The issue begins with an introduction by Charles Rosner which I’ll spare you the bulk of. It does strike me as disrespectful and lazy somehow to not at least offer a few words, however, for context’s sake. So here is a single paragraph to get light your way forward.

Quote: “As for the impact [of advertsising] on society: the economic implications are closely linked up with deep-rooted inferences. The ‘social function’ of advertising is to stimulate wants, to make people dissatisfied with the little they have, and to work harder and earn more. Yet this function—to stimulate dissatisfaction—is relatively recent, for the goods people want, the auto, the washing machine, the radio, the television, electric iron, dishwasher, are all products of the lasty forty years or less. All this is part of the transformation, of the Western world at least, to a high-consumption society. There is more advertising in the United States not because salesmanship is a peculiar American virtue, or vice, but because of the comparative opulence of the country. As Professor Galbraith has written, A hungry man could never be persuaded that bread that is softened, sliced, wrapped and enriched is worth more than a cheaper and larger loaf that will fill his stomach.” —Charles Rosner, Graphis annual ‘57/58.

I only wish these older volumes had more plates printed in color!

Lastly I’d like to leave you with a final paragraph from the annual’s introduction. In our internet age with Tumblr and Flickr and Ffffound it seems as relevant as ever, weather some of us like it or not.

Quote: “The public is demanding more pictures and fewer words. American housewives want a lot of pictures and little copy. They want the picture to tell the story. Ideas expressed in art can do more and reach more people than any other form of communication. Witness the picture magazines, the great decrease in text in all advertising, the outdoor poster, television. The eye has a far better memory than the ear and the advertising man who is in tune with the times will seldom want for an idea.” —Charles Rosner, Graphis annual ‘57/58.

So there you have it. Until next time.

Evidently audiences in the 60’s and 70’s had other ideas because in 1967 a ballet came to the stage which became an absolute sensation. It was called Astarte, after a naked semitic Goddess of fertility, sexuality, and war, who’d eventually be absorbed by the Greeks under the name Aphrodite.

Choreographed and directed by one Robert Joffrey it was considered groundbreaking in its staging and it remains the only ballet to ever grace the cover of Time magazine. A spread featuring it’s two lead dancers recreating poses from the ballet was also published in Playboy 5 years later. It ran for just short of a decade.

The images which follow were created by photographer Herb Migdoll. They are not documentary shots of an actual performance but rather interpretations of what took place on the stage. They are montages, built up layer by layer, with multiple color photographs way back in the mists of pre-photoshop design.

Have a look—

I’m particularly fond of that last one for some reason.

Looking at these as a group I can’t help but think of Seth Rogan and Paul Rudd, on mushrooms, at Cirque Du Soleil, or indeed of my own experiences in a similar vein. It’s easy to see from the photos why the late 60’s / early 70’s audiences flocked to it. After all, the Pink Floyd Laserium light shows didn’t really take off until 1974.

Oddly the other thing which these bring to mind for me are “the future.” Seems ridiculous, I know, but I have so many science-fictional images which were produced in this era burnt into my mind that’s it’s a kind of pavlovian response. In as much, though we scoff instantly today at anything which produces the faintest whiff of goofy utopian hippy psychedelia, I can actually imagine a revival of Astarte being quite successful a millennia from now.

By then all the hippies and their spawn and their emulators and their collective patchouli cloud will be long gone. Time will do it’s little trick of erasing all the negatives and complete failures and hippies will be viewed, on decaying film reels, in grey concrete cities, as some kind of wonderful. A new mind-obliterating nano-drug will hit the streets and blam! out will come the day-glo paisley leotards.

Actually, now that I think about it, today, with theater evidently completely out of ideas, with every shitty band having a show cobbled around its music and with scores of movies having a musical version staged, perhaps it won’t even take a millennia. Let’s just give the desperate producers time to run through broadway productions of House M.D. and 24 and To Catch A Predator and then we’ll see what’s what.

Anyhow, hope you enjoyed.

For more check out the following:
Robert Joffrey and the Making of an American Dance Company.
A Rock Classic: Astarte Remembered.
Dance, Sex, and Gender.
Time magazine’s original piece: Rituals in Rock.

Lastly you can hear a few snippets of the “hard rock” music used in the production as played by the original band Crome Syrcus.

When, as children, we first catch wind of the existence of astrological symbols we are at a point in our lives when anything which might help solidify our identities by differentiation is something deserving of our attention. Most of us, I would venture to guess, take hold of our symbol for some short interval as children, and wring whatever meaning we can out of it, drawing corollaries between ourselves and others who shared the same sign, taking heart in character traits supposedly attached, bolstering, through mythical means, our sense of ourselves. When later in our lives we reject astrology as fanciful and amusing hokum it hardly matters. Our signs are still there as the tiniest footnote at the bottom of our appraisals-of-self. We will always see in them the faintest reflection.

An analogy might be that of the lapsed Catholic, who was brought up going to church, but who on adulthood rejected religion outright. Catholicism was something born-into, something outside oneself, something not chosen but inherited. Even after a definitive choice is made to reject it, however, the symbol of a cross will always manage to successfully travel that guarded pathway to our interiors. Whatever judgement the brain passes that symbol will still hold sway with the eyes.

When I was in art school I was obliged, as all hopeful image-makers are, to re-examine the personal symbology of my life. Did any of the tired old symbols carry any weight or meaning? Could any of them be used, adapted, perverted? It dawned on me around that time that though I was fond of “The Balance” as a symbol ⊕, the equal-armed beam balance which is universally used seemed not quite right. This scale with its symmetry and elegance and precision could simply never be an accurate symbol for me, my mind, or the life that I lived. It was altogether too platonic.

A few years later while working, for a short time, as a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art an alternative symbol presented itself. During a shift I was stationed in one of those wonderful, dimly-lit, and comparatively empty areas of the museum ⊕, beside some long glass cases containing Roman artifacts. There were small functional and decorative objects of all kinds inside —vessels and tools and little statues and amulets all jostling together like a the contents of Romulus’ hall closet.

Amongst all of this iron and bronze a single object seemed to demand further scrutiny. It was asymmetrical and brutal looking, with its dangling chains each terminating in a hook. I had no guess as to its function or purpose. Torture device? Weapon? Brutish tool of animal husbandry? Looking at its little placard I discovered it was called a “Roman Balance” or “Steelyard” and that it was in fact a scale. I marveled for a moment at the coincidence. Of all the objects to draw my eye and interest it had to be a scale. I knew immediately that I’d found an object I could get behind, an object which resonated with me somehow. I’d found a proper Libran symbol for myself.

A bit of background information:

The Roman balance (or statera as it was originally known) is so called because no instance has been found of its existence prior to the Roman era. A similar principle was used in ancient Egyptian balances, however, and independently created examples have been found in China. Some evidence seems to exist that this type of scale was actually in use among Greek craftsmen in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries B.C.E. before Hellenistic mathematicians like Archimedes ever formally demonstrated the theoretic basis for their workings. 

The Romans brought these scales to Britain around 55 B.C.E. and the English word ‘steelyard’ by which they are referred today is thought to be a mistranslation of the German ‘Stael-hof’ ⊕, which was itself the name of the base of the Hanseatic merchants of the Middle Ages, who used the Roman balance extensively in their businesses.

Functionally steelyards differ from the balance because they have unequal arms and employ a counterpoise, rather than a series of fixed-mass weights, which is shifted along the long arm in relation the the fulcrum. At the place where the counterpoise keeps the beam exactly horizontal, the weight of the object is indicated on an engraved scale on the long arm. ⊕

Though steelyards are less precise for weighing small objects like coins or jewels ⊕ they have the benefit of employing a single weight for a wide range of loads. They were particularly useful for weighing heavy objects like vehicles, sides of beef, and humans. Additionally they had the benefit of cheap manufacture and portability. In as much they were used as industrial scales straight through the eighteenth century and remain in use in markets all throughout Asia and and the Middle East today.

I happen to find them, with their precarious asymmetry, their hooks and chains and their myriad forms of sculpted counterweights quite compelling, and beautiful.

Visually, viscerally, the steelyard seems to embody some aspect of balance, or perhaps the personal quest for it, which the equal-arm balance does not. After having discovered it there at the Met I visited it often. It didn’t take me long to realize that this object had symbolic potential far beyond the whimsical introspection it might supply for the comparatively small group of us who were born under the sign of Libra.

What, after all, do the scales symbolize for the rest of humanity?

Justice.

Thinking of the equal-arm balance, alone, in silhouette, or held aloft by the left hand of Themis / Justitia / Lady Justice, notions undoubtedly come to mind. They are precise and unambiguously immediate, aspirational and inspirational, they are resplendent and exalted, they are incorruptible and pure. In other words they have no relation whatsoever to the realities of human justice as it is experienced and met out.

Now look at the steelyard. It is hard-looking and vaguely menacing, all hooks and chains and lengths of metal. It has a brutality to it somehow. You can imagine wielding it like a club or a flail and imagine the damage it might do were it wielded against you. Then there’s its asymmetry, which on first glance seems so counterintuitive to achieve any kind of balance. By design its sides are unequal, set against one another at cross-purposes. One side only holds the weight while the other only passes judgement, and a not quite precise judgement at that.

It’s a strange, hard, dangerous looking object, all angles and points set against a shifting bluntness, and one could imagine that were you to hand one to a child she’d be just as likely to smash in a skull as to balance anything whatsoever.

Though functionally the steelyard can achieve the same aims as our aspirational equal-arm scale, visually it suggests a complexity and precariousness and menace entirely more human, and I’d argue entirely more appropriate, symbolically, for our notions of crime and punishment, corporeal or otherwise. If a pound of flesh needs weighing this is the scale for the job.

Add to this to the forms which the steelyard’s counterweight took, and could take, and all sorts of explicit symbolic relationships emerge. In the past these “poises” as they are sometimes called were often fashioned in the shape of gods, men, women or animals. One could easily imagine a slab of beef on the hooks counterbalanced by golden McDonald’s arches for instance, or an emaciated corpse counterbalanced by an Iron Cross, a knife counterbalanced by a black glove, a smoldering retarded child counterbalanced by a weight in the shape of Texas, a boot stamping on a human face, forever, counterbalanced by a giant silver dollar, or… well… whatever delightful image strikes your fancy!

The steelyard can do it all.

Anyhow, since happening upon that Roman balance about 12 years ago I’ve adopted it in my mind. When I think Libra I think steelyard, and so, conversely when I think steelyard I think, in some small way, of myself.

When I see a statue or etching of Lady Justice my mind reflexively erases that flimsy equal-arm balance with its impossible precision and imaginary exaltation and replaces it with its hard, practical, rough and ready, asymmetrical cousin. ⊕

Symbols are what they are, obviously, and not much more, but shouldn’t good ones reflect in some way the truth of a thing? Shouldn’t they hold their weight as it were? For me the steelyard does the job admirably and, yes, before you ask, even Nonists need symbols they can believe in.

Hope you enjoyed.

Quote: “Only 16, he walked into a Marine Corps recruiting office in Wichita and said he was 18. The recruiter didn’t believe him and sent him away. The Navy rejected Buckles as flat-footed. Finally, an Army recruiter in Oklahoma City accepted him, but only after Buckles insisted that the only proof of his age was in a family Bible back in Missouri. The state didn’t issue birth certificates in those days.

“I liked the Army right off,” says Buckles, recalling how he enjoyed calisthenics.

He was in a hurry to get to the front. A sergeant told him to join the ambulance corps because the French, America’s ally, were “begging for ambulances.” At Fort Riley, Kan., he learned how to use his belt to cinch a wounded soldier to his back and carry him from a trench.

He eventually got to France, but never close enough to the action to pull anyone from a trench.” —Andrea Stone, USA TODAY.

Quote: “After the armistice, he was assigned to guard German prisoners waiting to be repatriated. Seeing that he was still just a boy, the prisoners adopted him, taught him their language, gave him food from their Red Cross packages, bits of their uniforms to take home as souvenirs.

In the 1930s, while working for a steamship company, Mr. Buckles visited Germany; it was difficult for him to reconcile his fond memories of those old P.O.W.’s with what he saw of life under the Third Reich. The steamship company later sent him to run its office in Manila; he was there in January 1942 when the Japanese occupied the city and took him prisoner.” —Richard Rubin, NY TIMES.

He remained a P.O.W. himself for over 3 years. A strange symmetry there certainly.

How does Buckles feel about the quirk of circumstance which has left him, as the last American survivor of the Great War, a name for the history books?

Quote: “Someone has to do it.”

The Veteran’s History Project at the Library of Congress has a section devoted to Buckles which you might check out if your interested including a 148 minute video interview.

Cavellini was born into an Italian merchant family and ran a dry goods store, which in the post-war years following World War II he transformed into a thriving department store. In the late 40’s he began using profits from the family business to buy art. This is how his initial inroads into the art world began, as a collector and early (albeit decidedly amateur) proponent of Modernism. It wasn’t until about 1960, when he’d exhibited and sold much of his collection, that he began trying seriously to transition into becoming a creator of art rather than just a collector.

This was not, strictly speaking, his first foray into art-making however-

Quote: “At 15 he was dressing windows for the family shop and skillfully using brush and ink to letter price cards for the vitrines. This new-found graphic facility inspired some youthful experiments with sketching and caricature which continued during his army service and led to his being charged with lettering Mussolini’s slogans on corridor walls. A chance encounter with a local painter, Domenicao Mucci, resulted in some informal instruction in fundamentals. Right after the war Cavellini tried his hand at drawing landscapes, self-portraits and other figurative subjects. The wealth of art that he saw in the museums and ateliers of Paris during his 1947 trip persuaded him to abandon his paltry efforts, but about 12 years later he felt compelled to make art once again.” —Marcia E. Vetrocq, Art in America, 1993.

Now, just because you are compelled to create does not mean you are creating anything of particular interest to anyone else. I am of the opinion that if creating art fulfills you then the act of creation itself, its rush, its internal convolutions, its compelling emotional peaks and valleys, its ability to keep you engaged and distracted from self destruction, is reward enough. You may proclaim “I am an artist” in crowded rooms all you like, or you may work in a vacuum and never let on. Little matter, so long as you are actively fascinated and successfully avoiding the great emptiness at the center of it all, then positive outside valuations of your work are a luxury, comfy and gratifying but ultimately inessential. Cavellini did not seem to agree. For him, joining the canon was the only goal.

Public response to his work was tepid at best. He cycled quickly through styles and traditions seeking to find a voice which others might actually want to hear. He worked on abstractions, gestural pieces, collages, imagery of pop culture Icons, assemblage, etc, etc. Ultimately, the words which best describe his output to this point, however, are reproduction, homage, and appropriation. His work was “openly and blissfully derivative of the artists whose works he admired or collected.”

Quote: “Cavellini’s aggression toward the system of art, stoked by experiences of rejection both as a collector and as an artist, was expressed in acts of comically flagrant plagiarism accompanied by outrageous claims of authorship, in the seemingly endless reproduction and recycling of his own and others’ imagery, and in unabashed gestures of self-promotion.” —Marcia E. Vetrocq, Art in America, 1993.

He had 6 gallery shows between the years of 1962 and 1970 which by his yardstick were total failures, resulting in only two sales and total critical silence. It was this period of failure which inspired the conceptually self-referential “Autostoricizzazione” or “Self-Historification” which would occupy the rest of his artistic career, and find him trying desperately to “enter Olympus without asking anyone’s permission.”

Quote: “The biography of an artist is frequently written after his death, imperfectly and incompletely. Since I don’t want any such biography to be written about me, I’ve decided to write my own.” —G.A. Cavellini.

This autostoricizzazione put him at the center of a fictional art history in which he was a towering figure. He created a fake encyclopedia entry for himself ⊕, posters announcing centennial exhibitions of his work at museums around the world, and a series of postage stamps honoring him in the context of the great masters. He created frontispieces of fictional works like Dante’s Divine Cavellini, Leonardo’s Treatise on the Painting of Cavellini, and Nietzche’s Thus Spake Cavellini. He commissioned portraits of himself by better known artists which he used in his own work, he travelled with a “court photographer,” and created a seemingly endless amount of self-portraiture.

This was all the tip of the autostoricizzazione iceberg, for Cavellini had become more than anything a conceptual artist and the one concept he explored, over and over and over, was himself and his own towering position within the history of art.

Quote” Here in Italy, perhaps, there are still people who want to label me «the famous collector,» or to think of me as a rich provincial who amuses himself with sophomoric experiments in making art. «Self-Historification» may still be too far ahead of the times; people still aren’t ready to take it seriously since they find it paradoxical, anomalous and full of presumption. They act as though they considered me an artist «to be kept under observation» as though I were still waiting my turn finally to «make it». Perhaps my way of doing things is still unclassifiable, and even though I’m no longer a young artist, I’m simply never mentioned whenever the critics try to put together a show of the most significant developments in art in recent years- Either criticism has no eyes to see with or else it thinks of these free-wheeling operations of mine as belonging to a world of the future that’s still to be materialized. The critics don’t want to admit or to understand that I’m a new Duchamp.”

“For quite some time now, I’ve been receiving daily testimonials in the form of art works that give praise and pay homage both to «Self-Historification» as a phenomenon and to me as a person. Nothing like this has ever happened to an artist before. This material is all destined to go into a «Cavellini Museum,» and scholars will sooner or later be forced to study and consult it, since it’s an entirely unprecedenied phenomenon in all of art hisiory, and it’s not likely ever to happen again.”

“By now, an incredibly large number of facts and circumstances has grown up around my process of «Self-Historification» and I feel that I have every reason to be convinced that it’s destined to be a great deal more than just a meteor that flashes for only an instant through the skies; slowly but surely, «Self-Historification» is destined to become one of the most firmly fixed stars in all of art hisiory. (It) has already proved to be an indication for the construction of a new civilization and an entirely new way of thinking.” —G.A. Cavellini, from Autoritratti, 1981.

Cavallini went on “self-historifying” himself right up until his death in 1990, leaving behind a mountain of works and papers, all designed to help him storm the annals… so let me ask you, had you ever heard of him before now?

Personally I’m not particularly bowled-over by Cavellini’s works pictorially speaking, though some are compelling, nor am I much interested in conceptual art of this kind. I do find his quixotic quest interesting however.

It strikes me that though most of us may never have heard of Cavellini, he has had a modicum of success at attaining his goal of artistic immortality. I am, after all, writing about him right now and extending his post-humous reach. And though I purchased his book of self-portraits in the Strand’s bargain bin, it was there to be purchased.

To me Cavellini is a bit of a sad clown character because the lengths to which he took his joke seems slightly tragic. Rather than the sly wink and implied mystery which many self-aggrandizing artists employ to better effect, Cavellini seems to me more like a hammy vaudevillian.

The analogy which immediately comes to mind is that Loony Tunes cartoon, called Show Biz Bugs, in which Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck are competing for an audience’s applause. Bugs does a simple dance and gets wild applause. Daffy meanwhile goes all out, dances with visible effort, slides toward the audience on his knees with arms outstretched in expectation… and is greeted with the sound of crickets. For me that dance is Cavellini’s career. 

And yet as I said, he is remembered to some degree. Why? I would have to contend that in much the same way world history remembers, to spite itself, particularly potent screw-ups and villains, so too does art history make allowances for others than its paragons. In Cavellini’s case I’d say he took a certain brand of conceptual buffoonery to previously unknown levels, and so must be remembered as one of its giants. It’s only fair.

The irony is that today, very similar kinds of buffoonery regularly spawn millionaire art celebrities who are whole heartedly embraced by the art intelligentsia. Indeed in many respects he is conceptually a forefather of postmodernism. So perhaps Cavellini was ahead of his time, just as he said he was, and merely had the misfortune of being born in an era when the art world still had something like accepted standards one was expected to measure up to.

In any case, it’s all subjective now isn’t it? He says “emperor of presumption,” I say sad clown, you say potato. We’re all right and Art just keeps on chugging along.

-

Most of the biographical information in this post was adapted from Marcia E. Vetrocq’s Art in America piece, Dispatches From the Jungle of Art. If you are interested in the artist I recommend reading it as it goes into much deeper detail.

The images were all scanned from Cavellini’s book Autoritratti.

You can see more of Cavellini’s work at The Cavellini Archive Foundation website.

What makes this particular document so fantastic is that in issuing these “Special Instructions To Players,” warning against foul language on the field, Major League baseball decided to reprint some of the offensive language verbatim. Hilarious.

See below and read for yourself.

Ha. God I love that.

It shouldn’t come as any kind of surprise though, considering in the 1890’s baseball players weren’t yet the over-groomed, under-motivated, millionaires we’re stuck watching today. Back then, if these guys hadn’t been playing ball they’d probably be exactly what they sounded like, longshoremen, or coal miners, or infantry grunts, or vice presidents.

A grateful hat tip to seldivider for bringing this to my attention, and giving me an excuse to coin the hyphenated term “shit-pickling.”