The Material Collective was at the feast this year. The 48th International Congress on Medieval Studies stood up and delivered a rousing conference, and it’s the spirit of the entremets (the delightful disruptions that becomes the main topics of conversation) that I will pursue in this account of sessions with a Material Collective presence. Actually, the parenthetical above is the most important part of this post, because it gets at the glad and thrilling realization I had at this year’s Kalamazoo: that the conversations we used to have on the side, the ones that really warmed us up but weren’t considered part of the main conference, the passions and pulls we kept bracketing from the sessions – those have now become the main discussion: the Really Big Session, the heartiest laughter, the most shared ripple of recognition and community, the greatest momentum for the work we might do together next. And so…

The Future We Want: A Collaboration (A Roundtable)

It turns out that you can ask both for and of the future you want. You can clamor and beseech, speculate and hope, encourage and innovate. Prompted in part by the threatened futures of the humanities, the institutional cuts and undercuts, Jeffrey J. Cohen gathered us together under the banner of George Washington University’s Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute (GW-MEMSI) and said “Go.” We worked in teams and all the futures will be gathered together in a punctum book later this year. Karen Overbey and the Lothar Cross and I struggled within a lush future that can be collective beyond luxury. All the fervor (the attention to materiality, the vitality of things, the weight and presence and being of objects) of object-oriented ontology is still learning how to talk to all the fervor (the dignity of the human condition, the work for social justice, the articulation of civil rights) of the liberal democratic subject. “Oh!” we said at the beginning of a sentence we repeated twice we believe in it so much, “That is the future we want: an ethical relationship with objects that still allows for lushness.” A lush ethics. Stay tuned. And then there were other futures, here offered as glimpses in eager anticipation for the punctum books volume: Institutional Change/Paradigm Change from Eileen Joy/L.O. Aranye Fradenburg (a call for ornament and delusional spaces); Time Change/Mode Change from Allan Mitchell and Will Stockton-spoken-by-Eileen-Joy (consider scholarship as trauma, forgetting as fundamental to a humanities education); World Change/Sea Change from Lowell Duckert and Steve Mentz (who had swum in Lake Michigan at 6 a.m. that morning, who led us to images of calving glaciers and spoke us through a few of Fernando Pessoa’s seventy-plus heteronyms); Voice Change/Language Change from Chris Piuma and Jonathan Hsy (take note of modes and memes and containers for language and “spectral intervocality” and hey, “let’s overpopulate our containers”); and Collective Change/Mood Change by Julie Orlemanski and Julian Yates (and the Battle of Maldon (oh Aethelred the Unready!) and moodiness and the question that resonates: “How do you decide which collective to change yourself into?”). Each one of these futures was an encouraging “come join us” gesture to an entremet at past Kalamazoos: spoken around a table or over a glass of wine or during that last tired walk back to the dorms. When you hear the passion and the honesty and the joy and the immediacy of these futures, you wonder that they were ever not spoken centrally. But they weren’t. And now they are. And so yes, answer the call of Eileen Joy, and ask what the future wants, too.

Time and the Material Object

RRRRRRRROLL Collective, animated GIF

If you’re mesmerized by the RRRRRRRROLL Collective gif, that’s ok – stay a while. You’re already sitting still enough to read these words, why not marvel at the phenomenal variety of stillness and action around you. The computer you touch is still, but whirs within processing processing; your body is still (relatively) but your metabolism burns and thrives, processing processing; the building around you hums, that wooden pencil cracks just a little with age, the coffee gets cooler and cooler. Experiencing time through objects; the temporal experience of objects; the objecthood of time; the experiential time of objects. The permutations of the talks and discussion of the panel sponsored by the Material Collection involved the packed room in the entremets of time – those wondrous glitches that disrupt a slow and steady progression from conception to origin to stasis in a work of art. Reception of works of art through time is messy and driven by desire and is anything but slow and steady. The ending isn’t always in the museum; all of the papers in the panel argued (beautifully, expectantly) that there is no ending.

Matthew Paris Map

Beth Williamson Samways led things off and led us in with “Ductus and Duration: Physical and Sensory Engagement with Medieval Objects.” For yes we make objects, yes we manufacture them, yes we may activate them, but in actuality (in experience and in time), they lead us. Images, and medieval art objects especially, have a ductus – a path that they trace for us to take, be it narrative or liturgical, compositional or aesthetic. Considering this ductus through time becomes a very interesting proposition: you have to relax your grip on the absolute value of human agency, and consider the inter-action between object and user. We experience works of art temporally, and Beth’s paper opened up the interpretive possibilities tremendously: from the immediacy of musical correlation (heard then and there as the viewer tracks her way through a stained glass window) to the lifetime return of Matthew Paris’s yearning for Jerusalem through maps.

Sometimes the ductus will take you way off-script to unexpected places, like the Philadelphia suburb of Bryn Athyn or Gloucester, Massachusetts. I include this image to herald Jennifer Borland and Martha Easton’s conjoined talk on “Integrated Pasts: Glencairn Museum and Hammond Castle,” despite its graininess and black and white coloring, because of the palpable love that Mildred is showing for the statue the family called the “Thin Lady.” Take the time, look at the website, let their ductus make you want to go. Beautiful, aren’t they? Easy to get caught up in the world of the handsome men and women who wanted it and made it happen. That desire is more democratically shared today at, say, Medieval Times (where I will never forget being told that I could “upgrade my experience to royalty for $10!” smile!), or, more poignantly, the Ozarks Medieval Fortress, whose building site has gone dormant for “financial reasons.” But Glencairn and Hammond remain. I loved the warmth and laughter that rippled through the audience as lush image after lush image of these American medievalist fantasies appeared: statues reset on capitals, heraldry invented, floors brought in from Europe, tiles, glass, stone, linen, jewels – entremets, entremets, entremets, an entire architecture of entremets collected, crumbs from the tables of a Europe not dreaming of the Middle Ages like these reveling Americans. That audience laughter goes deep: I laugh because of the simultaneous absurdity and possibility of such places. They’re “fake” and “artificial” and “wrong,” replete with artifice and pretension and maybe even naïveté. But they work. They do work. Precisely because they are entremets, delightful things dis-rupted from their origins, they can be savored, their materiality more present because it can never again be lost in a big picture, because it now stands reframed as its own picture – absurd, disassociated, but as such, treasured and available for whatever association you bring to it.

Bal des Ardents, Bibliothèque Nationale, ms. fr. 2646, fol 176

Brendan Sullivan set up a great problem of time and perception that will be perpetuated here. “Dress You Up in My Angst: Clothing in Medieval Depiction of the Past and the Problem of Historical Distance” is obsessed with a shoe, a green shoe to be precise, whose toe peeks out ever so slightly (but just enough!) from a dress amidst all the chaos and horror of Charles VI’s Wild Men performance going up in flames. Brendan saw it when he saw the manuscript “live,” when he was in its presence, when it pulled him where he hardly expected to go. What are we trying to do when we look carefully (when we study) medieval images? I’m not talking about the interpretation and the writing and the conferences and the publications. I’m not talking about the knowledge that we produce as a result of looking. I’m talking (provoked by Brendan’s eloquent insistence) about our experience of looking. Somewhere in that prolonged, hunched shoulder gaze is an attempt to see as was seen: to see as medieval viewers saw – not exactly, but at least to be looking at the “right” thing. A green shoe in the midst of the king’s demise is exuberantly not the right thing. It doesn’t lead to any new attributions or interpretations or conclusions. But it does create an in-sight, a realization of distractions and their presence and their pull in any viewing experience. What if we opened up our viewing experience to more than looking for the “right” way of seeing? How much more would we see of the hesitation, rebellion, delight, anxiety, objecthood, and materiality of our works of art. Try it: let yourself be distracted by the detail that doesn’t fit the mood, message, or moral of the bigger piece. Turn Morelli on his head and let the details lead you further into the mystery of the work.

Materially collected!

First and foremost, reread Skinny Legs and All by Tom Robbins. Re-member Painted Stick and Conch Shell and Spoon and Dirty Sock and (oh yea) Can o’ Beans (poor man’s entremets). And re-consider with Ben Tilghman “The Still Lives of Medieval Objects.” Our fast and flurried motions around our works of art, all that fervor in gesture and hope and liturgy and praise – all of that eventually goes, and the object is left still, in its non-human time. If you look at, behold, an object for any amount of time, you will be unnerved by its stillness. If it’s figurative, this might happen all the more quickly in your desire to connect with those still eyes, will those still lips to part, yearn to see that still arm reach for you. We dismiss this as the stuff of nonsense today, tracing and retracing the line between animate and inanimate, but visions and miracles gave free reign that the desire to shimmer stillness. Ben makes a beautiful point of the sanctity of stillness: of incorruptibility of holiness as the ability to slow oneself to superhuman stasis. The saints are still. They approximate objects (and art helps them do so after they are gone). The audience seized up this idea of still objects and there were questions about how objects inhabit and thwart their own stillness, there was marveling about how objects make us move them around (how our desire for objects (calling Mildred!) exert our efforts of money and distance and labor in their favor) – how we might be vehicles, vectors (as we are for viruses) of movements for objects. The discussion made me think of how works of art carry their stillness with them. Their materiality collects about them and holds on; and we come forward, with gladness and anticipation, slowing down our human time to enter object time for that little bit of time that we crave and crave again.

Blunder (A Roundtable)

Marian Bleeke slicing and splicing

If you’re still with me, let’s blunder to the end together. The BABEL Working group called out for Blunder and the Material Collective responded in two pairs. This is the entremets that veered: didn’t go as planned, took off somewhere, lost control, was moved by God Knows What – in short, blundered. These, like the previous conversations, were conversations that had not had their say at Kalamazoo. Mary Kate Hurley proposed blundering as a way of moving through Beowulf, as a way that Beowulf moves “Blundering at the End in Beowulf;” M. W. Bychowski took up fruit and considered the “Fruit of Failure;” Maggie Williams and Nancy Thompson engaged in “Speculations,” performing a pastiche letter of rejection made up of lines pulled from letters received by the Material Collective in members’ publication attempts; David Hadbawnik encouraged “Scribal Blunders, Poetic Wonders: Reports from a Modern-Day Scribe” and seeks contemporary willing folk to engage in writing manu-scripts; Marian Bleeke and I sought to look the blunder of writing in the eye (ha!) in “Slices and Splices” and cut up conference papers submitted after a call on Facebook and let the phrases drive the poetry that emerged from the splicing; and Asa Mittman and Shyama Rajendran extolled the virtues (and the vulnerability and the pathos and the good will and the humor) of the academic “Failblog/Fumblr.” Each of these endeavors invited its own wayward path, and the audience followed in great trust, and with much laughter. It made me realize that blundering is not faltering – that there is a resoluteness in the blunder that we all came to admire by the end of the session. Once the waywardness has begun, go for it – maybe the path will shift for you, maybe the path wasn’t so great to begin with. “Speculations” hit a nerve with the audience. The first question launched right into a gladness and a thank you for acknowledging the unnecessary peevishness of many a rejection letter. You will see some of these lines (denouncing “imagination” as an unsound source; referring an author to her own dissertation; citing the reviewer’s state of being unconvinced as all that was needed for dismissal) in a Fumblr post soon. For now, for then, for that audience, there was a palpable relief at enunciating the lancing words that leave us all feeling like we’ve blundered, and might continue blundering for who knows how long. How to subvert this particular power play? How to make writing and publishing more humane? More of a relationship than a judgment? More of a conversation than a sentence? We wouldn’t (we shouldn’t!) dare grade that way – why are the imperious tones and impatient dismissals allowed? Strategies of resistance emerged: identifying yourself as a reviewer, editing (if you’re an editor) your reviewers or asking for their greater consideration, singing the praises of a review that helps, and making yet more fun of those that don’t. A worry that greater generosity would lessen critical thinking turned the conversation to a passionate argument for the possibilities of generosity as critical thinking, pushing the reviewer to think through the perceived problems, open up solutions, suggest new avenues. What about that? What about blundering through together? What about giving up a self-congratulatory authority in favor of a shared desire to know, experience, cherish, and sustain the texts and objects and images and ideas that we have devoted our lives to? Generosity and gladness are critical modes: they acknowledge the need for alliances in the futures we want so much for medieval studies; they call for stillness and heightened perception; they build the spaces and platforms and interpretations for the entremets that make the party come alive.

The post Entremets/Entre Nous: Kalamazoo 2013 appeared first on Material Collective.

Time and the Medieval Object (Saturday 1:30pm)

This session will consider the complex relationship between art objects and time in the Middle Ages and beyond.  It proceeds from the notion that medieval things refuse to remain fixed in single temporal moments.  Instead, they reach back into the past and also anticipate their future lives through a variety of strategies, both materialist and idealist.

Medieval objects are regularly marked by a temporal instability. Ancient and foreign spolia were integrated into fine golden church furnishings and reliquaries. Composite objects made connections across time through stylistic affiliations and iconographic citations, and they were regularly altered through the addition of new components and the removal of old. They were also subject to wear and tear through ongoing use and occasional repurposing. Gifting and other changes of setting created complex genealogies mapped out over time.  Medieval objects continued to exist beyond the Middle Ages, and their impact on subsequent moments in time could also be a focus for proposed papers. Speakers will draw on theoretical developments in areas such as object-oriented philosophy, thing theory, and other realms of thought.

Organizers: Gerry Guest, John Carroll University, and Maggie M. Williams, William Paterson University
Presider: Karen Overbey, Tufts University

• Beth Williamson, University of Bristol, “Ductus and Duration: Physical and Sensory Engagement with Medieval Objects”
• Jennifer Borland, Oklahoma State University, and Martha Easton, Seton Hall University, “Integrated Pasts: Glencairn Museum and Hammond Castle”
• Brendan Sullivan, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, “Dress You Up in My Angst: Clothing in Medieval Depictions of the Past and the Problem of Historical Distance”
• Benjamin C. Tilghman, Lawrence University, “The Still Lives of Medieval Objects”

Respondent: Asa Simon Mittman, California State University–Chico

The Material Collective will also be well represented in other sessions, particularly the following;

The Future We Want: A Collaboration (A Roundtable)

Session 367 Fetzer 1005
Sponsor:  Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute (MEMSI), George Washington University
Organizer and Presider:  Jeffrey J. Cohen, Georgetown University

• Field Change/Discipline Change. Karen Overbey, Tufts University/Material Collective, and Anne F. Harris, DePauw University/Material Collective
• Institutional Change/Paradigm Change. L. O. Aranye Fradenburg, University of California–Santa Barbara, and Eileen A. Joy, BABEL Working Group
• Time Change/Mode Change. Will Stockton, Clemson University, and Allan Mitchell, University of Victoria
• World Change/Sea Change. Lowell Duckert, West Virginia University, and Steve Mentz, St. John’s University, New York
• Voice Change/Language Change. Chris Piuma, University of Toronto, and Jonathan Hsy, George Washington University
• Collective Change/Mood Change. Julie Orlemanski, Boston College, and Julian Yates, University of Delaware

Blunder (A Roundtable)

Session 515 Bernhard 158
Sponsor: BABEL Working Group
Organizer: Eileen A. Joy, BABEL Working Group
Presider: Valerie Vogrin, Peanut Books

• Blundering at the End in Beowulf. Mary Kate Hurley, Yale University
• The Fruit of Failure. M. W. Bychowski, George Washington University
• Speculations. Nancy M. Thompson, St. Olaf College, and Maggie Williams, William Paterson University
• Scribal Blunders, Poetic Wonders: Reports from a Modern-Day Scribe. David Hadbawnik, University at Buffalo
• Slices and Splices. Marian Bleeke, Cleveland State University, and Anne F. Harris, DePauw University
• Failblog/Fumblr. Asa Simon Mittman, California State University–Chico, and Shyama Rajendran, George Washington University

MCers are, of course, represented all up and down the KZoo program!  Sessions 98, 282, 315, 340, 548, 577, and on!  We will see you everywhere.

The post Material Collective at Kalamazoo 2013 appeared first on Material Collective.

Although I find all of the food images in this manuscript to be extremely charming, there is something about this depiction of fromages that continues to delight and intrigue me, insisting that I spend more time thinking about it—only to find more questions than answers.

Régime du corps, British Library Sloane MS 2435, fol. 69r, late thirteenth century

The image is almost minimalist in its simplicity. The capital “F”, only around two by two inches in size, is illustrated with fourteen rounds of cheese, depicted as simple white circles fanned out in three rows between the two crossbars of the letter. Especially to my twenty-first century eyes, this little painting brings to mind the abstract works of artists like Kazimir Malevich or Sol Lewitt.

Kazimir Malevich, Black Circle

Many late medieval pictures in an equivalent framework—tiny scenes within the confines of initial letters on the pages of manuscripts—are often based on relatively formulaic constructions. For instance, a model image of a man on a horse could be used as the foundation for a biblical scene or for a knight in a romance. But were there pattern books for images of food? And if not, did the cheese’s painter create this image “from scratch”? I find myself wanting to attribute to this image’s designer certain aesthetic sensibilities that would have valued the perfect simplicity of these cheeses, as anachronistic and unfounded as that probably is.

And what, exactly, was the artist trying to communicate through this image? How would a medieval reader-viewer have approached or understood such a scene? I suppose it is true that multiple rounds of cheese conjure the food better than one circle would; that said, fourteen seems a bit excessive. Certainly when cheese is made, many rounds are created from one batch—perhaps this “scene” is also meant bring to mind many rounds stacked on shelves. As an object that may have been seen most often in multiples, perhaps the number was less significant here than the suggestion of abundance.

This miniature painting also leads me to other questions. What, ultimately, is the goal of any artist who creates images of food? Would this image have made the reader not only think happily “fromages!” but also feel hungry? Indeed, other paintings of cheese seem to do just that. In his “cheese portraits” Mike Geno manages to capture particularly well the textures of his subjects, bringing to mind the still life tradition that reaches back from Wayne Thiebaud to the magnificent seventeenth-century Dutch paintings of artists like Floris van Schooten.

It does seem that cheese art had different functions or associations over time: memento mori, symbol of twentieth-century consumerism and luxury, post modern commentary on abstract painting, and ultimate foodie extravagance (in the words of my colleague Louise Siddons, “perhaps the only way that health-obsessed citizens of the twentieth-first-century can “consume” cheese?”).

Despite what would seem at first to be a celebratory image, the chapter text that accompanies the historiated initial from the Régime manuscript actually speaks about cheese as being rather unhealthy: “cheese is generally completely bad because it swells the belly, making it heavy and inflated,” and “people who have used it for a long time…have pains in their side, a bad head, dullness of wit, kidney and bladder stones.”

Although if the reader must consume it, fresh cheese is more nourishing, while older cheese is best for therapeutic uses, such as comforting the stomach. Furthermore, at various historical moments, it seems cheese was actually seen as a lower-class food, associated with peasants and laborers. Whether or not this was an association prevalent when this manuscript was made in the late thirteenth century, it does seem surprising that a food not seen as particularly beneficial to one’s health would receive the special recognition offered by the historiated initial. Embellished with gold and expensive blue paint, this precious little painting of cheese reminds us of the marvelous ambiguities of such images, as well as both the pleasures and the dangers of this rich yet humble, sometimes stinky and sometimes sweet, deliciously complex food.

Janet Williams, haut-de-page detail of gold-leaf cheese, Aesop’s The Fox and The Crow, hand-made manuscript, assignment for Late Medieval Art, Oklahoma State University, Spring 2013

The post Feeling Cheesy appeared first on Material Collective.

The “Tilghman Hours.” Photo by Colette Lunday Brautigam.

This is not a particularly fancy book. That’s not to shrug it off–I mean, it’s a bona fide medieval manuscript and the grad-student me who discovered it was over the moon with excitement–but by the standards of late medieval Books of Hours, this is a pretty modest thing. There are no miniatures, the foliate ornament is limited to just five pages and looks fairly tossed off, and the pigments aren’t of the highest quality. Even the fact that it’s small is a sign of its modesty, since it didn’t require as much parchment to make.

Despite those shortcomings (in many ways, because of them), it’s great for teaching, and when I moved out to Wisconsin this past fall to teach at Lawrence University, my father and his brothers generously allowed me to bring the book with me. This past term, each of the students in my manuscripts seminar came by my office to spend a little time with it, getting a feel for the parchment, familiarizing themselves with the script, and just generally developing a sense of how manuscripts are like, and very much not like, the other books in our lives. They were trepidatious at first, but that unease seemed to sharpen their sense of how the physical experience of a book–opening it, holding it, handling it–is crucial to how we read and look at it.

Beaupré Antiphonary, showing damage in the margins (note the feet of an erased creature at top). Walters Art Museum, W.760, f.173r. © 2011 Walters Art Museum, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

The students were particularly interested in the evident damage the book has endured: the first and last leaves clearly got damp at some point, and there are crude repairs where the ink ate through the parchment. They loved that readers darkened several corners with the grime of their thumbs, and had rubbed down the gilding on several pages to its underlying size. We also discussed how the folios were trimmed down and their edges gilded when an antiquarian rebound the book for sale sometime in the 19^th century (judging from the handwriting on a flyleaf). This sense of the book as a site of physical encounter came to the fore the day we discussed excellent essays by Kate Rudy, Beatrice Radden Keefe, and Jennifer Borland on erasures, revisions, and damage to medieval manuscripts.[1] We talked about charters and other documents enshrined on the pages of early gospel books, and the possibility that the erased marginalia in the Beaupré Antiphonary were victims of John Ruskin’s penknife. At one point in the discussion, a student asked me, “Have you ever been tempted to do something to your grandfather’s manuscript?”

Well… no.

It suddenly occurred to me that the book bears no traces of its years in my grandfather’s care, and I have been very careful so far not to leave any of my own. After all, I’m a historian entrusted with the care and maintenance of our cultural heritage: of course I’m not going to write in it, or mark it up, or erase anything.

But really, why shouldn’t I? The marks of readers, the traces of the past lives of artworks are some of my favorite things about works of art. I love imagining all the people who have come into contact with a work of art, who have touched it and been touched back by it.

The more I think about it, the more I think I should do something to this book. In my classes and my scholarship, I try to make the case that every work of art, no matter how old, is a work of contemporary art, and that we rob ourselves of great pleasure and insight when we insist on sealing artworks into the moment they were made. Shouldn’t I practice what I preach? Shouldn’t I somehow mark this new chapter in the life of this book?

The “Tilghman Hours” under duress. Photo by Colette Lunday Brautigam.

So, friends, I ask you: should I? Should I, as Billy Collins puts it, “catch a ride into the future / on a vessel more lasting than myself?” If so, any thoughts on what I should do? Pencil in my name? Add an ode to my cat in the margin? Perhaps update the decoration a bit, or scrape off some errant flecks of paint? I’m open to suggestions.

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But the question of how collections and collectives function with regard to the visual arts is obviously a much more complex one, and I’ve only begun to fathom what I want to say about the subject. I’m going to try to formulate some initial thoughts here, by sharing my experience of the incredible 2010 documentary Wasteland (http://www.wastelandmovie.com/index.html and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNlwh8vT2NU). I hope that you’ll pass it on, re-blog it, talk about it in your classes and with your friends, because, truly, it’s worth sharing.

The movie is about Brazilian artist Vik Muniz’s work with the catadores, the “pickers” who once lived and worked in the world’s largest garbage dump outside of Rio de Janeiro. Jardim Gramacho was an open-air landfill built in the 1970s. It was closed in 2012 because of environmental concerns about the contamination of Guanabara Bay, and it is slated to be replaced by a methane recapture plant. Sounds great, right? We’re cleaning up the environment—not to mention the city that will host the Olympics in 2016. But there’s a catch. What about the catadores?

For generations now, they have been picking through the trash at Jardim Gramacho, sorting out recyclables to make their living. (Those of us who live in urban environments, are familiar with the phenomenon on a much smaller scale—at least in Brooklyn, it’s very common to see someone with a shopping cart, working his or her way up and down the block to pick out recyclables, which they turn in for cash). It’s not a glamorous lifestyle, by any means, but it has kept the catadores from starving and offered them the dignity of doing genuinely good work. During the 70s, 80s, and even the 90s, when much of the world was only just beginning to institute real recycling programs, they served an essential social and environmental purpose. They recycled out of necessity when most of the rest of us were too self-involved to do it for ourselves.

And they took pride in their work. They formed a union (often referred to in the media as a “collective” or a “cooperative”), the ACAMJG (Associação dos Catadores do Aterro Metropolitando de Jardim Gamacho, or Association of Recycling Pickers of Jardim Gamacho), which became part of a national movement. That national movement then spawned a global alliance, which you can read more about here. Presumably, such national and international action wouldn’t have been possible without the exposure the catadores received through the Academy-Award-nominated movie, and new media outlets like the Internet. After the closure of Jardim Gamacho, the pickers were supposed to receive lump sum payments and the opportunity for job placement, but registration problems and long lines caused many of them to give up.

Ok, ok, you’re thinking. That’s all pretty interesting, but what about the art?

Although he began his career as a sculptor in the late 1980s, Vik Muniz found his groove in works that use surprising materials to render images that are often familiar. He has riffed on many art historical icons, such as Da Vinci’s Last Supper in chocolate syrup:

Or the Mona Lisa in PB & J:

His glorious portraits of the catadores look like this:

What you’re looking at is a photographic reproduction of a collection of things, a collector of things, and a collector of people, all in one incredible recreation of Jacques-Louis David’s famous painting, The Death of Marat (1793).

Muniz’s photo is an image of Tiaõ (Sebastiao Carlos Dos Santos), the young catadore who served as the energetic president of the ACAMJG at the time the film was made. Tiaõ has worked as a picker since he was 11 years old, and he was inspired to organize his co-workers when he read political texts that he found in the landfill. After years of collecting recyclable things, Tiaõ shifted his focus and began to bring people together, forming the union that changed the way many of the catadores felt about themselves and their vocation.

Muniz took his picture, posing him to resemble the murdered French revolutionary, and granting the young man the dignity he deserves. Here’s the before and after:

But the final image that you see at the right is not simply a picture of Tiaõ slumped over the edge of a bathtub. Muniz has recreated his contours with fragments of dust and other matter, sketching the human form out of rocks and bits of debris taken from the trash heap itself. In fact, all of the color and texture that surrounds the main figure is a collection of garbage, which Muniz arranged on the floor of a vast warehouse—around his “drawing” of Tiaõ—and then re-photographed to create the final work. By gathering all these things together, Muniz captures both the young organizer’s radical spirit and his tragic circumstances. The image’s link with David’s famous painting asks viewers to take Tiaõ seriously as a political figure, and the ensemble is definitely more than a sum of its parts.

What interests me the most about these photographs is the transformations that are made possible when things come together. By itself, each object in the image is a discarded, used-up piece of rubbish. By himself, Tiaõ is just another nameless, faceless, member of the Brazilian working poor. But when they come together—the materials that Tiaõ collects and the people that he gathers around him—something magical happens. In that moment of encounter, there’s a comingling of atoms, voices, vibrations and scents. Invisible transactions occur, and matter—both living and inert—is forever altered.

In many ways, the process of Muniz’s work is nearly as important as the final results. Here’s a shot of one of his catadore portraits in progress:

That’s Magna (Magna de França Santos), whose photo depicts her as a strong, proud, and hopeful figure. Magna came to be a catadore after her husband lost his job and she made a choice not to work as a prostitute. Here’s her before and after:

In the original photograph, her radiant face is surrounded by plain cloth; in Muniz’s collage, that drapery comes alive with the objects from her collection. Her humanity is so much more palpable in the midst of all that other stuff.

For me, Vik Muniz offers a model of what the Material Collective should strive to be. He transforms the stuff of life—even the dirty, messy, seemingly banal substances—into beautiful and moving things. Those things have real impact. They can affect honest and measurable change in the world. They have inspired many of the catadores to look beyond their circumstances, and I hope that they have also aroused distant viewers—like us—to look beyond our surroundings and work towards a universe that we would be proud to inhabit.

More than anything else, I feel a kinship with Muniz. His expression of the pickers’ pride, intelligence, strength, and beauty makes me feel guilt, powerlessness, and inspiration all at once. And, truthfully, isn’t that the perfect combination? Just enough guilt to make you feel ashamed of the accident of your birth, the cost of your education, and the overall cushiness of your life. Precisely the right amount of powerlessness: you have no hope of ever affecting real change for these particular people (especially at your age!), but still you want to rail against that ineffectuality and make some kind of difference in your own arena. And, just a dash of hope, enough to urge you on, force you up off the couch to DO SOMETHING.

So I’m writing this to ask you to pass it on, blog about it, bring it up in your classes. If Muniz’s photos can magically transform the basest of matter into the loftiest of ideas, maybe our work can also manifest some real change in the world. Maybe, if we work at it, we can bring things and people together in inspirational new ways.

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Yayoi Kusama, Pumpkin

Last May, I visited Naoshima, a small island in the Seto inland sea in Japan. The island has a population of 3,600 or so, in an area a little over 8 square kilometers. Many of the residents are laborers in the Mitsubishi Materials Smelter and Refinery, a large industrial complex spanning the northern part of the island. To the south, there are three small villages, including Tsumuura, a long-time fishing port,and Honmura, a castle town founded in the 16th century.

But I didn’t go for the castle. Since the late 1980s, Naoshima has been developed as Japan’s “art island”—it is home to three museums, dozens of site-specific installations, and an ongoing collaborative project between artists and the Honmura civic council to transform abandoned buildings in the village. I went to Naoshima to be immersed in art. I stayed there, with my husband and three dear friends, for two nights and most of three days—though time there is difficult to judge, and in my memory it is simply one extended exhale.

Our rooms were in the Benesse House Museum part hotel, part gallery. The museum’s collection is remarkable:  Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly, Donald Judd, Yayoi Kusama, Gerhard Richter, Shinro Ohtake, Richard Long, Nam June Paik, Yukinori Yanagi, Gilbert & George,  Hiroshi Sugimoto. Each guest room was a private gallery, too: we slept beneath Josef Albers’ White Line Square; a Sol Le Witt hung in our friends’ room. In the evening, after the museum closed to visitors, we padded down the hall in Benesse-issued sleeping shirts and slippers to watch Bruce Nauman’s 100 Live and Die  flash “Sing and Live,” “Kiss and Die,” “Play and Die,” “Fail and Live,” and on and on in neon poetry for an hour or so before bedtime.

This private access was thrilling, but I’m not writing this to show you my vacation slides. I want to tell you about falling in love with light and paint and glass. I want to share some moments of abandon. I can’t think of another way to say it: on Naoshima, we were in the art. Each museum, each installation, is meticulously arranged and carefully sited to put artwork, beholder, light, and environment not only in conversation, not only in proximity, but in an overwhelmingly sensuous intimacy.

Intimacy, proximity, conversation—that is the very stuff of Cai Guo-Qiang’s Cultural Melting Bath, an outdoor installation of Taihu rocks, hot tub, and herb-infused bath water. Since 1997, Cai has exhibited several Cultural Melting Baths (subtitled “Projects for the 20th Century”) in China, Europe, and the US; Naoshima’s is a permanent exhibition, arranged in a clearing between museum-hotel and beach.

We’d made an advance appointment to visit the installation, and we picked our way down the hot, rocky path. There were three of us, together, and two others, strangers: one from Beiruit and one from London. I couldn’t help thinking, art historically, that we were part of one of those macrocosmic Chinese landscape paintings, and at the same time set into a fantastically oversized garden of gōngshí, or Scholar’s Rocks. The 36 stones of the Cultural Melting Bath come from Donting Mountain near Lake Tai, Jiangsu—and because of the action of surging water on limestone, the rocks, over time, become open, porous. They change their form, slowly, through interaction. It is a dynamic, transformational process, unfolding. We had booked an hour at the Bath, though we stayed nearly two, the initial awkwardness of sharing the tub, and bathing suits, and languages, with strangers dissolving in heat and water.

The most intense emotional experience on the island came for me in the Chichu Art Museum—a fantastically stark concrete bunker by the architect Tadao Ando.

Each of the four spaces of the Museum is custom built to harmonize with a specific artwork; in that particular room, five huge paintings from Monet’s Water Lilies series float on white walls, over a white floor. (We trade our shoes for slippers at the entrance, and can only enter a few at a time.)

The point here is natural light, diffused from a shaded skylight. And here is where art historical writing fails me, and I long for a better training in ekphrasis. I walked into that room, and I burst into tears. Silent, streaming tears, and a feeling of both physical and metaphysical lightness I’ve only had in dreams, or deep underwater. My reaction startled me. I’d seen Water Lilies dozens of times; shit, I don’t even like Impressionism. But then, there: I did. I loved it. Because the light, the walls, the space, the scale—they made the paintings glow. The Water Lilies became three-dimensional. Not in a “painterly” way, not in an “I can see the brushstrokes” way. In an Op-Art, cross-your-eyes, Avatar-in-IMAX way. The canvasses were on each wall. And I was in the middle of a garden of water lilies. In the middle of a garden of water lilies.

I looked over at my husband, at my best friend. We were all crying.

That art can affect us, affect me, so profoundly when we simply look at it shouldn’t surprise me. But it still does.

For this post, I had intended to share some of the artworks that most interested me on Naoshima, works that I found particularly satisfying both visually and intellectually. I had intended to write about Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photograph framed and embedded in the cliff face above the island’s shore, left to elemental transmutation.

I planned to consider how the distance, the impossibility of seeing the work, creates longing for an imaginary object that is ultimately absent and irretrievable; the subjective experience thus reframes the material processes of photography, and plays on both time and exposure.

I intended to compare this to another Sugimoto installation, Appropriate Proportion, across the island in Honmura. Sugimoto restored the main, Edo period building at the the Go’oh Shrine, and added a new viewing pavilion and rock garden.

It remains a shrine, a devotional site in which the materials themselves seem to be the objects of veneration. The crystal steps leading up to the Main Sanctuary are made of optical glass, like that used in camera lenses.

And so I intended to write that this makes us aware not only of Sugimoto’s role as photographer, but of the slipperiness of vision, and perhaps even of the play of illusion, transparency, and transcendence in religious “seeing” itself. If Cai Guo Xiang’s works on Naoshima are about touch, community, and interaction, then Sugimoto’s seem to be about vision, distance, and desire.

I had intended to write about the artworks of Naoshima in this way, sharing my impressions, interpretations, discernments. And in doing so, my goal was to practice closing that gap between ‘writing about materiality’ and ‘writing about history’ — a gap held open, as James Elkins has noted, by habits of art historical writing and thinking. I still want to practice that, write that. And I will. But here, I realize I can do something that other publishing formats won’t quite allow. I can show you. I can show you what affected me, what made my heart gasp and my breath beat on Naoshima: the small places where one material rubbed up against another. Where light or concrete or grass or glass or wood or water turned me toward its partner and whispered: look.

Naoshima quickened my sensitivity to materials, to surfaces. Since Naoshima, I fall even more easily in love with nearly every concrete, water, stone, and wood that I come into contact with. (I think about surfaces that way: coming into contact; a process, a movement toward, an attraction.) This must be “adhesive love,” that phrase of Whitman’s glossed so poignantly by Jane Bennett at last September’s BABEL meeting as the tenderness of feet for concrete, the sudden, compassionate affection for bumped-up-against strangers on the subway. And so I want to show you the objects of my affection, the beautiful, adhesive surfaces of Naoshima. I’m doing this with the help of Krystl Hall, my friend who cried with me in the Water Lilies, my friend who sweated with me in the Melting Bath, my friend who took me to Naoshima (where she’d been before) so she could stand next to me, lean against me, and whisper: look. Many of these photos are hers; a few are mine. Here I attend with respect to Benesse’s request not to photograph inside the museums. But that’s no limitation, really: there was concrete, wood, water, stone, and glass everywhere.

Look.

The post On Being in Love with Concrete, Wood, Water, Stone, Glass appeared first on Material Collective.

My mom at her desk. The dresser in the background is now my son’s.

I recently read the novel Mink River by Brian Doyle. Well, I almost read it, meaning I just couldn’t finish it. It is a beautiful book, and its beauty made it too hard for me to read. I sat in on some discussions of the book with students participating in the Oregon Extension program, and the professor leading the discussion, together with her students, noted the power of things in the book. When the old nun character dies, her spirit rises up above her body and takes note of all the things in her kitchen: “the toaster shining, the refrigerator magnets shining, her coffee cup shining, the painting of Moses shining, her to-do list with fix fan! on it shining, and she could hear for miles and miles, every sound crackling and distinct…” The nun’s spirit wasn’t connected to her body, but her soul wasn’t disconnected from the everyday things in her life.

I used to feel bad about my attachment to things. My mom was really attached to her things, so much so that if she gave any one of her kids something that was hers, she needed regular updates on the status of the thing and its place in our home or life. She shed tears when my brother and sister-in-law sold an old family grand piano to buy an upright that fit better in their living room. I look at her beautiful coffee table, which now sits in our living room, patterned with small indentations made by my son’s cars, and I cringe at the thought of what she would say if she saw it.

For a long time I dismissed my mother’s attachment to things, things that her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother owned, as materialistic and almost fetishistic. What do these things matter? They are just wood and gold, porcelain and paint, and of little importance. Things weigh you down, both physically and spiritually. This disdain for the material world creates a tension in a person who had dedicated her career to the study of old stuff.

One character in Mink River is simply known as the man who has (insert number) days to live. On the day when he is the man with six days to live, he tells Daniel, a boy recovering from a bike accident, about the things that matter to him. When I finished this passage, I had to put the book down to stop myself from sobbing. On the man’s list are, among other things: The way that frozen dew outlines every blade of grass; Fresh bread with too much butter; Toys; Tiny wrenches and screwdrivers; Trains; Folding laundry hot from the dryer; Book marginalia written with the lightest possible pencil as if the reader is whispering to the writer; First-basemen’s mitts; The way my children smelled after their baths when they were little; Weeds forcing their way through sidewalks. And more. This list moved me because it is so much about how things feel, smell and taste. These are the things and experiences that make us alive, and they are the things that the man with six days to live will miss.

I thought of making my own list of things that matter to me. My mother’s china; My son’s blankie; Coffee; The habit my college boyfriend had of going for weeks without showering; Chocolate cake; My husband’s dark blue sweater; My wedding ring; My books (all of them); The 150-year old oak tree in our backyard; My son’s dirty hair; The silver forks, knives and spoons in the drawer in the dining room. What are these things? Some of them are sensual while others are material. But mostly, they are things that are tied to people and experiences.

Since her death, I’ve come to understand the importance my mother put on things. She certainly was interested in the monetary value of her family heirlooms (although she would have never sold them because that, in her mind, would have been tacky). But I think she also loved the way that all the stuff in her house connected her to people from her past. From lamps and framed prints came great stories about her mother’s friend Marvel Curry and my great Auntie Chris, both of whom I never met. And from her nursery furniture arose stories of scarlet fever; the bedside table and chest of drawers, now in my son’s room, were some of the only things spared from the cleansing fire that claimed all of her books and toys after she recovered.

The characters in Mink River I think about above are connected to earthly things not because of the value of the things themselves. Tiny wrenches and screwdrivers are not usually family heirlooms. But the things that the man with six days to live and the old nun remember and cling to are things that remind them of the day-to-day aspects of their lives and of the sensory experiences they have and had as living beings.

I am coming to a better understanding now of how and why things are important and not trivial parts of my life. My husband and I are always trying to reduce the amount of stuff in our house, and we’ve really stopped buying a lot things. But I am always reluctant to get rid of things passed down to me. My mother’s things affirm her continued presence in my life and have the power to evoke memories and even a sense of her physical presence. I still have her hair brush, and every so often I pick it up and touch it to my face, believing that some of her cells are still on it. Maybe they are, most likely they are not. To me, it doesn’t matter.

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Giovanni Bellini, Doge Leonardo Loredan, 1501-02

The Material Collective is pleased to present this guest post by Karl Whittington.

I’m sure many people (especially art historians) may have had the feeling that a painting has haunted their life, but people tell me that my case may be exceptional. Reproductions of Giovanni Bellini’s Portrait of Doge Leonardo Loredan hang in my office and dining room, in my closet ironed onto the back of a kimono crafted by a friend to wear on Halloween, and have previously appeared in six apartments, three dorm rooms, a childhood bedroom, and on the backgrounds of two cell phones.

I must have seen the painting for the first time when I was about 10, on a trip to London with my family. I don’t remember my first encounter with it, but I bought a postcard that hung in my bedroom and slowly worked its way into my imagination. My real engagement with the painting started my senior year in high school, when I read and was infuriated by an article in The New Yorker about David Hockney’s claims that Bellini and other Renaissance painters used lenses to project and trace their images. I wrote a letter to the editor (thankfully, never published) lambasting the article—I couldn’t accept that my favorite painting was somehow “fake.” Now, of course, I can’t run from that letter fast enough. Now I study, as my job, art’s intersection with science and technology, and am fascinated by how painters used these kinds of tricks. Yet the letter keeps catching up with me; to my dismay, my mother read it aloud during a toast at a celebratory graduation dinner (who knows how she even got her hands on it). It seemed too complicated to try to explain why I disagreed with everything I had written before; I really just wanted to crawl under the table to avoid having to confront the pretentious, outraged tone of my teenage self.

I feel a bit less embarrassed by my response to the painting as I was set to enter college. I wrote about it in my application essay, explaining the ways that I saw myself, aged a few decades, in the painting’s subject—that there was something that I felt he and I shared. Now, having seen so many other people’s response to the painting, I can only assume that this alarmed the admissions officers. To me, he was kind, but to others he was severe, creepy, emaciated, stern. In my love for the painting I thought I’d found the perfect example of my love of art, something that I assumed would bind me to others, but it was quite the opposite—it just revealed another layer of difference, of a response to something that wasn’t quite right. In the years that followed, my friends became affectionately amused by my attachment to the painting, but they never hesitated in conveying their impressions and questions. How can you think he looks like a nice guy? Benevolent? Are you kidding? Why would you want to grow up to be HIM? Is that a man or a woman? Don’t you feel like he’s watching you while you’re eating/working/sleeping (depending on the room where it was currently hung)? My partner accepted the painting with good humor, helping me hang a reproduction in our first apartment, giving me the time to explain all the meanings it had for me, nodding knowingly to each.

After so many years of looking at it, I am finally starting to see what all these people meant—there is a sense of the uncanny in the figure’s expression. Now that I think about it, he might actually be a ghost, haunting the streets of Venice every time I visit, ensuring that things are never quite right. The time when I was five and went to Venice with my parents and a cast on my broken arm, and then returned home to have the doctor saw off the cast and find a piece of corn inside from feeding the pigeons in San Marco Square. Was he there twenty years later when, in the middle of the afternoon and miles from my hotel, I fell into one of the canals (joining an illustrious list that includes Katharine Hepburn, George Eliot’s husband, and, in the fourteenth century, a relic of the true cross)? A couple years later when shouting teenagers set up shop in the Campo San Tomà outside my hotel windows for an entire week, keeping me from any sleep?

I still look at the painting dozens of times every day—I can see it from the chair at my office desk and my place at the dining room table at home. In some ways I think I’m finally starting to figure it out. Before, I always thought it was about the person—the Doge Leonardo Loredan—and some connection I felt with him across time (despite knowing little about him). That he was my kindred spirit. But he has faded into the background. What I see now, and what I have perhaps always loved but not been able to express, are miracles of paint on a surface. How the blue of the background shifts a single tonal increment, impossibly slowly, from bottom to top. How the shine of the silk is both rough and smooth, catching light and producing it. The drawn lips and lined face contrasting with the bright, youthful eyes. The perfect simplicity of the pose and composition. The way that, in the absence of arms or hands, the head seems almost disembodied, perched atop a cloth-covered pedestal. I think I love it because it has always seemed to me to be a perfect painting—one that couldn’t exist in any other way than the way it is, a house of cards whose glory would crash down if a single detail was changed. If the string of nuts on his jacket were simply buttons, I think I might be able to look away. Or if the two single threads didn’t fall down from the cap, breaking the simple outline of the figure against background. In the painting I’ve embraced on some visceral level some quality of perfection and genius that I otherwise reject as a myth.

Now this is starting to feel like a college application essay—another case all over again where I try to reveal myself through examination of something else (though of course it looks nothing like the essay I wrote on the painting when I was an applicant at 17). I didn’t intend it to be that—I’m just trying to understand why I can’t escape the painting. How could I have been under its spell for so many years? It returns me again to the knowledge that there are works of art that I want to look at and live with, and works of art that I want to study, and that they are often not the same. In my years of work, I’ve never wanted to read (and never have) a single scholarly article on Bellini’s painting. Though now I know that Hockney was right about the Renaissance use of optics and mirrors to create near-photographic effects in such paintings, I don’t want to think about it here. All I want to do is look at the painting—not think about it. I wonder if other art historians have secret obsessions like this, and, if so, what they are—these paintings or objects that we wall off from our scholarly minds and preserve in some other realm.

Karl Whittington is Assistant Professor of Medieval Art History at The Ohio State University.  His research explores issues such as art and science, medieval image theory, and gender and sexuality.

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Entrance to the Getty’s Florence Exhibition

I recently had the enjoyable opportunity to see two rather visceral exhibitions, back to flayed back.  First, Caravaggio and His Legacy at LACMA and then Florence at the Dawn of the Renaissance at the Getty (both through February 10).  Both shows — different in most respects — showcase depictions of violence, especially in the context of martyrdom, and in so doing highlight the chasm between the early Renaissance and the full-blown Baroque.  The LACMA show is full of stunning works, though nothing surprises.  The Getty show, curated by Christine Sciacca (with whom I had the pleasure of walking through it), is by far the subtler and more significant, as it pushes back against just such categorical, periodizing assumptions and rhetoric.

In room after room, painted in rich, dark colors drawn from the works themselves, Florence surprises.  The show’s title is a lure to bring in visitors, since the real focus is the relatively unknown and certainly understudied Pacino di Bonaguida.  Sure, there are more works by Giotto than have ever been shown in a North American exhibition, but they are routinely outshone by his contemporary, Pacino.  Were his name a household one, as Caravaggio’s is, the show might well have been titled Pacino di Bonaguida and His Legacy.

The real subversion of the show, though, is not of the Giotto/Pacino hierarchy, but of the basic medieval/Renaissance divide.  While the show tells us we are “at the Dawn of the Renaissance,” manuscripts are given at least equal play as the larger panels, altars, crucifixes, glass, and other Renaissance staples.  These are usually relegated to separate shows — at the Getty, for example, “medieval” manuscripts are usually downstairs in the gallery dedicated to their display, and “Renaissance” panels are housed in the galleries of paintings.  Here, the first work we encounter is a remarkable manuscript record of grain sales from Orsanmichele), heavily illuminated and open to the earliest surviving city view of Florence (which plays very nicely against the massive photo of the modern cityscape just outside the show’s entrance).  The manuscript illumination is a nice bit of propaganda touting Florence’s generosity toward the indigent, in comparison to that cheapskate Siena.  We all saw Orsanmichele in Renaissance courses, and I am willing to bet that few of us saw manuscripts along side it.  The manuscripts appeared in our medieval courses, the panels and porticos in our Renaissance courses, and never the twain shall meet.

The show begins with this surprising manuscript, but ends — appropriately — with the real show-stopper.  No, not one of the Giottos, nor Pacino’s stunning Chiarito Tabernacle, with its gold-over-gesso relief of Pentecost.  No, the final work (or works, depending on your perspective) is twenty-four leaves, reassembled through great effort from 16 collections, from the magnificent Laudario of Sant’Agnese (ca. 1340), illuminated by Pacino and the Master of the Dominican Effigies.  I had seen the remarkable image of the martyrdom of St. Lawrence in a smaller manuscripts show at the Getty, depicting the saint being grilled over a gorgeous black and red representation of glowing coals (famously, his Vita claims that he told his torturers “Turn me over.  I’m done on that side.”).  The image, though, that captivated my companions and I was just beside it: a leaf containing the martyrdom of St. Bartholomew.  A medievalist friend and I were in delighted raptures over this illumination for fifteen somewhat giddy minutes.  In two main panels and two marginal roundels, the saint is flayed alive, beheaded, returns to preach and is buried by his followers.  

In the scene of his flaying, he appears youthful and Christ-like.  He towers over his torturers — indeed, he stands as tall as the tower to which he is chained.  Bartholomew leans to the left, as if about to take flight, while three men go about the workman-like task of removing his skin.  Two use knives as if opening seams on his right arm and leg, while the third yanks down on a flap of skin already loosened from his left hand.  I once saw a goat being skinned, and the image seems to reflect closely both the process and the straightforward, serious, calm demeanor of the flayers.  We have no screaming, grimacing, mocking tormentors, as Bosch would perhaps have given us.  The flaying is gruesome enough, but in the second scene, Bartholomew kneels, his body in a position of prayer but his head already chopped off, fallen in a splash of blood and curiously — as in several other martyrdoms from the Laudario — turned back as if to look at the body from which it was severed.  Would that I had known this manuscript when I was writing about severed heads.  The head seems to have instantly become a relic, like the (several) severed head(s) of John the Baptist, its halo becoming a golden platter, as if mimicking the immensely creepy relic at Amiens.  Here, the body of Bartholomew wears what might be mistakes for a white robe, but for the foot we can see still attached — this is his flayed skin, of course, which he wears like a cape, with the arms knotted at his stump of a neck, the skin of the hands dangling down limply, in sharp contrast to his flayed and — we suddenly realized — bloody hands which, though the body is now headless, nonetheless remain raised in an attitude of reverent prayer.

There are other great flaying images, of course — Michelangelo’s image of Bartholomew, apparently containing a self-portrait on the flayed skin, and Gerard David’s The Judgment of Cambyses come readily to mind.  And there are other works that seem to stress skin, less directly (for me, a number of the images in the Tiberius B.v Marvels of the East seem to be about skin, and at some point I’ll write that essay, since I was rather wrong about it the one time I have done so).  

Katie Walter has a new collection on Reading Skin in Medieval Literature and Culture coming out in Palgrave’s great New Middle Ages series.  Peggy McCracken is working on a book tentatively entitled In the Skin and a collection of essays (co-edited with E. Jane Burns) on Stones, Worms, and Skin: Gender and Embodiment in Medieval Europe.  Kat Tracy is tentatively planning a collection of essays on flaying, which will hopefully feature essays on visual images and material culture.  You know you all want to read an essay about the scrap of ‘Viking skin’ nailed to the church door at Hadstock.  Hopefully, someone will take that up.  Skin seems to be having its moment in medieval studies.

This image seems a perfect place to focus such a discussion, since the skin is so very much in evidence, the imagery so striking, and the context — a manuscript, of course, illuminated on vellum – more potent for such a discussion than the same image on a wooden panel or ivory plaque would be.  One hardly needs the Old English book riddle to draw the connection between the flayed skin in the image and the flayed skin on which the image is painted.

One of the curiosities of the exhibition is the striking contrast between the excellent state of preservation of many of the manuscript leaves — despite their origins in violence and their modern dismemberment — and the more worn and faded state of many of the panels.  In two displays, the exhibition highlights the ravages of time on the panels.  In the first of these, two panels by Bernardo Daddi are hung side by side, one worn much more than other.  In the better preserved, the coy glances of St. Ursula’s companions are well preserved, and their boat floats in lovely, translucent waters.  The martyrdom scene, in comparison, is bleached, sapped of life and, I suppose, of death, with the image’s central violence muted by fading of colors, losses to the surface, retouching, and so on.

The side panels of the Chiarito Tabernacle have also suffered badly over time, subjected to light daily, and in some areas painted with unstable pigments like yellow orpiment, which has fallen off the surface, and blue azurite, which has darkened so much as to appear black.  The manuscript leaves, on the other hand, have spent more of their life closed away and thereby protected, and their colors (though in some cases faded) reward us for their long stewardship (at least until the nineteenth century, when some were divided and, in essence, turned into independent panels):  they are far more vibrant and vivid than their contemporaries.  Beside the Tabernacle, though, we are treated to a digital reconstruction, resulting from a Getty partnership with a scientist from the Rochester Institute of Technology, based in part on examinations of the better-preserved pigments in Pacino’s manuscripts.  Turning to the manuscripts allows us to experience the effects of the panels, without reconstruction, especially as one of them — wonderfully and bizarrely — contains an illumination on panel-painting scale, filling nearly the entire folio of a large-format copy of the Carmina Regia, an address from the city of Prato to Robert of Anjou, King of Naples.

All this overlap between manuscripts and panels, panels and glass, glass and manuscripts, all of this potently and implicitly questions the medieval/Renaissance divide, as well as the divide between media.  We should follow the model established by this exhibition in our examinations of art.  We should be more omnivorous, taking into account not only our medium of specialization (why do my discussions of monsters in manuscripts remain generally confined to manuscripts?) but also our periods of specialization.  Go to the show (which will also open in Toronto as Revealing the Early Renaissance: Stories and Secrets in Florentine Art, March 16 – June 16, 2013).  You’ll see just what I mean.

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Hammond Castle, 1926-29, Gloucester, Massachusetts

I have always intended to read Marcel Proust’s tour de force “Remembrance of Things Past.” One of my former professors, who wrote for me for graduate school, even asked me to read it as he would like to mention that I was doing so in his recommendations. I’ve never been quite sure why. I dutifully bought the three-volume set, started it, and decided that reading it was going to be a life-changing experience that I wasn’t mature enough to have yet. So I suppose I was admitted to graduate school under the false pretense that I had completed Proust. Every few years, I would pick up the first volume, become thrilled by the language, and eventually put it down, still convinced that it wasn’t the right time.

I was interested to learn some years ago that the newest English translation of the work was going to be retitled “In Search of Lost Time,” to reflect more accurately the French title. I thought quite a bit about the difference between remembering the past, a relatively passive reflection on what has happened, and the far more poignant implications of seeking time that has disappeared, that is fundamentally irretrievable.

For me, a place called Hammond Castle is my madeleine dipped in tea. It is a medieval-style castle built in the 1920s by the inventor John Hays Hammond, Jr., set high on a cliff overlooking the sea in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Although it was Hammond’s house and scientific laboratory, because it housed his collection of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance art and architectural fragments, he almost immediately opened it as a public museum, even while he continued to live there. My grandparents and father, who summered in Gloucester, visited numerous times, and when I was growing up in the 1960s and 70s, they took me. For a young girl given to romantic flights of fancy, there was no better excursion. With a drawbridge placed between two round towers on one side, flying buttresses on the other, gloomy winding staircases, a cathedral-like great hall with stained glass, an enormous fireplace from a manor house, and an interior courtyard with facades of medieval shops set around a green-tinted pool, the entire structure was a fantasy of the medieval past. It mattered little to me what was real and what was not. Without a doubt, it was the foundation of my subsequent interest in the Middle Ages.

I think Hammond, and other collectors of medieval art in the early twentieth century, were looking for lost time. Revivalist movements of any kind could be described as such, but I think there’s something about medieval revivals that is different, that represents a longing for a historical moment that seems more difficult to recover than most because it appears to be so different than our present. We have a fantasy of the Middle Ages that has been filtered through and shaped by the passage of time, and we think of it as a period steeped in faith, mystery, and legend. As scholars we may scoff at such romantic constructions of the medieval, and instead search for the authentic, and eagerly point out the anachronistic. Most medievalists appear never to have heard of Hammond Castle, and it seems to be dismissed as a kitschy pastiche of the real and the fake.

Perhaps because I’ve turned 50, perhaps because I’m bored with my previous scholarship, I am not writing the book that I had expected to write. Instead, I’m searching for my own lost time, a time of innocence, of possibility, of romance. I’ve returned to Hammond Castle, but this time not as a child, but as an adult, as a medievalist. I’m not sure what I’m trying to find. I’m interested in what made Hammond, a man on the cutting edge of scientific technology, who invented radio control and designed top-secret inventions for the military, want to collect the art of the past and live surrounded by it in a castle. I’m interested in the provenance of the things he collected, and the way his collecting patterns and display affected subsequent museum design (the architect of Hammond Castle went on to design The Cloisters in New York). But as I sit alone in the dining room of the castle, poring over documents that have been unearthed for me by the present director/curator, with a fifteenth-century ceiling over my head, the medieval courtyard behind me, and the sparkling sea dancing just outside the windows, I feel returned to my past in a way that is viscerally satisfying. Local lore has it that the castle is haunted, that the ghosts of Mr. and Mrs. Hammond appear in balcony of the great hall under the reproduction of the stained glass window from Reims, speak French among the books on medieval art in the round library, and clink champagne glasses in the courtyard just outside the portal from Ravello that Hammond found dismantled in a basement in Naples. I hope and fear those ghosts will speak to me and divulge their secrets, tell me about their own pasts which are closer to my own in time but seem almost as culturally remote as the medieval objects they lived with.

Indoor Pool, Hammond Castle, 1926-29, Gloucester, Massachusetts

This past summer I visited the castle with three scholars (including Material Collective original Jennifer Borland, who is working with me on a project thinking about revivalist monuments such as Hammond Castle, and Glencairn, Raymond Pitcairn’s home in Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania). I also brought my father, who had not been back to the castle in years and years.

My father was born the year Hammond Castle was begun; he is now 86 years old and in relatively poor health. He is also losing his memory. He deeply enjoyed going over the castle again with the curator, hearing all the stories that he had heard in his own youth about the shenanigans that went on in the castle among Hammond and his crowd of wealthy friends, including stars of music, stage, and film. After we left, I drove him all around the area, visiting his old ocean haunts; he had a remarkable ability to find hidden driveways and obscure houses he and his parents had rented in long-ago summers, even some he hadn’t seen in over 70 years. And yet, he became confused about some of the most basic details of his life when trying to recount them.

It is unlikely that we will be able to take such a trip again.

And so, I think I am trying both to remember a past, and search for a lost time, for both my father and me. My father and I share many things – a birthday, a love of the seaside, an appreciation of old, historic buildings, and a deep-rooted connection to Hammond Castle, even in its Disneyfied appropriation of the medieval style. In trying to pin down Hammond Castle, to wrestle it into some kind of scholarly order, I am finding that I don’t really care about authenticity, and clearly neither did Hammond. Hammond’s version of the Middle Ages is but one of many constructed tales that we tell about times that we can’t actually remember ourselves, and as my father’s experience has shown, even memories of our own past can become impossible to retrieve. Perhaps I am attempting to recapture a moment when my father was young and vigorous, when I could look at a castle and be swept away by my own imagination of the past and its gentle pressures on later historical moments, Hammond’s and my own, when memories were being formed and had not yet slipped into the crevices of time.

I still haven’t read Proust. Maybe next year.

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