CRARY - Géricault, the Panorama, and Sites of Reality

Grey Room, Inc.Géricault, the Panorama, and Sites of Reality in the Early Nineteenth Century Author(s): Jonathan Crary Source: Grey Room, No. 9 (Autumn, 2002), pp. 5-25 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1262599 . Accessed: 06/05/2013 22:18 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . The MIT Press and Grey Room, Inc. are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Grey Room. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 143.107.252.133 on Mon, 6 May 2013 22:18:54 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Gericault, and the Sites of Panorama, Reality in the Early Nineteenth Century JONATHANCRARY Even as our present lurches further into the twenty-first century, there is still a pervasive sense that an archaeology of our own rapidly changing perceptual world begins in the nineteenth century amid what Jean-Louis Comolli has now memorably described as "the frenzy of the visible."' The grounds for claiming this would certainly have less to do with the fact that film and photography were nineteenthcentury inventions (for the relative transience of these forms is now self-evident). Rather, if it is valuable to insist on continuities between the present and 150 years ago, those links would involve the status of the spectator and the persistence of certain imperatives for consumption, attention, and perceptual competence. Rather than focusing on the development of specific apparatuses or technologies, such as film or photography, I believe it is more important to see how a related group of strategies through which a subject is modernized as a spectator traverses a range of seemingly different objects and locations. To move quickly from the general to something concrete, consider William Hogarth's South wark Fair from the 1730s, a work in many ways remote from the more modern problems I have just outlined. It is, however, an image in which we can see forms of premodern and modern culture coexisting side by side. Clearly we are looking at the remains of a traditional social phenomenon in an exhausted condition, at the tail end of its presence within European collective experience. Rather than a literal depiction of a specific fairground, we see here the marginal survival of what had been the carnival energies of festival within premodern Europe. Even through Hogarth's own class prejudices, which privileged thrift, conjugality, moderation, and industriousness, we still get a tenuous sense of how the disorder of carnival overturns a distinction between spectator and performer, how it destabilizes any Grey Room 09, Fall 2002, pp. 5-25. ? 2002 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 7 This content downloaded from 143.107.252.133 on Mon, 6 May 2013 22:18:54 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 133 on Mon. 5 This content downloaded from 143. 1730s. Southwark Fair. 6 May 2013 22:18:54 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions .William Hogarth. Engraving.107.252. 252.107.Fair. 6 May 2013 22:18:54 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions . Southwark Detailof Hogarth.133 on Mon. 6 This content downloaded from 143. 1880s. Bottom:Kaiserpanorama. segregated from the more rationalized economic life of the city. I'm not pointing to any kind of technological lineage or some sequence dependent on the improvement or development of devices. 1860s. the tactility of bodies mingling.252. And it is a process that obliterates or at least sublimates the possibility of carnival. The model of optical apparatus in the corner of Hogarth's fairground shifts from a relatively minor element of early modern popular culture to become a powerful model of what would come to characterize dominant forms of visual Topleft:Kinetoscope. how it suggests a teeming mix of sensory modalities.133 on Mon. The continuities I am thinking of can be suggested. all at least coequal with vision.107. the vertigo of the topsy-turvy world. Even though the form of the peep show can be followed in reverse from the 1730s-back to the perspective boxes of the seventeenth century and probably further into the sixteenth century-what interests me is the move that begins in the later eighteenth century when the spectator of the peep-show form coincides in a general way with WalterBenjamin'saccount of the reader of the novel as a new isolated consumer of a mass-produced commodity.2 Here we have two spectators who are constituted and positioned very differently than anyone else depicted in the print. as if the important questions concerned the literal viewing apparatus. But at the same time it is clear that the leftover fragments of carnival.fixed position or identity. which was pervasive throughout the second half of the nineteenth century (or many other similar forms). for example. anticipate one of the primary pathways that popular culture will trace out of the eighteenth century into the nineteenth and eventually even into our own time.1890s. Topright: Stereoscopes in use. This brings me to one particular component of Hogarth's turbulent scene: the two seated individuals at the corner looking into a double-sided peep show. by considering the peep-show-type setup of the Kaiserpanorama in the early 1880s or the related miniature arrangement of the stereoscope. These immobile and absorbed figures. how with inversions of high and low it parodies and profanes official forms. sounds and smell. interfacing with the window of the peep show. 8 Gryor0 This content downloaded from 143. 6 May 2013 22:18:54 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions . had by this time been relegated to the terrain of the fairground. The physical device is simply a figure for a broader psychic.4 Amid the democratizing tendencies in postrevolutionary Europe there was concern that an unregulated mixing of social classes could import a fairground disorder to interior public spaces.culture in Europe and North America-that is. A large security force was recruited and set in place on opening day and on days of reduced ticket prices. The prioritization of visuality was accompanied by imperatives for various kinds of self-control and social restraint. 6 May 2013 22:18:54 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions . but it turned out to be completely unnecessary. after the disappearance of carnival.5 In this turning point in the exhibition of manufactured consumer goods. As Tony Bennett and others have shown.252. when the Crystal Palace was under construction there was considerable official anxiety that this largest-ever indoor space would be threatened by unruly behavior and public drunkenness. there were virtually no incidents of trouble. the public museum (whether of art or natural history) emerged as one of the sites in the nineteenth century where new kinds of social intercourse seemed to pose possible problems. The many ways in which this occurred included the self-disciplining of the spectator as an occupant of or visitor to interior spaces and institutions: in a sense. perceptual. Mikhail Bakhtin indicates that.133 on Mon. thereby harming the pedagogical and ideological agendas of those institutions.3 As much recent work has shown. the relative separation of a viewer from a milieu of distraction and the detachment of an image from a larger background. and social insularity of the viewer. One particular site in Europe has been especially fascinating to those studying nineteenth century visual culture: the Egyptian Hall which operated in London. the Panorama. The luster of the commodity radiated its own exhortations for self-control. a major component of the making of nineteenth century visual culture was the education and training of both the individuals and collectivities for whom new forms of visual consumption were being produced. and Sites of Reality in the EarlyNineteenth Century 9 This content downloaded from 143. more or less continuously from around 1812 until 1904 Crary Gericau t.107. as well as a pervasive privileging of vision over the senses of touch and smell. in the area of Piccadilly. the formation of modern audiences. particularly for forms of attentiveness that require both relative silence and immobility. experience in the nineteenth century acquires a "private chamber" character for an enclosed and privatized subject. For example. art exhibits.1820s. But it never was to merge into the growth of the modern bourgeois museum." since the Hall's semipermanent display included various spoils taken from Egypt (alongside. papyrus texts. ventriloquists. operated in the writings Hall." as Gunning explains. Originally called the London Museum by its founder William Bullock. 6 May 2013 22:18:54 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions . and the solicitation of attention through surprise and astonishment." to use Tom Gunning's term. advertisements promised "Natural and foreign curiosities. and a vast range of curiosities. like many other phenomena in the nineteenth century. no doubt. relied on the direct stimulation and shock of display. then a hall for early cinematic exhibitions. it is important as a stratified site through which the historically mutating shape of an exhibition/entertainment milieu can be examined over this long span of time. movies. In the nearly 100 years of its existence one could have seen displays of natural history. was demolished. organized into a rough categorization of types and groups. instead it remained part of the modern permutation of the older model of curiosities into a nineteenth-century preoccupation with "attractions.252. statues. as in magic acts or shows of giants or Siamese twins in which the mere exhibition of something is self-justifying.6 Though now physically lost. a far greater number of fakes): mummies. gems. phantasmagorias. There were also exhibits of hundreds of stuffed birds and animals. versions of panoramas and magic-lantern shows. 10 Grey Room 09 This content downloaded from 143. the inciting of visual curiosity and pleasure.133 on Mon.when the building.107. The word "attractions. a mix of the obsolete traditions of the cabinet of curiosity with a burgeoning but inchoate inclination to quasi-scientific organization. Interior view. vaudeville. Top:Egyptian Bottom:Egyptian Hall. Opposite:Posterfor Egyptian Hallattractions. magic shows. Antiquities and Productions of the Fine Arts.c. At this point in the late teens the Egyptian Hall was a hybrid of the various possibilities of organized display in the nineteenth century. freak shows. it quickly came to be called the Egyptian Hall because of its exterior of simulated Egyptian relief sculpture and hieroglyphs. 1900.7 Gunning sees early cinema as an attraction that. and other music hall-type acts. 1844. At its opening in 1812. In this larger sense it is a question of how the carnival disorder of the premodern fairground. SONGS.252. Perhaps the single most important category of exhibitionary attraction in the nineteenth century encompasses those various techniques of display whose allure was simply their relative efficacy at providing an illusory reproduction or simulation of the real. d theQUE•N I)W AG•E STh*VktPUENT8front HER MAJESTYau i the HaIL beseewm may The GE W. the reality effect for Barthes was a specific device in nineteenth-century literature that had to do with the function of the so-called concrete detail in a fictional text-he called it the "direct collusion of a referent and a signifier. that "the real" as modernity came to conceive it was invented then. who insisted that a new discursive model of reality takes shape in the nineteenth century. **:: will• %VS 9 ..of Sergei Eisenstein to evoke its fairground origins. about history that were manifested in "the devel*A nw Gallery . Thus a site like the Egyptian Hall is important for the diversity of "reality effects" that occurred within it. 6 May 2013 22:18:54 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions . and he linked it to the emergence in M.133 on Mon. t:. There will never be a clear separation in this historical period between the appeal of a technique of verisimilitude solely as demonstration of its own operation and an attention to the referent conjured up by that apparatus. the historical museum. ou&l bth90e th7 a que OGNERAL m as A Grad . regardless of what was being shown."8 '* But he also showed that the reality effect was not MR only textual. &c. AND AFTERNOON EVERtY MORNING EXITING the nineteenth century of modern assumptions EGYPTINp ti H&L. TRNKLEIh. o S Or. VY ven y Aue iu p•o IW~ uva Bl m *ua GENERAL whereby the signified is expelled from the sign. This now familiar phrase is of course from the work. TTAIA. is deposed onto the peep-show model of visual attraction and how the multifaceted festival participant is turned into an individualized and self-regulated spectator. its profuse grotesquerie and strangeness. * PICCADILLY. opment of the realistic novel.• L T." Important here is that although photography is emphasized as a reality effect it is not in any sense a foundational model or prerequisite for it. fwom -pat 2 to 4.in full Military Cstumne. It should be remembered that he used this term in several different ways. Woo Wan Bastyad lW70y WvA& tb. SI t . Wor ek-lke Adelaide Av4 " Ea.107. in the late 1960s.AlWrO. From II to I... 11 Crry I Gericault. the Panorama..Adel. oGa L hashad i the houmo a ppeanig PAL. the exhibition of ancient objects and the massive development of photography whose ..at Alg4 #adDama ?e* a P*a. ISand WvUl otihe M oWvdaSe Dea tme will 9give * esr. w"h. W -.VM . and Sites of Reality in the Early Nneteenth Century This content downloaded from 143.&c. willgive his Representation of NAPOWIO)N : GRECIAN BONAPARTE. STATUE8. of the French critic Roland Barthes.. the news item.n aideo G&lry mtheGENERAL •& do .and Mr.AC UKINGgaAtM THREE TTIMEby Command 4 HERIMAJFRSTY. u0stab )esu e eaw .5 sole pertinent feature is precisely to signify that 0 the event represented has really taken place. J.LW WJJFJIATCwAX. DANCES. On the one hand. documentary literature. the private diary. 9 This was a familiar strategy in wax museums. 1819.133 on Mon. or. a pocket watch. 12 Grey Room 09 This content downloaded from 143. one of the most successful exhibits was the display of Napoleon's battle carriage captured after the Battle of Waterloo and shipped back to England. one-armed Dutch coach driver had been brought back to be part of the exhibition. bulletproof. bars of soap. Theodore G6ricault's Raft of the Medusa. even more simply. It is particularly noteworthy that after years of exhibition on tour throughout Britain and other parts of Europe the carriage was sold to the then thriving establishment of Madame Tussaud's in London. and numerous other minor articles. But apparently a feature that was of overwhelming interest to the thousands of spectators was the chance to look inside at the plush drawers and built-in cabinets that contained his personal wardrobe.In the early years of the Egyptian Hall. for example. however.10 There are many reasons why the exhibition of this work in this particular venue is of historical importance.11 My larger point. an object placed on display there in June of 1820. and Napoleon's wounded. is an obvious one. for awhile. painted dark blue with gold trim and wheels of vermilion. But despite the unquestioned popularity of wax museums. though it certainly bears stating: the observer of painting in the nineteenth century was always also an observer who simultaneously encountered a proliferating diversity of optical and sensory expe- Theodore Gericault. to become part of her permanent display of waxwork figures of Napoleon (for whom she had previously worked).252. At this point I want to examine another piece of the heterogeneous visual culture of the Egyptian Hall.107. a wax figure seated at the desk or table actually taken from their prison cell. it was such "mixed" reality effects that finally were the most problematic in the nineteenth century. one of the most important sites in London for the temporary exhibition of paintings. What went on view was not simply a carriage but a model of the "real"in newly distilled form. usually occupying an outer limit of popular taste or fascination. the proximity of illusory wax skin with the real clothing that often had actually belonged to the subject. 6 May 2013 22:18:54 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions . it should be noted that the Egyptian Hall was. these mundane items became a supplementary but vital confirmation of the authenticity of the object itself. First. where the simulation was augmented by the adjacency of objects having a literal presence-that is. In line with Barthes argument about the concrete detail. Raft of the Medusa. and there will only be space here to indicate a few of them. flasks of liqueurs. Obviously it was of interest because it was luxurious. usually paintings that either in terms of sheer scale or subject matter had a viability as a popular commercial attraction. Thus.*-he Paorama and Sies of ReaIity in the Ea rIy Nineteeth Century 13 This content downloaded from 143. with Raft of Medusa there are two distinct but not unrelated problems: the circumstances of its production and of its reception.12But this is almost incidental to the particular approach G6ricault staked out for his representation of this subject. the very immediacy of the horrible event. 6 May 2013 22:18:54 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions . legal.107. and other guarantees of the real.133 on Mon. In other words. commodities. but as one of the many consumable and fleeting elements within an expanding field of images. According to Charles Cl6ment. paintings were produced and assumed meaning not in terms of some cloistered aesthetic and institutional domain." indicating that G6ricault attempted to collect every news story and public C-ry r GcauItt. testimony. to assimilate the facts. and political sources of evidence. fact. The fact that G6ricault chose for the subject of his painting a contemporary news item made it already compatible with a larger social arena in which information was transformed into commodities and attractions. one of his earliest biographers. G6ricault made extraordinary efforts to master. medical. which is why this painting occupies its unstable position between two distinct historical worlds-between the enclosed order of reference organized around the rhetoric of the human body in the art of antiquity and the Renaissance and an unbounded heterogeneous informational field of journalistic. the truth. and attractions. G6ricault assembled an immense "dossier crammed with authentic proofs and documents of all sorts.riences. G6ricault engaged the project as if all of this new data could be distilled and forged into a visual experience that would synthesize and transcend its fragmented character. the evidence.252. an event which already by the time he began working on it had assumed a multilayered informational existence. Detail. J. Savigny and Alexandre Corr6ard. 14 Grey Poom 09 This content downloaded from 143. including the best-selling firsthand account by two survivors. As critics have noted for a century and a half. or symbolic sense-but death as the literal degradation of the physical body. of evidence. Right: Study of severed limbs.left:Raftof the Medusa.B.107. Theodore Opposite. 6 May 2013 22:18:54 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions . in which older models of visibility are exceeded. the only thing G6ricault didn't do while immersing himself in the event was experiment with cannibalism. What Cl6ment referred to as the immense documentary dossier of G6ricault would finally have to include also the corpses and body parts he had delivered to his studio (or studied in hospitals) in order to live with the sights and smells of decaying human bodies. He made the acquaintance of Savigny and Corr6ard (the former was the ship's surgeon) and interviewed them at length even though their published account was already exhaustive.right: c. that the event could be narrated only in terms of its temporal TheodoreGericault. emaciated bodies. Of course it is not a work that looks real by virtue of its literal correspondence to a specific viewpoint of a specific moment. submerged a few feet below water level. this is part of the discursive fissure that I suggest runs through the painting. religious. G6ricault used Savigny and Corr6ard as models for two of the figures standing near the mast. Working amid this field of effects. just as the survivors of the raft who kept parts of the dead on board for their own sustenance. As far as we know. we don't see the raft as it really was.document about the expedition and shipwreck. "the referential plenitude" of the work. We should note the utter discontinuity between the semantic status of their images in the painting and the various references to old master art. to use Barthes's phrase. Initially he was convinced that the project could be achieved only through a sequence of several paintings. of direct experience that produces. GUricault. However. 1819. Its verisimilitude is based on its more profound embeddedness in new networks of the real. 1821. we see no starving. every bit of eyewitness testimony. psychological.252. Not only did he assemble all the journalistic images he could find. whether Michelangelo or Rubens. Madwoman. but he commissioned the surviving carpenter of the Medusa to build him a small-scale model of the raft.133 on Mon. G6ricault's first inclinations are highly telling. Opposite. which he tested out in water to see how it floated and maneuvered. In fact. the most extreme and notorious measure undertaken by G6ricault to ensure the authenticity of his work was his insistence on becoming familiar with the immediacy of death-not death in a narrative.c. fastening them onto the painting for their stature as eyewitnesses but also as a way of making actual the representation. It is this whole dossier of fact. the body drained of any living coherence. 107. But much of the historical significance of the Raft is how G6ricault forced this content and its discursive substructure back within the rhetorical terms of a classical model of representation.252. Music historian Lawrence Kramer. the painting incarnates a vision all but cut off from the possibility of a reciprocal exchange of gazes. Seen from across a room. in which the focus of attention is funneled and narrowed to a single barely perceptible point.t. A key feature of these images is the breakdown of a reciprocal gaze."15 discloses that separation. constantly threatened with Here G6ricault separation from the outer world. For reprieve and deliverance in this image would consist in a mutual exchange of gazes. We get an even more piercing sense of this new understanding of the privatization of vision in G6ricault'slate portraits of the insane. That he could not do this seamlessly. the self becomes an essential difference. the Panora~r and Sites of Reality in the Eary Nineteenth Century 15 This content downloaded from 143. its inherent dislocations. that these incompatible projects collide and fracture is part of what made this such a charged object at this threshold of modernity. 6 May 2013 22:18:54 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions . where the peep-show model of looking describes both an intensification of visuality and also an isolation of the subject from a lived embeddedness in a given social milieu. these pictures appear more or less congruent with the conventions of middle-class portraiture. not only the impossibility of a mutuality but a sense of the complete nonidentity of worlds. thematizes the first half of the nineteenth century as a time when "human subjectivity ceases to be a common field and becomes instead a secret recess. in an essay on Chopin. it is no accident that in his efforts to reduce the event of the disaster to a single image he chose this moment-a moment in which vision takes on such an exclusive priority. We are here a long way from Goya's nearly contemporary renderings of the madhouse. Even so. which is here tragically denied or at least deferred.14But this is part of what Bakhtin saw as the "private chamber" character of experience in the nineteenth century. And it is alongside this shift that the need arises for at least a simulation of a real world experienced in common. that a preoccupation Crary •icau.dispersal. The line between the normal and the pathological is made disturbingly indistinct. in being acknowledged by the ship.133 on Mon. and it is only on closer examination that one realizes something about them is different. as Michael Fried and others have indicated. the loss of a shared objective reality.that difference in extreme form.13 To redirect the terms of Fried's argument. No longer a shared sameness. and shipped to London where it opened for public exhibition in June at the Egyptian Hall. when a somewhat melancholy G6ricaultmade arrangements for the huge painting to be rolled up. In the six months Raft of the Medusa was on display at the Egyptian Hall. G6ricault's financial problems and depression. now extracted from the universe of the Louvre. was already showing to sold-out houses a few streets away. of its authority as objective historical discourse. It is as if they were optical instruments whose lens we will never look through. which supported its value as an attraction." He showed figures on the verge of entrances into dark unfathomable spaces that communicated nothing back to the observer except the shiver of an annihilating loss of redemptive possibilities.. it drew over 50. Thus the work. but which. functioned alongside the painting as a reality effect. which did much to ease. Hall Opposite:Egyptian exhibitionof modernand ancientMexico. 16 Grey Room 09 . 6 May 2013 22:18:54 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions . The availability of this text at the exhibition.with the real emerges... would reveal a radically different vision of the real. Newspaper ads emphasized the grim but sensational subject of the painting and equally stressed its size as an attraction in its own right. That the public in England was already well acquainted with the horrific details of the story is in part attested to by the fact that when the painting arrived a stage play about the wreck of the Medusa.107. Here. it is that Gericault has recorded."a field of reified current events. was made continuous with another network of "actualities. we learn from standard accounts. In a related way. with apparent clinical objectivity and detachment.. if we could. which included an abridged edition of the English translation of the book by Savigny and Corr6ard. Admission was a shilling. Rather. Right: . a deal was struck to have the painting do a run in Dublin. crated. titled The Fatal Raft. complicit in establishing what Barthes calls the authenticity and "omnipotence of the referent. Yet it is not just that the possibility of our eyes meeting the eyes of the insane is unthinkable here.133 on Mon. G6ricault was repeatedly drawn during his stay in England to architectural motifs that functioned as perceptual "black holes.000 visitors. at least temporarily." Following its run in London.1820s. because any reciprocity would include an unbearable moment of self-recognition and self-differentiation. eventually leading to whole industries of reality production taking shape in a rapidly modernizing West. But back to the spring of 1820.252.. individuals who were perceiving a hyperdelusional world. :• ::: : FrenchPanorama.! This content downloaded from 143. the painting did Al i . as well as hundred of birds and fish.252. and Sites of Reaity in the Eary Nneteenth Century u 17 This content downloaded from 143. Why did it not do as well in Dublin as it had in London? In a remarkable historical intersection." which represented precisely the same recent news item. for roughly the same price. soon be used overwhelmingly to signify a 360-degree circular painting exhibited on the interior of a cylindrically shaped structure. a consumer had the choice of seeing over 10. A key problem is to Crary Gricaui . it certainly should not be seen as some opposition between elite culture and a crude popular form. of course. and by 1800 numerous panoramas were operating in large European cities. and the marketplace decided which was the more compelling attraction.less well. a moving panorama involved a long band of canvas on which a continuous sequence of scenes had been painted and which was unrolled before a seated audience. The word panorama would. Thus. One such exhibit displayed a large quantity of objects and specimens brought back by Bullock from a six-month expedition to Mexico. billed as panoramas. The word panorama was used in a variety of ways in the early nineteenth century. G6ricault's painting competed for attention in the Irish capital with another artifactof nineteenth-century visual culture.16 Sometimes called a Peristrephic panorama. and often a small orchestra added drama to the whole. and after two months in the spring of 1821 the decision was made to have the work shipped back to France. and the Egyptian Hall was a place where large mural paintings. 6 May 2013 22:18:54 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions . Colored lighting enhanced the effect of individual scenes. a moving panorama titled "The Wreck of the Medusa.17 The panorama is a compelling object for historians in that it flourished in a relatively consistent manner for a period of time coinciding very closely with the nineteenth century itself.000 square feet of moving painted surface or about 450 square feet of motionless canvas. Rather it was competition between two types of reality effect that each represented the same event. A patent was issued for such a form of exhibition in 1787.107. were created as components of exhibitions. the Panorama. If G6ricault's painting and the Dublin panorama were rivals for patronage within an economic space around 1820. so one really didn't need to pay to see the original as well. Moreover. These included a mix of real and simulated artifacts: casts of Aztec sculpture such as Montezuma's calendar stone. three-sided painting of a Mexican landscape (like a twentieth-century museum diorama) with a three-dimensional dwelling abutting the two-dimensional painted mural surface. but the word panorama was not used until 1791. all placed in the context of a large.133 on Mon. one of the scenes in the moving panorama was effectively a copy of G6ricault's painting. fake plants and fruits. London. viewing Opposite:Panorama platform. The situation was very different from that of a few decades later. The panorama falls into the general category of the phantasmagoric as defined by Theodor Adorno: . but there was the tacit assumption among many writers that over time panoramic painting would become a conventional way of representing certain kinds of subjects and that gradually major artists would gravitate toward it. it should be noted that the panorama is a distinctly nonphotographic form. in 1800. and cultural developments. 18 GreyRoom 09 This content downloaded from 143. 1880. c. Ingres. This is hardly to imply that the meaning or effects of the panorama remained static for over a century. In one of the last major academic treatises on perspective. Initially many artists and critics immersed in traditional practices were favorably disposed to the panorama. 6 May 2013 22:18:54 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions . generally applying the same aesthetic criteria in evaluating the latter's success or failure. within any discussion of reality effects. Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes. At the same time. Friedrich. At least into the mid-1820s there was still a pervasive though often uncertain sense that panoramas were part of the same representational codes as older existing forms of painting. We know that many artists (including David. Although this familiarity means really no more than saying that an artist living in 1920 went to the movies. it also suggests the degree to which panoramas were pervasive urban phenomena. when the panorama was clearly situated within the terrain of popular entertainment and the term panorama painter was an expression of disdain. Constable.c. Copenhagen.252. For in fact its status continually mutated in relation to social. Turner.18In the popular press of both London and Paris the same reviewers who wrote about conventional art exhibitions would often review the opening of a panorama painting. It was a startlingly unfamiliar format.107. saw the panorama as fully within the terms of classical representation.explain its historical durability in a time when constant innovation and rapid obsolescence were already integral parts of cultural production and consumption. I think it is reasonable to see the panorama as one of the places in the nineteenth century where a modernization of perceptual experience occurs. 1802. technological. as just a new twist on familiar problems.133 on Mon.77: :: 7"m i: : Nw-:_ LeicesterSquare Right: Panorama. and others) were familiar with and favorably disposed to the panorama. And about the early 1820s one point needs to be stressed: the panorama had an uneasy but relatively uncontested proximity to traditional modes of painting. a spectator usually entered into the rotunda by means of a staircase that led one out onto the central viewing platform. the Kinetoscope and. Such lighting conditions made the painting seem to radiate its own light. Forms as seemingly different as Daguerre's Diorama. leaving the rest of the interior in relative obscurity. Almost all panoramas sought to create a spatial remove from the image. This also meant that spectators could never cast shadows on the image. 6 May 2013 22:18:54 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions . and it was sometimes found that on bright summer days the light would be too strong-enough so that the seams of the separate canvas became visible. the Panorama. At the same ricaut. The spectator therefore had nothing like the floor in a museum. specifically. Wagner's theater at Bayreuth. with a moatlike area surrounding the viewing platform.133 on Mon.107. whose apparitional appeal is an effect of both its uncertain spatial location and its detachment from a broader visual field. of course.or gallery-type interior to assist in a subjective rationalization of the intervening distance between eye and image. the Kaiserpanorama.19 How. was the panorama phantasmagoric? After purchasing entry. We have accounts indicating that audience members occasionally tossed coins at the image as a way of determining how far away it was. and Sites of Reality in the Ear y Nineteenth Century Crary 19 This content downloaded from 143. Part of the reason for the elevation was purely functional-no doorways could interrupt the continuous surface of the painting. This is how the panorama can at least be partially associated with the peep-show model discussed earlier: it involves a detachment of the image from a wider field of possible sensory stimulation and creates a calculated confusion about the literal location of the painted surface as a way of enhancing its illusions of presence and distance. cinema as it took shape in the late 1890s are other key nineteenth-century examples of the image as an autonomous luminous screen of attraction. The interior was darkened in such a way that only subdued light entering indirectly from the top of the building illuminated the painting on the walls of the structure. disclosing it to be merely a two-dimensional surface. Adorno used this adjective to describe any form or process under capitalism that concealed or mystified its actual production or operation.borrowing from Marx. revealing the painting's constructed character and thus disrupting the illusion. the effect of which would obviously be antiphantasmagoric.252. It is from a point in the novel when Emma has been making regular trips to Rouen to see her lover. sieges. And it was within this format that a popular taste for concrete actuality asserted itself. What was it about the panorama that seemed to guarantee a heightened verisimilitude? Clearly it had to do with the novelty of its new encircling format. the city came into view.. Thus Flaubert himself introduces in his text. This is its self-defining feature.time the panorama is another instance of how spectatorship accompanied by a narrowed focus of attention produces social docility. 20 GreyRoom 09 This content downloaded from 143. the idea of a visual image that is circular or round (an amphitheater) Panoramaof Prague. head. every landmark along the way. But as one moves one's eyes. She has made the coach ride to Rouen often enough so that she knows every turn in the road. Flaubert's Madame Bovary. the factory chimneys. panorama audiences were attracted by cityscapes. we find that his most extensive example of the reality effect is one that he himself describes Barthes has derived this characterization from a texwith the word "panorama.1840s."23The rest of the paragraph is an accumulation of details-about the boats anchored in the Seine. It has no frame (and in this certainly departs from the peep-show model). it does have upper and lower boundaries. landscapes. an image that is to the viewer endless. the distant gray hills. even in group circumstances. even for an ambulatory spectator.133 on Mon.22 Here are Flaubert's words: "Then. but what are some of the ways to understand this? Going back to Barthes's essay. including the crest of a hill from which the entire city of Rouen spreads in full view below. drowned in mist. But the panorama is unique: unlike these other forms. the it sprawled out shapelessly beyond its bridges. 6 May 2013 22:18:54 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions . all at once. the image appears as a continuous boundaryless field... but also for its more important evaporation of the vanishing point and its residual theological implications. or body laterally. or erudite historical themes). streets lined with bare trees.20Strictly speaking. or views of remote regions of the world. In one sense this horizontal orientation is a decisive culmination of a secularization of sight long underway. Developing out of late eighteenth-century enthusiasms for view painting and picturesque landscape (as opposed to images with mythological. Sloping downward like an amphitheater."21 tual object. it presents an unbounded image. roofs wet with rain. allegorical. if not specifically the panorama.107. Thus seen from above. or recent events that one would have read about-battles. whole landscape had the static quality of a painting. and so on. not only for its refusal of the obvious symbolic resonances of the ceiling and the vertical. Fragment.252. characterized by a seemingly self-evident wholeness. that seemed immediately accessible but that always exceeded the capacity of a spectator to grasp it. in the context of urbanization. of narrative irrelevance." whereby an authentic realism would seem to demand the deliriously impossible inclusion in representation of everything present to sight. the panorama image is consumable only as fragments. was increasingly incoherent. on the inadequacy of a human observer. whether a landscape or city. the setup of the panorama presumes to present a total view. If we can speak of the panorama as a reality effect. And one important definition of the adjective panoramic as it was used in the nineteenth century is the notion of a full 360-degree view that has no obstructions. it is an effect produced through a confluence of more elements than I could begin to discuss here. A structure that seems magically to overcome the fragmentation of experience in fact introduces partiality and Crary Gricaulw. The viewing platform in the center of the panorama rotunda seemed to provide a point from which an individual spectator could overcome the partiality and fragmentation that constituted quotidian perceptual experience. it is a pretending or seeming to transcribe the world in a scrupulous fashion while avoiding the trap of what Barthes calls "the vertigo of notation. its reality.133 on Mon. the Panorama. In this sense the panorama provided an imaginary unity and coherence to an external world that. of an inexhaustible inclusion of the real. the panorama was in another sense a derealization and devaluation of the individual's viewpoint. and Sites of Realty n the EarlyNineteerth Century 21 This content downloaded from 143. Important here are the affinities between the strategies of the real at work in panorama painting and in literary realism. 6 May 2013 22:18:54 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions . is given. The authority of the panorama was founded on the limitations of subjective vision. then the world is being seen in its completeness. Like the name itself.and which is like a painting. nothing blocking an optical appropriation of it. It posed a view of a motif. This is where the "insignificant detail" in the text intervenes as if to proclaim that if this level of minutiae. is achieved is through the novel 360-degree format of the image.107.252. But while seeming to provide such a simulation of perceptual mastery and identifying the real with that sense of coherence. But perhaps the overriding way in which a related impression of completeness. as parts that must be cognitively reassembled into an imagined whole. Unlike eighteenth-century topographical painting. Caspar David Friedrich's Traveler above the Sea of Clouds (1818) has long been associated. it implies the mastery of a position that transcended local provincial viewpoints and permitted at least an optical appropriation of a natural world that was increasingly being parceled and abstracted into smaller units of property. That a perspectival representation allowed only a partial and delimited opening onto that world was offset by the universality and rationality of the laws by which it was composed.Publishedin Narrative of a Voyageto Senegal. perhaps excessively so. perspective had for several centuries established the pervasive fiction of an adequacy.252.incompleteness as constitutive elements of visual experience. 1818. In one sense it became a degraded simulation of the sublime. of visual facts that finally resisted synthesis into perceptual knowledge. Panorama painting. and it has been suggested that Friedrich not only was extremely familiar with early panorama painting in Germany but that he briefly had plans around 1810 to undertake one himself. available to anyone for the price of a ticket. heightened the disparity between a subjective visual field and the possibility of a conceptual and perceptual grasp of an external reality. at the same time. Right: Traveler above the Sea of Clouds. but.Of course.133 on Mon. Two almost contemporary images disclose very different intuitions about the panoramic viewpoint. It seems to incarnate the ascendancy of newly released bourgeois aspirations and fantasies of autonomy.24 In the painting the position of this depicted observer and his relation to the surrounding landscape certainly correspond to the central viewing platform in a panorama and the illusory sense of a distant image. philosophical. Very generally. Opposite:Planof the raftof Medusa. The proliferation of reality effects in the nineteenth century coincided with the collapse of the scientific. with both its cancellation of the vanishing point in the work and the reciprocal loss of a localizable point of view. 6 May 2013 22:18:54 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions . to the contrary. 22 Grey Room 09 This content downloaded from 143. a congruence between the subjective point of view of an observer and the world. and aesthetic systems that had in a variety of ways posed an imaginary reconciliation of the limitations of a human observer with a full possession of a perceivable world. with the effects of the panorama. of details. within Friedrich'swork any sense of exhilaration is inseparable from a metaphysical melancholy CasparDavidFriedrich.107. It simulated a totality that was necessarily beyond the reach of a human subject. 1818. perception was transformed into the accumulation of information. evidence. At stake in this work is an apprehension of the numbing disproportion between the limits of human perception and the implacable otherness of the exterior world.25 The sail itself. images of reality effects drifts. The sensory and cognitive dislocations of modernity can be mapped only through the tangled and hazardous destiny of a collective subject. This is the field on which G6ricault'sdossier of documents. without markers. of a sensory impoverishment and emotional privatization. and Sites of Reality in the Early Nineteenth Century 23 This content downloaded from 143. And the group of spectators on this platform have a far more pressing motivation to scan the perimeter of the circular field than Friedrich's mountain climber. and on which homogeneity and repetition overwhelm singularity. has. never been associated with a panoramic viewpoint and certainly does not have the same defining high vantage point of The Traveler. And in a larger European context this image gives a piercing sense of how the panorama coincided with new forms of subjective isolation. again almost historically simultaneous with the Friedrich. G6ricault is incapable of imagining a crisis of perception in terms of a solitary individual. surrounded by an unobstructed 360-degree view. the Panorama. Crary I Gricault. But if we consider the perceptual conditions that are diagrammedwithin G6ricault'sRaft. hovers on the horizon line like a section of the assembled painted canvas that lined the interiors of the panorama rotundas. Unlike The Traveler.107.133 on Mon. without a center. 6 May 2013 22:18:54 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions . which suggests the security of a stable point of view. tied together precariously like the raft itself. we have a group of observers no less situated on what we could call a viewing platform. a curved piece of canvas. facts. And also unlike Friedrich.252. The other image. G6ricault's work discloses a very different sense of the conditions of panoramic experience-it is to be uprooted from any point of anchorage and to be drifting on an amorphous surface like the sea. never congealing into a reassuring armature of meanings. as far as I know.at the tragic insufficiency of the relation between subject and world. 3. however. ed. see Lee Johnson. Frame.252. Peepshows: A Visual History (New York: Abrams. See. Tom Gunning. Rabelais and His World.0. Wolfgang Seitz et al. The Medusa was part of a convoy of French ships en route to Senegal in July 1816. Due to the inexperience of the captain. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge: MIT Press. On the history of the peep show. 8. Fragment 24 Grey 09 Room This content downloaded from 143. 1. Jean-Louis Comolli." in The Cinematic Apparatus.133 on Mon. My thanks also go to the Grey Room editors for their help and advice. 6. ed. Altick's indispensable The Shows of London (Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Its Spectator. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. To accommodate everyone. 1968). and the Whitney ISP. the ship ran aground on ocean shoals many miles off the African coast. leaving the raft and its company to drift on the open sea. trans. 130-132. drunken and murderous of panoramapainting. 276-277. Yale. Princeton. Narrative. Benjamin Robert Haydon 1786-1846 (Kendal: The Wordsworth Trust.On the exhibition of G6ricault's work in England and Ireland. ed. 1999). The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display (New Haven: Yale University Press. trans. Lorenz E. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang. and Bakhtin. See.107. The Rustle of Language. Cornell.. 12-13. When the crew in the lifeboat realized the raft was impeding their own progress to safety they cynically cut the cable. Eitner. Thirteen days later. 1. 1996). there were only a few serviceable lifeboats. The Birth of the Museum: Theory. after storms. 1984). 5. 2. and Richard Balzer. Tony Bennett. Emory. 147. 1978). 209-212. Durchblick. 1990): 56-62. 1995). University of Washington. 2000)."Burlington Magazine 62 (December 1965): 616-627. and I'm grateful to my hosts and audiences at Brown. Thomas Elsaesser (London: BFI." in Early Cinema: Space. 9. 1983). and the Avant-Garde. "The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film. GCricault: Work(Ithaca:Cornell University Press. 12. which coincided with the display of Gericault's painting in 1820. 255. Politics (London: Routledge. The London Encyclopedia (London: Macmillan. See the account of these concerns in Jeffrey Auerbach. 235-252.. see Der Guckkasten: Einblick. ed. 4. 418-421. Suzanne Lodge. 122. 11. because of negligence. "Gericault His Life and in England. 1995). "The Raft of the Medusa in Great Britain. 1983). eds. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mikhail Bakhtin. Ben Weinreb and Christopher Hibbert. 136-148. 1986).. 7. See the extensive factual account of the Egyptian Hall in Richard D. 1992). Teresa de Laueretis and Stephen Heath (London: Macmillan. trans. for example. a raft was hastily assembled out of the ship's timbers and 150 passengers rode on it. the account of the exhibition at the Egyptian Hall of Benjamin Robert Haydon's enormous Christ's Entry into Jerusalem. in David Blayney Brown et al. Ausblick. 6 May 2013 22:18:54 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions . David Robinson.Notes This essay is the text of a lecture delivered recently at various locations. 6-41." Burlington Magazine 46 (August 1954): 249-253. London: World City 1800-1840 (New Haven: Yale University Press. Roland Barthes. "Machines of the Visible. After two days a decision was made to abandon the ship. 1998). The Victorian Visitors: Culture Shock in Nineteenth-Century Britain (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press. See also Celina Fox. (Stuttgart: Fiisslin Verlag. and Rupert Christiansen. 1980). for example. towed by one of the lifeboats. History. Music as Cultural Practice 1800-1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press.' alluding to the name of the vessel. London: Dawsons. 1988). 1999). cat. Courbet's Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1996). Savigny and Corr6ard report that "One. This consolatory idea did not quit us." 145. 1999). among others said. joking. trans. Harro Segeberg (Munich: Wilhelm Fink. 15. in order to promote sales of Turner's engravings.. 1968).252. Gustave Flaubert. "The Reality Effect. 142-143. In Search of Wagner. An event devoid of anything heroic or ennobling. In creating that "reversed telescope" effect of vast separation between raft and distant ship. Bernard Comment. was actually named after a mythological creature with a hundred eyes has struck many as an extraordinary coincidence. The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium (New York: Zone Books. Turner and subsequent engraving by William Miller for the 1834 volume Wanderings by the Seine. Ralph Hyde. thus causing 140 unnecessary deaths. 85. 1990). 23. 'If the brig is sent to look for us. J. let us pray to God that she may have the eyes of Argus. and delirium." Savigny and Corr6ard. 19. (Basel: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern. Francis Steegmuller (New York: Modern Library. 1990). See Theodor Adorno. 22. surmounting the obstacle of distance and space. 47. Madame Bovary. 29-31. Narrative of a Voyage. 1997). 18. 16. The Painted Panorama (New York: Abrams.• in the EarlyNineteenth Centufiy the Paioraman ad Sites of •Reality 25 This content downloaded from 143. focusing public attention on the corruption of the Restoration regime. Sehsucht: Das Panorama als Massenunterhaltung des 19. That the rescuing ship. and we spoke of it frequently. See Stephan Oettermann. 13. it became a political scandal." in Die Mobilisierung des Sehens. In the summer of 1829. The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium. Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816 (1818. 299. de perspective pratique. five died soon after reaching shore. Cary IGcaut. 20. fifteen survivors were rescued by another ship. a l'usage des artistes . Less often remembered is that the full: mythological name was Argus Panoptes. Lawrence Kramer. the Argus.. which had awarded command of a ship to an incompetent Royalist officer. 1973). Perhaps the most stunning visual treatment of this particular hilltop view of Rouen is the watercolor by J. 1993). Pierre Henri de Valenciennes. accidentally evoking a range of forms through which the capacities of an individual (merely mortal) human observer were exceeded. and Albrecht Koschorke. Barthes. Valuable studies of the panorama include Stephan Oettermann. 6 May 2013 22:18:54 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions . including the panorama and Panopticon. 14. which we presumed would be sent after us. 21. Rodney Livingstone (London: NLB. cannibalism.133 on Mon. Of these. 132-133. Panoramania (London: Barbican Art Gallery.. 1997). Michael Fried. 17. Jahrhunderts. 88. See my comparison of the nineteenth-century optical models deployed by the panorama and the stereoscope in Suspensions of Perception (Cambridge: MIT Press.. reprint.W. ed. 24.107. 1957). 295-296.B. "Das Panorama: Die Anfringe des modernen Sensomotorik um 1800. trans. 1981). through the use of a visual technology that exceeded the mere human vision deployed on the raft. Henry Savigny and Alexander Corr6ard. Elements reprint. trans. G6ricault was obviously aware from Corr6ard and Savigny's book that the eventual rescue occurred because the raft was spotted through a telescope. (1800.M. exh.fighting. 339-343. 147-168. that is. Geneva: Minkoff. Deborah Schneider (New York: Zone Books. starvation. an exhibition of his watercolors was held at the Egyptian Hall.