richard Fleming records sound for documentary films and enjoys taking long walks. she founded Audible Visions. New York. her upcoming shows include “PG-13. and stellar scintillation. He also makes electronic music and plays electric zither in the Raymond Scott Orchestrette. New York. He continues to produce concerts and recordings of his work and other sound artists. 1998) and Berthe Morisot (Harper Collins. Marcel Dzama was born in 1974 in Winnipeg. Email: genken@ generatorsoundart. singer. Her work is part of renowned permanent collections both in this country and abroad. and in 1989 founded Generator. The sounds that result from his manipulations retain the essence of the original sounds. Massachusetts. born in Brooklyn. Paul Collins is the author of Banvard’s Folly and the forthcoming Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books (Bloomsbury). She conducts research on language acquisition. He lives in New York. Her feature film.” a two-person show of video works at Calvin College in Grand Rapids. . is a freshman at Brooklyn Tech High School. composer. Dewan has been a research scientist at Hanscom Field Air Force Base since 1957. Leonard S. a native of Cambridge. a performance space for new music and sound art in Somerville. Massachusetts. Montgomery was one of the original founders of Generation Unlimited and the Pogus Productions record labels. Sina Najafi is editor-in-chief of Cabinet. including Secret Games: Collaborative Works with Children 1969-1999 (Scalo. which represents her work. Currently he is writing Walking to Guantanamo. John Oswald is a musician and sound/multimedia artist based in Toronto. 90% Post Consumer Sound. In 1998. Abrams. She has been seen in the Swans video “Love of Life” and in Zoe Beloff’s 3-D film Shadowland. 1997). gravity waves. 1998). in January 2003. Emmett Kim. Robert Kloos is Director for Visual Arts. Her works are in collections of major museums. Shelley Jackson is the author of The Melancholy of Anatomy. writer. Oswald is also an improvising saxophonist who has played and recorded with artists including Henry Kaiser. 1960-1980 (Granary Books/NYPL. New York. Since then his work involves atmospheric bores.” will be presented at Participant. His early work includes a theory of REM sleep and the first demonstration of a machine controlled directly by a human brain. Brooklyn. with Steve Clay. Karlsruhe. Helen Mirra is represented by Meyer Riegger Galerie. Regine Basha works independently as a curator. Teddy Fire was born in the same year as Never Mind the Bollocks. Gen Ken Montgomery is a sound artist who has lived and worked in New York since 1978. dancer. and his chapbook of poems. He lives in New York City. he gave up music and poetry and now works in a record store in Boston. and a senior fellow at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School University. “Max’s 15th Birthday Party. 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. the Washington Post. the Netherlands. born Ted Conrad. Dan Wolgers is a Swedish artist living and working in Stockholm. an independent theater company in New York. Gregory Whitehead is a playwright. Alla Rosenfeld. who has conducted research on behalf of the human rights organization B’tselem on the planning aspects of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. He lives in Brooklyn. His book. Rutgers. . Eyal Weizman is an architect. including The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins. He can be reached at david@cabinetmagazine. He is also one of the founders of Clubbed Thumb. Culture of Accidents: Unexpected Knowledges in Early Modern England. Practical Lives: Modern Histories of Prosthetics (NYU Press. Brian Selznick has written and/or illustrated many books for children. Aura Rosenberg is an artist who lives in New York City and Berlin.Todd Pruzan is an editor at Blender magazine. David Serlin is an editor and columnist for Cabinet. His most recent project. Mónica de la Torre is co-author of Appendices. Recent works include O Monstrous Voice Like Mine and Everything I Know About Glossolalia. the New Republic. 2002). and his Feast and Folly is forthcoming (SUNY). She teaches at the School of Visual Arts and the Pratt Institute and her agency is Issue Management. Allen S.” curated with Wayne Baerwaldt. Joseph R. was just published by Stanford University Press. the Village Voice. Michael Witmore teaches English at Carnegie Mellon University. Wolin is a curator and critic in New York. She is also a Ph. Her book Berlin Childhood has just been released by Steidl/DAAD. 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. She is represented by Gasser & Grunert gallery in New York. His writing has appeared in publications including the New York Times Magazine. and editor-atlarge at Cabinet. He is the co-editor of Artificial Parts.D. “Royal Art Lodge: Volume 1. Illustrations & Notes (Smart Art Press) and editor of the anthology Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry. is now 31 years old and living in Queens.org Thuunderboy. based in Tel-Aviv and London. City University of New York. which was awarded a 2002 Caldecott Honor. and McSweeney’s. radio artist and voice performer who makes frequent excursions into the occluded soundscapes of the dead. Weiss has been working hard on ingestion: He recently co-edited French Food (Routledge). The State University of New Jersey. a native of Russia. candidate at the Graduate Center. recently published by Copper Canyon Press. 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. Jay Worthington is a lawyer in New York City. columns . alien oxygen that science sips to stay alive. In order to train pilots for long-range air activities. It was a magnificent picture. 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. In early 2002. 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. 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. hardly surprising: in the space sciences. Until very recently in NASA ’s history. in keeping with its mandate to make its gear reusable and cost-efficient for the long term. could accommodate up to 95 percent of the female astronauts currently enrolled in the space program. The tacit emphasis given over to the needs of male astronauts. cold. most space suits were custom-tailored to the individual physical measurements of (predominantly male) astronauts. But in recent years. tobacco. Weiss’s column on cuisine. – Yuri Gagarin at his first press conference.“ The Clean Room. NASA has chosen to make available space suits in only three sizes: medium. as in the life sciences more generally. Indeed. of course. appears in each issue. most of whom tend to have smaller chests and shorter arm spans than their male counterparts. The privilege accorded to the male astronaut’s space suit by aerospace scientists and NASA administrators is. McFarland. these three sizes work for about 90 percent of the men in the space program but only about 35 percent of the women. Long before Yuri Gagarin or Alan Shepherd were ever catapulted into their lonely orbits. male privilege is the thin. came as a surprise to those who have witnessed NASA ’s commitment to gender equity expand over the past three decades. aerospace science. who chaired the Harvard School of Public Health in the late 1940s and early 1950s. His laboratory studies pushed the body’s limitations and charted its circadian rhythms in order to understand and even predict the extreme conditions of .1 The decision. and specifically white male. dark blue. if built. Built upon centuries of passive assumptions and naturalized across a billion cultural exchanges. used the cream of military recruits to study the effects of alcohol. aesthetics. 15 April 1961. regardless of their gender. hunger. blue. 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. It had a smooth transition from pale blue. Ross A. which angered women scientists and their supporters both inside and outside the space industry. violet and absolutely black. / “Colors” is a column where a guest writer is asked to respond to a specific color assigned by the editors of Cabinet. Prior to the 1990s. especially since airplane pilot training was typically the prerequisite for NASA ’s first roster of astronauts. and carbon monoxide on human performance. creating a smaller range of space suits would benefit all astronauts of smaller stature. / “Leftovers” is a column that examines the cultural significance of leftovers or detritus.” David Serlin’s column on science and technology. women and minorities were almost universally excluded. and sleep deprivation. 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. According to NASA’s own internal accounting. as it would allow many individuals a greater degree of physical control prohibited by the larger suits. fatigue. and philosophy. Smaller sized suits. and extra-large. 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. / “Ingestion” is Allen S. the male body is used as the uninterrogated base line of our species from which all variations and permutations emerge. officers chose men who could endure high altitudes and fast speeds as well as extreme conditions such as heat. large. . . ” Elton John’s “Rocket Man. space exploration could be used to investigate ideas of race pride. The racial barrier for black astronauts was finally broken at the end of the 1970s. life-affirming thumbs-up for the umpteenth time to the on-board cameras. Many black musicians maintained a deep and abiding interest in space themes: Thelonius Monk.” But reading Shuttleworth’s biography alongside his temporary title of Soyuz 5 Nominated Space Flight Participant. 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. Elton’s astronaut pines for his family. tied inextricably to the house party dance floor rather than the isolated teenage bower. squat. 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. One wonders why the Nation of Islam keeps its astronaut training program surreptitiously hidden from public view. explained the history of global race relations as a space drama of operatic proportions. in the words of Nelson Mandela. South Africa.air travel on the human body. or the absence of race altogether. often configured as the transgalactic egalitarianisms seen in popular entertainments like Star Trek. Russian officials announced the availability of space aboard its Soyuz 5 rocket for the small price tag of $20 million.. and well above the median age of male astronauts of any nationality. black intellectuals and political figures adapted science fiction themes to challenge racial hierarchies. rechristened himself with the middle name of “Sphere. Bluford. stood in stark contrast to popular music of the era.” while Sun Ra claimed an intergalactic citizenship influenced by theories of space visitors to ancient Egypt. the twentysomething Shuttleworth—who made . the first African-American woman in space. basically solipsistic teenage fantasies of white alienation deeply previous: Neznaika. Television networks. Tito realized his life-long dream of space tourism. 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. when themes of space exploration and visitation occur in black popular music of the 1970s—such as in concept albums by George Clinton/Parliament Funkadelic—they are community-based narratives filled with deft humor and social critique. for example. Lawrence would have been America's lone black astronaut until NASA chose three black trainees for the space program in 1978. were kept isolated from the rest of the armed forces during World War Two and were naturally excluded from such tests. white American businessman Dennis Tito ponied up the dough and became a Soyuz 5 Nominated Space Flight Participant.” a wordless though eerie paean to the unknown. and exactly four decades after cosmonaut Gagarin’s historic mission during the height of the Cold War. International hits of the early 1970s like David Bowie’s “Space Oddity. while Bowie’s Major Tom does a Virginia Woolf and disappears into the black void of space altogether. 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. 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. challenging the narrative of immutable social progress at the heart of any civil rights agenda. 1965. With the mainstreaming of the civil rights movement and the international rise of Black Power as a political force. are preparing to launch new space-based reality TV programs. In the end. at approximately the same moment that NASA had chosen to dismantle its program for designing smaller-sized space suits. Jr. a pearlytoothed. Mark Shuttleworth of Cape Town. race neutrality. One year later. physiology. most of whom were chosen because they fit the masculine ideal required of specialized military personnel. Despite the inability of non-whites to participate as actual astronauts. Had he survived the crash. In 1991. became the world’s second space tourist. Short. desperate to “only connect” like E. a short-lived precursor to NASA training that closed in 1969. In the 1940s. Guion S.M.D. such as the famous Tuskegee Airmen. Minister Louis Farrakhan. though it is unclear exactly who or what is piloting these spacecraft. In early 2002. Jeminson. More recently. By contrast. coupled with unconventional time signatures and arrangements. with Glasnost-inspired earnestness. Long before the arrival of Lieutenant Uhuru on the bridge of the starship Enterprise. In 2000. Mae C. for all of their conceptual drama. an evil black scientist named Yakub was credited with having created the white race in a period of only 600 years. Nonwhite pilots. is often recognized as the first black astronaut though he never left the earth. Neznaika on the Moon. hero of Nikolai Nosov’s Russian children’s book. By the time NASA reorganized administratively for outer space explorations in the late 1950s. became the first African-American man in space when he was named to the crew of the space shuttle Challenger in 1983. Following an initial Big Bang and 66 trillion years of cosmic peace. Black artists in the 1950s and 1960s were reliable proponents of space travel to imagined worlds. creating a shallow pool of applicants on whom to base the latest equipment designs or model the latest pressure suits. Elijah Mohammed. taking advantage of this new frontier of product placement. with the noticeable exception of The Tornadoes’ 1962 instrumental “Telstar. and performance that continue to vex contemporary biologists and social theorists. including one called Celebrity Mission which will follow Bass’s adventures. Farrakhan described a formidable battalion of fifteen hundred smaller space ships housed in the mother ship. made even more spectacular headlines when she flew aboard the space shuttle Endeavor in 1992. however. assumed the stature of “our first Afronaut. for example. Major Robert Lawrence. Future installments of Celebrity Mission will follow big-name (though obviously expendable) industry icons as they mawkishly writhe in zero gravity. 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. bypassing the regimentation of NASA ’s astronaut training program for post-communist Russia’s embrace of cold hard cash. one of those three black trainees. Notwithstanding thorny questions about race. Forster. an Air Force test pilot who held a Ph. the relationship between space and race in the 20th century was vividly imagined in both political discourse and cultural works. indebted to British high modernism. The angular abstractions of Monk’s and Sun Ra’s music. Shuttleworth. One imagines a succession of images of the maudlin singer giving. Dr.” and Klaatu’s “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft” are. who assumed the Nation of Islam’s political leadership. 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. it was the first space shuttle flight both to launch and land during the night. In addition. the culture of astronaut training followed from the studies conducted on a small. three decades after the consolidation of a federally funded aerospace industry. in chemistry. Dr. But the era of seemingly unlimited equal opportunity for astronauts is more deceptively complex than it might appear at first glance. the originator of the Nation of Islam in the United States and former mentor to Malcolm X. coincidentally or not. elite sector of Navy and Air Force pilots. 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. his $600 million fortune by inventing the prototype for VeriSign, the encryption software used by millions of Internet retail sites around the world—followed 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 DeaTh’s DooRKnoB PaUl COllinS Disposing of very large quantities of blood is an onerous chore. You can't give the stuff away—well, 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 blood’s 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 mix—”A blood-invigorating and muscle-making beverage of the highest order.” Plasmon’s 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 dentist’s 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 Dibble’s 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, Dibble’s 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 Hollingshead’s 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 Harper’s 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 “Dibble’s Dental Apparatus,” in Scientific American, 30 September 1865. 5 A description of Bois Durci is available at Plastics Historical Society’s 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 company’s history. The strike is detailed in the 16 March 1946 New York Times. coloRs / sulPhuR THOMaS Beller There’s a butterfly called the Orange Sulphur (Colias eurytheme). It’s the color of a lemon drop. Another butterfly is called the Cloudless Sulphur (Phoebis sennae). It’s the color of a creamsicle. These are lovely colors, light and tasty. But they’re the bright side of sulphur. They don’t 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 it’s a mood. What mood would be sulphuric? Pablo Neruda’s 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.” “What’s 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 it’s 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 he’d 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 earth’s crust. It’s 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 Nestlé 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 wasn’t 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 wasn’t 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 wasn’t 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 isn’t 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. . ” This architect manqué would sublimate his untried passion into the some of the greatest manifestations of spun sugar edifices in the history of French cuisine. It glowed as though lit from below. the visual aspect of a pièce montée surpasses the gastronomic value of the dish itself. It is round in shape and has four arcades. for some random mixing of components. In other words.2 Culinary history abounds in examples of such constructions. a few years after the era of the chemistry set. you remember it everywhere. the trunks and branches of solid gold. one with caramelized sugar. as expressed in the avertissement to the third edition of his Le Pâtissier Pittoresque. as well as the centerpiece that adorns the table. as when he created pièces montées using inedible binding materials to guarantee their longevity. or the blue grotto at Linderhof created for the mad King Ludwig of Bavaria. We might recall the details of a great feast given by Amédée VIII. containing enigmatic and emblematic monumental sculptures and ruins representing the arts of the ancient cultures of Egypt. 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. as recounted in the 1420 manuscript dictated by his chef de cuisine. recounting his experiences and tribulations as he searches for his beloved Polia. the whole thing turning inside out as it emerges from your fist. the color of sulphur. the back of the throat. 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. and candy which evoke such fragile fantasy worlds. however antithetical this might seem regarding the gustatory goals of cuisine. It becomes a Zelig of colors. which are made up of ring biscuits of almond puff pastry (which you powder with fine sugar sifted through silk). once you start fixating on a color. The taste for miracles and marvels certainly does not avoid its culinary instances. 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. or even more radically. Somewhere behind me was the island’s volcano. the sea to my left and open fields of cut hay to my right. synthesizing incompatible victuals. and gold. the garnish is Genoese pastries in rings. which I had visited that morning. Duc de Savoie. the middle boiled. and Rome. Etna. serving as a model for the interweaving of two arts that had only recently received their muses: landscape architecture and cuisine. all evincing a perfection lost in the contemporary epoch. and the late afternoon sun slanted sharply across a field of hay and made it look enchanted. The pedestal is made of German waffles. mimesis is revealed for its inherent artificiality. constitutes both a secular feast and a cosmic symbol. a roast swan. And then there was that reddish brown earth that sat. all perfectly resembling the originals. .] There were also herbs and flowers of diverse colors. forms and species. in which were planted a mix of box-trees and cypress. but in removing the hard sweetmeats from the saucepan. You open the test tube called “Sulphur” and smell it. InGesTIon / culInaRY lanDscaPes allen S. replumed with its own feathers. The allegory then thickens as Poliphilus continues his neo-Platonic quest toward love and truth. non-toxic. like that magic trick with the handkerchief that is a deep lustrous purple with a little loop in one corner. [. studded with sugar pearls. published in Venice in 1499. such as I conceived it for the embellishment of princes’ parks and private gardens. the architectural autodidact whom one gastronome referred to as “the Palladio of cuisine. which in no time produces a nice ridge of rocks. served with three different sauces. pastry. In it goes as purple. he notes the extent of his passion for architecture per se: “I would have ceased being a pastry-chef.. But sulphur goes straight to the gut. architecture. bordering on orange? Sulphur making a cameo. those of the palate. in a lumpy pile next to my father’s grave: Weren’t there streaks of light brown. ornamented with the guests’ coats of arms. though one might suspect that the pleasures of mirabile dictu far surpassed. or behind the eyes. It is made of hard sweetmeat à la reine.”1 The brilliance and genius of this pure artifice incite Poliphilus’s admiration and wonder. as described in detail. Every animal was highly decorated and spitting fire: a huge gilded boar. there was. and a different dish at the foot of each tower. or perhaps into another test tube. The bower is crowned with a small waterfall in silvery spun sugar. which are the ultimate expressions of human artifice: gardens of glass. labyrinthine forest. The yellow orange light was. The rock forms four arcades. in many such cases. Consider. and finally two young women symbolizing reason and volition. This dish. encountering five girls representing the five senses. You simply line up these ring biscuits without attaching them at the vertical joints. looking back on it. contradictory modes of cooking. and the rest with lump sugar to which you add saffron. Almost all the other smells exist in the mouth. For the most celebrated of French chefs. his extraordinary “moss-decorated grotto. WeiSS One of the seminal texts in the history of European landscape architecture is the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili of Francesco Colonna. and. and the leaves of glass so perfectly imitated that one would have taken them for natural.. Very often.” described in Le Pâtissier Parisien: “The effect of this large centerpiece is very picturesque. a huge pike cooked in three manners. silk. The meal was an amazing spectacle. by invoking divine guidance. and heterogeneous symbols into a flamboyant totality. you form groups from five to eight and from ten to twelve. a suckling pig.from the test tube into your palm. Carême. and temples. From that loop you can pull through a bright pink handkerchief. Here he discovers a scene filled with gardens and palaces. Beginning in the anguished solitude of a wild. he is taken to the three palace gardens. For while such 17 a garden of spun glass might never have actually been created. such as pyramids. even predating Colonna. Sicily was the world’s provider of sulphur until the end of the nineteenth century. Antonin Carême (17831833). had I blindly abandoned myself to my natural taste for the picturesque genre. for example. dark. Indeed. out it comes as pink! The smell of sulphur goes all the way down to the bottom of you. and garden design (notably works on garden folies) at the cabinet des opposite: Dried splatter.” spent untold hours studying drawing. one cypress between two box-trees. The tale consists of the phantasmatic quest of Poliphilus. over which you sprinkle coarse sugar and chopped pistachios. into a beautiful. Greece. which must also be glazed: one part with rose-colored sugar. It was not yet dusk. the history of cuisine attests to its influence in the fabulous inventions of pièces montées of spun sugar. After visiting the palace. the tail end fried. and the head roasted. Maître Chiquart. You surround it with meringues glazed and garnished with vanilla cream. a queen symbolizing free will. all made of glass. sunny landscape of absolute perfection. This imaginary garden of glass established a major aesthetic sensibility. The archaic is brought into the service of the arcane. Carême’s decorative perfectionism often transcended his culinary aspirations. Maybe even good for you. The craftsmanship was truly marvelous: “All along the walls were flower-beds in the form of tubs. presented as an initiatory drama couched in the form of a dream.”3 This miniature landscape certainly bears comparison with the Grotte de Thétis in the gardens of Versailles. he finally emerges. when a new method allowed for the mining of deposits in Louisiana and Texas. the decorative values of cuisine always existed on an equal level with its gustatory qualities. obelisks. . 74. and a pantheon of the names of the country’s great heroes. stylized reduction of historical detail to imaginative decorative fancy. pp. Islamic. and so forth. 1997). “Syncretism and Style. “These are real buildings. 120. in Allen S. a fantasized. he explains how one was inspired by the ocean’s waves during a tempest. where it is evident that his inspiration was both classical and romantic. which included projects designed for the embellishment of both Paris and Saint Petersburg. Bonnet’s article is an excellent introduction to Carême. Venetian. though his classicism syncretically responded to the aesthetics of many civilizations. 12 trophies. rotundas. as befits his art. The actual gardens of the 18th and 19th century offered precisely the sorts of folies. Egyptian. “Carême. forms of water curled by the wind. in Le Pâtissier Royal Parisien. multicolored and gleaming mosaic of the pointillist iridescence from which emerge forms of poured water. may inspire some readers to create their own contemporary follies. he describes. Lusitania.” Specifically. fortresses.”4 However surreal and nightmarish. Sophie Hawkes. from a text by Salvador Dali. and the waves of the sea. 1998). 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 spoon—with the bloody. Russian. France). For example. pagodas. A striking example of such architectural fantasy reveals a strange modernity at the core of Carême’s classicism. thick protuberances of fear bursting from the incredible facade. 4 Salvador Dali. were created in a great diversity of styles: Italian. temples and minarets that inspired the books and the pièces montées of Carême. a temple dedicated to glory of the French nation. Le Songe de Poliphile (Venice 1499. veritable ruins of ruins! For to do so would be tantamount to admitting 19 the temporal and fragile nature of his art. 3-4 (1933). however. Paris. The extreme instance of this architectural passion was not. we might note that. 176-77. cascades. never does Carême actually describe the state of his pièces montées after the meal is finished. he proposed. belvederes. Dali concludes this essay with the claim that. 3 Antonin Carême. as well as the inexorably mortal side of cuisine. 8 statues. pièces montées that would represent rivers. mills. in the case of both landscape architect and pastry chef. Irish. ed. melted by the ‘naturalist-stylized’ nunuphars and nympheas concretized in impure and annihilating excentric convergences. kiosks. Ledoux. veritable sculptures of the reflections of crepuscular clouds in water. in Cordes-sur-ciel (Tarn. “Beauty shall be edible or it shall no longer be. forms of mirroring water. or the Last Sparks of Decorative Cuisine. p. “De la beauté terrifiante et comestible de l’architecture modern style. all these forms of water constellated in an asymmetric and dynamic-instantaneous succession of bicyncopated. gazebos. restricted to the art of pastry making. Turkish. pp.” Minotaure. Reprint: Paris. for the place du Carrousel in Paris. cited in Jean-Claude Bonnet. This conflation of styles and epochs is. This might be compared with another fantasy of edible architecture. forms of spreading water. See Allen S. Nostalgia (New York. no. In fact. and the other by the tranquil waters of a lake. One cannot help but remember the outstanding role of the table.” Is there any better argument to consider cuisine as one of the fine arts? 1 Translated from Francesco Colonna. Chinese. 2 There exists a small museum of spun-sugar art attached to a restaurant. which would display 48 lions’ heads. Le Pâtissier Royal Parisien (1815). And yet. 9-42. His spun sugar creations in the forms of pavilions.” which celebrates the oneiric and troubling nature of certain architectural creations. Polish. in pictorial representations of vanitas. Princeton Architectural Press. soft spoon of gamey meat that approaches.” in Unnatural Horizons: Paradox and Contradiction in Landscape Architecture (New York. stressing an inexorable desire to “to eat the object of desire. and Lequeue as they are with the art of pastry decoration. forms of stagnant water. and ruins of all sorts. “De la beauté terrifiante et comestible de l’architecture modern style. Between 1821 and 1826 he published Projets d’Architecture. This is attested to by his volumes Le Pâtissier Pittoresque (1815) and Le Pâtissier Royal Parisien (1815). Imprimerie Nationale Éditions. All this was finally combined in an imaginative mélange whose results would transgress the historical limits of both architecture and cuisine. greasy. pavilions. 1994). In this context. Weiss.estampes of the Bibliothèque Nationale (Royale) in Paris. eccentric and fascinating. interlaced reliefs. 1546. hermitages. Taste. often depicted in a state of extreme chaos. however fantastic these projects may seem. edited and prefaced by Gilles Polizzi. . describing two Art Nouveau houses that Gaudi designed on the Paseo de Gracia in Barcelona. In a dreamlike evocation. this passage is an archetypally modernist continuation of the imaginary conflation of architecture and cuisine. temples. it is hoped. towers. made possible by recourse to an immense and mad. Weiss. opposite: Two of Carême’s drawings from his book Le Pâtissier Pittoresque.” trans. Carême’s books remain practical guides to pièces montées. Gallic. these projects are as much in keeping with the utopian architectural fantasies of Boullée.. one based on a curious hybrid of styles. one which. materials and natural orders. Le Grand Écuyer. maIN . and so on. The “mountain” is important in understanding the ideological transition in Israel after 1977. which obviously also allows a maximum amount of surveillance of the Palestinian population beneath. to the bedrock of Jewish identity. and in Jerusalem. All aerial photos: Milutin Labudovic for Shalom Achshav (Peace Now). It’s very concrete: it proposes an inner ring and an outer ring of houses.” and the architect is completely left on his own to do whatever he wants. and religious history of the area to issues of photography and mapping to concepts of strategic building forms and settlement growth patterns. except in Haifa. is a groundbreaking examination of the character of building. When Leitersdorf built Ma’ale Edumim in 1977-78 he was in effect setting the guidelines. all are designed to provide basic municipal amenities within a context of highly refined. a paradox: when the Zionists came back to their “promised land.” they initially settled in the places where Jewish history didn’t happen within the land of Israel. so that each settlement takes the exact form of the mountain summit and is built around it as a ring that overlooks all directions. located on mountaintops and without agricultural space to cultivate. the Israel Association of United Architects. where there is not just one peak but many peaks and ridges. the area has become home to some 200. A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture. purpose-built settlements perched on its hilltops. in October 2002. whereas the plains were inhabited by the Philistines. the Israeli population was located mainly in the valleys. Basically. These were new urban typologies that maximized the potential of the mountain and made use of the precise morphology of the topography. surveillance-based security. Weizman. Berlin. the project has stirred strong opinions in Israel. in May 2003. discusses both the natural and built environment of the West Bank – from the social. 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. So there is a geographical reversal. Abruptly cancelled last summer on the eve of the Congress by its commissioning organization. There you see the direct translation of topographical cartography into urban form. the 2. that the mountain enters the public imagination – people write songs about the mountain. Weizman spoke by phone to Jeffrey Kastner and Sina Najafi from Haifa. 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.000 including occupied East Jerusalem) who populate numerous. 2002 . of extremely particularized strategies for building on heights. This ongoing state-sponsored policy of expansion onto the high ground has been paralleled by the development. Although it was dismissed by the association’s president as “one-sided political propaganda. So we have this severe set of guidelines versus no guidelines at all. The return to the mountain is a return to those sacred places.000 Israelis (400. and community in the West Bank. It is only after the occupation. At this point. at the end of January and in the exhibition “Territories” at KunstWerke. overlooking long-established Palestinian lowland communities. discusses the idea of offering the maximal amount of views to the maximum number of settlers. New York. if you look at the master plans of the settlements.” 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 Ha’aretz.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. when a messianic religious discourse entered the political debate with the right wing coming to power. Since the cancellation. where you get a sense that sometimes the government offers no guideline other than “We need a town built here. cooperative agricultural and pioneering settlements built mainly on the fertile plains. research it. talk about it. Israeli architects and planners had little experience of building in mountainous regions. which he says are central to the research he and Segal continue to conduct. which is a mountain city. planning. 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. Along with it came a decreasing emphasis on agricultural pioneering and its replacement with a new typology of the religious suburb. Ma’ale Edumim was essential in creating a benchmark standard for building settlements. the roads retrace the topographical lines that we charted on maps. He also asks pointed ethical questions about Israeli architectural and planning practice and considerations of human rights. the Israelite settlements were primarily in the mountain regions of Judea. It’s most clear in Ma’ale Edumim. within the architectural and urban planning professions. The typical new Israeli settlements were the kibbutz and the moshav. What are the historical sources for this relationship to the mountain? If you look at the geography in Biblical times. apparently at the same time. a partner in Tel Avivbased Rafi Segal/Eyal Weizman Architects. The government wanted to resettle the mountain and architects needed to learn how to build there. and following the political changes in 1977. political. Over the last 35 years. Architects were starting to think about the mountain too. 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. but they had little experience of building there. a catalogue and exhibition originally created by Israeli architects Rafi Segal and Eyal Weizman as their country’s official entry to the 2002 World Congress of Architecture in Berlin.The Wall aNd The eye: aN INTervIeW WITh eyal WeIzmaN Jeffrey Kastner & sina naJafi One of history’s most fiercely contested landscapes. In general. so the Ministry of Housing came up with guidelines that promoted the use of topography for the establishment of observation points. overleaf: Nokdim to the right & Tekoa to the left. the mountain appears in many aspects of culture as a symbol and as an unfamiliar reality. Israel. Before the occupation. and architecture is part of it. In the following interview. lecture on it. Many of these draw on historical precedents. and the Galilee. Samaria. 22 . 23 . as if to uplift the gloom of the Yom Kippur War. you see the religious elements in Zionism taking control. 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. The first one was the case over the Beit-El settlement. Essentially. As for security. to be replaced by the right-wing Likud government of Menachem Begin. as the Egyptian and Syrian armies seemed to be driving toward the main urban centers. It took four more years for the Labor government. Until then. self-sustainable new man. What they did mainly was to settle the Jordan Valley with kibbutzes and moshavs – this is what they knew. And if other security arrangements were found. assistance. They were testing this new theoretical definition of what a settlement could be. They chose a strategy but ultimately lost the case and the settlement was destroyed. The convention states that you are not allowed to build permanent settlements on occupied land. They said. is called the Day of the Holocaust and Heroism. but as a strong. 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. frontier settlements on the plains. and . 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. 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. 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. was created by Gush Emunim. that they could be seized by Israel and declared state land. The national day of Holocaust remembrance. What the government was claiming was that the settlements were temporary paramilitary posts. but was related to some kind of divine right? Yes. And the whole settlement policy changed – they discovered the mountain. with Golda Meir’s government in ruins. and archaeology again. which is a kind of religious organization that has always pulled the government by the nose to build settlements. it was Shimon Peres who was supporting Gush Emunim.” before the reversal of power. where the good alluvial soil has eroded. 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. and details are unnecessary. This exemplified itself even in the way the Holocaust was portrayed and sometimes even glorified as an act of national resistance. The West Bank had not had a land registry since Ottoman times. we had a Labor government. Among them no refuge. It’s a complete reversal of the logic of cultivation. But was it presented as a security issue or was it presented as an ideological. 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.Since mountaintops are not suited to agriculture. Between 1973 and 1977. which produced an incredible protocol. they could always be evicted. One of the first settlements. as opposed to an area in which there are persons who are likely to observe them and inform the authorities about any suspicious movement. Zionism experienced “the return of the repressed. It is because Palestinians could not cultivate these hilltops. In the first 10 years after the occupation. 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. sometimes others. 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. again on hilltops. This was a time when the Israelis were fearing total defeat and old fears resurface. But immediately after the war. or equipment will be provided to terrorists. for instance. What was going on in 1977 that specifically catalyzed this shift? The crisis point in Israeli history was 1973 and the Yom Kippur War. The next case in 1979 was that of Elon Moreh.” with a renewed sense of doom. but you are allowed to build temporary interventions for security reasons. Sebastia. OK. 1967 to 1977. You describe an important evolution toward a kind of messianic political ideology. By this point presumably the left’s political clout had been much diminished.” 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. which was not related necessarily to this temporary security-based issue. which had controlled the country from its creation. presumably many of the settlers are commuting. “With respect to pure military considerations. 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. In 1973. Labor Zionism was trying to reverse the traditional image of the Jew – not as a victim. The matter is simple. There were petitions by Arab landowners against the confiscation of their land and the building of settlements. Are those industrial centers subsidized? They are subsidized in the sense that you pay much lower income tax and council tax. sometimes some are stronger. the settlements are built there because the mountains are not suited to agriculture. with only the incredible maneuvers of Ariel Sharon in the Sinai stopping them. This meant that the court could no longer authorize the settlement as a temporary military intervention. So Peres was actually the first person to promote settlements even before the beginning of “the mountain ideology. with the Israeli High Court Justice Vitkon at one point declaring that. This issue was debated twice in the High Court of Justice (HCJ ). Yes. 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. we can rely on Jordanian law and start a project of land registry. to which Israel is a signatory. sacredness. but beauty has an incredible political significance in the context of this conflict. mainly the hilltops because the hilltops were not being cultivated. so grazing and shepherding is very difficult in these areas that have been planted with pine. When we talk about the panorama in terms of the picturesque and the pastoral. which nevertheless need to be “read” with guidance. the government needed to create a map very quickly. You write about how after 1967 this contested land in the West Bank became one of the most photographed terrains in the world. 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.000 feet over sea level. They can see things that the untrained eye cannot. 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. because that is what you paid tax on. it said something that is in fact true. It’s as if those lines set the blueprints of the settlements. Right after the occupation. you did not have real land ownership. the view overleaf left: Shaked. which was based on Ottoman law. The settlers obviously have a very ambiguous relationship to this. where 3-D stereoscopic images were constructed using special double-lens aerial cameras. But Israel claimed that the West Bank was not actually “occupied land. So now the Palestinians are rushing to plant olive trees and the Israelis are planting pine trees. 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. and Israel was the ruler of the area. It was a very complex. but previously the Ministry of Defense was allowing us very narrow slots. but it’s not only that they grow faster. So basically Israel was collecting Ottoman tax documents to establish ownership and map out the extent of cultivated lands. that the West Bank was occupied by Jordan after 1948 but that the UN had never recognized its sovereignty there. self-contradictory and elliptical way of arguing. But legally. Was it difficult to obtain permission to take your aerial photographs? It is very difficult now after operation Defensive Shield. Jenin Region. overleaf right: Offra. he didn’t register it because that would just mean more taxes. It sounds like the project you are working on now is one of particularization – putting specific information along with the images. and the settlers both enjoy that view but simultaneously supervise it. 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. The desire to map the West Bank immediately after the occupation showed 25 clearly that you don’t just map things – mapping is an act of proprietorship and the whole settlement project is built upon those topographical lines. Whatever land could be proven to be under continuous cultivation remained in private Palestinian ownership. didn’t 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. and the Palestinian Village of A Taybe. We try to reveal the hidden narratives engraved on the landscape. and it was difficult to physically get to all the places. which were drafted on those photographs. Israel accepted and relied on the Jordanian rules. which grow a lot faster. On the one hand. 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. 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. and the rest was declared state land according to Jordanian law. One was the politics of pine trees versus olive trees. but they were absolutely not good enough to plan and construct with. Ramallah region. If someone fenced off a hilltop. beauty is thought of as both a commodity and a strategy in terms of the views from the settlements. That’s true. There are no bushes under pine trees. we claim that. There is a paradox in this beauty in that what is considered by the settlers to be a pastoral.” because the UN never recognized Jordanian sovereignty over the West Bank. Even if you cut the pine trees. On the one hand. They are taken at low altitudes – we were allowed to fly at 6. On the other.if you look at Ottoman land laws. 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. the subsequent acidity of the land is such that it does not allow agricultural cultivation. no matter where they borrowed those rules from? What they were saying was that these patches of land here and there. You would just pay tax for what you cultivated. were State of Israel land. These are photographs taken by Milutin Labudovic for an organization called Peace Now in order to monitor settlement growth. Are the new aerial photographs you’ve included in the catalogue similar to the ones the Israeli government took after 1967? Not at all. I think that’s 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. Your aerial images show a number of striking things about the details of the landscape. in fact. The stereoscopic images were essentially 3-D reliefs of the terrain taken at a much higher altitude in order to build topographical maps. That is true. Nobody wanted to own anything beyond what he was growing on. It is a guiding principle that the settlements are urbanistically laid out in order to maximize the view. and we tried to show it in these terms. The Ottoman rules were that the state could acquire any land that had not been cultivated for a certain amount of time. romantic panorama is actually the traces of the daily lives and cultivation of the Palestinians. Before the occupation. so they used this stereoscopic technique in order to recreate the structure of the mountain. They were state land because they were not under any private ownership. . over the air space the Israeli air force was using and underneath the national routes. . . the main settler body. to the State Department. 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 B’Tselem that was done in the context of a human rights report on violations through architecture and planning. although. usually with red painted asbestos placed on their flat roofs. But in Israeli architecture. and some in the Israeli establishment even work with it. something that they would like to be but cannot. does not serve the population. Yet they are. When you drive through the West Bank. perhaps the number of settlers in them. that trope of the red. if you look at Ariel. 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. to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “Oh. beautiful landscape. they see the Palestinians as the authentic component there. and size – that are contrary to human rights. When we sent letters asking to review the master plans. In addition to the photographs. there to destroy and replace it. and luxury – everything they strive for and want to emulate. either ideologically or in terms of planning issues? Most other maps of the West Bank show the settlements as points. suburban idea of the home. For example. When you look at a Palestinian village near a settlement. That is a great achievement for us. many times you’ll see that the houses that are very near to the fence – nearest to the settlement – imitate the red roofs of the settlement. which is one of the most strategic east-west arteries. the architectural sign of a red roof.creates for them a kind of biblical landscape that they admire. 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. the councils threw a lot of obstacles in our way and we finally had to threaten them with a petition to the HCJ . 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. which the Palestinians obviously cannot enter. And you ask yourself. or even more. “You must be joking! It maximizes traffic. is for the Palestinians a sign of progress. “Why was the settlement built like that?” If a student of ours came up with a plan of a city like that. a Swiss landscape on the whole wall. but it is the forms of the settlements – their shape. The government is bound by law to make the documents public. we were trying to make a connection between the very organization of matter across the landscape and human rights violations. for example. form that in its right context has a purpose but here is not at all suited functionally to the environment. Before the Intifada. Then they gave us some maps.” So there must be other considerations involved. Many times. too. but the “ideal” was somewhere else – in Switzerland. in the more close-up photos you could see some similarities. you see the great influence of settlement architecture on Palestinian architecture. The novelty in our map is that we actually took and were able to trace almost all the master plans for future settlement growth. So it’s not only the fact that settlements are there. So. does not allow pedestrians to walk. somewhere in the West – not where they were. it has an elongated banana shape. a way of life that seems to them more authentic. but always old maps. settlement building codes require that anyone building their own home must build with this red roof because it’s a sign that differentiates the “us” from the “them. modernity. forced them to build them if only to show Jewish presence. This is something you don’t see in a map where it’s depicted as a point. 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. etc. You start breaking down the formative forces that operate on the form of this stain on the map. This is a map of a possible future of the settlements and of the West Bank. sloped roof is itself a really displaced kind of beauty – a borrowed European. say. Last summer we presented it to the American administration. They show the location. On the one hand. but obviously the government and the regional councils do not have any interest in the Palestinians knowing the master plans. the settlement wanted to stretch itself as long as possible along Route 505. They checked it and verified it and are now working 28 with it. What general conclusions did you draw from the map when you actually saw it. It is very strange.” What is the government worried about in terms of what the maps revealed? Well. so they post them within the settlements. and vice versa. On the . and the Pentagon. The settlers try to learn from the Palestinians how to live in nature.” And I have heard of a residents’ meeting where settlers tried to resist the red roof – saying it’s a misplaced European element. in fact. Nobody contests its accuracy. almost Tyrolean. the catalogue has an aggregate map you’ve put together of all the different settlements. Out the window you could see an equally. 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. the expansion of settlements is guarded almost like a military secret. sorry. which is an urban settlement located west of Nablus. These supposedly have to be published. These were usually classified for a period of time and then released. So the settlement spreads thin as long as possible along that road. which for the Israelis is basically a rural. – while people from Gush Emunim. they would quite often have wallpaper of. It functions in the settlements as a sign. Conducting policy with this map is something we think is going to inevitably change the discussion. In a sense there is a kind of disturbing mutual admiration stretched along the double-poled axis of vision. when you could still go into the West Bank to Palestinian hummus restaurants. we would say. and then they’d say. I’ve recently heard that even some settlers’ organizations use it. But by actually showing form. 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, he’s not acting as an architect. You would say it is unethical. This is completely unethical! And it’s 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 he’s 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-à-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 didn’t 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? It’s 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, you’ll see it’s around the same time that Americans are inventing the gated community. It’s essentially a local form of the gated community. What you see in the West Bank is basically the same phenomenon you see in Los Angeles’s Orange County, Brasilia, Mexico City, and other places but in a much more violent and extreme way. It’s 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? It’s 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 it’s 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 Peres’s 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 Israel’s 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 For many of them. the unpainted concrete wall snakes around the ridgetop. the mural project was the brainchild of Shlomi Brosh. Since Israel took control of this hilltop in the 1967 war. The idea of a wall was controversial. A multi-million dollar scheme replaced many Gilo windows with bulletproof glass. From below. cheap rents. In the winter of 2000. and spectacular West Bank desert views. largely Sephardic Jews and Russian immigrants. which is to say from Beit Jala.000 lower. and a more militant settlement would never have allowed one to be built. unacceptable to the authorities. like a modernist fortress.to middle-class Israelis. been enticed to live here by glossy advertising brochures complete with photographs of the very vistas now assaulting them. it is less a militant settlement born out of colonial ideology than a place chosen for its convenience. The residents wanted it. Joggers could no longer run along the road overlooking the valley.PaINT your Troubles aWay richard fleming Built on high ground. Bullets whistled up the hill into the windows of Gilo’s 1970s apartment blocks. with the Green Line buried beneath a handsome new ring road that whisks commuters to the Jerusalem outskirts. have settled there. the military carted in concrete panels and installed them like a massive three-meter-tall highway median. but so much cement canvas was an invitation to political graffitists. According to the Jerusalem Post. Until the beginning of the Second Intifada. He commissioned eight Russian immigrant artists “to paint the . after all. 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. But one day their picturesque view across the olive groves to the Arab village of Beit Jala began shooting at them. An encircling wall is defensive. that the lands on the other side were beyond control. Houses in Beit Jala were duly shelled and destroyed. But each nightfall brought a hail of bullets. down the hillside. the residents sandbagged their windows and demanded Israeli military action. the Gilo wall is at odds with the ongoing Israeli policy of containment and expansion. A friend tells me that on the Gilo side the concrete panels were at first painted a jolly blue. the inhabitants of Gilo might have been forgiven for forgetting that they live in Palestinian territory. People took extended vacations. Gilo is the largest neighborhood within the Municipality of Jerusalem that lies to the east of the Green Line. more than 30. Outraged. gray and foreboding. obliterating the view. but the erection of a concrete barricade along the length of the exposed flank of Gilo would be an admission. They had. not offensive. then the head of the culture department of the Municipality. and the people who live in Gilo were not the sort of settlers eager to trade quality of life for ideology. like most West Bank Israeli settlements. ” as painters like to say. in an effort to alleviate some of the ugliness of the concrete slabs.com/Editions/2001/08/23/News/News. at www.33240. So we copied the view.” Brosh told the Post. the results are a sanitized simulacrum: the landscape beyond the wall “captured beautifully. whose villages typically have flat white roofs. the paintings do not amount to a realistic portrait. but they forced us to. and none of the buildings in the distance appears to have been shelled by Israeli tanks.” The Jerusalem Post Internet Edition.html Photos: Richard Fleming . “We did not want to part with the view. The blurry. “Seeing beyond Gilo's Siege Wall. a disproportionate number of buildings are painted with salmon-tiled gabled roofs. 1 Etgar Lefkovits.”1 Clearly the authorities wanted to diminish the sense of capitulation the wall represented. 23 August 2001. Executed in the style of a Midwestern Italian restaurant fresco.wall with the missing view. distant villages have been settlerized. The Palestinian “problem” has not been whitewashed but painted out of view.jpost. an architectural conceit unknown to the Palestinians. The long and winding trompe l’oeil slab is devoid of Arab inhabitants. 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. But on close examination. . who were then in high school. In addition. could reveal oneself in real time. The work also begins to take advantage of the self-reflexive potential of video by becoming more aware of the psychology of interpersonal relationships. In the following years. I remember that the first issue presented a proposal for a paperless society and an interview with Buckminster Fuller. but they expanded this initial awareness by also providing for a way that the viewer could interact with their work. the Portapak. which allowed them to both record spokesmen’s statements as well as to play them back again directly to the strikers who were assembled.” There was a sense of amazement towards that apparatus that. all these types of work were structured in an interiorized safeness. there were so many art pieces that came out of literally “living with the Portapak. That is different from the methodology that Ryan applied. There was not really an extension outward. Also. voiced in the influential magazine Radical Software. Think about Nauman’s “anti-gravitational” pieces. 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. The main thrust of Radical Software was that there should be an alternative to broadcast television. Among the writers for Radical Software was Paul Ryan. Wipe Cycle incorporated the viewer’s 35 image into delayed feedback loops. They were coming out of what became known as “body art” but also from a projection of an inner psychological state. In Wipe Cycle. The ones I am thinking about deal with being within one’s home space. to utilize the video systems like a telephone. and distribution blurred the frontiers between activism. In 1965 Nam June Paik bought some of the first consumer video equipment on the American market. and marijuana – determined the political framework of America’s young intelligentsia. He remains individualized in his own studio. I felt that early on there were two distinct developments evident. Thus. to permeate society. again the importance was that the audience became participants by directly affecting the work and thus the viewer was no longer passive. The communitarian use of video paralleled the development of cable television. Another of Ryan’s concerns was the application of those models to education. the magazine would also frequently detail hardware . which was to create alternative forms to broadcast television. like Dan Graham. 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 Ryan’s Birth and Death and Cybernation: Cybernetics of the Sacred (1972) and Michael Shamberg’s Guerrilla Television (1971). many works were developed in the isolation of the artist’s studio. local news forecasting. or in Dan Graham’s works between 1973 and 1978. Gillette and Schneider wanted to emphasize the process involved in a work. The first generation of video artists mapped and defined a utopian territory. one structure repeatedly appears: camera/body/monitor. he is not really participating in any social or communal rite. Which other writers of Radical Software were influential. or in slightly delayed time. the three M’s – McLuhan. Acconci’s Centers (1971) has the artist pointing at his own image on the video monitor. were producing works where this social awareness was evident. The one you first mentioned. With regard to the self and the body. attempting to keep his finger in the center of the screen. which was run by Ira Schneider. and how did the magazine circulate? The first issue of Radical Software came out in 1970 through the Raindance Corporation. unlike film. Here the concern was with relationships to and through the community. But there was also another area of development. an alternative media collective that published Radical Software. This approach was completely different from how broadcast television was being used. Marcuse. is best seen in the early tapes by Bruce Nauman or Vito Acconci. In that work he introduces another aspect of video: using the video monitor as a mirror. In early video pieces. Other artists.Cable Tv’s FaIled uToPIaN vIsIoN: aN INTervIeW WITh dara bIrNbaum nicolás guagnini When Sony released its first portable video camera. copyright. who came up with topological models for feedback. They were both members of Raindance Corporation. Control of the means of production. He was pointing away from himself and to an outside viewer. How did that development come about? From my own experience. that television has the capacity of being a responsive medium and a valuable social tool. He seemed much more interested in pedagogical models and collective usages for video. David Ross presented this at the Long Beach Museum of Art. Even though he repeatedly stamps in a rhythmic. like walking on the ceiling. 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. and art-making. Many pieces were diaristic and confined to a secure or isolated environment. 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. such as Graham’s numerous delayed feedback/mirror installations. Media artist Dara Birnbaum witnessed this process unfold as she defined her own practice. Feedback was one of the main topics. camera/body/monitor. or grade school. Alternative television was trying to reach out. and the theoretical framework was coming from Radical Software. The technical device that prompted the explosion of video art was the Sony Portapak. or a much more social “self. almost primitive pattern. Nicolás Guagnini met Birnbaum to discuss some of the entangled sociopolitical and artistic issues of the 1970s and early 1980s. Beryl Korot and Paul Ryan were also very involved. That was more like agitprop. where he inverted the camera so that to the viewer he appears to be walking on the ceiling. for example when Allan Sekula made reference to a group of workmen on strike – how they utilized a Portapak powered with car batteries. in 1968. quite influential in the works of Graham. there was the feeling that television should be open to all.” Both fields overlapped. such as Bruce Nauman’s 1968 Stamping in the Studio. artists were discussing the portability of video. It seemed natural to those students. What I hadn’t expected was that it had nothing to do with utopian ideas at that moment. What happened was that through federal and state regulations those cable franchises had to give something back to the community. whose well-known work Four More Years covered the 1972 Republican Convention. It is well known that in America everything gets old before its time. Berkeley was then called “Berzerkeley. This mirrors at a social level that interrogation of the self we were talking about. set up what could be considered the first “pirate TV ” station in Lanesville. That work was one of the first documentaries to be shot entirely on portable video equipment. which was to assist a friend involved in selling cable television. Therefore. And he said. The attempt was to create a bioelectrical sphere. I don’t think so. Their home-built studio was basically in defiance of FCC regulations. I can remember Tom Wolfe lecturing in the early 1970s in the very same building where many student demonstrations happened. with its own broadcast? What relevant experiments were carried out in that direction? In the early 1970s. and many of their programs featured local people. and the Portapak did so as well. In many cases it is about setting a series of rules. Of 36 course it only worked on a small. which would provide better signal reception through an expanded network of cable. when Sony saw the broader appeal of the Portapak with its multiple applications. and the plan was based on selling and delivering television through cable franchises. how you are dressing.” that privilege of consciousness.” There are very few remnants of this left. You are all so alike – what you are reading. and easygoing. such as Marcuse and Angela Davis. 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. as an alternative to the previous types of light shows at rock concerts. except for stations such as the Manhattan Neighborhood Network. I remember doing a small side-job.” The coding within that “alternative” society was as defined and strict as in the society we were rejecting. or sociopolitical purposes. formally. they intensified their marketing of it for home and individual use. At what point in the early 1970s was writing being done about each community having its own cable. Some video makers consciously or unconsciously used their equipment in the same way. It was during its rise and expansion that room was left over for a multiplicity of programming. looking at it from . and this also provided a sense of community. It was simply a business. Composer Peter Gordon talked about the portable audio tape recorder as a folk instrument. Are you also implying that it was rich kids having fun? No. For me. It was basically developed for electronic newsgathering. The free speech movement started there. and then living with those rules to push their limits and applications. like the Shakers. along with listing what were then considered counterculture videotapes. like the early-20th-century socialist community Llano del Rio on the outskirts of Los Angeles. It was also light enough so that women could lift it. marginal scale. an environmental architectural firm in San Francisco. Video was easy. The only stipulation was that the programming had to be deemed “in the local public interest. 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. There was a need for software and for a moment it was possible to provide alternative forms of programming within those spots. it became the first unlicensed TV station in America. early on in Los Angeles. They even ran many commercial ads showing how even a beautiful-looking young woman could carry and use this equipment without being encumbered. It was the amazement of being stoned through technology. It was low-power television. There was also the collective Top Value Television (TVTV ). there is an American tradition of founding utopian communities for religious purposes. And the collectives’ development took a different direction. From the “Woodstock Nation” on. Each new technology brings its own democratizing promise. For example. The Portapak was somewhat of a cast-off of the industry. You could pass around the camera as you passed around a joint. reformed under the name of Media Bus. while I was working for Lawrence Halprin. Feedback was utilized. and it was fortunate that there was someone out there to grab it. New York. It was innocent to believe that cable was not related to a capitalist notion of big business. But this was incredibly idealized. 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. 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. especially because he then represented the total opposite of a blue-collar worker. 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. a couple of blocks. It basically went down a lane. You could only say that it was unbelievable that America allowed itself that “leisure. Look at you. As early as 1926. It was one of the most politically active and aware places in the country. I was in Berkeley at the time. Later on. there was a brief moment when you actually felt that a large alternative group existed – that there were millions of “us” out there. It was almost a “throw-away” from the industry and was taken up by people who had the insight to see its critical potential. “You think that you are so different. and for people who felt alienated and thought that Berkeley would provide an environment with less pressure. Videofreex. It was a turnoff to see the author of Radical Chic in a totally white suit that looked so elitist to us. This fostered a stronger sense of community. Groups like Videofreex at the end of the 1960s joined together in order to provide alternative models of television. cable is not a failed utopia because it never was one. in the Catskills. Prior to McLuhan’s influence and hippy-ism. The Portapak promised nothing in and of itself. Bertolt Brecht proposed that the radio should step out of the supply business and organize its listeners as suppliers. The usage of all electronic equipment was also being redefined.” It became a depository for people who were runaways from all different classes and types of families. and what I found were a variety of attempts at alternative cultures or counter-cultures. There were amazing teachers at that campus of the University of California.information. And I felt that it was absolutely necessary to look into the most common language. like Jack Goldstein. that type of imagery was only coming one way at you. 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. it was a shock – a good shock. There was a proliferation of writing. it was important not to translate this vocabulary into other mediums. from 1977 on. The type of imagery and portrayal that was present in mass media affected many people around me at the time. When I was in Berkeley everybody was carrying a little red book – Mao’s red book – and when Warhol produced his portrait series of Mao in a very aestheticized way. above: Dara Birnbaum. 37 Wasn’t Warhol a model already for that kind of search? I was deeply affected by his work. which looked at America though the language of film – countless articles and studies on Hitchcock and Film Noir.what I feel is now a much more conservative time. However.” You certainly pioneered the act of making copyright and distribution instrumental issues for the meaning and understanding of the work. At a time when there were no VCR s available. 1980. 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. By turning the medium of video/television on itself. and that was TV . 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. and the other was an extension of other art forms like body art and performance art. the real dislocation took place by altering the iconography of television through changing its original structure and context. still from Pop-Pop Video. they were translating these images into other mediums. These artists began to utilize aspects of the mass media’s forms and modes of production. such as Screen magazine. especially coming from Europe. which was being ignored. 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. 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. NY . Before the onset of home video recorders. One was television. For me. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix. but nothing on television. like Warhol. Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman was put on cable TV opposite the “real” Wonder Woman on network TV. I think those pieces hold up as markers of a certain moment in time. The regulations that demanded that color camera studios for production be made available to the public. with a perfect body. I did not escape my own copyright. We wanted to respond by breaking down the “control” of the industry and to allow for a space for altering views and representations. In addition. as based upon a historical past. for local programming in the public interest. Now it is much more difficult to tell cable and broadcast TV apart. The feminist politics of the piece are very much alive. years later the tapes I made came down themselves to be saleable objects. corporate image of women. It was important to talk back and resist the passivity of reception. They give you a window into a specific preoccupation we had with mass media – and our feelings of being controlled by it. It was a weapon. So if you were channel-flipping. The urge for immediacy had a lot to do with being the first generation to grow up entirely on television. At that time her work was produced on cheaply photocopied. We were trying to change things by permeating different territories. but this still does not answer the previous question. rather than neglecting or resisting it altogether. If Bush has his own “axis of evil. Wonder Woman bathing suits were the hottest-selling items for girls. The other regulations that guaranteed programming time to such local and artistic production allowed a window for more experimental work and ideas. and that is how I wanted to use it.TV was strictly controlled. Of course. many artists working directly with video thought of cable TV as different from broadcast TV . The attempt to change context was very naive but very honest. 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. Its structure was different in relation to commercial advertising and how that affected programming. opposite: Covers of Radical Software. In the year that I made the videotape. This was a horrendous image for me. for a moment. Was that idea of permeating the monolith of mainstream culture. I thought that this was the most important territory to invade. 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. The context of the piece evolved within the logic of the industry. hopefully you could come across both versions – which I felt could destabilize the meaning and intention of the original network program. It was a way of talking back to the media. but to let it exist on tape or film. Both Kojak and Wonder Woman are today a 38 cherished part of many people’s childhoods. at that moment it represented a potential space for art practice. By 1979. It was an apparatus that was introduced in our houses like a gun. gave many people a basis for production without great expense. even though it was already developing into a big business. there was a terrible need for product – software – to temporarily fill the gap presented by these new spaces of transmission. It was possible. I couldn’t go and join Lanesville’s community television. to live out a more Benjaminian ideal of becoming producers. A lot of the artists working in the late 1970s and early 1980s had a need for immediacy. That type of immediate reaction. Even though it was also a big business. Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger were also working in that direction in their artwork. like everything else in this society. I wanted to place the work anywhere that it could permeate back into the culture. In the early 80s. that immediate provocation. Courtesy Paul Ryan and Davidson Gigliotti . both in relation to the mass media’s dominant forms and its ideologies. standard 8 1/2 by 11-inch paper. rather than spectators. and that is the way they are distributed now. For me “the evil” was and is the industry – an industry that men dominated. was exactly what I was looking for. I distinctly remember when someone smashed the storefront window of Franklin Furnace. I felt that I had to take on the task more directly. The idea was to grab these images that were part of my own landscape and not to translate their meaning by making objects.” then that image was mine. it marks a moment in time when I felt I had to capture that idealized vision of a woman. related to artists using cable? Yes. angered by the aphorisms that Jenny Holzer had posted there. Looking at it from today. where they could form a commodified. It seemed less regulated and controlled. but they were not invading the territory of television. not unlike the original series that they come from. wrapped in the American flag. . 40 . The current required to drive the speakers was much greater than that of a regular telephone signal. it was possible not only to synthesize sound but also to transmit it over telephone lines. 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. Inside Telharmonic Hall. see Reynold Weidenaar. making it possible to provide music to thousands of hotels. 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). in 1906.Thaddeus CahIll’s “musIC PlaNT” Brian dewan The trouble about these beautiful. Cahill described his instrument as a “Music Plant. Though the Telharmonium enjoyed immediate success. investment in it would remain unprofitable. there were frequent complaints about interference as the Telharmonium’s music bled into telephone conversations through the wires.” A spokesman for the Hall announced that trolley cars could have music piped into them using their overhead power wires. Cahill and his siblings financed the endeavor themselves even after Cahill’s partners fled the company. which was a simplified Telharmonium in miniature. opposite: Musician playing at the Telharmonic Hall. N. with 48 keys per octave. In the mid-1930s. For further information.J. while abolishing every musical instrument. and he invented improved mechanisms for stenograph machines and typewriters. He conceived of an ideal instrument that possessed the virtues of all musical instruments and none of their limitations or. The pressure sensitive keyboard employed an evenly alternating pattern of white and black keys. June 1907. and lobby furniture. Hammond Hayes.” In addition he invented improved keyboard actions for pianos and organs. more music than they ever had before.” On the main floor at Telharmonic Hall. The Telharmonium was first publicly demonstrated in Holyoke. two to four musicians seated at the control console operated the Telharmonium. Thaddeus Cahill was born in Iowa in 1867 and grew up in Oberlin. Every time I see or hear a new wonder like this I have to postpone my death right off. as he wrote. The advent of radio at the end of First World War spelled the end for the Telharmonium.” Cahill patented the Telharmonium in 1897 and in 1902 he and his two business partners founded the New England Electric Music Company. eight telephone receivers fitted with paper horns were hidden behind ferns. and later that year he had it moved to New York City. 1995). one of which he named a “synthesizer. Cahill installed it at Telharmonic Hall at 39th Street and Broadway.” Crowds were eager to hear the new instrument demonstrated. Doric columns. “In the new art of telharmony we have the latest gift of electricity to civilization. one article declared. A separate musician controlled the volume in discrete steps from a piano keyboard and had a set of timbre controls and four expression pedals. gives everybody cheaply. AT&T ’s head engineer. It weighed 200 tons and required 30 boxcars to ship. The special intonation keyboards were difficult for most musicians to play. and the 60-foot chassis held 145 rotors. it was mired in difficulties. In his early teens he was employed as a court stenographer. decided that even with special circuits it would disturb regular phone service. consequently. One of the company’s electricians suggested connecting the Telharmonium’s current to the overhead arc lamps. Hard economic times. he had created the unprecedented art of music synthesis. turned the popular modern wonder of the Telharmonium into an untouchable business enterprise. Because the sound was generated electrically. I couldn’t possibly leave the world until I have heard this again and again. and London: The Scarecrow Press. “defects. 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. Below the manuals there was a pedal keyboard to be played with the feet. a pioneering and immensely ambitious electrical musical instrument. In his youth. Cahill proposed that “telharmony” could even be used to relieve boredom in the workplace. from the jew’s-harp to the cello. each manual having four banks of 84 keys each. knowing that the lamps would resonate with the instrument’s frequency and produce a “singing arc. (Metuchen. restaurants. Lawrence Hammond patented the first electrically amplified organ. because the technology was prohibitively expensive.. but in the 1950s electronic music pioneers Hugh LeCaine and Robert Moog regarded Cahill’s invention not as a failed business venture but as a seminal acheivement: not only did he create the first significant electric instrument. Each generator rotor produced a pitch. and home subscribers. much to the Cahill family’s consternation. Before 1920 it was removed from Telharmonic Hall and scrapped. and the analysis of musical timbre as combinations of tones in the harmonic spectrum excited his imagination. Massachusetts. The entire 41 floor below housed the electric power station that generated the instruments tones. In addition. Timbre was controlled by adding harmonics in varying combinations. unlike a conventional organ keyboard. and everywhere. Ohio. 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. The console had uniquely arranged keyboards. Magic Music from the Telharmonium. When Telharmonic Hall opened amidst much public excitement. Courtesy Reynold Weidenaar . No recordings of it are known to exist today. and AT&T ’s reluctance to allow The New England Electric Music Company to use its conduits and manholes. an art which. This made it possible to play using just intonation. — Mark Twain The new wonder that Mark Twain described was the Telharmonium. though impressed with the instrument. Hammond did not acknowledge the influence of his predecessor (whose patent had not yet run out). novel things is that they interfere so with one’s arrangements. the first to synthesize sounds from electrically generated waves. The photograph originally appeared in Gunther’s Magazine. Cahill had read Helmholtz’s On the Sensation of Tone. a third picture emerges in the middle. From a dIsTaNCe. If you try to meet my gaze in the two pictures by crossing your eyes. . If you focus on it.To be looked aT. it becomes three-dimensional. WITh eyes Crossed dan wolgers These pictures are from a photo booth with two lenses. ). the Director for Visual Arts. 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. France) have historical systems of government support for the arts at home. the location of which is unknown to them). 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. These sanctioned assertions of national cultural identity tend to compete on the island of Manhattan. 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. Canada puts more effort into self-promotion in France and England than it does in the US (budgets are higher. As stated in the Institute’s annual report. 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 Zealand’s Trade Office in New York. NICe To meeT you. In 1990. Sweden pushes furniture. they are hired locally (as dual nationals or citizens) rather than from their own countries in order to develop dual allegiances. Here in the United States. The idea is that local employees. The following conversation grew out of several encounters I had with two of my former counterparts – Robert Kloos.). The 49th Parallel. Since we all have strong convictions regarding the limitations of our roles as cultural attachés. for instance. RK: Traditionally. As the hegemony of US culture spreads throughout the world. etc. officers for culture in its foreign missions began taking posts as early as 1966.. the Department of Foreign Affairs suffered serious cutbacks and had to close the gallery space. RB: As for Canada. the presence of a foreign government’s cultural department is usually contingent upon that country’s economic strength and its own domestic cultural priorities. This proves to be a more cost-effective plan for the department. It was said that there might have been an electoral motive to the foundation of these Institutes whose primary function was to reinforce patriotism. So now that we all seem to have an official “cultural policy” or “cultural diplomacy. Holland pushes design and architecture. Often it is not clear what the main goal is: furthering the exchange of . the former Director of Literature and Visual Arts at the Mexican Cultural Institute of New York. There seems to be no global standard regarding the appointment of a cultural attaché or the official presence of a cultural department abroad. can better guide the department locally and provide valuable built-in contacts. the desire of other countries to protect and disseminate their own cultural agendas on American turf becomes all the more urgent. Over the years the Institute evolved into a cultural center that catered to a very different audience than the one originally conceived. there is a gallery space. most of whom are professionals in their fields. Over the years the agenda has changed from importing pre-packaged projects to the United States (such as exhibitions. we compared the demands of our respective posts here in New York. Italy pushes fashion and food. For instance.hello. His efforts even supported a consulate-run gallery. but these early positions were taken by career diplomats. because many European countries (such as Holland. then. Yet by the early 1990s. In the cases of countries with less economic reach. I’ve been thinking about the ambiguous role of the “cultural attaché” and how foreign governments use culture to further national and political agendas. Sweden.e. In some cases. is how effective are they and how does the cultural attaché negotiate this role? Through our discussion we found that the role and effectiveness of the cultural attaché is shaped almost entirely by the personality of the individual occupying the position. Each country has its own agenda and approach that depends on the popularity and economic demand of each of its unique “cultural products” (i. 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. since the local officer does not need to 43 relocate. their foreign policy includes a stronger cultural diplomacy effort abroad. etc. 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. Of course. 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 Mexico’s history and traditions” – an idea that came directly out of the administration of former president Carlos Salinas. culture may not have been given a special envelope of funds (or special status). For instance. Japan has as much presence in Australia as it does in the US . from 1980 to 1992 in New York. The question. some countries might choose to direct their cultural promotion toward countries other than the United States. Architecture and Design at the Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York. Germany. You could say that we changed our job description from salesmen to information brokers and matchmakers. do you WaNT To go To hollaNd?: a CoNversaTIoN WITh roberT kloos aNd móNICa 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. and Mónica de la Torre.” 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. 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. tulip. Of course the opposite happened as well. whose work has come to epitomize Canadian art in a way: dry. For example. Or take. Before the poetry reading some dancers performed an Aztec dance. So when is it appropriate for the Consulate to accentuate nationalist traits? MT: What you’re saying reminds me of a strange thing that used to happen to me when I’d find out about certain events in New York that took place without us. from which I’m glad to have freed myself. in Canada’s case. conceptual. culture 44 is not easily disassociated from politics. etc. the Institute. Our office supports professional artists from all over the world who have been living and working in the Netherlands for at least three years. You could say that there is a strange consensual agreement going on and it can become very convenient for artists to participate. for example. When there was some prominent event with Mexican artists (an exhibition or reading. almost like logos.the arts. Artists will undoubtedly bring baggage from their cultural backgrounds. regardless of where they are based. for instance) happening without my involvement. but it is the current locality that has become much more important for the understanding of their work. I’d understand if they’d feel embarrassed to have the Mexican Consul offer a speech at their opening. Jeff Wall. and focus on the art itself. classical. knowing. there might have been certain instances in which artists preferred not to involve any Mexican officials. where there has been a lot of political turmoil in the last decade. where countries feel the need to protect their cultural heritage. Ebru Ozsecen (Turkey). I’d even say that the Institute itself got competitive about it. I’d actually feel like the people organizing it were chipping away at the Institute’s territory. in the recent past we were mostly involved in projects with artists that are not Dutch nationals. Meschac Gaba (Benin). someone like the news reporter Peter Jennings has been out of Canada for years. there are issues about how to guage the degree of the artist’s 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. I would like to shed the windmill. My personality would split. Many times we tried to avoid having our logo associated with certain events. We shouldn’t forget that in the case of Mexico. Once there was a tribute to Octavio Paz celebrated at the National Arts Club. At some point . on the stage hung a poster of the Virgin of Guadalupe. For instance. These traits tend to parlay into positive stereotypes when placed in the context of cultural policy. Paz must have been rolling over in his grave! On the other hand. I wonder how much of that has influenced the funding flow for him and for other Canadian artists who follow suit. I clearly developed an institutional persona. such as Carlos Amorales (Mexico). or using the arts to propagate national identity in a day and age of globalization. RB: Yes. Moshekwa Langa (South Africa). which is quality based. and wooden shoes mentality. The artists or personalities then turn into cultural products. but the Consulate still points to him and announces that he’s a Canadian and includes him in high-profile official events – whether he considers himself one or not. Fiona Tan (Indonesia). it was a culture shock! In Canada. As for “Canada in a Suitcase. a few years before I had started. the Consul General at the time responded in typical Mexican fashion. there wasn’t much need to promote the government in general. there was a new envelope of funding that was designated as “Public Diplomacy. that frequently organized protests outside of the Consulate. symbolizing New York. in conjunction with the Mexican Cultural Institute. 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. Also. MT: I have a question before you go on. It was used at one point to enlist a PR firm to shape an image for the Consulate. I believe. the idea being a friendly neighborhood within New York next to the Upper East Side or Upper West Side. and arts.” It was basically a glorified PR budget. an anti-globalist. 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. RB: An artist was commissioned to build a three-dimensional Suitcase”? RB: Actually. there is constant emulation. and general information about Canada’s resources. that’s cultural diplomacy. I don’t recall having this need to promote Canadian-ness in any way. The relationship Canada has with the US is very strange: on the one hand. MT: Yes! I know that apple very well. a neutral space. 45 RB: To the office here. and ties. better yet. As we know. it’s just a citizenship and not a nationality. 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. the Department of Foreign Affairs expressed discomfort in regard to her politics and put up barriers to the realization of the program. What is “Canada in a the idea of being a friendly. with a red Canadian maple leaf on it. the idea for this conversation came up because of “Canada in a Suitcase. When things heated up. Certainly there were times when a particular “cultural” project made the Canadian Consulate nervous. on the other hand. The Consulate presented a view of Mexican institutions that was very open and democratic. an officer at the Consulate wanted to invite the controversial author Naomi Klein. mouse-pads. in the end this didn’t work for the PRI. The reality is that many artists leave for the US and are not interested in being called Canadian—this is called the “brain-drain” – and you wonder if for some. coasters.or consumer-driven as the US ). and promote it to the US — which felt to me like a very American thing to do. We used to receive the Canadian Consulate’s newsletter and. generalized way and to import it. because government funding for the arts is a given in Canada (as with Mexico and Holland). especially on the part of corporate Canada and Canadian pop culture. or indigenous people. . there is a strong desire to distinguish itself from the US. which are given away as gifts. by doing this it neutralized opposition. it’s a certain political neutrality. there are of course thorny. mini-flag pins. The leading voices representing both sides were brought from Mexico.around 1999 there was a group of pro-Zapatista activists based in the South Bronx. especially when it seemed overtly political. After that I came to realize that the Consulate is basically a PR firm in disguise. RK: And you went into shock! RB: Yes. protests did diminish. Of course without ever saying it directly. Here it was very evident that there were strategies in place to define what Canadian-ness is in a unified. The PR firm developed the image of the “Can-Apple”: a green apple. there were no added implementations to justify what’s Canadian or not. The panels took place at The New School. In the end she came anyway. It was supposed to be used for the highest-profile New York events and promotional material – big names only. to give a talk in New York. in part because the Consul’s move paralleled the way the Mexican government in general began dealing with the Zapatistas. There’s a reason why the PRI managed to stay in power for over 70 years! He decided to organize a symposium. So. it was our model for how things should be. economy. RB: Yes. there was a certain kind of acclimatization that took place. if visitors came in from abroad. by the way. resourceful country with a more open immigration policy than the US . unresolved issues – especially with Quebec’s Francophone identity vis-à-vis English Canada and the autonomous rights of First Nations.” When I started at the Consulate. though. not the usual support grants that we would give to venues and individual artists. and it’s not! I mean. Internally. possessing a dry humor – somewhere between British and American. MT: What seems really weird to me is that this apple is present- ing the institution and not Canada. The Consulate’s newsletter is called The Uppernorthside. When Fox won the presidency in 2000 a sense of hope about the possibility of true dialogue was kindled. If I’m not mistaken. if there was a space… maybe. helpful neighbor to the US (but not as market. Included in the listings are famous Canadian celebrities that appear in New York regularly – and don’t really need our publicity or funding. has already appeared on scarves. It’s transported to events like a mascot of the Canadian Consulate. tourist pamphlets. when the Americas Summit opened to huge crowds of protestors in Quebec City. One is expected to take this around on “outcalls” (meetings). diverse cultures. Last year. RB: That’s exactly right! The criticism was that it serves to pro- mote the Consulate itself as if it were a venue. RK: So what are those characteristics? version of the apple out of the Public Diplomacy budget. The apple. about the pros and cons of the Zapatista uprising. In my job at the Saidye Bronfman Centre for the Arts in Montreal. So tell us more about the apple.” basically it is a cardboard box fashioned into a suitcase that contains a video. The auditorium was packed. package it. a vast. Photo: Regine Basha have an exhibition space. We do not use general communication tools such as brochures. but you never overtly push any artists or anything. programming. 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. or we wanted to. Perhaps you didn’t have this problem. nice to meet you. It’s tempting to fall into the “Hello. But I’ll tell you what the rationale is. If they needed lists of artists to meet with. This was inspired by a series of very successful exhibitions we had done in Mexico City and New York curated by Kenny Schachter.RK: In the beginning I thought I wanted to have an exhibition space to present Dutch art. We decided to start a new exchange program that consisted of inviting independent curators to come up with exhibitions for the gallery. but pretty soon I changed my mind. opposite: Canada in a Suitcase. and the like. Robert. to the artists of the country you must. do you know how many Mexican artists show up at your office every week? Some of those artists we couldn’t immediately dismiss. It segregates it from the regular New York art scene and underlines the Dutch-ness of the work. etc. I cannot deny that I have to carry out my country’s national cultural policies. in 1999 we moved to a new building that had a pretty good gallery space. MT: One can think of our roles in terms of infiltration. This might have been idealistic. These promotional tools you are mentioning are misguided. It would not provide the necessary context and environment for the work. First of all. You become someone who people can trust. A few years ago I devised a system that we call the “factfile” project. I’d like to say that in principle I do agree with you. The art market plays by its own rules and many artists either can’t or simply don’t want to adjust to them. These programs worked well because they truly promoted lasting ties between artists of both Mexico and the United States. websites. in the sense that you first trace this map and know more about them than they think. It contains a database and archival system that maps the cultural field in the United States and records information about organizations. has a perfect understanding of what is going on there. Of course this is much more effective than walking around with catalogues or slides in your portfolio. Sometimes we had to. RB: But the position itself demands that you be a double-agent. it gobbles up a lot of money that could otherwise be used for the support of the arts. In some instances we also gave them grants to go on scouting trips to Mexico and meet with different artists. It is unnerving to be in that double role. if they at least included a couple of Mexican artists. help them show their work in New York but didn’t feel that there were many chances that a mainstream gallery or museum would be interested in it. and interest in international exchange. but on the other hand. do you want to go to Holland?” trap. Furthermore. promote and service their needs. publicity kits. their mission. from that moment on. On the one hand. but instead favor one-on-one contact and direct dialogue. that it’s better not to have one. I’d much rather see Rineke Dijkstra presented at Marian Goodman than at a venue that only presents Dutch art. I am constantly trying to find a balance. I want the curators to come more often and to stay longer and enter into a serious dialogue with Holland. but we never told them whom to see. but if you’re at the Mexican Cultural Institute in NYC . Then you make yourself a prominent figure in the art world. Also. but we never thought that our job was comparable in any way to that of a Chelsea dealer. I would rather have my role be superfluous. It is not enough to support a curator’s visit to a country once and think that he or she. The newsletter heaps all kinds of unrelated information together and disperses it among an indiscriminate audience instead of a target audience. 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. they are not about cultural promotion but about national promotion. what projects we collaborated on. MT: Going back to the issue about whether it’s good or not to RK: But even these trips need to be thought out more. Also. while to the local institutions you are the provider of funds. it documents the work history our office has had with these organizations. They could include whomever they wanted. by default. 46 . we would provide them. . Richard Sawka. Doris Brickhouse. Ronald Joseph. 2003. the release of old unpublished work into the public domain may well be meaningful. Peter Rockefeller. Ayal Shlomo. Thanks to: Ariel Apte. at $50. Robert and Lynn Burress. Bonnie Williams. Sarah Crowner. and their contributors can sleep easy because under current American law these photographs are now copyrighted until 2047. Edward Nostrand. the sort of material it’s hard to imagine the public gaining access to. like Mark Twain? For students and publishers of such celebrated writers. Charles Yabba. and Josephine Zywicki. By the time this issue is distributed. Debra Singer. Phillip Saxe-Coburg. Jason Hashmi. then. Given that few people knew that these images existed before we published them here. Ibrahim Ba. Samantha Cranko. however. Denis Blot. 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. nobody’s bought one yet – but they are published. Frances Richard. or even being aware of. Michael Hargrove. we invited readers to send in family photographs taken by photographers who died before 1933. These images were your responses. anyone wishing to pen the definitive Twain biography will have to obtain the Twain Project’s permission. they would have entered the public domain on January 1. Sara Harris. is as aware of copyright law as we are. Katie McMullen.000 each. Had they not been published by the end of this year.save your FamIly Jay worthington In the last issue of Cabinet. But what about all the unpublished writing of someone famous. 48 . Who cares? Probably nobody. The microfilm set is not cheap – actually. Cherma Wildman. Peter Johnson. Oh well.000 pages of (mostly) unpublished writing by Mark Twain. it will be down to America’s libraries and archives to get busy and let us (the public) know what we have actually been given. Agnes Vertucci. Robert Smith. Jay Worthington. Jane Melamed. in the first place. David Berqvist. The Mark Twain Project. Until 2047. and last year they published a three-microfilm set containing an estimated 500. . columns maIn chIldhood . A lonely boy with a neglectful stepmother and distracted father. the naturally occurring forms of crystals were correctly assumed to be external manifestations above from top: Unknown kindergartner’s paper folding album. Pestalozzi developed techniques that incorporated a combination of both. for example. is the practical and philosophical heart of the system — Fröbel’s interconnected series of twenty play “gifts” using sticks. The works of his contemporaries Goethe and Schiller added to Fröbel’s intuited cosmology. hands-on activities and what he termed Anschauung — ”object lessons. One’s teacher was usually a woman and she led the class in activities that would have been considered play outside the school. Thirteenth gift (papers for cutting). From 1811 to 1815. as well as building blocks. ca. the ABC was a tool developed to facilitate observation and the learning of writing by fragmenting letters and pictures into their basic components. that it is natural to assume personal expertise on the subject.” and just as commonly. 15 (slats).. Abbie A. J. The son of a Lutheran minister. relations between people in a free society. Kindergarten has always included singing and dancing. Milton Bradley Company. Germany.1 Abstract and unintentionally iconographic. 1920. ca. concrete observation. yet through the agency of their mutual pupil Fröbel. At Napolean’s defeat in 1814. recreated with kindergarten gifts number 7 (paper parquetry). At the school he opened in Yverdon. as Pestalozzi considered it of primary importance in the teaching of writing and comprehension of form. “L2B3” might mean a short diagonal followed by two long horizontals. sewing cards. ca.. Recognizing that children manifested a natural “taste for drawing. and the gridded tables at which the children sat. Hemmelmann’s paper cutting album. Used with permission. a forest town in central Germany. Published by Harry N. and soldier. changing the field from a branch of natural philosophy to an exact mathematical science. Pestalozzi’s success with orphans and the previously disenfranchised children of the working class altered the course of modern education. The names Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and Christian Weiss may ring no bells today. Eighteenth gift (papers for folding). a diluted version of what Friedrich Wilhelm Fröbel (1782-1852) originated as a radical and highly spiritual system of abstract design activities developed to teach the recognition and appreciation of natural harmony. when the existence of atoms was finally confirmed with the invention of X-ray diffraction. Fröbel’s first visit to Yverdon was in 1805. Switzerland. 1920. the place of the individual in relation to the nature that surrounds and includes him. So. is a distortion.Fröbel and the GIFts oF KInderGarten NormaN BrostermaN Kindergarten has been around so long. Mass. Springfield. their influence was profound.” or direct. teacher. coincident with Fröbel’s tenure in the museum. 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. and 16 (jointed slats) . the symmetries of crystals and seashells. But kindergarten for us. 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. he returned to teach under Pestalozzi and stayed until 1810. mosaic tiles. as well as observation of the workings of nature — the growth of plants. and the life force that controls growth in all things — as both a permanent goal and working gauge. and for most of the generations born in this century. 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. the system was inherently confusing and short-lived. But long abandoned. 14 (weaving). 1875. ABC der Anschauung. Abrams. and is so thoroughly familiar. and he fashioned a personal philosophy of Unity — embracing the spiritual potential within a person. Fröbel took an assistant’s job at the Mineralogical Museum of the University of Berlin under Professor Christian Samuel Weiss (1780-1856). New York. Two years later. In their joint publication of 1803. Springfield. after acting as a private tutor in Frankfurt. 8 (sticks). colored paper. an aversion to the study of letters. 9 (rings). Milton Bradley Company. Philadelphia. 1875. Weiss was in the process of formulating the theoretical parameters and objective techniques of modern crystallography. Westfield. after stints as a forester. All rights reserved. All images except overleaf are from Inventing Kindergarten © 1997 Norman Brosterman. Herrick’s paper Beauty forms. Before the 20th century. overleaf: Vasily Kandinsky’s Composition 8 from 1923. Fröbel was born in Oberweissbach. Mass. Inc. and thus hardly known today. The traditional educational activity of drawing was greatly emphasized at Yverdon. drawing equipment. in 1804. 1875. he formed an unusual kinship with nature that blossomed into spiritual exaltation during the height of the Romantic era. Massachusetts.. Like quirkily-coded versions of Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings. 52 . 53 . Two years later. Publicly banned in Germany as a result of the failed revolution of 1848. For Fröbel. the world. and the United States. and art were interchangeable. as the class shifted from gift to gift and from realm to realm. 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. transforming the very same materials into something new each day. it soon top (clockwise): Perforating cushions. he exultantly fixed upon a brand-new word to describe his revolutionary invention. “kindergarten. the gifts were never available for entirely “free play. this intense and prolonged occupation with the geometric handiwork of God had a profound and lasting impact. the knowledge forms mathematical: 2x4=8. or imagined. 4+4=8. After formulating the explicit lesson of kindergarten (growth and interconnectedness). people. the ultimate lesson of kindergarten was straightforward. Milton Bradley Company. Mass.2 The shapes of crystals in particular — the systematic variations in the design of their forms. and art either or both. Westfield. Fröbel opened his first institution for the very young. mathematics. Great Britain. United States. numbers art.. A chair might become numbers. and forms of Beauty (or Art). developing energy” in the smallest fixed forms of nature’s infinite palate and learned to recognize people. He began to perceive “transforming. Simply put. the geometric gifts were used to create pictures or structures that fit loosely into each of three fundamental categories — forms of Nature (or Life). Photograph: Zindman/Freemont . 1900. and entire societies. trees. The original kindergarten spread successfully around the world in the decades after Fröbel’s death in 1852. forms of Knowledge (or Science). Canada. and while doing so would enter the world — and it would enter them. 1875. In 1837 in the spa town of Blankenburg. which was Unity. handling these forms correctly would reveal 54 and illuminate the mind of the creator itself.of the regular arrangement of minute particles in threedimensional matrices. and traditional crafts that were their forbears. or the gifts) that he theorized would lead to its comprehension. Children could make anything they saw. perceived. In slightly different guise. With extremely simple means. people.”3 What once seemed obvious to Fröbel about living things — that their essential growth was governed by fixed laws from above — now also resonated in mere stones. In 1816. he discovered forms of symbolic unity that could. After teaching around Germany and Switzerland for another 20 years. Switzerland. Fröbel worked each day for almost two years in a “locked and perfectly quiet room” organizing the diverse and dazzling samples of the mineralogical museum’s splendid omnibus collection. as Fröbel felt symmetry was most comprehensible as beauty to little children. inclined as he was to view nature as a great work of design by a higher power. five-. Unlike the building blocks. through all their numberless various stages of development. and six-year-olds. Fröbel designed physical tools (models of natural crystals. Springfield. planes. Kindergartner Gina’s (last name unknown) Nature forms made by pricking paper. It was particularly popular in Holland. and more significantly for the generations to follow. Through the efforts of missionaries. Furthermore. be transferred to paper and bound into books. ca. squares and cubes— are the outcome of the same natural laws that also result in the growth of children. The life forms were tangible: chairs. and their perceived borders were misleading.. Fröbel declined a professorship of mineralogy in Stockholm in favor of founding his first small school for children. ca. plants. For four-. and would ultimately reveal its specific chemical composition. former crystallographer Fröbel effectively assembled all the components of the universe into his training program for infants. with pencil and straightedge. Kindergarten teacher Abbie A. type. liberal. artificial constructs. a rigid dullness was too often already fixed within them.… Nature and Man now seemed to me mutually to explain each other. Japan (the first school opened in 1876). their use was subordinate to the greater whole. Fröbel postulated that since the shapes of crystals — combinations of triangles and tetrahedrons.” In short sessions of directed play. Equivalency was kindergarten’s foundation and it was expressed in all things and at all times. mosaic toys. France.” which encapsulated in a single clever neologism two related ideas: its organizational model (the children’s garden) and its spiritual foundation (the garden of children). Mass. he concluded that when many children began school at the officially mandated age of seven. and man’s development and history. ultimately leading to Weiss’s discoveries. and Jewish schools until its complete acceptance in the early 20th century. It was the genius of Fröbel’s mentor Weiss to recognize that the number. Herrick’s Beauty form. the beauty forms were usually symmetrical patterns. 1900. He simultaneously created a methodology that when properly utilized.” Always tethered in some fashion to the forms of the three realms. provided children with an infinite number of conceptual links between the two — exercises in what were usually called the “Three Realms. it was maintained there in private. and relative direction of a specimen’s observable geometric symmetries distinguished its unique internal structure. and symmetries — provided an obvious structure for the categorization of mineral classes. Italy. the early kindergarten pedagogues in effect created an enormous international program designed specifically to alter the vision of above: Children’s garden. except by using fantasy. their parents did not. Such representation so little resembles the real object that even with the best of intentions. the system’s proliferation resulted in unforeseen consequences tangential to. and the German word “kindergarten” is still found in the dictionaries of a great number of totally unrelated languages. Los Angeles. these games. 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. Fröbel’s explicit lesson of Unity. rather than being preparation. a collection of triangles. before a few of them grew up and invented abstract painting and modern architecture. Marie Matrat. While focusing on kindergarten’s many educational and social benefits. but significantly removed from. are the actual teaching. they have made it into the dominant portion. and the actual objects surrounding the children remain forever forgotten. millions of little children in Europe. which he cannot represent using these trinkets. or écoles maternelles. and significantly. the general populace. Three little sticks held like a fan is a vase of flowers. a hundred things the child has never seen. a tomb. and in its repetitive use of geometric form it taught a new way of seeing that was utterly unfamiliar to the preceding generation. the Inspectrice Générale of the French national kindergarten system. 1900. a log.became a fixture in almost every country on earth. unidentified kindergarten. is a factory. In a word. and in some areas. and Japan began their education in Fröbel classes.4 . By connecting the gift plays to an abstract mode of expression. laid out according to a given pattern. In 1882. ca. Because 19th-century children in countries from Austria to Australia were required to learn a new form language as a requisite of kindergarten. North America. for me it was impossible to ever recognize the object. the mechanism of a windmill. From 1860 on. The original function of Fröbel’s 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. which might even be called improvised. declared in exasperation: Even the best headmistresses have visible form as their first concern! Rather than resorting to a few random exercises. Yet all of the gifts remained essentially unchanged and in general use until at least 1910. so that the generation that came to maturity before World War I was comprised of the prime recipients of the original crystalline kindergarten. well after. 56 . geometric elements were what should first be made visible to the child-mind. United States. Pedagogical drawing for little children in Holland at that time entailed the systematic construction of increasingly complex geometric designs on right-angle grids.5 If Wright were the only important 20th-century respondent to the kindergarten pedagogy. was a Fröbelian kindergarten teacher in Vienna before Walter Gropius invited him to Weimar in 1919. the circle (sphere) and the triangle (tetrahedron or tripod)-these were smooth maple-wood blocks. cut across and connected seemingly divergent data. It was the seed-pearl of the modern era and it was called kindergarten. Vasily Kandinsky attended one of the very first Italian kindergartens in Florence. Fröbel’s twenty gifts. 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. which deliberately deconstructed nature from solid to plane to line to point and back. A Testament (New York: Horizon Press. Thus color sense awakened. I wanted to design. the specific forms of the kindergarten were inherently ill-suited for actually emulating European art and architecture of the late 19th century. But the smooth cardboard triangles and maple-wood blocks were most important. Scarlet cardboard triangle (60°-30°) two inches on the short side. kindergarten taught intellectual diversity and the value of unconventional reasoning. where he was living with his parents in 1870.. glazed and matte. a new art that would become the next art. oder AnschauungsLehre der Massverhältnisse (Tübingen: J. were another one of the “gifts”— cut into sheets about twelve inches each way. Louise Colin. Jeanneret took the equivalency examinations that allowed him to enter the public primary school. ca.to seven-yearolds —were in the primary band of the scholastic spectrum. p. All are in my fingers to this day. G. and among other things. at the age of 17. which. It has been largely ignored because its participants — three.” in H. Charles-Édouard Jeanneret. There were also ingenious “constructions” to be made with straight. or for that matter. Providence. ed. Photo Zindman/Freemont. Cosmic. 1957). 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. Also German papers. Wright’s 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. and some definitely did. But there were others. and what they all did to some degree. the art of their future. Keatley Moore (Syracuse. After three years in this private kindergarten. was also structured along Fröbelian lines. etc. Piet Mondrian won his license to teach drawing in Dutch primary schools like his father before him. Taken East at the age of three to my father’s pastorate near Boston. 1993). The children thus exposed might have been expected to eventually focus these primary experiences toward art. 5 Frank Lloyd Wright. 4 Marie Matrat. these squares were slitted to be woven into gay colorful checkerings as fancy might dictate. even before his fourth birthday. It was also kindergarten gift number ten. was to systematically transform the gifts into the kind of crystalline expressions associated with another art. translated and annotated by Emilie Michaelis and H. It was never fodder for artistic argument over absinthe and Gauloises in Montmartre cafés. Allen Brooks. the daily activities in any average kindergarten exhibited affinities with nothing so much as an introductory course in the mechanics of art and architecture. And due to the configuration and particulars of play with the gifts. NY: C. Autobiography of Friedrich Froebel.6 The grid of the kindergarten table became a very real model of a type of inquiry that drew from multiple sources. 1892. As one of the few kindergarten kids to write about his early experiences. dried peas for the joinings. any other epoch. Switzerland run by one of the first graduates of the new state-mandated Neuchâtel Fröbelian Normal School. W. slender. I soon became susceptible to constructive pattern evolving in everything I saw. 1890. began his studies in the Ecole Particulaire of La Chaux-de-Fonds. we would still owe a debt to Fröbel’s persistent dream. bare a close resemblance to the components of his Bauhaus paintings. 1 Johannes Buss & Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi.. Cotta. 3 Ibid. . In 1889. opposite top: Unknown kindergartner’s beauty form made with the fourteenth gift (paper weaving). pointed sticks like toothpicks or jack-straws. 1889). “Les Ecoles Gardiennes de La Hollande. But crowded around the grid of the kindergarten table in their lace and velveteens. were smooth triangular sections with which to come by pattern — design — by my own imagination. US. 2 Friedrich Froebel. opposite bottom: Kindergartner Alice Hubbard’s beauty form made with the fourteenth gift. I did not care to draw casual incidentals of Nature. 312. In its tacit acceptance of abstraction. Photo: Zindman/Freemont.” in Revue Pedagogique (1883). Yet paradoxically. I learned to “see” this way and when I did. for several years I sat at the little kindergarten table-top ruled by lines about four inches apart each way making fourinch squares. ABC der Anschauung. as per an 1889 law. It was identical to the netzzeichen (net drawing) Fröbel first proposed in 1826 as a response to Pestalozzi’s ABC der Anschauung.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. Johannes Itten. Eventually I was to construct designs in other mediums. and restructuring the resulting intellectual panoply with a new worldview. etc. while mimicking some of the traditional activities of real art making. beautiful soft color qualities. and had the potential to result in more than one “correct” conclusion. there is no question about the system’s profound effect on his architecture. Mlle. On 1 September 1891. ca. nor was it taught at the tradition-bound academies. first Master of Form at the Bauhaus and creator of its revolutionary Vorkurs. early modernism. 57 the future Le Corbusier. played upon these “unitlines” with the square (cube). and one side white. 6 See Marc Solitaire. “Le Corbusier et l’urbain: la rectification du damier froebelian. pp. 19-20. what the first great kindergarten generation could do well. La Ville et L’Urbanisme après Le Corbusier (La Chaux-de-Fonds: Editions d’En Haut. in public use in Holland along with the rest of the system since 1860. Bardeen. 1803). orange leaf. fourteenth (paper weaving). and eighteenth (paper folding) gifts for kindergartners. pages 59-60: Fall . 2002 58 .school Year HeleN mirra Artist Helen Mirra’s project uses Friedrich Fröbel’s eleventh (perforating).62: Winter .paper folding. white branch. 2002 pages 61.paper weaving. 2002 pages 63.64: Spring .paper pricking. green bud. 59 . 60 . 61 . 62 . 63 . 64 . England is where children’s literature as we know it got started. Newbery printed. all the way back to Comenius. But as Leonard S. The adults were not all that interested in reading about things that could never be. writing categorized as children’s literature — is often described as a benign (if often commercially aggressive. ran an experimental school in Boston—until he was closed down for bringing in a black girl. in his Thoughts Concerning Education. and sold his own books. although well reviewed. As the epicenter of the Industrial Revolution. describes. For a variety of reasons. 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. In England. 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. full of misanthropic philologists. Scholars who study 19th-century literature often describe it as the “golden” period of the novel. in the US . Lewis Carroll published Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland 20 years later. Historically. child rearing. published. Thirty years later. they were scholars. Margaret Wise Brown. Marcus. Is there a connection or parallel development between theories of what kinds of books are appropriate for children and various theories about children’s education. In the early 1800s. at the beginning of the 19th century in Germany. and all of the people who stood over them. teachers. These books. the author of Goodnight Moon and many other picture books. 2002) and Storied City: A Children’s Book Guide to New York City (Dutton. Louisa May Alcott’s father. As sometimes happens. the Grimm brothers collected their very well known fairy tales. for example. turned out to be golden age of realistic fiction for children. and fanatical librarians. as in the case of the Harry Potter phenomenon) enterprise that revels in escapism and fuzzy feelings. They were interested in delving into the origins of Germanic culture. is there a moment when “children’s 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. John Locke wrote that children respond more readily to illustrated texts than to unbroken blocks of type. you publish a book with one audience in mind but it finds a different audience instead. Is there an equivalent “golden” or “classical” period of children’s literature among people who study children’s literature. So the middle of the 19th century was a golden time for what is often called nonsense literature. Alcott was aware of the European theorists of education of his own and earlier times.Where the WIld thInGs Were: an IntervIeW WIth leonard s. It sounds as if the emergence of children’s literature is roughly concurrent with the emergence of what we think of as the modern novel. like a key or a dog. among others. One of them was a philologist. because they were very focused on succeeding in the modern world. and commissioned writers like Oliver Goldsmith to write for him. a leading authority on the history of children’s literature.to late 20th century. in Germany. the history of children’s literature is complex and often contradictory. It was a cross between a picture dictionary and a picture encyclopedia. of recording it and capturing the part of it that was disappearing as Germany turned into a literate society. There were little illustrations of things to be recognized. got her training as a writer for children. in 1865. Orbis Pictus was a very popular book. as well as a seller of patent medicines. David Serlin and Brian Selznick spoke with Marcus in September 2002. and of the picture book. Edward Steichen was inspired by Bank Street to create two unusual photographic picture books for children. which was not unusual for the time since merchants very often had two or more trades. or child development? You can trace a connection. For example. and the word that corresponded to the picture was printed along side it in both German and Latin. in that same year. which was published in Nuremberg in 1662. The Grimms 65 were not thinking of children as their audience. including their parents. 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. In London in the 1740s. or among children’s 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 children’s literature. which is where. between theories of education and the kinds of children’s books that were being published. the book known in English as Slovenly Peter. Newbery was a printer. 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. and the Grimms’ fairy tales were received by the German middle class as a work primarily for children. Marcus is the author of Ways of Telling: Conversations on the Art of the Picture Book (Dutton. did not become especially popular in their time. Bronson. 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. marcus DaviD serliN & BriaN selzNick Children’s literature — or more specifically. publisher. was published as well. sometime writer. But the first edition was not published as a children’s book. modernist image-makers. offering a comfortable buffer zone between innocence and experience. It’s interesting because we see a splitting off between what was considered “children’s literature” and what were considered appropriate kinds of storytelling for adults. and their ideas found their way into children’s magazines of the day with which the Alcotts were associated. John Newbery was the first person to make children’s books a viable commercial enterprise aimed at the entertainment as well as the education of young people. forthcoming 2003). and was published in the Englishspeaking world in the 18th century. by Heinrich Hoffmann. . Edward Lear published his Book of Nonsense Verse in 1845. bookseller. the mid. the other was a librarian. More than Germany. That observation became one of the basic principles for children’s literature. after the turn of the 20th century. Quite a few Magritte paintings appear to be based on scenes from Alice. Nearly all contemporary “board books. There seems to be a relationship between the kinds of work that Steichen was doing for these children’s books and other kinds of modernist techniques or themes that we would identify in much more experimental.” They were walled off from the rest of the library. placing each of those pictures across from a blank page that was left for the child to do with as he or she pleased.” and the dream life of children. André Breton talks directly about children in his Manifesto. Do you think that those two attitudes are in some kind of dialogue with each other? That’s a good question. Around 1900. The fear is that the children of River City are going to play pool and read Balzac and turn into lecherous. You can think of those rooms as “secret gardens. respond to images of things they already know. follow from the concept and design of that book. Of course. If you think of the musical The Music Man. I gave a slide lecture in which I “illustrated” Alice entirely with paintings by Magritte and Dali.There’s a clear resemblance between some of Steichen’s commercial work and his photographs for the children’s books. and claimed Lewis Carroll as one of the proto-Surrealists. The New York Public Library . were ideas that mixed and merged in the minds of some of these artists. very few major literary Illustrations courtesy The Donnell Library. There’s no chiaroscuro effect going on. He was working from the Bank Street theory that one. He photographed toys. public libraries began to hire specialists in children’s literature and to open special reading rooms for children’s use. By the 20th century. and collages by Max Ernst. This had the effect of cordoning off children’s literature itself from the rest of literature. and feel validated by the experience. When I taught children’s literature at the School of Visual Arts here in New York. but that’s what was happening around the United States at that time. telephones. 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. the townsfolk use “Balzac” as if it were a dirty word. The child as “primitive. in a straight-on way with a minimum of shadow. whether knowingly or not. That’s true.” which are printed on durable cardboard for the very youngest children. Europeanstyle perverts! The River City library was too small to have a children’s room. M. clocks — things that would be found in almost any home. You find.and two -year-old children are most attuned to their immediate surroundings. C. One reason why libraries created those rooms was to keep children away from the adult literature that they didn’t want them to have access to. it’s 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. “adult” works. there seems to be a split between those who want to create art to empower children’s imaginations and those who prefer to sentimentalize children as vulnerable beings who need protection from their own desires. Steichen would photograph a seashell in order to reveal a universe in the swirls of the shell. Escher graphics. he was pretty much eye-to-eye with the object. in the US . which was published not long afterward.C. up through the 1960s and 1970s. in 1976. But their work filled a certain void. There wasn’t a whole lot of interest in politically radical literature. There was a new psychological realism in children’s books. 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. It was initially quite controversial. had been the dean of Rutgers University during the time when Paul Robeson was admitted there. there was no market for contemporary original art of that kind. The Beims’ career is pretty much forgotten now (and in fact their books have only an historical interest today. first as an editor at Harcourt Brace and then as the founding editorial director of the children’s book imprint at William Morrow. and were generally dismissive of the art and writing in children’s books. the Limelight Gallery in the West Village was the only gallery in New York City that sold photographs. to become more integrated than before. with middle-class book publishers selling their books to middle-class librarians. She was trying to change society through the books she published. had been published for very young children. Swift. Other books followed. Jerrold and Lorraine Beim wrote picture books about friendship between black and white children. An artist who met Dr. the first children’s history of the “Negro” people. An important children’s book editor of the 1940s and 50s. Can you give me an example of a children’s book that was directly influenced by psychoanalysis? Well. but the fact that he had dark skin made it unique for its 67 time. About a decade later. and the largest part of the children’s market was the library market. and he took Robeson under his wing. In the 1950s. More people were finding it acceptable to go into therapy than ever before.publications showing any interest in children’s books. And the woman who ran this gallery had trouble . A few years earlier. by Hildegarde H. So publishers were making books for the libraries more than for anybody else. That’s hard to fathom. Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak. so there is a really clear line of social concern. not a literary one). They don’t hold true to the central argument of his book The Uses of Enchantment. Hamilton’s father. because children weren’t supposed to yell at their mothers. He thought it was a damaging story. This is why some people were afraid of Where the Wild Things Are when it was first published. An article in the Saturday Review of Literature in 1965 entitled “The All-White World of Children’s Books” caused a lot of people to think about what they had been doing. 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 children’s literature before the 1960s. For one thing. 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. in 1962. the children’s book world had been so selfenclosed. to a very limited extent. But this is all a little hard to pin down. think about art photography. Bruno Bettelheim condemned Where the Wild Things Are in his column in Ladies’ Home Journal as being too violent for children. and illustrated by Lynd Ward. by Ezra Jack Keats. People didn’t attribute value to them. It had nothing to do with being black. a medical doctor living in Washington. In the 1940s. that the art from even a successful children’s book would not be recognized as even worth a nominal amount. and suddenly picture books seemed. a fact many people have forgotten since it was given the Caldecott Medal that year. for one. The idea that children experience rage and that it’s a natural part of their psyche was a new idea to children’s picture books. whereas in the 19th century The Nation and The Atlantic Monthly reviewed children’s books on a regular basis. We know that there was a tradition of proletarian children’s literature in the former Soviet Union going back to the revolution. You’ll find one of the most powerful of the librarians — the New York Public Library’s Anne Carroll Moore — showing those protective and very proprietary tendencies some of the time but also loving a new children’s book by Gertrude Stein. In those days. How does the collector’s market for children’s books or the illustrations created for children’s books compare to the collector’s market for art and books in general? Until recently there weren’t many collectors who took children’s books seriously – apart from those books from the more distant past. and did so from a consciously political perspective. a picture book called The Snowy Day. Elisabeth Hamilton. It was set in Brooklyn and showed a little black boy walking out in the snow and having a great time. It was against that background that the insights of psychology and psychoanalysis began to find their way into children’s books. Hamilton also discovered Beverly Clearly. 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 Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich? The 1960s were a turning point for children’s literature. in a bizarre twist. 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. There was little awareness of a connection to the rest of art and literature. it was then that most editors and librarians finally realized that most children’s books were about the life of the white middle class. Until then. You could buy the best photograph by Edward Weston or Ansel Adams for between 1025 dollars. Was there a similar tradition of children’s books written by people in the United States who identified as socialist or communist? Publishing was so connected to the library world. that very often the editors at publishing houses were former librarians. too. which in 1939 was pretty far-out. D. In the 1940s. I think these comments of his were more a reflection of Bettelheim’s confused psyche than of his theories. Well. Hamilton published the Beims as well as North Star Shining (1946). Louis Bevier. named Irwin Kerlan began collecting original art from contemporary picture books and founded the Kerlan Collection at the University of Minnesota. was a pioneer in this regard and certainly was not politically naïve. children’s book ever published? Slovenly Peter. but some people were convinced otherwise. or it’s a send-up of a cautionary tale. For that reason. The section we were reading turned out to be about the return of Voldemort. so they weren’t very attuned to books for very young children. became one of the most popular children’s books in history throughout the world. We were down to the last forty pages of the book on September 11. . It’s 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. it grew directly out of the Bank Street theories about small children being interested in their immediate surroundings as opposed to fairy tale. 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. published in Germany in 1845. Many librarians hated it because there was no story. I don’t know outside of Germany how widely read it is read anymore but for many years it was a book that was hotly debated. and the other half think of it as scary as hell. or among the most controversial. the author couldn’t have intended this. including once by Mark Twain. Is there a book that gets the gold star for being the most controversial. about a black rabbit and a white rabbit who fall in love and get married in the end. and people disagree as to which of those two things it is. I was reading the fourth and most recent of the Harry Potter books out loud to my nine-year-old son and there’s a supernatural figure called Voldemort who is the center of evil in the book. “Don’t fight! Don’t resist!” Again.paying her rent! So photography is another art form that used to be valued differently than it is now. it’s a very controversial book. It’s kind of hard not to read it as an allegory. as well as numerous parodies. terrible figure rising up out of the ashes to come back and haunt the good guys. they didn’t recognize it as having literary merit. it was translated into English at least three times. and for them a good picture book was one that you could read during story hour at the library to a hushed audience. Garth Williams’s The Rabbits’ Wedding is a picture book. Until recently. the book seemed to comment on some of the things that were happening in the world just then. It was one of the archetypal works that drew people to one side or the other in the debate about realism versus fantasy. And the children’s books we remember make sense in precisely that way. I think that often what happens with children’s books is a by-product of the distillation that is required to reach their primary audience. There have been at least 600 editions of the book. this violent. the authors denied that they were commenting on the situation in Spain. But children’s books have a way of resonating with real experience in unexpected ways. Plus. was controversial because it came out during the Spanish Civil War and some people interpreted it as a pro-Franco fable advising. published in 1959. never-never land. Even Goodnight Moon was controversial. The Story of Ferdinand. librarians didn’t want very young children coming to the library. published in 1936. Without my intending it. Slovenly Peter is either a cautionary tale meant to scare you into behaving properly. Some saw it as a list of words. Obviously. . an artists’ residency in rural Wyoming. To the extent I can smell anything here in Wyoming.” It has no direct correlative in standard English. the Red Fish. though its first definition would have to be “stuffy. That shit is art. We just follow each other around like a pack of Brooklyn waterfront dogs. For artists with one child. “Daddy. Yesterday. When I was asked to collaborate with my children for this issue of Cabinet. Sniffiness is synesthetic. it isn’t working out. Whenever we set aside time to make something. our sniffy. my mind immediately went to scratch ‘n’ sniff. Alas.” Adeline has a comprehensive term for the conditions that cause her to hold her nose. So this may seem like a cop-out. Lisa: Congratulations. until I had been resurrected from the dead. I am in the middle of four weeks at UCross. And especially trying to establish e-mail correspondences with Emmett and Ella. who loved the idea of putting something in a magazine – who just loves making stuff. it often seems the child itself is a project. And. too full of effort. Ella and Adeline has turned out to be the same collaboration we have every day. The last of the sage bloom has put me in a histaminic haze. Addee: That’s my room. My wife Lisa told me a few days ago that Addee has been saying that I am dead. after some minor translation. it didn’t quite work. firmly secured in her claustrophobic car seat. but my collaboration with Emmett. Lisa and I throw virtually all of it out when they’re not looking. “Daddy. It is essentially a sense of dwindling space brought on by warmth and stale odors. As I write this. about Kelly. I climbed about 450 ft. So I sniffed out a few choice scraps along the way and forwarded them to the magazine. Predictably. kept trying to make Art. The new school year has its demands. I left New York a few days after school started. She tried her best. an object of artistic doting. scratch ‘n’ sniff turned out to be too costly.” I discovered this while working with Ella (six years old). it was established that cars are sniffy. it was also becoming clear to me that the last thing I wanted to do with my children was some sort of “project. up to the top of a nearby butte (the only place I can get a strong phone signal) and asked to talk to her. I wonder what they’ll choose and I wonder if they’ll follow through on my request to toss the stuff once they’ve made 6000 copies of it.” The origins of “sniffy” can be traced to a warm day circa late spring 2000 in our cluttered sedan when baby Addee. a kind of olfactory denial. I have been hoping to work with the kids remotely. about how she didn’t cry today after nap time at her new school. altogether too aired-out. and it’s becoming clear that my kids can sniff out and kill anything resembling a project with Pops. Zane (Addee’s best friend. I stayed on until she was good and ready. . She told me about her new pet fish Sweetheart (a birthday gift). forget it. 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. in turn. about Ella’s first piano lesson and latest soccer exploits. Ella: You win the Nobel Prize! Ella (sniffing Emmett upon his return from a sleepover): You smell like Emilio. It stinks. except in the dead of winter. All except for that fine piece of needlework I made. The next day was the first anniversary 70 of September 11. but with three kids. 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. I found myself foisting my ideas on Ella. My family is obsessed with smells. “You stink. she was worried that I might fall off.” which really means. Again. period. the last thing I wanted was art. her new best friend. She does this most frequently during her long trips to the toilet which inevitably end with the announcement. not with her fingers. The word is “sniffy. and that was just the problem. Maybe these kinds of families can make art together. claustrophobic world. the day after I arrived was Addee’s fourth birthday. exclaimed. which means. “Roll dowd by widdow! It’s sdiffy!” And so. Yesterday we talked a solid thirty-five minutes. And as I tried to come up with another project. Adeline (four years old and known as Addee) frequently holds her nose.a PacK oF blInd snIFFInG doGs ByroN kim Addee: I just farted. and she. but by blocking the air passage through her nose with her glottis. “I’m done. because everyone knows that what children do is especially beautiful because they aren’t really trying. especially our own. walking up the stairs at the start of a playdate): Something smells. Ibe dud!”. of course.” passes for a term of endearment in our home. Usually. I miss my family. come wipe me. Our attempts were too intentional. it smells too clean. Asking them to send me their renditions of Sweetheart. a phone conversation with Addee lasts a matter of seconds before she gets distracted or her sister elbows her offline. It’s astonishing how much stuff our kids’ lives produce. . The sheer numbers of such images are staggering. and. Images of children are everywhere.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. traces the history of the images that helped shape this contemporary relationship to children as it first emerged in the 18th century. you trace the history of the Romantic paradigm of the innocent child that emerged in the 18th century. 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.PIcturInG Innocence: an IntervIeW WIth anne hIGonnet siNa Najafi At no time in history have pedophobes had it worse than now. 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. . on calendars and Christmas family cards. on keychains and in office cubicles. including the most basic assumption about the absolute innocence of childhood. and the other was to present a set of alternative possibilities. Anne Higonnet. In her book Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood. worst of all. photographic and otherwise. However. 38 percent of amateur photographs deemed important enough to be framed were of children. Of the 25 billion photographs taken in the US every year. which is the historical contingency of any image of childhood. that seem natural. normal and real. in advertisements for banks and toilet paper. moral failure. disappointments. knowledge of one’s mortality. First. which made me understand that what I thought was an art historical question was more fundamentally in the present a legal question. about half of them feature the very young. ill health. Your book sets out to do two things.” 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. I knew from the most cursory examination of differences between 17th. economics. Second. According to the Wolfman Report of 1992. a child pornography case called Knox v. Sina Najafi spoke to her by phone. professor of art history at Barnard College. these images speak of an age of innocence not yet tainted by politics.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. the United States. Grinning at us in that saccharine way that profitmakers love. 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. The legal problem of Knox hangs on the question of whether you can legally define the one true meaning of a photograph. I started the book project with a question that came out of the current political situation. class frustrations. In the 19th century. As the family becomes more intensely nuclear. overcrowded. What was the conception of childhood preceding Romantic childhood. By the 19th century. People from different fields tend toward different explanations of why the shift occurred. Moral purity is attained. one of the iconic paintings of childhood was Gainsborough’s Blue Boy. which is how the idea of absolute childhood innocence is still maintained. Even at its moment of conception. both social and personal. Another factor that’s pointed to. 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. For instance. even though Freud is debunking the notion of a childhood sexual innocence. It’s about adults who want to look back on a time before their own lives which was supposedly less complicated. But there is also a paradox insofar as child pornography laws are structured to increase the chasm between adult sexuality and childhood innocence. . 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. 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. 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. As infant mortality begins to be curbed. There is a demographic explanation. 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. yes. 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. It’s not just that you have a change in the concept of childhood but that the whole notion of what childhood is becomes increasingly important. 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. 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. As the middle class became by far and away the dominant class in AngloSaxon culture. the blue boy is dressed in 17th-century costume and is a figure of nostalgia. parents develop expectations that the child will live and they attach a greater emotional significance to each and every child. A very powerful force shaping our ideals of the innocent childhood is the force of nostalgia. to the simplification and popularization of a commercial opposite: Maud Humphrey Bogart’s 1900 drawing of her son. Is that a simple question of those kinds of images reaching more people? Most basically. Some of the most effective early labor reforms are demands for the elimination of child labor. the future Bogey. the world’s most famous painting in the 19th century. Already in the 18th century. 73 You can say that Freud in a way is both the describer of that and the proof of that. paradoxically. displacement and repression. But Freud is also the person who tells us about denial. 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. a model of childhood prior to the 18th century is one of likely death. 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 . but there is also a gender factor involved. children’s fashions for a very long time were the most nostalgic and most resistant to change of all Western dress. 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 emotional issues around parent-child relationships become increasingly important in society.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 Ariès in Centuries of Childhood. 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. as the majority of states are now demanding that many children be tried as adults. 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. more pure and worthy. In the 19th century one sees the way that progressive reforms wider than childhood find a rallying point in this notion of childhood innocence. Even back in the 18th century. 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. not coincidentally. My job then became to fill in the gap between the 18th century and the present and to figure out what happened. because so much of his theory is based on the importance to the psyche of what happens in childhood. into the domain of the visual. In a brutal sense. the concept of childhood became correspondingly more important. this new concept of childhood seems to have been suffused with nostalgia. One explanation for the idea of innocent childhood being so predominantly Anglo-Saxon is that it is precisely a middle-class concept. 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. is the one that Freud points to — if not in some kind of transcendentally analytical way. at least in a locally descriptive way. at least in terms of the increasing pace with which the issue of childhood becomes important. which became. The middle class could have seen the painting if they made an effort.” 1881.image of childhood. for example? In the 18th century. it would have been known through very small-scale but public painting exhibitions. The Blue Boy then begins to be reproduced in the form of prints. 1976. As are some of the major challenges to the traditional representation of innocent childhood. then at the beginning of the 20th century the painting is sold to the American collector Henry E. By the second half of the 19th century. These exhibitions were free. So there are new ways of making a above: Kate Greenaway. “Ring-a-Ring-a-Rosies. she is completely vindicated. There is a lot of debate as to whether there is such a thing as a “child consumer. Her work belongs to a very particular and crucial moment. but one of the things Sally Mann was up against was the claim that not only that her images were wrong. detail of cover of Led Zeppelin’s Presence. By the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th. you can talk about a mass reproduction of prints. As it turns out. for example. the painting hung in an aristocratic collection that was sometimes open to the public. When Sally Mann started contradicting stereotypes of childhood in the late 1980s. Huntington. But certainly a child audience develops at that time.” particularly in the field of children’s literature. If you track the most popular and influential images of childhood. 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. Were there men in the field? Yes. 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. opposite: Hipgnosis and Hardie. Then in the 19th century. and that sale is the occasion for tremendous media exposure which brings out the way in which the picture taps into ideas about childhood. There are many people working in that field now. she turns out to have been announcing a kind of widespread change in how people think about childhood. 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. . whereas in the 20th century they are overwhelmingly American. is it possible to state who would have seen a painting like The Blue Boy. but that the subject was trivial. in particular English. a decade later. and about whether it is all about their parents’ tastes. 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. there were some great 19th-century children’s book illustrators who were men: Randolph Caldecott and Arthur Rackham. To understand how widely images circulated before the appearance of the modern media. you can see in the 19th century that those images are overwhelmingly European. there are some extraordinarily gifted women who find themselves creating an extremely culturally powerful visual ideal. Wyeth. Once those images begin to be produced. the first of the great Wyeth line. The financial success these female illustrators were having is astonishing. For many critics. Violet Oakley. angel child. Childhood was becoming simultaneously popularized. Do the women receive their training as painters at art academies or do they go to specialized schools for illustrators? Both. C.000 a year doing illustrations of children. Now we are getting to a “chicken or the egg” question between technology and ideology. 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. their talents were being used to confirm an identification of women with maternity. but some of them ended up working in illustration. who taught there. and feminized by the late 19th century. Commercial imagery becomes based on its own tradition of imagery. and less tied to a high art tradition. How does illustration lose its primacy as the medium for representing children? Between the 1880s and 1920s. and also N. That is one of the reasons why women are attracted to the field. But as it became possible and affordable to reproduce photographs. who was a great supporter of Kate Greenaway’s work. she was making $40. tablecloths. Delaware. The mother-child relationship became increasingly close and idealized in the course of the 19th century. Women were being given an outlet for their talents and yet they were not threatening any gender conventions. On the contrary. 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. and children posing as adults. this was a very happy outcome for a gender dilemma. And then there was the “Brandywine” School of Illustration coming out of the Howard Pyle School of Art in Wilmington.living as an artist that did not exist before. maternity was one of many diverse occupations and obligations that fell to women. Elizabeth Shippen Green. Absolutely. married in 1898. But then something must have happened in the period since the late 18th century because Reynolds’s or Gainsborough’s representations of childhood were presumably considered masterpieces of the first order. child dressed up in a fancy costume. It is kind of odd that this would not have already happened by the 18th century. The school produced Jessie Willcox Smith. illustration had a gigantic audience compared with any other previous audience for images and had very little media competition. Thomas Eakins. 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. The categories are mother with child. 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. . commercialized. women went wherever there was a teacher who would accept female students. Some receive the academic art training and some go directly into an illustration training school. By the time the women of the Golden Age of Illustration are active in magazines. child with pet. commercial illustrations were slowly replaced. Your book mentions that when Maud Humphrey Bogart. was very active in encouraging women. In general. there also seem to be many more products on which the motifs could be replicated. There are things like kitchen towels. then the process begins to feed on itself and one generation of commercial illustration is the foundation on which the next will work. There are ways of making a living in the field that are less closed to them than the high-arts realm of painting and that’s how you get a disproportionate share of female talent working on the subject of childhood. which meant concentrating on the body paradoxically in order to diminish its corporeality. Every single one of these women illustrators said they were very strongly encouraged to specialize in the subjects of maternity and childhood. etc. Prior to the 18th century. As you get the split between consumption and production in the Industrial Age. Yes. once you have what we call tie-ins to books and visual advertisements for products. greeting cards. future mother of the actor. But what is even more surprising was the critical success they were accorded by people like Ruskin. women become increasingly relegated to the home and that home becomes the site of a much more nuclear family. All five types in some way proclaimed the innocence of the child. there are aspects of their personal experience that lead them to question that conventional. you also provide historical examples of images of childhood that we can now see already implied a different relationship to children. that was even more true with photography than it was with commercial illustration. It remains true that an overwhelming number of people who address the subject of childhood seriously are still women. stereotypical image of childhood. However you interpret Lewis Carroll’s relationship to children. women had more opportunities in photography than they did in the more traditionally prestigious media. The representation of childhood and the relationship between masculinity and femininity are always to some extent tied together. 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. going all the way up to art photography and even up to the present. it was certainly very intense and ongoing. Some sensitive photo historians like Carol Armstrong or Carol Mavor now think that Cameron and Lewis Carroll produced equally complicated images of childhood. Lewis Carroll’s photographs are an obvious case. we might say. I would also say that while women are under the strongest cultural pressure to believe in a happy. Even though you think that the crisis of ideal childhood is coming to a head now. There is nothing like being with a toddler 24 hours a day to make you think that toddlers are not always angels. Julia Margaret Cameron began photographing when her children were already grown up. There was a niche for women.From the start. of what you call the knowing child. but you also include someone like Julia Margaret Cameron. What is the relationship between these two desires? That is a very important issue because. Lewis Carroll’s 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. and maybe adults have very complicated sexual feelings about children. we’ve relied for a great deal of time on this idea of childhood innocence. idyllic notion of maternity. in our efforts to protect children from adult society. whereas Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographs were in a way nostalgic images of relationships to children. The way the rationale went is: “Children are innocent. therefore they deserve to be protected. In fact. The camera was given to her by one of her children in an attempt to console her for her empty nest. From the very start there were women like Julia Margaret Cameron who demanded that photography be considered a fine art. The single most successful image-maker of children today is Anne Geddes. and in particular they are sexually innocent. However as the 20th century unfolds and feminism makes demands for femininity to be reconceived. It is only in the 19th century that childhood begin to be associated with maternity and takes a conventionally feminine role.or herself. “Maybe children are not so sexually unknowing.” Does that mean children no 76 longer deserve to be protected? I think that the most .” Once we all start listening to Freud or looking at Calvin Klein ads. on the other. philosophical. which is the opposite of objectification. opposite: Glen Wexler. 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. it is a strategy of a consumer culture that leaves children vulnerable. The alternative conception of childhood acknowledges the complex relationship that children have with the world around them. It seems to me that a case about completely artificially created images should be easy to decide. and that adults have with children. Some of Nan Goldin’s images of children are subjectified without being sexualized. and the representations we produce of them. but I don’t believe these things progress in a linear way. and. Yes. for a change. and you concentrate on action. then there is no certain place we can go to. That is just as insidious as any other kind of objectification. However. For one thing. 1994. judicial difference between representations. To me. that clarifies the pornography controversy insofar as there is a categorical. And I think we all know examples of children who have been objectified through their innocence.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. can try to defend the welfare of some very young people. The Free Speech Coalition.” I feel so strongly that children should be protected from the consequences of adult society that I don’t believe the sexual feelings of either children or adults should in any way compromise the protection of children. as well as the use of children as soldiers. Of course it is easier to legislate adults than to control children themselves. To the extent that the sexualization of the child is an objectification of the child. My other comment is that this issue is so culturally and historically subjective that while one. I do not believe that all sexualizations are objectifications. The recent Supreme Court case. on the one hand. Here is one tragic example. I think there are many different kinds of sexualization and some forms endow a subject with a sense of power and personhood. . And then some admittedly arbitrary decisions will need to be made on the basis of age. Of course they come up against culturally different notions of childhood. That is a two-pronged project. Of course I hope and believe it will all sort itself out soon. at every moment in time. you leave representations alone because they belong to the province of free speech. Human rights organizations try to address the global sexual traffic in children. This is a difficult moment in which people’s anxieties over radical change are causing them to make very hasty and dramatic decisions and this is a period of great anxious flux. children. First. and which I think is exploitive. I would hope. but my feeling is that our judicial system should be vigilant about real things that adults do to children. 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. most importantly the sections banning any “virtual” images that 77 implied that a minor was engaged in a sexual activity. Ashcroft v. How does one square the cultural knowledge you bring to your book and the kinds of decisions needed to put legislation in place? Once we’ve understood the complicated relationship between adults. cover for Van Halen’s Balance. I think it is extremely difficult to do so on the basis of some transcendental definition of childhood. and actions against real children. which makes us want to enforce an absolute definition of childhood. This is where I would like to substitute the word objectify for the word sexualize. children are being sexualized at speeds and in ways that are astonishing. because real children are not at stake. overturned large parts of the Child Pornography Protection Act of 1996. We must seize these weapons from enemy hands. On 1 November 1917.1 As discussed in “The Forgotten Weapon. the Bolshevik regime regarded children’s books as major vehicles for transmitting Soviet ideology and influencing the new generation.” published in a February 1918 issue of Pravda. So focused on guns and other weapons. In selecting cannons and weapons. the need to become active participants in the building of the Communist state. children’s literature would serve an important function in the class struggle: In the great arsenal with which the bourgeoisie fought against Socialism.does a ProletarIan chIld need a FaIrYtale?: the sovIet ProductIon booK For chIldren alla roseNfelD In the aftermath of the 1917 Revolution. Children’s literature would impress upon young readers of the postRevolutionary epoch.2 . we overlook those that spread poisonous weapons. many of whom belonged to the working class and peasantry. we forget about the written word. the People’s Commissariat of Education (Narkompros) decreed that the Soviet state should achieve general literacy as soon as possible by introducing obligatory and free education. children’s books occupied a prominent role. many of whom. Fairytales are needed so children who are hungry and cold can escape into the world of fantasy and feel imaginary happiness. The State University of New Jersey. The former condemned the fairytale as emblematic of the old regime. Between 1923 and 1929. such as Vladimir Lebedev. In the pre-Revolutionary era. The appropriateness of fairytales for Soviet children’s books was a subject of intense debate during the 1920s and 1930s. focusing on science and technology. including the Commissar of Education. many in collaboration with the writer N. The most highly regarded theme was industrial development. The production book addressed themes that reflected the importance of modernization in Soviet society. turned to graphic design. The Riabov Collection . Several thematic groups developed within this genre.The issue of children’s literature engaged Communist Party leaders at the highest levels. Moscow. such figures designed highly experimental children’s books that embraced the principles of contemporary art movements such as Suprematism and Constructivism. Moscow. and David Shterenberg. industrial themes from their pre-Revolutionary predecessors and Western counterparts. Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts (RGALI). unable to implement their innovative ideas in industry and architecture because of material scarcities. American pragmatism. It also captured the imagination of leading Soviet avant-garde artists. Illustration for Morozhenoe (Ice Cream) (Leningrad: Raduga. Throughout the 1920s. the pedagogue E. Smirnov. Anatoly Lunacharsky. 1932). Many Soviet educators deemed fairytales incapable of accomplishing the tasks assigned to children’s literature in the new epoch. in particular the theories of John Dewey (1859-1952). 1925). Often created with a opposite (counterclockwise from top): Cover of Patrols of the Harvest (Moscow: Detgiz. the years following the Revolution saw a rapid.… 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. the Soviet critic G. and the conquest of nature. and agriculture. construction and urbanization. Yanovskaya. one of the leading authorities on preschool education. various professions and trades. Their works combined ideas from abstract painting with experimental typography to create a new visual language of Soviet children’s book design. Rutgers. Courses in religion.5 › › › During the second half of the 1920s. In her 1925 book Does a Proletarian Child Need a Fairytale?. Eikhler wrote: The first and primary requirement for Soviet children’s books on science and technology is a clear demonstration of the principal difference between socialist and capitalist technology. Among the first successful experiments was the work of two Moscow-based artists. 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. This feature would help distinguish Soviet publications on modernizing. focused on the fairytale’s role in child development from the perspective of class consciousness. ancient languages. Soviet writers introduced a new genre: the child-oriented production book. The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum (ZAM). the Soviet critics of children’s literature presumed. ZAM. The State University of New Jersey. Opponents also believed that fairytales reflected the ruling-class ideology of the eras in which they were created. the Chichagova sisters produced around 20 books. V. 1932). while topics such as the production of cosmetic powder or women’s fans were dismissed as unworthy of treatment in book form. Acquired with the Irene Nintzel Memorial Fund. 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. Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts (RGALI). G. She argued that the fairytale acted as an obstacle to the child’s understanding of historical materialism and called for the abolition of the genre. they represented only 5 percent of them the following year. . different types of machinery. El Lissitzky. 1934). Design for Moscow Has a Plan (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia/OGIZ. the central components of the First Five Year Plan. children’s literature primarily consisted of fairytales. Cover of Moscow Has a Plan (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia/OGIZ. and poor men becoming rich — she concluded. Rutgers.”3 Criticizing 79 the story of Cinderella. greatly influenced the Russian school programs of the early 1920s. Nadezhda Krupskaya.4 To replace the disgraced fairytale. Since many tales preached loyalty to kings and included religious superstitions. the production book became one of the most important art forms of the Constructivists. Galina and Olga Chichagova. Discussions about children’s books were carried out within the broader context of the spectacular transformation of the Russian educational system in the aftermath of the Revolution. who in the 1920s were students of Aleksandr Rodchenko at VK hUTEMAS (Higher Artistic Technical Studios). including stories about mass production. for example. In 1935. described the oppressive and alienating labor of capitalist societies. stupid people turning smart. while others defended their social value. Aleksandr Rodchenko. While folk legends and fairytales constituted approximately 25 percent of all children’s books in 1918. as if in response to the tremendous social changes that accompanied the Bolshevik upheaval. which. “The bourgeoisie needs these fairy tales to support their exploitation. Another requirement for production books was that they celebrate technology’s progressive potential. and fantasy stories. The Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union. and Lenin’s wife. Describing fairytales’ improbable (occasionally impossible) plot developments — old men turning into young men. marked decline in such themes. However. legends. numerous Soviet pedagogues regarded it as virtually criminal to introduce proletarian children to ideals that had no place in a socialist society. and ancient and medieval history disappeared from the curriculum. Many Soviet critics argued for the social importance of the themes. The Soviet adherents of Dewey’s theories claimed that the task of the school was not to educate but to create the conditions for the development of useful skills. and were not only propagandistic tools but also innovative artworks in their own right. The Newspaper Explained to Children. they are absent from the Chichagova sisters’ illustrations. The book’s illustrations. featuring straight lines and schematic. which are strongly reminiscent of Rodchenko’s advertising designs. and sans serif lettering. .” “devoid of sentimentality. Although the workers are mentioned a number of times in the text. praised it as “precise and to the point. herself a children’s author. The illustrations of Vladimir Lebedev. Anna Grinberg. employing a rigid geometrical organization. the sisters’ designs embraced the Constructivist machine aesthetic. adhere to the typographic principles developed by the Constructivists. asymmetry. they depicted the stages of dish production. While one contemporary reviewer described the book as “quite boring” and “lifeless. Izvestiia. describes the process of newspaper production and features the front page of an actual issue of the Soviet newspaper.compass and ruler. 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. which focus on machinery and production tools.”7 Another Smirnov-Chichagova book.” and “capable of holding a young reader’s interest without resorting to fables.”6 another reviewer. elementary forms that resembled technical drawings and corresponded to mechanical printing. another Soviet artist who produced important children’s books related to technology. In the 1924 book Where Do Dishes Come From?. The State University of New Jersey. These used cars were bombed from an airplane so they would become totally unusable. one chapter of the book. and the Young Pioneers’ important role in the achievement of these goals. A caption under a photograph depicting a pile of smashed cars reads: “Among this pile of used cars there are perfectly good ones. It happened in Chicago. These artists included Evgenia Evenbakh. Pox. 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. The State University of New Jersey. 1930). The latter’s portrayal is enhanced by Razulevich’s cover design. Chinese. Cover of The Newspaper Explained to Children. the topographical character is dominant to the exclusion of any decorative feature. opposite (counterclockwise from top): Cover of How the Plane Made the Plane (Leningrad: Raduga. who promoted during the later 1920s and 1930s. 1926. In order to create her illustrations for the book Porcelain Cup. Fox and Mr. powerful figures seen from below in the manner of Rodchenko’s photographs. which demonstrated via short stories and numerous photos the ongoing construction of a hydroelectric station. representing the events described in the book through documentary photographs. David A. based many of her illustrations on close observations of objects and production processes. wasteful figures are the Soviet workers and peasants. and published in over 20 countries. Acquired with the Irene Nintzel Memorial Fund. The book was translated into English. 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 children’s book design. For example. Morse Art Acquisition Fund. Rutgers.” Ilyin’s fictional American capitalists. the artist reveals the structure of the plane’s parts: some of the instruments are depicted in cross-section to show their interior components and demonstrate their uses or processes. A whole generation of Soviet children received their introduction to socialist and capitalist economics by reading Ilyin’s book.” Those benefiting from burning the harvest. who are pictured as happy individuals. she bought a pike at Leningrad’s Andreevsky market and made many sketches of it. Lebedev’s illustrations for the book promote modernization. and destroying used cars are “Mr. Deineko and Troshin’s books informed young readers about metric units or explained where their cotton clothes. Dneprostroi. which depicts workers as towering. The George Riabov Collection. making the preliminary drawings for their production books directly at the factories they visited. Rutgers. Ilyin consistently compares the capitalist and socialist systems in favor of the latter. In contrast to these greedy. The George Riabov Collection of Russian Art. This book. 1930). bread. entitled Moscow Has a Plan. This type of intimate engagement was widely . Illustration for Where Do Dishes Come From? (Moscow/Petrograd: Gosizdat. the protection of the harvest. proud of their active participation in the building of socialism. ZAM. throwing out food. In the cover design. In his 1927 illustrations for Samuil Marshak’s How the Plane Made the Plane. and sugar originated. and Japanese. a time when many publishing houses organized business trips for their artists to industrial centers and collective farms. Photomechanical illustration (after a photograph) for Dneprostroi (Leningrad. For his illustrations to Nikolai Mislavsky’s book. When Evenbakh worked on a cover design for the 1926 book Market. 1924). 1927).emphasized the two-dimensional nature of the page. Lantzetti appropriated various archives of press photographs. featuring poetic images of the new objects that are produced by contemporary technology to replace the old ones. Evenbakh carefully studied the process of porcelain production at the Lomonosov Porcelain Factory in Len81 ingrad. Cover of How Beets Become Sugar (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo. and Mildred H. explained to its thirteen-yearold readers the processes of Soviet Socialist construction. GIZ. USA . entitled “Crazy Country. often utilizing the avant-garde technique of photomontage. 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. Soviet children’s book illustrators commonly employed found photographs as figurative elements. The artists Olga Deineko and Nikolai Troshin participated in these excursions. shoes. It caused somewhat of a stir in English left-wing circles. The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum (ZAM). Other important subjects of photo-illustrated children’s books of the 1930s were the struggle for the collectivization of Soviet agriculture.” criticizes the overproduction of food and consumer goods in the American economic system. 1925). this signified a return to traditional. Yanovskaya. 252-253.” Pechat’ i revoliutsiia. 1 Sbornik dekretov i postanovlenii rabochego i krestianskogo pravitel’stva po narodnomu obrazovaniiu (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo APN. which established a system of strict censorship over children’s publications. no. pp. pp. p. 40-42. 3-4. 9 Editorial. (Moscow/Leningrad: Gosizdat. Pravda (Moscow). p. Eikhler. 1947). 1925). 156. 1 March 1936. according to the Soviet authorities. 3 E. pp. pp. “K voprosu o nauchno-tekhnicheskoi literature dlia detei. The Pioneer’s facial expression exemplifies the political atmosphere at that time. Cover of Vchera i segodnia [Yesterday and Today].” As early as 1927. 7 Anna Grinberg. V. 1-3. with the constant search for “enemies of Soviet people. The Riabov Collection. Iz opyta issledovatel’skoi raboty po detskoi knige (Moscow: Doshkol’nyi otdel Glavstsvosa. 43-44. 5 G. Lebedev depicted schematic lifeless mannequins.”9 A previous version of this paper was presented at the Museum of Modern Art’s symposium “The Russian Avant-Garde Book. clockwise from top: Cover of Porcelain Cup (Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo. In his drawings. p. “Retsenziia: Otkuda posuda? N. the most experimental publishing house. no. Smirnov.these themes are presented in P. Chichagova i O.A.8 That same year.” Detskaia literatura (Moscow: Izdanie kritiko-bibliograficheskogo instituta). 8 “O khudozhnikakh-pachkunakh. 4 Ibid. 6 Z. For book design. 1924). Illustration for The Travels of Charlie. ZAM. 3. “Zabytoe oruzhie. 1936. G. 5-6 (June–September. no. The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum. “Knigi byvshie i knigi budushchie (dlia malen’kikh detei). I. the Committee of Children’s Literature prohibited the release of 81% of the children’s books by Raduga. In the following year the Communist Party issued a decree that placed all publishing houses specializing in children’s literature under the supervision of the Central Committee of the Komsomol (the Young Communist League).17 February 1918. nos. The George Riabov Collection of Russian Art. 1925). since. Quoted in Detskaia literatura (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia). (Leningrad: Raduga. 1926).” Detskaia literatura (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia). (Kharkov: Knigospilka. 1935. the images of dull monsters have nothing in common with the most productive workers of the Soviet Union. Stanchinskya and E. 35.” (O detskoi knige). eds. . 2 L. 1925). Nuzhna li skazka proletarskomu rebenku? [Does a Proletarian Child Need a Fairytale?]. Rutgers. “Protiv formalizma i shtampa v illustratsiiakh k detskoi knige. The State University of New Jersey. 44-45. “About Artist-Doubters. Postyshev’s Patrols of the Harvest (1934). 1936. 3. Chichagova” in E.” Pravda. The 1936 Pravda article. they were contaminated by harmful bourgeois ideology.” initiated a severe reaction against avant-garde experiments in children’s book design and forced them to employ more realistic and figurative styles. The book’s cover image contains a photo-portrait of a Young Pioneer intensely watching a collective farm field. 3-4. Kormchy. pp. 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. an editorial in the Children’s Literature journal severely criticized Lebedev for his formalist approach: “Instead of concrete images of realistically rendered distinguished workers of the Soviet Union. 1910-1934” on 30 March 2002. nonexperimental typography and design. In 1934. Dreizin. Flerina. We rigged my son’s bicycle helmet with a tiny video camera. which was pointed at the students’ eyes as they read. I asked each of them to read for me in a makeshift studio in the literacy coach’s office. I was interested in seeing the students’ physical reactions as they tackled a new book. invited me to become a member of her class.on readInG WeNDy eWalD I have a son who is learning to read. Michelle Silvia. Like any parent. each drew a web describing what reading means to them. .to fifth-grade students struggle with reading and writing. a special education teacher at Carl Lauro Elementary School in Providence. I am fascinated by his development. Afterwards. At what point would those marks on a book page turn into a readable pattern? What if that didn’t 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. Most of her third. . . F. The Doll Games emerged in Berkeley. 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. the Doll Games’ enduring antihero.D. this allpurpose Duchamp. and the Chaste Hermaphrodite in the Doll Games of Shelley and Pamela Jackson. politics.” The ending point of the Doll Games is easier to locate. and their uncompromising moral vision. employing stock scenarios such as “pirates. Barbie’s kid sister Skipper got a butch haircut and later. Which latter. fashioned with who can say what degree of knowingness about the theatricality of gender.” and “running away. However. became the lecherous wolf Harvey. It was conceived at different times as. It is no wonder that it became none of these things. by their own admission.” appropriated and remixed elements of the epic. the Doll Games propose doll games as a true folk art form. the Doll Games have confused some critics.the doll Games sHelley & Pamela jacksoN This excerpt from the Jacksons’ unfinished collaboration is edited and introduced by J. whores and roués. tender heroes. visited the Doll Games from without. the artists’ family was opening a feminist bookstore just down the street from People’s Park. bumbling he-men. a multimedia art extravaganza. Indeed. cannot be understood without reference to the larger public discourse in which they took place. funny and tragic. Never afraid of acknowledging wish-fulfillment as narrative’s primum mobile. 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. while they went on with less ambiguous projects — until I. clay breasts. Not the least peculiar object that has come down to us from that late. That abandoned project has been for some years a ruined edifice housing a ruined edifice: a mystery inside an enigma. the Doll Games was a genuinely interactive art form. obsessional. as a tenacious admirer and scholar of the original Doll Games. this scholar would argue that this optimism was a radical gesture. borrowed freely from literary and consumer culture. having come full circle. It is up to the reader to say whether a Doll Games configured and. renewing itself with every performance. comical sort. but languished as a collection of poorly copyedited fragments in the files of the Jacksons. as well as the numerous documents and artifacts they generated. 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. but evolved by degrees out of earlier games (stuffed animals.” “the orphanage. Intricate. Obedient to no rules except those its practitioners invented for themselves. 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. California. completely collaborative. and farce. Perhaps this work of mine will itself fall to ruins and become the object of a future archaeologist’s course of study. In this theater of two. and the ruined city it was built upon. is a doll-sized mirror.” Kiddles). sporting a moustache. violent and sexual. persuaded them to abandon their files to the ministrations of my jiggling keyboard. a work of postmodern cultural criticism. The Doll Games did not spring fully formed out of a Mattel box. is already tremulous with the implied moustache of Harvey. To make up a cast of characters comprised of swashbuckling heroines. Little Red Riding Hood.” “the rebel princess. the Games’ highly conventionalized narratives. though too much weight has been placed on Shelley Jackson’s famous dictum (1976): “People are more interesting than dolls. variously. This fossil. so that the transfigured Harvey in the mirror might . though deliberately excluded from the doll world. decadent period of the Doll Games so particularly rich in artifactual droppings. moral. Resurrection. and sexuality were fiercely and publicly debated. race. the Doll Games presented a resolutely cheerful Weltanschauung. “That depends on how you define the Doll Games. I consider myself in the light of an archaeologist working two sites at once: a ruined city. A crude moustache. “The Doll Games” is also the title of a project the adult Jacksons undertook to document their childhood collaborations. as the dolls were taking their first steps toward literary history. is itself a disguise and a supplement. The Doll Games cannot be precisely dated.”1 The Games themselves. California. I have done my best to disensepulcher. and so on. I feel immensely privileged to introduce this curious little world to a new audience. and a collection of thoughtful and rather poetic autobiographical essays. It has haunted me. but also to those of the larger society around them — a contrast of which the artists were very much aware. comedy. As an independent scholar I have studied the Doll Games for some years. given that the values the narratives affirmed were in stark contrast certainly to playground norms.” their outlaw utopias and anarchic 86 child societies. and became the dashing heroine Aina. to restore. “Kleenex dolls. But the Doll Games transcend their epoch. leading some scholars to dismiss them as naïve. Bellwether. and even. Ph. but — mise en abyme — when Harvey himself is the Narcissus. The Doll Games’ privately staged confrontations between androgynes and “dainty ladies. This influencing machine. this derelict. in so far as it is possible for one not privy to the secrets of the Doll Games first hand. yes. the adult Jacksons’ own “Doll Games” failed. Similarly. a point I make in “Laurie Reborn: Death. the Jacksons used whatever material came to hand with bold directorial instincts and a sense of identity fluid in the extreme. and what survives of them are historical documents of a wobbly. becomes delirious with the double spectacle/specularization of the moustache-implicit antagonizing and defeating the moustache-explicit. eyebrows. The Doll Games held up a funhouse mirror to their times. in the first half of the 1970s. 1970 and 1976 are generally understood to mark the limits of the period of greatest energy and invention. romance. to add exquisite layers of irony. every audience member was a co-creator. at a time when gender. baby dolls were reimagined as obese adults. an open-to-the-public celebration of and clearing house for foul-mouthed ex-little girls. When did the Doll Games begin? As Babette Jackson has said. (Tragedy and gothic horror. perhaps disfigured by an epigone can succeed where. though any attempts to identify an inaugural moment are defeated by the nebulous nature of the phenomena under discussion.”2) Giving the postmodern pastiche a comradely nod but eschewing its cynicism. MDXIXVIIIIIX. see “Did the Doll Games Ever End?” Postmodern Culture. Ph.D. for experiencing a moment of vertigo. F. in my mind’s eye. and therefore both less like him/herself (“Harvey”) and more like him/herself at once. Summer 1998. not to reveal their secrets. 1 I argue this point at greater length elsewhere. restored to the Little Red Riding Hood that is hidden inside every wolf. but to play yet another Doll Game? – J. I may be excused. and for a moment seem to glimpse my own image in the glass. I hope. because more like any other female in a false moustache. As. especially if I inform the reader that I too have a moustache. if you will pardon this fancy that bestows sight on a doll. 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.look to him/herself. 87 . but just the latest dummy of the Jackson girls — that those pint-sized ventriloquists are throwing their voices out of the past. in his/her reduplicated facial decorations. Bellwether. rather more feminine than usual. 2 Per/forma 11. Is it possible that I am neither the critic nor the audience. Sensitive.” passing into the hands of P. suffering Christ. Jackson on Christmas of 1970 or 1971. in the end. Aina acquired a second head some years after the first. lived on in his sometime rival. “Big Josh. Aina became the Doll Games’ first and finest heroine. her sidekick and romantic partner. a “found” Barbie was finally admitted in the late classical period. but also transforming him. has been forgotten. her name. and pirate apprentice with pluck and panache. making him a source of comedy. born into the Barbie family as little sister “Skipper. lithe. Tragically mutilated during a makeover. on the condition that she suffer her trademark blonde hair to be dyed black. all of which marked him as masculine “other” to the youthful androgynes Laurie and Aina. as did his hands and even eventually his left foot. and alternated between the two thereafter. and perhaps some part of his spirit.Aina Laurie Josh McBig Barbie Aina Presented to S. and no doubt to the young Jacksons. and her legs to be amputated just below the knees. Josh had a vulnerable quality. Unfortunately. Jesse. Twist ‘N’ Turn body. especially in the late farces. and of the Doll Games’ eventual decline. comely. Aina led the games through most of their finest years together with Laurie. and poseable wrists. and later began to loosen and fall off. and recast soon thereafter as Laurie. Laurie embodied the Doll Games’ romantic male ideal. . androgynous twin and chaste lover of Aina. moustache. originally used to chop a plastic log (now lost).” In spite of his muscled torso. Laurie The Doll Games’ most beloved boy hero and its martyred saint. Jackson under the name “Fluff” in Christmas of 1970 or 1971. His name seems to gently parody his original identity as brawny lumberjack. She was supplanted by identical twins Mara and Melanie in the later Doll Games. the offensive “blackface” and ungainly leg stumps that resulted from these operations made her a laughingstock. into what we can only see as the Doll Games’ sorrowful. orphan girl. the circumstances of which remain shrouded in mystery. and she never found a lasting place in the Doll Games. and the mature bulge in his plastic underwear. this is generally considered to mark the beginning of the decadent era. if she was given one. with flowing hair. Josh McBig The Doll Games’ archetypical “manly man” with action arm. Barbie Long snubbed by the Doll Games. playing such roles as runaway princess. A cheeky tomboy with cropped hair and a wide smile. His legs dangled weakly from his loosely jointed hips. his body. Jesse Harvey Poet and libertine. Dawn was cast as the trashy “bitch/slut” of the Doll Games. and vain. leaving her hips and legs naked on the ground. His eternal amorous pursuit of the unreachable Mara and Melanie. was deterred by a thick bandage of medical tape wrapped about her waist. 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. the Doll Games’ “horny fop” was originally a Little Red Riding Hood doll of unknown make. just as Aina2 shared the body of Aina1. Jesse took over Laurie’s body and his role at Laurie’s death. both a hapless Romantic with perfumed hair and a goatish lout. wasp-waisted. to split in half. Dreamy.” while the surrogate families she ruled became Oedipal laboratories in which the Doll Games conducted many of their boldest experiments. plundered along with Aina’s second head (or Aina2) from a matched pair of Scandinavian costume dolls. in keeping with her crass exhibitionism. Matron was a key element in the Doll Games’ studies of the “maternal grotesque” as well as the “infant whore. Initially sharing Laurie’s body and taking turns with him. At once mother-substitute and gargantuan infant. Much remains to be examined in the original foursome. reviled for her showy breasts and cheap feminine allure. and Melanie. . was one of the great comic motifs of the late Doll Games. A tendency. perished in an attempt to dye his hair black that was seemingly motivated by the wish to differentiate and decouple him from his siblings. a cruel voluptuary who presided over the orphanages and boarding schools of the so-called “nasty” games. 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. interrupted by ferocious rutting with the likes of Dawn and Sue.Dawn Harvey Matron Jesse Dawn Dainty. Matron The Doll Games’ Sadean baby doll. Dawn was ritually vanquished and “put in her place” as the Doll Games’ cheerful moral order reasserted itself at the end of each game. corrupting virtuous boy dolls and jealously tormenting rivals Aina. the lamented Laurie. Mara. gentle Jesse entered the Doll Games as a disembodied head. Insinuating herself into the chaste plots of the virtuous heroes and heroines in order to seduce them into vice. Stridex medicated pads. Was the vaginal purse—pictured here in an almost military array—waging a war with the phallic dagger over the contested territory of the Doll Games? . although the Doll Games showed a utopian disregard for money and a high scorn for the conventional appurtenances of femininity. Coppertone.” white rectangles each bearing a circled numeral 1 in pencil/black marker. 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. Johnson’s Baby Cream. Suave Shampoo. we are left with a shoe and a question. Johnson’s Dental Floss. Mara. Rectangular block of wood painted black with a white strip accenting the front. Buffered aspirin. including Desitin lotion (in pump dispenser). Roman style. the sheath is faux leather. The Duracell purse. clay parts were nearly universal in the later Doll Games. transforming and reconfiguring it for its own purposes. one purse and one backpack. All others are of faux leather. This artifact exemplifies the Doll Games’ strategic appropriation and ironic framing of elements of the dominant culture (in this case. rather than out of a more general concern with anatomical correctness. 5 Camera. This camera. 4 Padded bra of molded white gum adhesive covered in white medical gauze. semi-transparent purse on small brass bead-chain. Daggers. 2. and female leads Aina. Either way. 3 Lot of three daggers. half of which has been hammered flat to make a straight. a short hand-guard is affixed to the blade with white medical cloth tape. were de rigueur for the heroes and heroines (above all the spunky Aina) of the Doll Games’ “Pirate” and “Outlaw” scenarios. 3. The blade fits snugly inside its sheath. not all of them as finely crafted as these. Noxzema. On the back of the camera a small strip of yellow paper is glued to the center. Paradoxically. Secret deodorant. 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. none more than half an inch tall. most stitched with telephone wire. 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. these jewel-like miniatures. narrow blade. are the products of thoroughly American dreamers. Bamboo dagger.1 2 3 4 1 Bathroom commodities in molded “plastic wood” decorated with magic marker to resemble name brands. 1. Johnson’s Baby Powder. This removable prosthesis is particularly interesting for the way it highlights the fundamentally theatrical nature of gender. also points to the voyeurism/exhibitionism so characteristic of Doll Games plots. Band-Aids. popular styles of the disco era). which is real leather folded and joined with more cloth tape. purses were manufactured in quantities rivaled only by daggers. Just whose foot did the cobbler have in mind? Like the bewildered prince in the fairy tale. was made from a container for hearing aid batteries. with straps of yellow telephone wire. loaded with self-reflexive implications (and a full roll of film). 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. The grip is colored green on one side. this once formed a loop for hanging. [brand illegible] nasal spray. where a nut and washer together form the lens. Emblematic of the way the Doll Games consumed the larger culture. as no male doll was originally endowed with a penis. folded and stitched up one side with telephone wire. Sucrets. A thin strip of fraying green cloth is taped to the top of the sheath. whittled flat and tapered toward the tip. Aluminum dagger made of a length of wire hammered flat. 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. Steel dagger made of a round-headed nail. up which they are possibly intended to be crisscrossed. On it is printed “1 – 1” to represent the exposure number. Two contain paper “money. and Melanie had the smooth torsos of the pre-adolescent Skipper and Fluff. 6 Eight assorted handbags. the end of which is left loose to serve as a strap. which like this breastladen bra can be donned or discarded at the dictates of desire and story line. but is torn close to the sheath on one end. Displaying his gift for drawing as well as poesy.. 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.. I adore you. Mara. Harvey’s “Moments with Mara” and “Parakeet—A flash”)... The glorious oneness I feel with your innocent lips upon mine. On the other side of the card is a vivid semi-abstract mixed-media drawing (pencil. Mara.” “Madame Dotrovthnile’s Hairdressing Book”). (except when it’s Melanie’s. which I never feel otherwise. Philisses.... “Mara and I” printed on it in red marker. Sucrets. The poem is a stellar example of that combination of sentimentality and ribaldry so characteristic of Harvey. was popular with the orally fixated Jacksons for its candy-like sweetness. by Dawn. and romantic ephemera from Dawn’s busy love life. . is bliss Ah. a throat lozenge. anne’s [sic] or Jenny’s lips) Ah.. this may be the most precious item in the collection.. including literary efforts (Dawn’s “A true-life romance”... Ah. Dawn’s. 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. Mara.. My fair queen of love. self-help publications (“Dieting the Easy Way.. warm and yielding against my strong chest.5 6 7 8 7 Tin “SUCRETS” box containing the assembled writings of the dolls in various styles and formats.... as well as a redundant legend in purple identifying this as a “picture (abstract)”. is an experience I will never forget Ah. to feel warm and peaceful. magic marker and white-out) with distinct sexual overtones. and signed on both sides. signed in purple marker by Harvey and with the title. after fucking long & vigorously with you. Mara. to feel you... So the child as a theme comes very late in art history. For the early modern period. Bubbles are made of very little. Tootsietoys. childhood is a very defined moment in the order of the world. who put the bubble making toys into full-scale retail distribution by the latter part of the same decade. in the cycle of life. Chemtoy was acquired by a larger company. And even then. What we find. translucent nothings are not appropriate vessels for a range of heavy metaphysical meanings. Children are depicted in earlier times but they are not shown as children. Blowing bubbles had long been a childhood pastime but the longer lasting bubbles of Pears’ soap made bubble blowing more worthwhile. The child would have been considered deficient in the qualities that define an adult or an adolescent.homo bulla: an IntervIeW WIth sabIne mödersheIm kris coue The year 1789 was revolutionary in more ways than one. But Sabine Mödersheim. At that time. professor in the German department at the University of Wisconsin. Bubble solution is still one of the best selling toys in the world today. A century later. there is a very circular and static idea of history or the circle of life. But his soap was not only less abrasive on the skin: it also produced bubbles that lasted longer. especially in the late 18th century. Kris Coue spoke to her by phone. street peddlers and pitchmen were selling bubble-blowing kits as toys. The well-known modern instrument — a circle on a stick attached to the jar cap — was pioneered in the early 1940s by Chemtoy. 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. 16th and 17th centuries. almost nothing. it’s more as an allegory of life or one stage of life. It’s the Renaissance that pays attention to children for the first time. mainly in the 15th. When do children and their games enter art history? Children were depicted in artworks from the 15th century on. My research stays in art history and cultural history. a chemical company that manufactured cleaning supplies. although it would be inappropriate to use the word develop because that’s 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. has been examining the very different meanings that bubbles have had in art and cultural history in the past three centuries. is that 92 . 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. It ends with the Pears’ soap advertisement from the late 19th century. For the early period as well the Middle Ages and the early modern period. the child is actually a small adult. and it might seem that these evanescent. All the qualities are there but they’re still weak so their qualities and characteristics have not developed. the first time an artwork depicting a child blowing bubbles was used in an advertisement. the most common instrument used was a pipe. they are not shown playing. though. most importantly. We have a dramatic change in the fabric of the family at that time. they have to learn how to interact and they have to learn all the skills they used to learn by doing and watching. The bubble blowing activity is what is important and the bubble is an allegory. mothers. history. 1651 above: Sir John Everett Millais. For example. enviable stage of life where civilization has not yet regulated the person’s life: it’s carefree and innocent. and that plays into the depictions of children. leaning on a skull. 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 child is actually not at stake. bubbles are a moralizing emblem. What we see in the late 18th century. which stems from the Roman adage coined by Varro and Lucian and adapted by Erasmus for his famous collection of proverbs “Adagia. and eternal life in the eschatological sense. They were available and cheap. The manufacturing of toys starts much later and proper toys are something that only the upper classes are able to afford. Was playing in general considered in a negative light? It was. Hendrik Goltzius’s engraving Quis Evadet (1594) is typical of the genre: It shows a putto. Now children have to be schooled. The proverbial saying refers to the brevity of the individual human life compared to Creation. The motif begins to show up all of a sudden but there are some prominent examples. c. 1886 below: Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin. Bubbles. Smoke is rising from an altar in the background. 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. with the families becoming smaller and.” published in 1572. and as a reminder of futility and death. who is blowing bubbles — one of them already bursting — with a small pipe in his hand that is stretched out into the air. is that we have a separation between the lives of the women. and the inscription Quis Evadet (“Who escapes?”) is on a stone that looks like a gravestone. homo bulla. It’s very telling and probably surprising for someone today to see how children and bubbles were initially connected to death. which they would fill with little peas and stones to make a rattle. 1739 . The emblem was used as an allegory of fleeting time and the shortness of life.people start thinking of childhood as a different. in Dutch genre paintings. That’s a radical shift that takes place in the 18th century in terms of how we see motherhood and childhood. Most children wouldn’t have had proper toys. and children and the fathers who provide for the family. They would find a stick or something. children were a part of the adult world. opposite: David Bailly. They would just be around and learn whatever they had to learn but they were part of that environment. Earlier. That is why soap bubbles were popular. It was seen as idleness and we don’t yet have the modern idea that children learn through play. Still Life. The Soap Bubble. we see peasant and burgher children using things like pigs’ bladders. holding a shell with soap water in the other hand. This is the emblem of Man as a bubble. with the father’s occupation being separated from the house so that the workshop is no longer in the same place as the house. This is a melancholy that was not possible in the 13th century. say. It is a very clever combination of two motifs. It was very common at that time to have a copperplate engraving made after a painting for larger distribution. The company sought permission from the painter to use it in an ad. And is the Pears’ soap advertisement the culmination of this revaluation? Yes. It’s one of the paintings where you see the shift to the depiction of childhood innocence. How successful was the advertising campaign? Immensely. Pears’ also wanted to enter a soap bar into the painting so that there are two versions of the painting. And the advertisement is still available today as a poster so its appeal has not worn off. pages 95-98: Marcel Dzama.When are bubbles relieved of this heavy metaphysical burden? The shift is clearly marked by the Chardin painting The Soap Bubble from 1739. untitled drawings. We still have the original without the soap bar. The painting depicts children at an age where they might start regretting that their childhood is over. He pretended at least that he didn’t want this to happen but he did give his permission. But the shift is already there. because childhood was a stage of deficiency that had to be overcome as quickly as possible. It’s much more about personal melancholy. the little boy’s clothes are actually from the late 18th century. an 1886 painting by Sir John Everett Millais depicting his own grandson. blurring art and commerce. I think they used the original as a model for a new painting. It’s hard to say what Millais thought. mourning one’s own childhood being gone rather than the general idea of vanitas and fleeting time. There was a moral outcry on the part of other artists that Millais was selling out. You have the childhood motif and nostalgia. It’s 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. That’s already built into this painting. 2002 . The French copperplate of the Chardin has an inscription and a poem. Some artist historians say it was the first time an artwork was used for a mass advertisement. The ad used Bubbles. But it was not too melancholic. 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 poem is far more conservative than what the picture allows. etc. 95 . 96 . 97 . 98 . poet who had had his day in the sun and then toppled off the map before reaching the tender age of 15. Lot 84). the king carefully placed his fingers inside the wound to feel the beating . they were the tabloid stuff of gossip as well as the elevated subject of scientific inquiry. Old volumes appear in inventories like basketed children. of books and pamphlets breathlessly describing fiery armies gathering in the sky. In an image commemorating his demise. by his enthusiastic reception in the English court in 1658. but perhaps the legend of his accomplishments will remain. composed by the author between the ages of 8 and 12. As an academic. I don’t buy old books. was only three and a half when he amazed the king and queen of Denmark with his elegant disquisitions at court. 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 they’ve gone. cetera mortis erunt (“through genius one lives. Three years later he disappeared. full calf cover that has been “blindtooled. the Lucius Wilmerding copy (his sale. For a mere $2. The man’s chest had been blown open in battle. 280 (numbered 262) pp.” “frontispiece. One quire browned due to quality of paper. corpses speaking out against their murderers. which for “Enlightened” Europeans stood nearly at the vanishing point of myth and history. But “Le Petit de Beauchasteau” slipped through his fingers and returned 99 to France. › › › When you want a book. With a little help from death. for example.” The author of the volume. the argot of its description becomes irresistible in its clinical precision. as far as I know. It is said. Granted. the “wunderkind” from Lübeck. the Puritan general who governed England during the aftermath of the Civil War. Cromwell was deeply impressed with the boy and wanted to keep him in London. The French craze over “Le Petit de Beauchasteau” was matched.century England. as the young Apollo surrounded by adoring (if somewhat startled) muses. FIRST EDITION of this remarkable collection of poems in praise of the most eminent men and women of the time. I am used to this feeling. genealogy. at age 11. New York. a young Children. and 26 engraved portraits. like legends and rare books. Christian Henri Heinecken. the young genius sits at a writing desk while a skeleton reaches over his shoulder to grasp a paper that reads: vivitur ingenio. one half-page allegorical plate and two armorial headpieces. and Baron Capell of Hadham. but the wound had healed without entirely closing. [1] leaf (half-title). was just as real for other child prodigies of the age.” “quire. “Leaves. newly delivered from some ancient stream. it doesn’t really matter that “one quire is browned due to the quality of paper. engraved frontispiece representing the author at age 11.. the child from Lübeck is destined to fade into the mist. never to return. [4] leaves. The book. [9] leaves. dated 1701. all the rest will pass away”). Later it was rumored that “Le Petit de Beauchasteau” made his way to Persia. I came across the description of his book by accident while doing research on child prodigies in 17th. known in French as “Le Petit de Beauchasteau. Seventeenth-century libraries were full. waiting for someone to pick them up. 29 October 1951. [1] pp. you can “own” what Cromwell could never quite get his hands on: the legacy of a youth who possessed both virtuosity and courtly fame.” was one of the most celebrated child poets of the 17th century. forestalled by the existence of this pretty little book. one can glimpse the stand of Olympian woods through which “Le Petit de Beauchasteau” must have crept on his way to oblivion. on the other hand. of Algernon Capell. ou la Muse naissante du Petit de Beauchasteau. bibliophiles — a period. Particularly striking is the brightly colored frontispiece that depicts the author. he will hop off the high-backed chair and step smartly into the garden behind him. Like the young Apollo.500. Christian had studied sacred and profane history. it turns out. But that doesn’t mean I don’t occasionally want to pluck them from the stream. sentimental kind of despair. anatomy. The 17th century was not afraid of marvels. you would join an illustrious line of keepers who may have pondered the mystery of the child’s disappearance while studying the engraved portraits of 17th-century “worthies” that are interspersed among the poems. At the time of his death (age four). In doing so. They go on to careers as precious objects or simply sit there in the rushes. Paris: [Nicolas Foucault] for Charles de Sercy & Guillaume de Luynes . mounted on title verso is the armorial bookplate. Viscount Maldon. been purchased). La Lyre du jeune Apollon. At the direction of Harvey. [45] leaves (including engraved title. for example. are often on the verge of disappearing. in fact. FRANÇOIS MATHIEU CHASTELET DE. Two parts in one volume. I read them. 1657. geography. that King Charles I was thrilled to examine a man who had been brought to court to prove William Harvey’s theory of the circulation of the blood. still exists (and has not.. Perhaps this is why a book like La Lyre de jeune Apollon commands such a high price today. where the boy flattered his hosts by abjuring the Catholic religion. 4°. just to the right of the child’s strangely glowing head. In the background.” and — prepare yourselves. The English court invited the child (along with his father or perhaps an ecclesiastical “keeper”) to visit London that year. earl of Essex. French. prices for 17th-century books are already high because of their obvious historical value. especially when they are as fabulous as the book I saw up for auction recently: BEAUCHASTEAU. Just as the bundles come within reach. The possibility of true disappearance. Modern full calf blindtooled in period style. Apparently the child. But La Lyre is of particular interest to cultural historians because it documents another age’s fascination with marvelous events and persons. I feel an odd. was one of the favorites of Lord Protector Cromwell. and printed title in red and black).FInders KeePers micHael Witmore Whenever I look at rare book auction catalogues. 143 (numbered 127).” (I imagine some Tiresian artisan-sage working steadily in his bookbindery…) At this point. they disappear into the anonymous hands of a collector or the stacks of a research library. and Latin. and children prophesying in the middle of the night in strange tongues. then 13. [Beautiful masterpiece of the universe. a reward for looking beyond the usual course of events for something truly spectacular.” the Cardinal exclaimed when she approached him (somewhat timidly) after the performance. Adored object of my verse. denouncing their parents to crowds of onlookers and. the rustic Enfants de Dieu or “Children of God” lectured all comers in several languages during their midnight trances. for example. in the same stroke. Also known as “Sister Euphemia” because of her piety in the convent at Port Royal. As one of his admirers wrote in the volume: A le voir. Jacqueline’s benefactor financed the publication of a collection of her poems (now lost) entitled Vers de la petite Pascale [Poetry of the Little Pascale] (1638). Interdit à mon corps et voix et mouvement. his childhood could have been understood as already passed. [Do not be shocked. Standing before the great eagle-eyed prelate.) We also hear stories of Robert Hooke — a celebrated member of London’s Royal Society — combing the woods for pieces of glowing tree bark in order to demonstrate the phenomenon of phosphorescence. illustrated for medieval readers the sovereignty of knowledge when it was uncorrupted by sophistry or greed. Si j’ai mal contenté vos yeux et vos oreilles: Mon esprit agité de frayeurs sans pareilles. (Able to strike suddenly at my very heart) Was able. to doctors and ecclesiastical 100 authorities sent from the city to investigate. excellent Armand. If I have not contented your eyes and ears: My soul.heart. (Why don’t the publicly disgraced enlist children in .] The idea that children already possessed the knowledge and experience of those far older was already ensconced in the literature of the middle ages. Germain before she could be presented to the monarch in person. eventually. ultra-precocious children were a startling aberration from the “usual course of nature. Jacqueline Pascale began as a poet who wrote her first epigrams and rondeaux at the age of twelve. Anxious to see her charge advance. Ayant bien pu toucher soudainement mon coer. que l’univers reconnoît pour vainqueur. 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. the young poet was asked to demonstrate her talents to the ladies of the court at St. Jacqueline Pascale (sister of the mathematician Blaise). But. Votre oeil. Adorable object de mes vers. one recognizes that he is old. A series of child preachers and prophets would follow in the God-child’s ancient footsteps throughout the late 17th and 18th centuries. since prodigious children were already adults in crucial ways. Centuries before Wordsworth declared the child father to the man. Like comets in the night sky. which thanks to a paucity of nerve endings was virtually anaesthetized. Rappelez de l’exil mon miserable père. on voit sa vieillesse. She acquitted herself handily with the following poem. composed spontaneously for a Madame de Hautefort: Beau chef-d’oeuvre de l’univers. But if I am capable of pleasing you here. A l’ouïr. But hearing him. Do not admire my impromptu poetry. 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. Quite often it was the young Jesus who was the source of this image. But it seems that such extraordinary talents were destined to fade. As proof of her talents. Child prodigies were yet another example of the way in which nature (via human reproduction) could occasionally surprise observers by producing something unusual. Mais pour me render ici capable de vous plaire. Prodigies of all sorts were the prizes of curious minds. just as easily. [To see him. confidently lecturing his skeptical audience on the steps of the temple. A child who writes and rhymes like an adult. Has inhibited my body. “Voilà la petite Pascale. When rural Protestants in France lost their nerve and converted to Catholicism. since it was only there that his fabulous talents could be preserved without parallel. which the world recognizes as its conqueror. A man whose beating heart can be touched with the hand. Like conduits for unconscious guilt. their children berated them in the middle of the night with long sermons about righteous long-suffering.] The voice of the young poet apparently melted the Cardinal. She also proved a charming actress. to touch my imagination. Such phenomena were not so different for early modern Europeans. troubled with incomparable fears. (The story may be apocryphal. on le croit enfant. Suspected as an imposter. A piece of bark that glows in the night. incomparable Armand. made her way to religion later in life. voice and gestures.” even if their overzealous parents were the most visible cause of their appearance on the world stage. Your eye. medieval writers were celebrating the character of pueri senes or “wise children” who had superior powers of reasoning and theological discernment. N’admirez pas ma prompte poésie. While many prodigious children grew up to become even more talented adults — witness Mozart’s dizzying ascent in the European courts — any particular childhood would always be on the wane. she recited the following poem: Ne vous étonnez pas. The adolescent deity. Recall from exile my miserable father. Another child prodigy.] Once admitted to the royal audience. one would think him a child. A pu d’un meme coup toucher ma fantasie. How long can a child prodigy remain a child? “Le Petit de Beuachasteau” may have been destined to disappear into an imaginary Persia. Jacqueline became the darling of the royal couple and her verses survive in letters describing her exploits. who ended up inviting her father to return from hiding without fear of harassment. Victor Cousin. 1993). “Whatever is lost in childhood” his expression seems to say. in love with the Duchess de Longueville. grim. Here is the finder of lost words. K. even if it is ultimately misguided. above: Frontispiece of Beauchasteau’s book showing him as Apollo surrounded by the Muses. Henri. Le Printemps des geniés: les enfants prodiges (Paris: Biliothèque Nationale/Robert Laffont. He is the visual opposite of the child prodigy: aging. 1869). a 19th-century philosopher and scholar who collected all available records of Jacqueline Pascale’s performances and assembled them in a volume entitled. was romantically obsessed with one of his older and more risqué 17th-century subjects. 1657). are precious because they are only passingly present.” Once the editor of the works of Descartes and Plato. lines of flight: swinging gates to ancient gardens that had been summarily abandoned. Victor Cousin. write and collect these books? These exiles from the garden are an inverted form of the wise child — aged in years but precociously infantile. Michèle Sacquin. Books grow old but they stay the same. Madame de Longueville: la jeunesse de Madame de Longueville (Paris: Didier. the great philosopher. glorious illustrations. the life of Victor Cousin. Cousin was as an intense man who. gone missing. in fact. du beau et du bien (Paris: Didier. for example. In the face of oblivion. Victor Cousin. accounts must be made. Schreiber. He knows that books are tangible things — they have blindtooled covers. Du Vrai. according to some. Cousin spent the later years of his career chronicling famous and infamous females of the 17th century. like the one about “La petite Pascale. he thinks. like any particular childhood. 1853).” But found where? In books of course. the facts of youth must be gathered. who died a century and a half before he was born. Like Richelieu. Consider. Jacqueline Pascale: premiéres études sur les femmes illustres et la sociéte du XVIIéme siècle (Paris: Didier. this time from the bending leaves of a philosopher’s tome. Books. faulty bindings and missing pages — whereas childhood and memory are not. the curator of childhood past. probing eye.101 the project of public rehabilitation today? Where are the cherubic defenders of Martha Stewart and Kenneth Lay?) Jacqueline’s remarkable encounter with Richelieu can be repeated only because it appears in books — the true keepers of childhood. Which is why Cousin’s attempt to retrieve Jacqueline’s life and poems is so beguiling. Jacqueline Pascale: premiéres études sur les femmes illustres et la sociéte du XVIIe siècle [Jacqueline Pascale: first studies of famous women and the society of the 17th century]. . For sale by E. Kössendrup. The philosopher’s right hand is tucked. 1999. “La petite Pascale” will reach out to her audience once more. Perhaps this is why Jacqueline. Praxis Dr. attached to desires that cannot be fulfilled in the wide.” Perhaps he should have stuck with lecturing on truth and beauty. La Lyre du jeune Apollon. and like the impromptu poetry of “La petite Pascale. at the moment when their contents are about to disappear.” they lead their keepers back to the unsupervised nurseries of legend. ou la Muse naissante du Petit de Beauchasteau (Paris: [Nicolas Foucault] for Charles de Sercy & Guillaume de Luynes. In the albumen print portrait of Cousin that resides in the Getty collection. the Duchess de Longueville. ed. into the side of his buttoned suit. 1853). The Paris wits registered their disdain of Cousin’s barely concealed longing with the mock epitaph: “Here lies Victor Cousin. he is creating an object that has already. They are written. in some crucial sense.” Those volumes became pathways. also known as the “sinner of the Fronde.” When Cousin sits down to write his biography of young Jacqueline. “can be found again. Bibliography François Mathieu Chastelet de Beauchasteau. Cousin seems to possess an implacable. wide world of adulthood. marked by the knowledge that life is short and scholarly work is long. overleaf: Aura Rosenberg. like the Emperor’s.. any trace of whimsy or sentiment has been banished. and Matthieu de Beauchasteau became more poignant as child prodigies when their exploits were connected with “lost volumes” or “rare editions. But what of the adults who read. . 103 . 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. Peas. but I wouldn’t. and put it on the right side of the stove — till the big hand is on the six. Mix the sauce in the blender so your elbows don’t hurt. Martel (Boston: Houghton Mifflin. When the skabbetti is done from the cooking in the broiler (2 degrees or maybe 3). Put it in the freezer for one whole half a hour. Massachusetts. 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 don’t 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.sKabbettI. and I would sell it to all the people for real money. then you cook. Stir it for a gallon long. Source: Smashed Potatoes. I would put it in a truck and bring it to a milk store. Then spread out the sauce. Jane G. . The book is a compilation of recipes by children at the Francis J. 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. 1974). Mix it with a spoon on a long stick so you don’t get your hands down in the dip. ed. It serves your whole family and all your father’s friends. Then you could eat it. Then it starts turning into ice cream because that’s how it’s made. aPPle caKe. Pour it in a round pot. Muraco Elementary School in Winchester. Then take them out and put them all together and we’ll have cake. First you decide what will it be tonight — sausages or meatballs? When your father tells you which one. get it in the silver pan with holes in it by your spoon with holes in it. released by Eary Canal Plates in 1989. “SCRATCH PEACE” (5:10) “A lone voice out of the dark. I find that type of babbling intriguing because it sounds so much like a real conversation. Their parents reported that. “WASHING MY HAIR” (2:58) Three-year old Luna Montgomery recorded in Pennsylvania in 1993. Originally released on Sound and Silence in the 2nd Grade (ATMOTW Records). backed by his half-brother Pablo Cuba on percussion and Phil Scher on guitar and bass. Fire Extinguisher (1916) read by a group of 12. whereas other children seem to focus more on producing individual words (an ‘analytic’ approach). “MASSIMO (MAX)” (2:46) From a 1998 recording made at La Scuola. to relay her adventure with a jellyfish.” “Swinging Sings” uses the sounds of squeaking swings as the raw material for violin improvisations by Band and Adele Armin. Originally released on Inuit Games and Songs (UNESCO. “ALPHABIT” (1:56) Susanna Hood performs an alphabet song. complete with sound effects and dialogue. 7 HOLIDAZE. featured the twins in his film Poto and Cabengo. creating songs as they went along. in 1973. performing poignantly flawed 105 language.” which appeared on Psychogeographical Dip (GD Stereo. The recording is the fruit of this activity. and Philip Petschek. “KIDS AT A RESEARCH LAB CONSOLE” (2:39) Edmond Dewan’s son Brian explains: “The tape was recorded by my father Edmond in 1969 at a research laboratory in Massachusetts.a. ‘prosody’) and the particular vowel and consonant sounds. Gorin’s film includes this excerpt from a hospital observation film. Performed by Qaunak Martha Meekeega and Temegeak Pitaulassie of Kinngait (Cape Dorset) and recorded by Nicole Beaudry in 1974. A year later. a boy enacts a miniature sonic drama. I was curious about where Tessie might fall into those classifications as her language developed. both with regard to contour (i. “SWINGING SINGS (EXCERPT)” (3:31) Ellen Band’s compositions often feature recordings of everyday sounds that are layered and orchestrated to produce what she calls a “sonic surrealism. Recorded in 1998. The piece features Ted’s then-favorite record. 12 JOHN OSWALD & SUSANNA HOOD. 4 ELLEN BAND. Here. “SPACE ODDITY” (5:24) In 1976 and 1977. however. produced by John Oswald. and indeed she did show some tendencies associated with the ‘gestalt’ pattern. Recorded in 1982. 14 LUNA MONTGOMERY. “AND THEY CALLED IT PUPPY” (3:13) A dual turntable improvisation by 22-month-old Ted Conrad.. “ANSWERING MACHINE MESSAGE” (1:17) Eight-year-old Luna Montgomery calling from Coney Island. His first effort received no comment from the teacher. Thuunderboy. threw switches and turned knobs willy-nilly. “PUTAYTUTAH” (1:05) In 1977.JuvenIlIa a series of Maoist experimental films. 2000). but without real words.generatorsoundart. The one who lasts longest wins the game. Ontario. It seems as if children get the conversational patterns (or ‘tune’) of language even before they have words. documenting a workshop for 2nd graders. 1998). www.org. The song fragment was recorded on an old wax cylinder. Moreover. 2002). The children at the console are myself. Originally released on 90% Post Consumer Sound (XI Records. See www. who had recently arrived in San Diego after working with Jean-Luc Godard on . identical twins Virginia and Grace Kennedy were brought to Children’s Hospital of San Diego for observation. New York. she fell between the two extremes. French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin. though.. the dadababies rewrote portions of the text and added stories.com.org 5 EDMOND DEWAN. I conduct research on language development and find the babbling interesting from a scientific as well as from a personal perspective. Ann Marie Kling (vocals). 5 to 8 years old. they spoke only to one another and in what seemed to be a private 10 GEN KEN MONTGOMERY 1998. “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. while the girls clearly understood both English and German (their mother’s native tongue).” 2 LUNA MONTGOMERY. grade-school music teacher Hans Fenger recorded hundreds of students in a gymnasium in rural British Columbia. The band jammed and made noise. the second only the admonishment: “Try harder!” In 1987. Gen Ken (guitar).e. and wouldn’t necessarily be apparent to the average person. This piece was later incorporated into “Washing The Hare. a. 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. Additionally. New York City. and found its way to me through a series of accidents and digressions. like most children. 9 GREGORY WHITEHEAD. www. The machine was not made to be a musical instrument. fragments. For this piece. 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). the oldest member (Ann Marie. Antipyrine. with undertones of dread. at the age of 6.” Originally released on Thuunderboy! (Table of the Elements. my brother Ted Dewan. Recorded in 2002 at the Mystery Lab in Toronto.tableoftheelements. and sound effects of their own. 8 JULIA LOKTEV. that crosses a children’s insult song with the phonic contortions of sound poetry. “What are you afraid of?” was created on the spot — the genius of children. these effects are fairly subtle. “DADABABIES (EXCERPT)” (5:42) Excerpt from a radio adaptation of Tristan Tzara’s First Celestial Adventure of Mr. John Kling (percussion). there seem to be individual differences. “ASSALALAA” (0:37) Assalalaa is an Inuit children’s game in which the participants wiggle and flop their limbs about while holding their breath.k. “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. Who’s there?” cD curateD By BriaN coNley & cHristoPH cox 1 CATHARINE ECHOLS. 3 QAUNAK MARTHA MEEKEEGA & TEMEGEAK PITAULASSIE.” 6 POTO & CABENGO. the lead singer) was 8 years old. Tina Kling (noise).xirecords. 10-year old Teddy set his poems to music. The children. The tone is ruptured innocence. recorded by his father. 15 LANGLEY SCHOOLS MUSIC PROJECT. 11 TEDDY FIRE. Produced in 1991 for CKUT Montreal. Donny Osmond’s chart-topping hit “Puppy Love. in which Grace (Poto) and Virginia (Cabengo) are heard speaking to one another while playing with utensils and baking pans. Scott McLeod. With the exception of Ken. it was an apparatus used in a speech lab. “BABY BABBLE” (1:41) “I made this recording primarily because my 14-and-a-half-month-old daughter Tessie’s babbling was so expressive. 13 THUUNDERBOY. Minimalist music pioneer Tony Conrad. “Homework” first appeared on Teddy Fire’s debut 7” record.and 13-year-olds under the direction of Julia Loktev. 1991). sticks. . something that wouldn’t excite him. Sánh Chi. In this recording. 2000. Luna Montgomery performing vocals. if lugubrious” rendition of his 1969 meditation on extraterrestrial alienation. Mother rats. To pass time when things get slow. Jean-Pierre Gorin.)” 20 MINH HUê & NHU’ QùYNH. “THOSE MYSTERIES” (5:00) Written by Ron and Russel Mael. there is a gap between verses while the singers whisper to each other. from their parents who have taught them standard phrases. a pair of seven-year-old girls have learned Hà Leu in the traditional way. Irwin Chusid. Here. the Eagles. but would be interesting enough for me. and backing vocals. “PAPER INTERLACING” (3:08) In the 1830s. “MUSIC FOR BABIES” (10:00) “My son. and performers are evaluated both on their endurance and on the tone quality they produce. was born on July 1st. Paul McCartney. so that there is no way that they can solve the task by recognizing previously heard words. Ursula. cylinders. Here the sounds are played back at approximately 1/20 their normal speed. Fleetwood Mac. Walter Wilczynski. “AQAUSIQ” AND “KATAJJAIT” (1:30) Katajjait (singular: katajjaq) are competitive “throat games” performed by the Inuit of northeast Canada. 18 BILL FARRELL. CD engineered by Daniel Warner. Engineered by Bob Schaeffer. Hà Leu is a repertory of five two-voiced melodies to which new lyrics are improvised on the spot. . 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. made by Philip Blackburn. rather than trying to identify boundaries between each of the words in a sentence. Originally released on Field Geometry (Explain. pans. Thanks to Maria Blondeel. and wanted to make something that would be static and calming to play while I was sitting with him . Two performers (usually women) stand close to one another. I had been listening to a lot of classical music.innova. nyckleharpe. however. CD photograph found on a street in Brooklyn. and backing vocals. They are often seen throughout the region planting rice in the rocky terrain or coaxing their horses and carts to market. 2001). the Nùng have developed a dialogue game (sli) as a form of public entertainment. where it could go on and on. David Scher. Tày. . These vocalizations are typically 40 to 50 kHz in frequency and hence fall well outside of the human hearing range. The resultant piece wound up having what I would call a ‘timeless center’ . 17 HELEN MIRRA. “STIMULI” (0:49) “These sounds are from a study in which I’m investigating how infants extract words from the stream of speech. Lary 7 on toy pianos. To test the prediction that stressed syllables are particularly likely to be extracted from speech and stored by infants.” Recorded in July 1997.keyofz. Speech actually is continuous (of course there are pauses between sentences and sometimes within sentences. I started recording some short sequences with a toy piano I had bought at a church sale. This piece. so they repeated in similar. but varying patterns. cello. e. needles. cubes. rings.mu. 16 MAGGIE GREY & JESSIE TOMASSIE. Originally released on Inuit Games and Songs (UNESCO. H’Mông and people of other tribes coexist. bass. and volley words or vocables into each other’s mouths. kindergarten inventor Friedrich Fröbel created a set of materials and activities that he called “gifts. features Mirra on guitar and Fred Lonberg-Holm on cello. “RAT PUP ULTRASONIC VOCALIZATIONS (SLOWED DOWN)” (2:53) Vocalizations recorded from 6. Michael Evans on pots.. These games are often played in groups. their faces almost touching. the Langley kids give what David Bowie deemed an “earnest. who was born on July 18th. I then pieced together parts of the sequences into loops.to 8-day-old infant rats during isolation from their mother and littermates at 15 degrees centigrade. That’s a task that doesn’t seem especially difficult to adults. 1991). and Neil Young. ad infinitum. recording the sounds of the activities themselves and interpreting them on musical instruments (guitar.com. 1997. www. “QUANG HòA.) intended to foster discovery through experimentation. For more informations. From Stilling Time: Traditional Musics of Vietnam (Innova Recordings. when the speaker takes a breath. 21 JOHN HUDAK. One gets a better sense of this when one listens to an unfamiliar language. 22 EGNEKN’S DAUGHTER.renditions of pop classics by the Beach Boys. 1994). rendering the vocalizations audible to humans. Each of the two kattajait presented here are based on the aqausiq (children’s song) that precedes it. conferring to decide the next lyric. but certainly not between each of the words in a sentence).” basic natural and geometrical forms (spheres. Nùng Yao. 106 . (We use nonsense words to make sure that it really is a segmentation task for infants. Gen Ken Montgomery on laminator and backing vocals. Kaspar. Produced for commercial issue by Irwin Chusid on The Langley Schools Music Project: Innocence and Despair (Bar/None. strips of paper. Helen Mirra uses Fröbel’s gifts as sonic and musical devices. 9-month-old infants hear two ‘sentences’ of nonsense words. mountainous northern border with China. 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. Since the new texts are sung simultaneously. with pauses between words. 19 CATHARINE ECHOLS. centered on the activity of folding a long strip of paper. . The game is over when one of the performers laughs or stops for breath. and kemençe). etc. CAO BANG” (1:47) Along the rugged. it’s difficult to tell where one word ends and another begins. Skilled singers are quick at inventing new words and can be devastating when their wits are sharpened. and others. Track courtesy Bar/None Records. They were performed by Maggie Grey and Jessie Tomassie of Kangirsuk (Payne Bay) and recorded by Denise Harvey in 1975. Recorded at Plastikville in 1999. I also wound up playing the piece a lot for my daughter. that is. 2000). before learning to invent new texts. we tend to think of spoken language as being like written language. can hear these sounds. see www.g. . . . as a suffocating family unit. And when I see those pictures. That vision has developed over the course of the last decade and a half or so. And then when I opened the door. immediately a flash of light would go off in my eyes. graduation school play. Imagine that right up in your face. was interviewed at his home in Greenwich Village on 30 September 2002. I pieced it all together. Bowing is nice. that’s before I was in school.” And then I’d go up to her and ask. But then when it came down to eliminating the pictures. yeah. Then there’s Dance Party. then you get to take your bow. I’m just taking photographs for this project. I remember all my friends and all the people I knew from elementary school. of course. “Mom. So. It doesn’t capture the nervousness of the kids. and saturated. “Oh. 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. who just turned 15 years old. “Oh. We’re all done. It shows all the hectic-ness of middle school. Do you think the pictures are a good representation of what you experienced being in the play? Well. as has Max. 1999 opposite: Barbara Pollack. The Family of Men. is that your mom?” And I’d say. and then. Well. When your mother comes to your school and does a series like The Sound of Music or Dance Party. Then I see all my friends from middle school. Like she knew I was going to be there. Dance Party (2001) captured the awkward interaction of his middle-school dance. And I only assume that maybe sometime there’ll be a show on high school. Max. that’s elementary school. if it’s supposed to be a project of the dance. ‘Cause then you’re done. Her vision is myopic. verging on miasmic. Just pretend I’m not there. 1999 Courtesy Esso Gallery . The makeup would be drooling down their faces. So. And did you know that your mother was going to photograph you when you were in the play? Well. Maybe four years old.” not the kind-of blurry pictures. why don’t you take pictures of other people at the dance besides me and my friends? Why don’t you leave me and my friends alone?” So then. sweating. like the glowsticks and the lighting effects and all those dust and smokescreen and all that stuff gets all blurred into one. Pollack has also made Max the subject of her videos. her first show. and this was merely the latest in a series of works that take Max as their inspiration. I like the way how all the light and hectic-ness of the party all goes into the pictures. almost lurid color — seems to embody an uneasy relationship to the world. And you were the star? I was the guy star. he was so cute. It just shows a still of the play. it usually ended up being the ones of me and my friends. And during the parts where we had to be really close up to the hot light. I thought she was going to take some pictures. The Sound of Music was four years ago. disorienting lack of focus. in-focus photograph would. And the next show. 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 Stronger (2002). what happens? Well. I think about a lot of stuff in my life. And then I’d say. I guess that’s true. and as a teenager. Because also it seems to me there’s one show per era of my life. people would be melting. my mom would be taking previous page (left): Barbara Pollack. yeah. 1999 previous page (right): Barbara Pollack.” and we’re all kneeling in the light in front. I like the bowing. an installation from 1999. His mother took pictures of the performance. portrayed a pre-school Max and his father. “Yeah. “The hills are alive with the sound of music. I don’t think any pictures of the play would actually show what the play is really like. If you saw one still of a movie could you really know what the entire movie was about? No. It was the leaving-school school play. the 110 lights in The Sound of Music were really. probably. But you still see the people. The last scene. some people would point around and say. “Well. but since she has the blurriness in there: blurriness. The Sound of Music. at the time she photographed Dance Party. which were like pictures that you put in a family photo album and say. what are you doing here?” And then she’d answer. Sound of Music #1. like the lights they use for portraits in photographs. really hot. and really melting. Family of Men. And when you saw those pictures what did you think of them? I thought they were pretty cool. we’re all singing. that goes way back when. It’s just that a normal still wouldn’t really show nervousness. When I see the pictures. And we’re all really sweaty. dissing Britney Spears with his friends. This would have been unremarkable save for the fact that Max’s mother is New York-based photographer Barbara Pollack. Max Berger starred in his fifth-grade production of The Sound of Music. as an adolescent intent on video-game murder in Perfect Dark (2001). “Hey. Max. I mean. Joel. We see him as a small boy hounded by his camerawielding mother in Game Boy (1996/2001). The truth is.model chIld: an IntervIeW WIth max berGer josePH r. Because you went to middle school after? Yes. Sound of Music #5. And then later. she would take lots and lots of pictures of other people. Pollack’s signature photographic style — all blurred movement. WoliN In 1998. Do you think in general your mother’s pictures represent your life? Oh. I’ve got no clue what she’s doing here. Do you remember when you first became aware that your mother was taking pictures of you? Oh.” And then she’d continue taking pictures of me. Sound of Music #6. What grade were you in? Fifth grade. But you’re still a compelling subject for her.me to these things. I came from her. so… That was fifteen years ago. which later I learned were called “openings. with a flash in my eye! And did you think that was unusual? Well. What would she rather take pictures of than her own son? . She went through nine months of pain and suffering. Why is it. I didn’t think it was that unusual. you think. Why do you think that is? Because. I thought it was just normal pictures. that you inspire your mother so much? Because she created me.” and there would be pictures of me about to open a door. Shelley was also given to using his sisters in a variety of “scientific experiments. which is not quite the same as believing everything is everything. at ages 18 and 16. childhood equipped now with man’s physical means to express itself.some relIcs oF chIldhood roDNey PHilliPs Saved by mothers. arising from a common source. In another journal.” In any case. In 1914. teachers. generally happy. In 112 fact. like Isherwood’s. Some might claim that Shelley remained a child until his early. The program includes a series of piano works. Edmunds Preparatory School in Surrey. Baudelaire. this prodigy of freethinking was given to writing “democrat. they are posed in a field. they sometimes hold an almost holy remembrance of golden ages. at “10 years of age. and education at elite boarding schools. probably in February 1933. Hogg. Richard. who was presumably visiting Isherwood’s father at the military base in Ireland where the family was soon to move. who as a wistful grownup was always conscious of his happier childhood as a sort of Eden in limestone. radical concern with the welfare of the local tenant farmers. not dying) and the source of his powerfully affecting art. Kerouac wrote his first “novel” at age 11. in Christopher’s letter of January 1912 to his mother. including adoring parents. the letters of children are ubiquitous and almost never interesting. with a cat painted on the top of the sheet. as are his budding republican feelings. writing. “Let each child have that’s in our care/ as much neurosis as the child can bear. in part. tragic death by drowning at age 30. who would have been eight at the time. Constance Rosalie Bicknell Auden has pasted her handmade “Programme for a Grand Concert. in particular his adoring sisters who (like his wife Mary afterward). The child of French-Canadians Leo and Gabrielle Kerouac. And there are many who would aver that this is a good thing (remaining a child. to whom he sent many handmade valentines. Samuel Butler. Paper relics. For his part. but there is evidence of the themes and variations of his later work. felt that “genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will. 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. where at least two of his early visions occurred. Hellen. Massachusetts seems gruesomely American. Isherwood’s childhood was beset by visitations of ghostly figures and a secret. his upbringing was strictly working class. H. being the only male among five offspring of Sir Timothy and Elizabeth Shelley. if I wrote about mine you wouldn’t sit in the same room with me. of course. drew the illustrating cat as well. immediately attractive documents. It’s not a great leap from Shelley to Christopher Isherwood. and by accident. Shelley was exclusively in the company of women. was great painter and drawer in childhood (he was) — (also said to be saint by nuns) — (recorded in novel Visions of . where the next year he met the “grubby” Wystan Auden. as Isherwood’s childhood was in many ways similar to Shelley’s. Dorothy Parker exclaimed: “All those writers who write about their childhood! Gentle God. or even entirely hindering. his grandparents’ estate. On another plane altogether. Auden’s childhood was. fathers.” including curing them of colds and flu by passing electricity through their bodies. great lover of mankind and atheist” after his name on hotel ledgers. Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire. and several duets with his mother. It is much more hopeful. Shelley’s friend and early biographer: “I have in my possession a very early effusion of Bysshe’s. His landscapes of the frozen park are smartly. Obsessively devoted to his mother.” on 24 April 1917. better times. when he was sent to a boys’ school at Syon House Academy. if a little dissonantly placed to liven up the letter to his mother. Perhaps this explains the eerie drawing of his baby brother. siblings.” written.” Perhaps. and included a mother who kept journals and notes about her children. I will try and find it: but there is not promise of future excellence in the lines. a collection of road-trip related pieces: “Influenced by older brother Gerard Kerouac who died at age 9 in 1926 when I was 4.” Others would look at the relationship between childhood and art (drawing. The earliest surviving poetry by Shelley is a piece entitled “A Cat in Distress. of whom Shelley was the oldest. by a parallel interest in galvanism. predicative of the future and redolent with the talent that was to be. played by the ten-year-old Auden. 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. written in the spring of 1917 on a trip to the Isle of Wright with her two sons. There is probably no more perfect specimen of all this than the child/poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. etc.” quipped W. funnier faces. according to a note on the extant manuscript (penned by his sister Elizabeth). who was indeed a privileged example of both conditions. Amusements of the young Shelleys included storytelling and ritual fires for ghost summoning. Elizabeth was the Cazire of the book they published together in 1810. Kerouac describes his relationship with her and his brother in the introduction to Lonesome Traveler. H. Then they seem endlessly fascinating.) In his later years. before the age of 10. including a somewhat imperious. the versification is defective. The poem comes down to us through a younger sister. In any number of photographs of the young Auden and his brother. The young poet’s interest in the fauna of the country estate is reflected. the young W. who described it in a letter to Thomas J. writing and childhood seem inevitably entwined.” Elizabeth. 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. Like Shelley’s.) as less useful. Christopher left Ireland to attend St. near a tree. (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was inspired. He also created horse-racing newspapers and a complex group of records and statistics surrounding his own fantasy baseball league. in his appropriately titled The Way of All Flesh. Auden. or poignant indicators of later tragedy or psychopathology. The earliest extant piece of Auden’s writing is also in the same notebook. The eight-year-old was writing from Marple. Auden was an inveterate rambler and hiker in the landscapes of Surrey. but is representative of the of the close-knit family of siblings. the childhood of Jean-Louis “Ti Jean” Kerouac in Lowell. newly wealthy Sussex landowners. haunted attic. occasionally collaborated with Shelley on his projects. painting. beside a cliff or in another natural environment. She was a great encourager of her son. Never. an Elizabethan mansion. that is unless the child evolved into an adult of genius. . 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. Kerouac’s 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 father’s 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 Sylvia’s childhood. Her mother had her 114 put back a grade, believing that she didn’t 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, L’Art Romantique (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 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 Isherwood’s letter to his mother, January 1912. previous page (below): Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “A Cat in Distress,” ca. 1804. Courtesy The Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and his Circle, The New York Public Library.. above: Sylvia Plath’s drawings, ca. 1943. opposite (left to right): Kerouac’s Valentine’s Day card to his mother, 14 February 1933; Team cards from Kerouac’s 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 people’s 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 farmhouse looks neat outside. and cover them with bruises. Lewis come to mind — but today. but the Italians think more of painting their ceilings and placing statues in their halls than of keeping their houses clean.com . you will soon wish to run out again — it is so dark and dirty. and watch for an opportunity of murdering their enemy. 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. The houses are very dirty. eventually selling millions of copies. You see they are passionate. to recall The Peep of Day in The New Yorker in 1950 as “one of the most outspokenly sadistic children’s books ever written. The people heap wooden dishes.” “the wild Indian. as you travel along. but they often quarrel with them. which almost stuns people of other countries. and spreading Jesus Christ’s word — was offset by a worldview that today seems intolerant. black eyes you see in France. they would. but more sad and thoughtful eyes. for then there will be no danger of two carts meeting in the narrow roads. If you were to fall out of the window. It is curious to see how badly the carpenters make boxes. they take their knitting. The English think a clean home is better than a pretty one. will not open. Her innovative second-person voice evoked the Sunday lecture of a severely absolutist teacher. and keeping company with their friends.” The Peep of Day and its 1837 sequel. especially the staircase and the doorway. published by the Scottish house Christian Focus Publications. and full of litter. instead of showing their anger at the time. and sing very sweetly. They have dark hair and eyes. Even boys. “But it was written for children from a different century. Line Upon Line. and terrifying Protestant children in 38 languages.” and “the stupid Hottentot. but if affronted. Her “you-are-there” format belies the evidence that she never set foot beyond England’s green hills. and cook. the ladies spend a great deal of time in cooking. though they wish to be kind. The number of stockings they make would surprise you. it is novels about people who have never lived.” notes Catherine MacKenzie. your neck would be broken. and men take out their knives and cut each other. children’s editor at Christian Focus. the wheels make a loud creaking noise. No people in Europe are as clumsy and awkward with their hands as the Portuguese. with a church. are filled with rage. In the mid19 th century. The carts are very ill-made. and have a great deal of linen of their own spinning. merry. and a few huts near. might find Mortimer more entertaining than frightening: drollest people in the world. next page: Deta from Switzerland. and even cruel.” Such passages led Mortimer’s own grandniece.S. take up stones to throw at each other. or if a cart were to go over them. When they read. her first and bestknown book. The ladies are very industrious. because the sun shines so much. even contemporary kids. Edward Lear and C. you will come to a room at the end full of beds. GERMANY. and spin? Yes. They may well be sad. It would be better to read nothing than such books. evangelical books. but she offset her lack of reporting skills with an unassailable authority about Christ’s love — even for “the poor Negro slave. In the country. instead of fighting with their hands. if you were to fall down from a high place. and old clothes in confusion upon the beds. and as they move slowly along. 1852’s Far Off: Asia and Australia Described.” Mortimer admonished in the opening chapter of 1833’s The Peep of Day. PORTUGAL. — not those bright. The text of Peep’s 2000 edition. locked up in their great chests. What sort of people are the Irish? The merriest. nor scrub. “How kind of God it was to give you a body! I hope that your body will not get hurt. IRELAND . and the smiths make keys. They are very kind and goodnatured when pleased. and wherever they go. What sort of people live in Italy? They are very dark. “I’ve had a little chuckle myself at one or two things. The little windows in the roof. More nationalities available at annettehimstedt. and her mission — teaching Protestant children about their world.… Her material is Biblically accurate. they also spin. you will often see a farm-house. few scholars know much about the one who may have been the very weirdest of all. are the only Mortimer titles widely available today. is still true to Mortimer’s hair-raising original.” The same cannot be said for three guidebooks Mortimer published later in her career. What an unpleasant place! ITALY. and then they call them names and throw things at them. nor even sweep the rooms. Rosalind Constable. It is dreadful to think what a number of murders are committed in Italy. and the harp. Can they do nothing but knit. and they never dust the furniture. Photos: Enver Hirsch. Their religion is the Roman Catholic. Others.” Mortimer’s writing on Europe (later retitled Near Home) might amuse adults unearthing rare copies today. your head would be crushed. in an e-mail. opposite: Emil from Germany. “Will your bones break? — Yes. How much better to knit than to smoke! When they are at home. and 1854’s Far Off: Africa and America Described. But they are not fond of reading useful books. ICELAND . for their country is in a sad state. Favell Lee Mortimer published 16 bestselling educational. If you grope along the dark passage. The poor men are fond of drinking. Dolls by Annette Himstedt. The house is never aired. not bigger than your hand. they are drawn by two oxen. blasting the foolish customs and filthy habits of virtually every culture in the world in 1849’s The Countries of Europe Described. they forget themselves and act in a very 119 wicked manner. spinning-wheels.… If a great box were to fall on your head. but if you go into the house. keep it in. and say it is of use. but the Portuguese do not mind the sound.the rouGh GuIde: Favell lee mortImer’s The CounTries of europe DesCribeD toDD PruzaN Great Britain has boasted countless offbeat children’s authors over the centuries — Lewis Carroll. weighed down with global trivia. They are as fond of their knittingneedles as the gentlemen are of their pipes. they can play on the piano. but try in every way to get money. but he was a false prophet. in Europe — and this is the reason: it has a different religion. 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. who have never been taught what God says in the Bible! They do not know who can keep them safe. a phobia that extended beyond religion and actually embodied Britain’s 19th-century industrial-agrarian tensions.… The poor people live in narrow alleys or streets. Still. He wrote a book called the Koran. or make them happy. TURKEY. like Spain. These children have been taught at home to steal. and he found that few had ever heard that there was such a book as the Bible. How ignorant people must be. This makes it dark and black. is filled with robbers. Would you rather sleep there or in that little dark room beyond? Look in. and lie. and filled it with foolish stories. “No. THE JEWS . and later dried a freshly bathed lamb by burying it up to its nostrils in sand. The Jews are not idle like the Poles. Go in at that low covered doorway. Mortimer’s distrust for those who worshipped differently betrays her fear of the unknown.Portugal. that he might talk to all the people who came there to draw water. Europe’s increasingly urban destiny horrified Mortimer — particularly near home. and Christ. A traveller once sat down by a stone fountain close to the road. born into society. it is full of dirty beds. who told people he was a prophet sent from God. and children of all sizes. “Is London a pleasant city?” she instructed her young readers. 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). This land is very different from all the other countries Even England’s increasingly urban Protestants could not escape Mortimer’s harsh glare. and horrible lies. He went there every day. into which no carriages can drive.” . the world her guidebooks brought to young readers seems to have been a very lonely planet. At one end there is a sort of house. that God allows them to be so unhappy. nor even boards — no — nor bricks — it is the bare earth. the laws are not obeyed. and a wicked man. but Turkey is a Mahomedan country. and talked to a great many. was ill-suited to the country life she chose. because the Jews are very dirty. There are schools for little ragged children — such as could not go to a neat Sunday school. The floor has no carpet. Mortimer. because there is so much fog and smoke. and none had ever seen it. Her intentions of bringing religion to “ragged children” may have been pure — but today. The religion is Roman Catholic. See that large shed under which horses and carts are kept. 120 and heaven and hell. and absurd laws. and in close places called courts. There are boards in one corner with some straw on them. and swear. In the Times of London in 1933. All the other countries are called Christian. It is the inn. but some of them listen to their kind teachers while they are telling them about God. taking care not to hit your head (unless you are only a little boy or girl). and the wicked often escape without being punished. What is that? Once there was a man named Mahomet. and the people are very ignorant. It is they who keep all the inns — and wretched inns they are. 121 .