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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.

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News (via) 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.

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Around 1919, after having studied philosophy at the University of Bonn and serving in the German army on both the Western and Eastern fronts, Ernst began experimenting with collage. He explains the impetus as follows:

“One day (in 1919), whereas I looked at an illustrated book of objects (umbrellas, watches, tools, clothing, etc) I was surprised to see such different things tight beside the others, things which one does not see together usually, my eyes saw other objects, I wanted to add with the pencil some lines and hatchings between the various objects so that it gives the same images that I see in my dreams.” –Max Ernst.

“It was enough at that time to embellish these catalogue pages, in painting or drawing, and thereby in gently reproducing only that which saw itself in me, a colour, a pencil mark, a landscape foreign to the represented objects, the desert, a tempest, a geological cross-section, a floor, a single straight line signifying the horizon ... thus I obtained a faithful fixed image of my hallucination and transformed into revealing dramas my most secret desires--from what had been before only some banal pages of advertising.” —Max Ernst: Beyond Painting 1948. 

The collage-novels which Ernst began creating in 1929, including La Femme 100 têtes (The Hundred Headless Women) and Une Semaine de bonté (A Week of Kindness), undoubtedly represent a pinnacle of the form.

I’d like to share with you some examples from a third collage novel by Ernst, published in 1930, titled, Rêve d’une petite fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel or, A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil, which I am lucky enough to own a copy of. It is the story of a girl who loses her viginity on the day of her first communion and so commits herself to “taking the veil.” The collages, each accompanied by a few short lines, are visualizations of the impious, schizophrenic, and mostly nightmarish dreams she has that night.

The book begins with a 5 page surrealistic sketch by way of introduction. Here is an excerpt:

Academy of Science.

The night will come when the Academy of Science itself will not disdain to cast its gaze on the sewers of the world. The night will come when, covered with all their jewels, the secondary skeletons that one calls scientists will ask themselves this question:

What do little girls dream of who want to take the veil?

On that night a violent storm will break against the doors of the academy of science and the water will roar in the pipes.

The water will remember the shameful year 1930, the year it would have liked to see all the cathedrals of the universe parade in far-too-short dresses. It will remember above all a certain night because…

On Good Friday night of the shameful year 1930 a child hardly sixteen years old dipperd her two hands in the sewer, pricked her skin and with her blood traced these lines”

To love the holy father and to dip one’s hands in a sewer, such is happiness for us, children of Mary.

77 collages follow, separated into four sections. Below I’ve reproduced 15 of them complete with accompanying text. Have a look.

The book’s translator’s note has this to say on the collages themselves:

“Each one of these collages uses cuttings often from the most banal of pre-photography illustrated penny novels, and from popular tomes about nature, science, and exoticism. The result may seem to embody our most frequent tragedies, our wriest enslavements, our most terrible solutions. Specificity dissolves in the timeless and the general.” —Dorothea Tanning.

The introduction to Max Ernst: A Retrospective adds the following:

“Max Ernst’s collages, for all their strangeness, strive for overall coherence and technical plausibility. This ‘plausible’ imagery, unlike the papiers colles of Picasso and Georges Braque, depends on an expurgation of the visible difference between artist’s hand and non-artistic quotation. The joins and overlappings had to be concealed from the viewer. This is why Ernst frequently published his composite imagery only in printed form, in photographic reproduction or in versions later touched up with watercolour. Thanks to these tactics of concealment he succeeded in presenting collage as that which he thought it should be: a completely developed and autonomous system in which the origin of the separate elements is submerged in the final, total image. He was out to produce irritating imagery in which, as in the perfect crime, every clue to its identity had been erased.” — Werner Spies.

To me there is a gravitas to etchings and wood engravings, a sort of official-ness, which is unshakeable. Perhaps it is simply the obvious effort involved in their creation or their historic connection with inherently valuable printed matter (be it newspaper or book) which lends the form these overtones. In any case, I think it is exactly this implied gravitas playing against Ernst’s strange, poetic, feverish, and funny subject matter, which creates the oddly arresting magnetism they still manage to exert almost 80 years later. I can only wonder at the effect they had on viewers in the 30’s… Some mixture of giggle and shiver I would imagine.

Anyhow, hope you enjoyed these.

For more on Ernst’s collage-novels see:
Une Semaine de Bonté: A Surrealistic Novel in Collage on google books.
Une Semaine de Bonté at La Boîte A Images.
A Week of Kindness at Giornale Nuovo.
La femme 100 têtes at Koninklijke Bibliotheek.
Werner Spies’ piece at Artchive.com.
The enduring significance of the work of Max Ernst By Stuart Nolan.
Max Ernst’s Adventures in Collage from The New York Times.
Kindness Week a film by Ernst based on his collage.
Ernst related videos at Tiosam.com

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Note: This post is in a series of reworkings of old posts which date from before the redesign of The Nonist. The text has been reworked and added to considerably, the amount of images has been doubled, and the links are all new. I will be periodically adding these reworkings into the flow of new content in an effort to eventually remove all the old pages from circulation.

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First a few words on the manuscript’s origins and possibly misleading title.

The Drake Manuscript is named for Sir Francis Drake, the famed English privateer, navigator, slave trader, politician, and pirate of the Elizabethan era, whose travels it is thought to illustrate. Though Drake was himself something of an artist ⊕, the images in Histoire Naturelle des Indes were not created by his hand. Nothing of his artwork survives as it turns out.

Truth be told there is no conclusive evidence to suggest that Drake had anything to do with the manuscript, let alone that it ought to be informally named after him. Such are the gears of history- grinding the anonymous down to invisibility and raising the famed higher… for a while at least.

The best guess as to the manuscripts origins are something along these lines-

The naive drawings ⊕ show signs of being created by several separate hands. Context reveals that these were likely the hands of Huguenots. Drake is known to have employed not only Huguenots on his voyages but artists as well. A “considerable number” of the images correspond to ports of call familiar to Drake, in some cases associated directly with his voyages, and Drake is mentioned by name, twice, in the manuscript itself. Hence, with a nice pile of circumstantial evidence to stand on, and no other clues, we have The Drake Manuscript.

Anyhow, whether this is simply an instance of a famous name capturing otherwise anonymous historical debris with its considerable gravitational pull ⊕ or simply an instance of fine deduction on the part of historians doesn’t matter much. What matters are the 199 fascinating images and accompanying captions.

Taken as a whole the images are an interesting mixture. The drawings of plants and animals are presented in a sort of cold practical manner, removed from their natural surroundings, with captions that read almost like a sales catalog, listing the virtues and drawbacks of each. ⊕ The drawings of the indigenous peoples themselves on the other hand are altogether warmer and seem to serve no greater purpose than curiosity.

The styles of the images are an interesting mixture as well-

Quote, “Some drawings are well rendered, others mere daubs, but most have a kind of buoyantly piquant vision of their subjects. Some are true to life, some–particularly the fishes with doglike snouts and ears–arise from an almost medieval fancy, and some may reflect a knowledge of printed sources.” - Verlyn Klinkenborg.

I’ve reproduced a group of the images below for your scrutiny. Some were chosen because I particularly liked the drawing, some because I was amused by the caption, and some because the ghost of Drake, boarding the deck of my apartment and holding me at sword-point, compelled me to. Have a look for yourself.

I find these fascinating, and believe me when I say I had trouble choosing from the 199 plates reproduced in the excellent facsimile.

Concerning the images themselves it amazes me to look at them in the artistic context of their time, because though I undoubtedly find them beautiful, when I remind myself that they were created in the 1590’s, and that at that same moment El Greco, Rubens, and Caravaggio were all active… well it’s surprising. Thought of in those terms it’s a wonder these weren’t made by the “Indians” themselves.

I think today, with television and advertising and graphic design having made the shared “visual language” so pervasive, we have a tendency to regard varying levels of visual sophistication simply as styles which homogeneously blanket entire eras, permeating everything from high art to life’s daily banalities. It may be true, to some degree, as far back as the 19th century, but images like those in the Drake Manuscript are, for me, a useful reminder that if you travel further back, our conceptions begin to break down and become little more than assumptions, based on the retrofitted categorizations art historians have coined for us.

The captions fascinate and amuse me for a similar reason. There is something comical to me about contemporaries of Shakespeare, Giordano Bruno, Cervantes, and Galileo ⊕ traveling to these “savage” lands, filled with a blustery and inalienable sense of their own superiority over the ignorant inhabitants, who upon arrival and lengthy inspection proceed to relay information as goofy and superstitious and folkloric ⊕ as their dark-age ancestors might have believed.

Of course, as not to fall into the same trap of egoistic presumption, and lest snide ephemera hunters of the 3000’s stumble upon this blog (attributing it, of course, to Markos Moulitsas or Xeni Jardin whilst my anonymous bones decay in quietude) and scoff at the wrong-mindedness of it all, I’ll shut my mouth right there.

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For a bit more on the manuscript see-

The Morgan Library page

Histoire naturelle des Indes on Google books.

This pdf from the National Humanities Center.

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I’ll only say this in closing, I enjoyed these and I hope you did as well.

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And let’s not forget that enigmatic architectural face, or “Cybertectural Animot,” which began the post. It is a detail of a piece depicting walking cities by artist Mike Wilkes, and you can click here to see the full image.

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You might look at these images of the future and find them stylistically dated, and they are 30 years old at this point, literally images of futures past, so I wouldn’t argue with you. I do think, however, that in a very palpable way these images, and images like them from the late 50’s all the way through the early 80’s, represent something which, in sci-fi’s drive toward the future, and possibly more to the point its drive toward “respectability,” the marketers of the genre have let slip away. That thing being Style.

A critique of the current face of science fiction and fantasy, as embodied in its book covers, is a voyage I plan to undertake, enthusiastically, in a future post. So I’ll just leave it at that for now.

In the meantime I hope you enjoyed these at least as much as those Strand cashiers seemed to, and I hope the sensation of feeling nostalgia for decades old visions of the future which have not nor may ever arrive is not to off-putting. Likewise I hope deeper reflection on the oddity of such a feeling does not leave any ugly bruises on your brain.

Until next time…

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