Today, when we (soft, fattened, fiddling Nero’s in miniature that we are) think “satire” we reflexively brace ourselves for the haw-haws. We think of Colbert and the Onion, or if we’re a bit older maybe Weird Al and Doonesbury, or MAD magazine and Dr. Strangelove. If we’re real oldenhiemers, with half a mind left, we might conjure fond memories of The Great Dictator and H.L. Mencken and a childhood of Twain stories and Thomas Nast reprints. In any case, for us, “satire” may as well be a straight-up 1-to-1 synonym for “funny.”

These Russian satires? Not so much.

Granted, I can’t read Cyrillic, and the million little contextual and cultural cues on display are obviously totally beyond me; I’m literally just looking at pictures. But one gets the sense looking over these underground turn-of the-century publications that the “satire” was here accompanied by an entirely different sort of wink. The closest equivalent I can think of, which might resonate for those living in a free and democratic society, would be the evocation of “satire” as a defense in an ugly slander lawsuit… if slander were punishable by death. Not much “comedy” involved. In these Russian magazines “satire” would seem, more than anything, a thin but precious barrier against open reprisal.

It’s said that these satires helped drive public opinion, to bring the criticisms which simmered just below the surface out into the open, and to force the first small concessions from the autocratic Tsar Nicolas II. Whether they in fact shamed the powers-that-be… it’s doubtful. I can say with certainty, however, that the graphic work in these publications, produced as they were under constant threat, does put most “underground” magazine work produced since to shame. The images, bleak and violent, mournful and angry though they are, remain powerful and terrifically beautiful.

Below, as illustration, I’ve reproduced a group of representative images culled from the book Blood & Laughter. Caricatures from the 1905 Revolution, by David King and Cathy Porter, put out in 1983.

Quote: “Bloody Sunday killed superstition, the old faith in a just Tsar, and unleashed a tumultuous rage among the masses… A huge wave of strikes swept the country, paralysing more than 100 towns and drawing in a million men and women. Throughout the summer peasants rioted while terrorists struck at figures of authority.

Alongside the struggle in street and factory was the struggle for the free press. Ministers and clerics suffered assassination more by the pen than the bullet as the revolution strove for the expression of powerful emotions long suppressed. A flood of satirical journals poured from the presses, honouring the dead and vilifying the mighty. Drawings of frenzied immediacy and extraordinary technical virtuosity were combined with prose and verse written in a popular underground language, veiled in allegory, metaphor and references to the past.”

“Russia had a rich history of satirical journalism. In the 1770s, in the reign of Katherine the Great, an elite of intellectuals close to the court developed a new ‘aesopian’ language — deeply subversive to the enlightened autocracy — to express their opposition to the old regime. The satire of the court flourished until the shadow of revolution in Europe drove the Empress to suppress it. Again in the 1860s highly popular satirical journals sprang up, drawing consciously on their courtly predecessors to curse the Crimean War and Tsar Alexander ll’s empty promises of reform. While populist revolutionaries went ‘to the people’ to make common cause with the peasants, radical journalists set out to collect folk-stories, popular sayings, soldiers’ songs and workers’ ballads. The old allegorical vocabulary was joined to the language of popular satire. By the 1870s these journals had been closed down, but this language was now part of everyday speech. Satirical writing returned to the underground, where it flourished, rooted in popular protest, until 1905. It was then that satire achieved its full power.”

“Satire turned holy names into household names, it insulted authority and withered reputations. Yet although the journals enjoyed an almost fanatical popularity, most writers clung to the anonymity of the underground where, apart from a few who became well-known after the Bolshevik revolution, they tended to remain. The artists proclaimed their names more openly, and a number of them — like Isaac Brodsky,  Alexander   Lyubimov,  Nikolai Shestopalov, Pyotr Dobrynin and Boris Kustodiev — went on to become prominent soviet painters. They and many other artists had all been students in the master-class of the great realist painter llya Repin. In February 1905 Repin and his students had marched together in a demonstration against the Bloody Sunday massacre, and from then on they had all turned to paintings of street demonstrations, meetings and peasant uprisings.”

“For a few brief months the journals spoke with a great and unprecedented rage that neither arrest nor exile could silence. At first their approach was oblique, their allusions veiled, and they often fell victim to the censor’s pencil. But people had suffered censorship for too long.Satirists constantly expanded their territory and their targets of attack, demolishing one obstacle after another as they went, thriving on censorship. The workers’ movement grew in boldness, culminating in the birth of the St Petersburg Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, the people’s government. For fifty days the Tsar and his ministers were confronted by another power, another law. Journalists and printers seized the right to publish without submitting to the censor. The satirical journals then reached their apotheosis, until the revolution died as it had risen, bathed in blood.” -Cathy Porter, from her introduction to Blood & Laughter ,1983.

Well…

Apparently slaughter and hunger and class-struggle and brutal autocratic oppression aren’t very amusing when you get right down to it. On the other hand, perhaps for their intended audience these were amusing. Perhaps the simple but revolutionary act of speaking out against an oppressor was powerful enough to make even of a pile of human skulls feel exuberantly therapeutic. As a westerner, living a century later, totally removed from the language and culture and context I can’t rightly say. I mean, Russian humor has always had a slightly darker more grim cast than that of the West hasn’t it? Perhaps these “satires” offer a tiny clue as to why that might be. 

If you’d like to see more of these Russian Satires the Yale University Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library has a very nice group of page scans, including interiors. Simply search for “Russia 1905.” Likewise, for more detailed information the Blood & Laughter. Caricatures from the 1905 Revolution is highly recommended.

Hope you enjoyed.

In his 1980 book Now I Lay Me Down to Eat, Notes and Footnotes on the Lost Art of Living writer, architect, collector, teacher, designer, and social historian Bernard Rudofsky used this misconception as a jumping off point to examine western attitudes toward everything from eating to sleeping to sitting to bathing to crapping. It’s a terrific book which, like many of his books, served as an accompaniment to a museum exhibition exploring the same subjects.

In any case, sticking with the Last Supper, I wanted to share a few paragraphs by Rudolfsky on the subject as it’s an interesting historical wrinkle which I suspect many remain unaware of.

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“One would think that a people that swears by the Bible would be at least vaguely familiar with some of tlie customs of biblical times. Alas, we are not; devout and impious alike are uninformed about testamentary etiquette. What, for instance, do we know about the seating and eating ceremonial at the Last Supper? No more, to be sure, than the fifty-odd generations of artists who, unacquainted as they were witli ancient usages, concurred in misrepresenting the momentous event. Thanks to them, the picture we have formed of it is a glaring anachronism—the apostles might as well be wearing black tie. The legions of painters and carvers were forever at a loss to interpret such stage directions as Saint John ‘lying close to the breast of Jesus’ (John, 13:23). All their attempts to follow the Scriptures to the letter— that is, to portray a recumbent John among companions stiff as pokers—presented an unsolvable problem. Whatever the extenuating circumstances, their common expedient to depict John napping is nothing short of slander.

A trifling incident in our eyes, it does, however, illustrate our ignorance and ensuing intolerance of all conduct that deviates from our own, and this furnishes the keynote to our musings. If Jesus Christ should want to visit this country, he certainly would have to mend his ways. A repetition of the multiplication of bread might be greeted with hosannas, but a miracle of changing water into wine would land him in jail in the holier of our states. Clearly, we’ve gotten the better of scriptural ethics.

To our way of thinking, lying down to a meal connotes debauch. Yet that was the way to eat in Christ’s time among middle- and upper-class Romans and Jews, just as it was for centuries before and after. A corroboration comes from instructions for Passover service: ‘On drinking the four cups, one leans to the left side, as it was the custom in ancient times among free noblemen wlio used to dine on couches in a leaning position.’ Although endorsed in religious doctrine, such behavior seems absurd to us; the whole concept of palpable conviviality flies in the face of our presumed respectability. And yet, wise men with a flair for good living have been known to disregard popular prejudice. ‘I like to eat and drink in a recumbent position (preferably on a couch)’ wrote Nabokov.

The mosaic (above) shows the recumbent figures on a sigma—a crescent-shaped couch—which, together with the table, forms one single piece. The apostles fit into each other as neatly as stacking chairs—a tangible expression of conviviality. Following the custom of the time, Christ, the host, occupies the place of honor, at the extreme left.

Little of this fraternal closed circuit remains in the Westernized Last Supper. Body contact has given way to discreet stand-offishness; invisible place cards have spread a chill through the proceedings. So has the inexorable grip of symmetry. Christ has been assigned a place in the center and, following Western protocol, everybody is sitting upright, except Saint John, who snuggles up to the Savior s bosom. Such seeming lack of self-control calls for closer inspection.

Christian iconography reveals a surprisingly rich repertory of John’s labored poses. He nestles his head in Christ’s palm or in the crook of His arm; hides behind His back; leans on His shoulder; or, most unceremoniously, rests his head right on the table; while Christ, to all appearances, remains oblivious of his beloved disciples difficulties. A New Testament Rip van Winkle, John failed to make the transition from past to present, from East to West. He alone remained faithful to his forefathers’ habits, which his companions, finding them out of place, preferred to ignore. They are portrayed either occupying benches or stools or simply sitting on the floor. A few artists who knew better put them on couches; yet, right down to our time—and this ought to set us thinking—not one presented them sitting on chairs. They all seem to have been aware that there was something very wrong with the looks of a chair.” -Bernard Rudofsky, Now I Lay Me Down To Eat, 1980.

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Now granted, for many of us the first thought might be something along the lines of, “well, does the historical accuracy of paintings depicting fictional events matter much?” To which I’d have to agree, no, not really. But it’s still interesting. 

Hope you enjoyed.

As it happens just yesterday I came across the perfect resource to illustrate that point, the 1971 book The Poster Art of Tomi Ungerer, compiled and edited by Jack Rennert. Below I’ve reproduced, for your viewing pleasure and Mr. Ungerer’s glorification, a small sampling of the terrific poster work contained therein. Have a look…

Quote: “Expect the unexpected” is a fitting description of all of Tomi’s posters. The element of surprise, the element of the absurd, is a clear constant in his posters. When Tomi is finished with a poster design, he will step back a bit, and if he’s really satisfied with what he’s done, he’ll say, “It’s absurd!”

This very absurdity, achieved by elements of surprise and exaggeration, makes for a good poster: one of the key elements of a good poster is that it be arresting, that it be immediately compelling. This propensity for gleefully combining the improbable with the absurd is carried through in all of Tomi’s works.” -Jack Rennert.

Quote: “Hans Pflug, writing about Tomi’s work when he first came to the United States, noted: ‘His drawings and advertisements all give the impression of having occurred to him in a flash, and of having been captured on paper with equal immediacy.’ To watch Tomi at work is to know that this was an accurate observation and is still so. What is amazing to me, is that Tomi at once gets a complete image of what he wants to do, and putting it down on paper becomes almost the automatic reflex of his clearly ‘seen’ image. He rarely goes back over his lines. They are immediately, cleanly, and finally, put down on paper. He may not be satisfied when he’s finished and will throw the whole thing out, but he’ll seldom redo or rework his lines or colors.” -Jack Rennert.

Quote: “The main influences in my work were, as a child, Mathias Grunewald, Durer, Schongauer, as well as Hansi and Schnugg, both Alsatian illustrators. Later came Goya, Bosch, the Japanese graphists (Hokusai, etc.), the old issues of Simplicissimus, and Wilhelm Busch.

My high school records were crowned with the final remark: ‘Perverse and subversive.’

My interest and hobbies vary and alternate: flying kites and balloons, old toys, books, bondage, erotica, minerology, botany, medicine, jazz-the list is vain and endless. My most meaningful author is Louis Ferdinand Celine, my favorite painter is Ingres, and Bach’s is just about the only music that gives me total satisfaction.” -Tomi Ungerer, from the introduction to The Poster Art of Toimi Ungerer

It was no easy task choosing what to include here but I hope you enjoyed these.

You can visit Tomi Ungerer’s homepage if you’d like to see some more of his work.

Also I’ve posted a small set of pieces Mr. Ungerer created for a 1966 IBM exhibition called Some Computer ABC’s over at the Nonist Annex.

Lastly, in that I was unable to find anything comparable on the web—the horse’s mouth and all that—I wanted to offer the full text of the biographical sketch Mr. Ungerer wrote for the introduction to the book. You can read it here.

As a young man Hsueh Shao-Tang fantasized about being an artist, but life intervened, as it has a nasty habit of doing. He was living in Peking when Mao Tse-Tung’s Communists swept through northern China, so the first order of business had to be entirely more practical. Hsueh’s family had an ancestral silk business but the war-time conditions of Peking had made it impossible to continue and Hsueh was ultimately reduced to roaming the countryside to hunt out food for his parents and sister. The hunt brought him to Shanghai where he was snatched off the street by “recruiters” for Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist army. He spent the next six years guarding against communist invasion in Taiwan and never saw his family again.

After being discharged he was desperate for some reliable means to support himself (and his new family- a wife and two children) so he enrolled in a school for classical Chinese cuisine. He did so well as a chef that after graduating cum laude he was sent to Turkey as the official chef for the Chinese ambassador there. It was during this three year period that he began to once again devote private hours to his art. Said art consisted of cutting postage stamps into fine little shards and gluing them onto silk to form traditional compositions. After the ambassador’s death he was invited to bring his family to Geneva, where he would cook banquets on holidays and could devote the rest of his time to his art.

What follows are 10 pieces created by Hsueh Shao-Tang during his time in Geneva.

Quote: “How many stamps have I cut to pieces making pictures? I’ve made about five hundred pictures—given them to friends and sold some, too. Big ones take up to a month. Let’s say they average fifteen hundred stamps apiece. But, of course, some need many more—up to ten thousand. For one picture! Anyway, I’ve chopped up nearly a million stamps. Whole stamps—forget the fragments! And, some days, it seems like that many cabbages, too, for those spring rolls!

I need maybe a thousand different Chinese stamps. Not Red Chinese . . . Taiwan! Friends buy them and send them from Taipeh. It’s terrible how the cost has increased in ten years! Of course, all are old stamps. Nobody could buy new ones. I’ve never used any Communist stamps although their colors are very strong. But not as good as Taiwanese. They’re the best. I’ve used about five hundred different Western stamps, too, but they are very expensive and the colors aren’t as beautiful. Naturally, my glue is special—my secret. It will never stain stamps or the silk on which I paste the fragments—it holds stamps and silk together perfectly . . . maybe forever!” -Hsueh Shao-Tang.

Gorgeous. The little snatches of text and image you find in say a bird feather, the tiger’s skin, or some leaves is fantastic. I’d love to see one up close and personal.

All of the quotes and images are from the book Magic Worlds of Fantasy by David Douglas Duncan, published 1978.

Unfortunately I was unable to find any further information on Hsueh Shao-Tang beyond that shared by Mr. Duncan, and while there are plenty of copies of Magic Worlds of Fantasy to be found for purchase on the web I was only able to find two small images of Hsueh Shao-Tang’s work. That strikes me as a real shame, as I’d love to see more of his work, but more so, after such a touching biographical sketch, I’d love to know how the artist and his art fared once he was able to devote himself to it.

Hope you enjoyed.

The image was shot by (and pictures) one Hippolyte Bayard. He was a French civil servant who, in his spare time, happened to invent his own method of reliably capturing photographic images on paper; an interesting fact considering, at the time, none other was known to exist, anywhere.

Hippolyte Bayard is not exactly a household name is it? More of a “buried in an unknown ditch on the other side of the Earth, who knows when or why, and basically forgotten” kind of name. It might have been otherwise, and during his lifetime, Mr. Bayard was well aware of that fact. 

As it happens, after inventing his direct positive photographic process, Hippolyte was visited by one François Arago, who convinced him, using who knows what logic, to postpone making an announcement of his find to the French Academy of Sciences. As it turns out François Arago was a close personal pal of another fellow, who shortly thereafter made his own presentation to the members of the Académie des Sciences, by the name of Louis Daguerre. Ever heard of him? Yeah, thought so.

By the time Mr. Bayard finally did present to the Académie they’d already made a substantial investment in Daguerre and his process. In as much their reaction was to pay Bayard a piddling sum for his troubles and assure him his process was so inferior as to be essentially useless. Nice guys. 

So basically poor ol’ Hippolyte got shafted, hard, and he knew it.

Which brings us to Self Portrait as a Drowned Man.

Self Portrait as a Drowned Man (more specifically, the series of “Drowned Man” photographs he shot) was Bayard’s protest. It wasn’t as metaphorically subtle a protest as it would seem at first glance either. On the back, written in third person, is Hippolyte’s suicide note in which states his grievance rather explicitly.

Quote: “The corpse which you see here is that of M. Bayard, inventor of the process that has just been shown to you. As far as I know this indefatigable experimenter has been occupied for about three years with his discovery. The Government, which has been only too generous to Monsieur Daguerre, has said it can do nothing for Monsieur Bayard, and the poor wretch has drowned himself. Oh the vagaries of human life…! He has been at the morgue for several days, and no-one has recognized or claimed him. Ladies and gentlemen, you’d better pass along for fear of offending your sense of smell, for as you can observe, the face and hands of the gentleman are beginning to decay.”

Ha. Stick it to ‘em Hippolyte! 

So, evidently, among it’s other distinctions Self Portrait as a Drowned Man also represents the worlds first photographic “fuck you.”

Bayard continued to take photographs for 47 more years until his death in 1887, but so far as his place on the great big list of history’s firsts he would have to make due with the rather miniscule honor of having held the world’s first public exhibition of photographs in June of 1839.

Wahhh-wahhh-waaaaaaaaahhh.

To the Académie and their endless ilk from time immemorial to present day, I offer, on Hippolyte’s behalf, a hearty “Je deteste, Ptuu!”

One last thought:

Squashed by the interests of the establishment? Disgruntled? Resistant? Resultantly sarcastic and innovative by necessity? Seems a pretty common pedigree by today’s standards. Could it be Hippolyte was actually the first bonafide “artist” working with the photographic process?

By 1913 their relationship is strained-

Quote: “They travelled to Italy together, and on one occasion visited the Naples aquarium. Kokoschka watched an insect sting and paralyse a fish, before devouring it, and at once associated the scene with the woman by his side.” -Edward Lucie-Smith, Lives of the Great 20th Century Artists.

Alma became pregnant and, against Oscar’s wishes, has the child aborted. Oscar is crushed. At the outbreak of World War I in 1914 he volunteers and serves with the Austrian army. In 1915, while stationed in Russia, Oscar receives a serious injury via unfriendly bayonet. He returns from the front to find Alma has married an old flame, architect Walter Gropius. Oscar is double-crushed. In 1918, underlining military doctor’s previous assessment of him as “mentally unstable,” he reacts to all this heartache the way any good, obsessive, expressionist painter would-

Detailed physical descriptions and full-scale drawing in hand, he commissions the doll-maker Hermine Moos to create a life-sized Alma Mahler doll to her exact, anatomically accurate specifications.

Quote: “Yesterday I sent a life-size drawing of my beloved and I ask you to copy this most carefully and to transform it into reality. Pay special attention to the dimensions of the head and neck, to the ribcage, the rump and the limbs. And take to heart the contours of body, e.g., the line of the neck to the back, the curve of the belly. Please permit my sense of touch to take pleasure in those places where layers of fat or muscle suddenly give way to a sinewy covering of skin. For the first layer (inside) please use fine, curly horsehair; you must buy an old sofa or something similar; have the horsehair disinfected. Then, over that, a layer of pouches stuffed with down, cottonwool for the seat and breasts. The point of all this for me is an experience which I must be able to embrace! Can the mouth be opened? Are there teeth and a tongue inside? I hope so!” -Oscar Kokoschka

The doll takes Hermine Moos 6 months to complete. Oscar is impatient. 

Quote: “I would die of jealousy if some man were allowed to touch the artificial woman in her nakedness with his hands or glimpse her with his eyes! When shall I be able to hold all this in my hands?” -Oscar Kokoschka

Oscar had by this time already found another playmate. A Serving-maid by the name of Hulda. But though she poses for him, calls him captain, carves his initials into her breast, and offers herself to him bodily, Oscar remains preoccupied.

Quote: “I was preoccupied with anxious thoughts about the arrival of the doll, for which I had bought Parisian clothes and underwear. I wanted to have done with the Alma Mahler business once and for all, and never again to fall victim to Pandora’s fatal box, which had already brought me so much suffering.” -Oscar Kokoschka

In February of 1919 the Alma Mahler Doll is delivered.

Quote: “In a state of feverish anticipation, like Orpheus calling Eurydice back from the Underworld, I freed the effigy of Alma Mahler from its packing. As I lifted it into the light of day, the image of her I had preserved in my memory stirred into life.” -Oscar Kokoschka

The doll which he’d hoped would have “natural feeling” skin is, in fact, made with feathers and, as might be expected, Oscar is disappointed with the results. He explains in a terrific letter to Hermine Moos-

Quote: “I was honestly shocked by your doll which, although I was long prepared for a certain distance from reality, contradicts what I demanded of it and hoped of you in too many ways! The outer shell is a polar-bear pelt, suitable for a shaggy imitation bedside rug rather than the soft and pliable skin of a woman. The result is that I cannot even dress the doll, which you knew was my intention, let alone array her in delicate and precious robes. Even attempting to pull on one stocking would be like asking a French dancing-master to waltz with a polar bear!” -Oscar Kokoschka

Even so Oscar does his best to make due. He paints and sketches the doll as he once painted Alma. Further he evidently tasks Hulda with spreading rumors about the doll, which they refer to as “The Silent Woman.” Stories emerge about his long carriage rides with it, their trips to the opera together, not to mention less public and presumably more sweaty liaisons.

In the final reckoning though, a doll could never really replace a woman now could it? I mean, a doll that you have an intimate relationship with can allow you to express insanity, but it could never drive you there, at least not with the speed and giggly zest of the real thing.

At a party, organized as the Silent Woman’s introduction to Oscar’s friends, the doll unexpectedly meets her destiny.

Oscar explains the events as follows-

Quote: “Finally, after I had drawn it and painted it over and over again, I decided to do away with it. It had managed to cure me completely of my Passion. So I gave a big champagne Party with chamber music, during which my maid Hulda exhibited the doll in all its beautiful clothes for the last time. When dawn broke - I was quite drunk, as was everyone else - I beheaded it out in the garden and broke a bottle-of red wine over its head.” -Oscar Kokoschka

Or so the story goes.

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For more see:
Oskar Kokoschka,
The Puppet,
The Silent Woman,
and The Chamber Maid
at Alma-mahler.at.

Man-Made Woman by Jon Stratton.

Oskar Kokoschka at the Artchive.

Oskar Kokoschka at Encyclopedia Britannica Online.

Hope you enjoyed.

The figure in the image is actually a Kwakiutl tribesman dressed as a Thunderbird. It’s a detail of a photograph shot by Edward S. Curtis, published in 1914. If you’ve never heard of Curtis he was a portrait photographer, living in Seattle, who decided sometime around 1900 to begin documenting the Native American tribes living in the Pacific Northwest. This project, with eventual interest of Theodore Roosevelt and resultant funding by J.P. Morgan, evolved into a 20 volume ethnographic opus called The North American Indian. The first volume was published in 1907, the last in 1930, at which point Curtis had shot about 45,000 photographs of over 80 separate tribes. Impressive though those numbers are, and expansive though the project was ⊕ Curtis died in 1952, broke, and with his life’s work forgotten.

“They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented.” So said Karl Marx. Were that representation pictorial and cultural rather than political, the sentiment might well be characterized as the driving force behind The North American Indian project. Curtis was a strong adherent to the prevailing sense that the American Indian was a “vanishing race” with no hope of maintaining any identity as Indian, and that it was the duty of the dominant culture to record the existence of the one being absorbed.

It was this conviction that lead him, in the course of his documentations, to go so far as to stage photographs depicting tribal traditions which had gone out of popular practice 50 years prior to his arrival with camera in hand. He paid tribes to undertake ceremonies out of season and reestablish ceremonies no longer practiced. He brought with him props, wigs, shirts, and other accouterments to “reenact” scenes, and was careful to remove “modern” items already adopted by tribes from the frame before shooting. His interest was in the “traditional” Indian, regardless of whether those traditions had already evolved away from the preconceptions of white america.

It’s because of this subjective tampering that Curtis’ photographs, even after their rediscovery and popularization in the 1970’s, remain somewhat controversial. On the one hand there are charges that his photographs, to large degree, simply reenforced the condescending stereotype of the “noble savage.” On the other hand it is unarguable that much of the material in The North American Indian does, in fact, represent unique ethnographic data recorded nowhere else. The prevailing attitude toward the project seems to be that though it is most assuredly “of its time,” harboring all manner of preconception, it is none the less invaluable for what it did manage to record.

In any case as regards Curtis’ life work I think it’s important to mention two things:

1) Even without intervention or the use of props or staging, photographs of this kind, framing a conquered culture through the conqueror’s lens and produced specifically for the conqueror’s consumption, will inherently deal in presuppositions. That seems inescapable. They will reinforce stereotypes to the exact degree to which the viewer, or framer, holds them dear.

2) Regardless of exactly the nature of what his photographs evoke, they are evocative, and very often beautiful, which is possibly the best one can say about a photograph from the artist’s standpoint. Not from a documentarian’s, or an ethnologist’s standpoint certainly, but from an artist’s.

Now to the photographs themselves…

Let me be the first to admit that when you have a collection as large as Curtis’ to draw from, you can gather together a group of pieces that illustrate damn-near any point of view you wish to support. For my part, I don’t want to drive home any particular point about Curtis’ outlook or the experience of the Native American’s he photographed.

I chose 18 images, drawn mainly from his time spent with the Kwakiutl and Navajo tribes, and exclusively of men obscured by ceremonial dress, their humanity left only as a vague outline, because I find them to be, as a group, a particularly potent illustration of the subjectivity inherent to viewing not only photographs of other cultures, images of the “Other,” and images of the unknown, but images of the past in general. These photographs are of men without men’s faces, without eyes to search, without familiar situations to read into, and so you are left to your own perceptual devices.

Quote: “It is a truism that to visitors of a new land – certainly to settlers – the original inhabitants were profoundly Other: The settlers may have had to struggle physically with the indigenous people for possession of the land, and in the process the original inhabitants became that which the settlers defined themselves against. It was virtually inevitable that the representations… would incorporate, reflect, or respond to, perhaps justify, the assumptions of the dominant (whites). ...The representations produced by the project tend to conform, in other words, to the lineaments of “the white man’s Indian.” ...Members of a dominant group, no matter how “intimate” their sense of their involvement with the people concerned, will represent nothing but the assumptions of their own kind.” – From the introduction to Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian by Mick Gidley.

Quote: “If the modes of seeing in different communities are at least in some respect irreconcilable because they reflect incommensurable presuppositions about the human situation, how can such communities understand one another? Or are cultures windowless monads– communally solipsistic entities in which only those who share the same conventions can make sense of one another, with everything outside the cultures walls either ignored or relegated to the status of error? Can one culture use its own terms to say something about another culture without engaging in a hostile act of appropriation or simply reflecting itself and not encountering the otherness of the Other? –From Chapter 2 of Play and the Politics of Reading: The Social Uses of the Modernist Form by Paul B. Armstrong.

Quote: “When the last Red Men shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the white man, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children’s children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone.” -Attributed to Cheif Seath in an address surrendering the Puget Sound region to Governor Isaac Stevens in 1854, but which is almost certainly a fanciful recreation set down by some unknown author many years later. Coincidentally, it was Seath’s daughter, Princess Angeline, who was Curtis’ first Native American subject. 

Personally I find this group of photos, in the almost total disembodiment of their actual subjects, really compelling. Their historical accuracy makes no difference. I can’t help but imbue them with a host of disparate, sometimes totally contrary emotions. My mind draws all kinds of corollaries and branches out into all kinds of narratives. Most likely you, yourself, draw a whole other set of conclusions…

Anyhow, though Curtis didn’t live to see it, his work is now widely written about and very well represented on the internet. Curtis’ story is a fairly interesting one, the debate over and reactions to his work even more so, and there is a whole lot of it to be seen out there if your so inclined-

Nortwestern University Collection
Library of Congress Collection
Old-picture.com collection
First People
Project Gutenberg
Edward S. Curtis in Context
Selling the North American Indian
Flurry & Company Ltd.
Video excerpts from Coming To Light
PBS American Masters
Prayer to the Great Mystery
The Imperfect Eye of Edward Curtis.
Etc, Etc, Etc.

Hope you enjoyed.

A tsuba is the small metal guard at the end of a sword’s grip, which sits between the hand and the blade itself… and that’s it. A humble object basically. Shaped by 14 centuries of Japanese sword culture and metalworking, however, you’d never know it.

Quote: “The tsuba served as the most important functional fitting and, due to its size and location, also had the greatest symbolic importance. It protected the hand, helped to balance the sword, and was the most visible decorative object when the sword was worn. Inasmuch as the samurai usually wore two swords at all times, and would not be seen without them, the kinds of tsuba worn often depended upon the day’s activity. One might, for example, prefer an iron guard for battle and a highly decorated soft metal guard for court use. although these distinctions were not invariable. The samurai usually owned several tsuba and matching fittings for each blade, and changed them to suit mood or occasion. -From the Introduction of the exhibition catalogue, Tsuba, put out in 1980 by The Cooper-Hewitt Museum.

The tsuba  evolved with advances in technology and to accommodate the needs of changing forms of warfare. The earliest examples were disks made of bronze or copper. In the 12th century plain iron disks, patinated to a “pleasing black color,” or allowed to rust slightly prior to stabilization to achieve a redish tint, were the norm. Inlayed, gold leafed, chiseled, complexly perforated, carved soft metal, and other decorative forms evolved later.

The perforations, punched or forged, visible in many tsuba began as a purely functional consideration. Iron tsuba could be made lighter with a few well placed perforations. Over time these perforations became more and more decorative in nature, to the point that functionality actually suffered. Some of the most ornate and complex examples were almost certainly used for formal or ceremonial occasions only.

Quote: “The use of alloys such as shakudo, shibuichi, as well as copper, brass, bronze, gold and silver together allowed color and contrast to become an overiding factor in decorative techniques toward the end of the fifteenth century.” —knives.com

Quote: “When peace came, however, tsuba making was carried out by rapidly proliferating schools of technically expert artisans whose production was seldom intended for use in warfare. The decorative styles of eighteenth-century tsuba matched their peaceful use; ornamentation of the tsuba became an end in itself and the art deteriorated. Although a few individuals and schools maintained the high standards of previous eras and produced magnificent works even in the twentieth century, a general conversion of art to artisanship continued until the wearing of swords was banned by Imperial decree in 1871, and the blades and fittings largely passed into the province of the scholar and collector.” -From the Introduction of the exhibition catalogue, Tsuba.

The images in the post (which were adapted and placed in my own desired groupings) were taken from the following sources-
Japanese-tsuba.com
George’s Tsuba Pictures
Ricecracker.com
Choshuya.co.jp
Aoi-art.com
Nihonto.com
Nihonto Kanji Pages
Japanese-swords.com
Shibuiswords.com
Tsuba.jyuluck-do.com

All of those sites feature a wealth of tsuba for your viewing, and in most cases, purchasing pleasure, and these are only the tiniest sampling of what’s available out there. Beautiful stuff.

Hope you enjoyed.

News was just recently released that Penguin will be publishing a novel co-authored by Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs which was written in 1945, before either achieved fame, or, one might argue, before either achieved talent. Not that this is necessarily a case such as that sketched in my over-dramatic first paragraph, but I can say with something approaching certainty that there is a reason why artists decline to put particular works out there.

Is this one a festering pustule on the golden, glorified legacies of two beat luminaries? I have no idea. Burroughs himself dismissed it as “not a very distinguished work.” ⊕ So the question begs to be asked, though we hail famous artists as “geniuses,” and fawn over their pronouncements, and make pilgrimages to their grave sites, and gobble critical texts parsing their brilliance, does it just so happen that the one area in which they are totally deficient is judging the merits of their own work?

The title of this “undistinguished” novel is evidently something Burroughs heard on a newscast about a zoo fire: And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. I actually love the title, though perhaps And the Artists Were Exploited in Their Caskets would be closer to the bone.

The events which inspired And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks certainly sound novel-worthy, complete with obsession, drunken knife-fights, murder, body dumping, and the incarceration of our intrepid beat luminaries. Surely its publication will have some redeeming value? Whether just for historians and completists and rubber-neckers, or as a work in and of itself, is yet to be seen.

I have to wonder what the artists themselves would think were they alive? Would they be embarrassed? Displeased? Would the fact that even their “undistinguished” works made it to a clamoring marketplace simply satisfy their egos and overrule their internal editors? Would they grin from their easy chairs unable to beat back the maniacal words, “I am legend”?

Letting “unsuccessful” works linger in drawers and boxes under beds is a weakness for most artists I’d say, but then, when they are your creations, even abortive ones, abhorrent ones, embarrassing ones, and your intention is to mournfully review them every decade or so as you would review old correspondences or family photographs, they retain a definite personal value. A personal value.

After Henry Miller’s death Moloch and Crazy Cock came to light, neither of which were sterling examples of his incredible talent ⊕, likewise Bukowski has had damn near as many books of poetry published since his death as before. At what point does the pile of “not ready for prime time” work of an artist begin to tarnish his or her legacy? Does it ever? Is our insatiable desire to know everything about those we’ve immortalized self-defeating? And are we actually entitled to see the things artists didn’t want to have seen? It may well be that we afford our idols more “personal space” physically, after their deaths, than we do metaphorically. 

It’s a moot point I guess. There’s money to be made and industry marches on. ⊕ And perhaps, just perhaps, the rationalization that even a turd from a master is better than nothing is true. One thing we can be sure of is that neither Jack, nor William, nor Henry, Nor Buk give a good god-damn either way right now, and we can take heart in the fact that while they lived, their art was their own.

The reigning young-bloods of the world love to needle the hippies. This, I surmise, is because the hippies are now their parents, grandparents, weird uncles, and, worst of all, their dick-head corporate bosses. The words Haight-Ashbury are as likely to induce a lemon-faced cringe as be met with a blank stare I would guess.

Not that most of us have been allowed to forget it for a single instant, but I’ll gently remind you anyway that there was a time when hippies were the avante-garde. A time when there were few personages thought more “happening” on planet Earth.

In any case I have no interest in discussing the hippies’ utopian experiments or their eventual backslide into the big black boots of the establishment… no, as is the norm in these parts, I simply want to share some pretty pictures with you, and as it happens, The Diggers quest for a “free city” did yield quite a bit of quality printed matter.

Quote: “The commune’s founder brought his printing presses to San Francisco in the summer of 1968, inspired by two fellow Diggers who suggested a free publishing venture. Over the next several years, the Free Print Shop published a variety of materials including flyers for other communal groups, for free services, ecology groups, free arts groups, and the occasional political protest. In the spring of 1969 the Sutter Street Commune began publishing an intercommunal newspaper, Kaliflower, named for Kaliyuga, the Hindu name for the last and most violent age of humankind and the Hindu goddess Kali. Each Kaliflower was printed and bound by hand. The binding used the Japanese method of yarn overstitched on either the top or side. Every issue was a different color, and offset printing was the method by which the issues were printed. Kaliflower became an important mode of communication among the communes.” –Patricia L. Keats.

Below you will find 20 examples of printed Digger ephemera, mostly culled from Kaliflower, but also including content from Free City News and a few leaflets and posters. Have a look.

(I love that last one so much.)

Digger output in the form of Kaliflower and related items from the Free Print Shop were only produced for a few years it seems. Before long the mock-funeral for the “Death of the Hippies” was staged, the communes began disappearing, and well… we know how the rest turned out.

For a ton of information and many many more examples of The Diggers’ work look no further than The Digger Archive which is packed with avant-of-yore goodness.

Meanwhile, if you’re in the mood for some related reading you might try Manhood in the Age of Aquarius By Tim Hodgedon, which goes into considerable depth.

Note that the image which began this post is not by Diggers, but of them, I adapted it from a photo of the famous free food giveaways.

Hope you enjoyed.