Henrietta Lacks Gets Immortalized in a Portrait: It’s Now on Display at the National Portrait Gallery

in Art, History, Science | June 1st, 2018

In my child­hood, I heard sto­ries about Hen­ri­et­ta Lacks’ mirac­u­lous cells. I heard these sto­ries because she hap­pened to have been my grandmother’s cousin. But this was just oral lore, I thought at first, leg­endary and implau­si­ble. Cells don’t just keep grow­ing indef­i­nite­ly. Noth­ing is immor­tal. That’s a safe assump­tion in most every oth­er case, but mil­lions of peo­ple now know what only a rel­a­tive­ly self-con­tained com­mu­ni­ty of researchers, doc­tors, biol­o­gy stu­dents, and, even­tu­al­ly, the Lacks fam­i­ly once did: Henrietta’s cer­vi­cal can­cer cells con­tin­ued to grow and mul­ti­ply after her death in 1951. They may, indeed, do so for­ev­er.

The once anony­mous cell line, called HeLa, has pro­vid­ed researchers world­wide with invalu­able med­ical data. Hen­ri­et­ta her­self went unrec­og­nized and unre­mem­bered until fair­ly recent­ly. That all changed after Rebec­ca Skloot’s book The Immor­tal Life of Hen­ri­et­ta Lacks, based on an ear­li­er series of arti­cles, appeared in 2010 to great acclaim. Since the pub­li­ca­tion of Skloot’s best­seller, the sto­ry of Hen­ri­et­ta and the Lacks fam­i­ly has fur­ther achieved renown in a 2017 film ver­sion star­ring Oprah Win­frey.

Suf­fice it say, see­ing Hen­ri­et­ta arrive on the pop cul­tur­al stage has been a strange expe­ri­ence. (One made even weird­er by oth­er media moments, like indie band Yeasay­er and for­mer Dead Kennedys singer Jel­lo Biafra releas­ing songs about her and her cells.) The injus­tices of Henrietta’s sto­ry are now well-known. She was poor and received sub­stan­dard med­ical treat­ment. Her cells were har­vest­ed with­out her knowl­edge, and after her death, no one noti­fied the fam­i­ly about the world­wide use of her cells for bio­med­ical research. That is, until doc­tors did research on her chil­dren in the 70s, pub­lish­ing fam­i­ly med­ical records with­out con­sent and gath­er­ing more data because the HeLa cells had con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed oth­er cell lines.

She has “become one of the most pow­er­ful sym­bols for informed con­sent in the his­to­ry of sci­ence,” Nela Ula­by writes at NPR. She is also a sym­bol, says Bill Pret­zer, senior cura­tor at the Nation­al Muse­um of African Amer­i­can His­to­ry and Cul­ture (NMAAHC), “that his­to­ry can be remade, re-remem­bered.” To that end, Hen­ri­et­ta has been immor­tal­ized as a whole human being, not just the source of extra­or­di­nar­i­ly immor­tal cells. Her por­trait, by African-Amer­i­can artist Kadir Nel­son, now hangs in the Nation­al Por­trait Gallery, a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of both the his­tor­i­cal fig­ure and her world-his­tor­i­cal bio­log­i­cal lega­cy.

Draw­ing on the pho­to­graph that adorns the cov­er of Skloot’s book, the por­trait shows her “just like they said she was in life,” says her grand­daugh­ter Jeri Lacks-Whye, “hap­py, out­go­ing, giv­ing,” and styl­ish­ly dressed. The two miss­ing but­tons on her dress rep­re­sent the cells tak­en from her body, and the pat­tern behind her, which “almost looks like wall­pa­per,” says Nation­al Por­trait Gallery cura­tor Dorothy Moss, is “actu­al­ly rep­re­sen­ta­tive of her cells.” Oth­er trib­utes, notes Ula­by, include a “high school for stu­dents inter­est­ed in med­i­cine” and “a minor plan­et whirling in the aster­oid belt between Mars and Jupiter.” The cells have also gen­er­at­ed bil­lions of dol­lars in prof­it.

In life, she could nev­er have imag­ined this strange kind of fame and for­tune. The HeLa cells were instru­men­tal in the devel­op­ment of the polio vac­cine and research in cloning, gene map­ping, and in vit­ro fer­til­iza­tion. They have trav­eled into space and around the world hun­dreds of times. The sto­ry of the per­son they came from, says Skloot in a 2010 inter­view, reminds us that “there are human beings behind every bio­log­i­cal sam­ple used in the lab­o­ra­to­ry… but they’re usu­al­ly left out of the equa­tion.” Mak­ing those lives an essen­tial part of the con­ver­sa­tion in med­ical research can help keep that research eth­i­cal­ly hon­est, equi­table, and, one hopes, based in serv­ing human needs over cor­po­rate greed.

The por­trait will remain at the Nation­al Por­trait Gallery until Novem­ber 4th, after which it will return to the NMAAHC.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Biol­o­gy Cours­es 

Down­load 100,000+ Images From The His­to­ry of Med­i­cine, All Free Cour­tesy of The Well­come Library

African-Amer­i­can His­to­ry: Mod­ern Free­dom Strug­gle (A Free Course from Stan­ford) 

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Explore 7,600 Works of Art by Edvard Munch: They’re Now Digitized and Free Online

in Archives, Art | May 30th, 2018

If there were ever an exhi­bi­tion of artis­tic “one-hit-won­ders,” sure­ly Edvard Munch’s The Scream would occu­py a cen­tral place, maybe hung adja­cent to Grant Wood’s Amer­i­can Goth­ic. The ratio of those who know this sin­gle paint­ing to those who know the artist’s oth­er works must be expo­nen­tial­ly high, which is some­thing of a shame. That’s not to say The Scream does not deserve its exalt­ed place in pop­u­lar culture—like Wood’s stone-faced Mid­west farm­ers, the wavy fig­ure, clutch­ing its scream­ing skull-like head, res­onates at the deep­est of psy­chic fre­quen­cies, an arche­typ­al evo­ca­tion of exis­ten­tial hor­ror.

Not for noth­ing has Sue Prideaux sub­ti­tled her Munch biog­ra­phy Behind the Scream. “Rarely in the canon of West­ern art,” writes Tom Rosen­thal at The Inde­pen­dent, “has there been so much anx­i­ety, fear and deep psy­cho­log­i­cal pain in one artist. That he lived to be 80 and spent only one peri­od in an asy­lum is a trib­ute not only to Munch’s phys­i­cal sta­mi­na but to his iron will and his innate, robust psy­cho­log­i­cal strength.” Born in Nor­way in 1863, the sick­ly Edvard, whose moth­er died soon after his birth, was raised by a harsh dis­ci­pli­nar­i­an father who read Poe and Dos­to­evsky to his chil­dren and, in addi­tion to beat­ing them “for minor infrac­tions,” would “invoke the image of their blessed moth­er who saw them from heav­en and griev­ed over their mis­be­hav­ior.”

The trau­ma was com­pound­ed by the death of Munch’s sis­ter and, lat­er, his broth­er, and by the insti­tu­tion­al­iza­tion of anoth­er sis­ter, Lau­ra, diag­nosed with schiz­o­phre­nia. Munch’s own child­hood ill­ness made his school­ing errat­ic, though he did man­age to receive some artis­tic train­ing, briefly, at Oslo’s Art Asso­ci­a­tion, an artist’s club where he “learnt by copy­ing the works on dis­play.”

From there the young Munch launched him­self into an extra­or­di­nar­i­ly pro­duc­tive career, punc­tu­at­ed by leg­endary bouts of drink­ing and carous­ing and intense friend­ships with lit­er­ary fig­ures like August Strind­berg.

If we count our­selves among those who know lit­tle of Munch’s work, a new ini­tia­tive from the Munch Muse­um in Oslo aims to cor­rect that by mak­ing over 7,600 of Munch’s draw­ings avail­able online. “The online cat­a­log, free to all,” notes Hyperallergic’s Sarah Rose Sharp, “rep­re­sents a tremen­dous feat of logis­tics, and fea­tures draw­ings that go back as far as the artist’s child­hood, sketch­books, stud­ies of tools, coins, and keys that demon­strate Munch’s ded­i­ca­tion as a dis­ci­plined drafts­man, and water­col­ors of build­ings that were some of the first bod­ies of work devel­oped by the artist in his youth.”

Over 90% of the draw­ings on dig­i­tal dis­play come from the Museum’s hold­ings, the rest from oth­er pub­lic and pri­vate col­lec­tions. “The goal is to make Munch’s art known and eas­i­ly acces­si­ble to as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble,” Magne Bruteig, Senior Cura­tor for Prints and Draw­ings, tells Hyper­al­ler­gic. “Since the major­i­ty of the draw­ings had nev­er been exhib­it­ed or pub­lished in any way, it has been of spe­cial impor­tance to reveal this ‘hid­den trea­sure.’” The online col­lec­tion, then, not only serves as an intro­duc­tion for Munch novices but also for long­time admir­ers of the artist’s work, who have hith­er­to had lit­tle to no access to this huge col­lec­tion of stud­ies, prepara­to­ry sketch­es, water­col­ors, etc., which includes the mis­er­able fam­i­ly group­ing of Angst, at the top, the reprise of his infa­mous Scream fig­ure, fur­ther up, from 1898, and The Sick Child, above, a por­trait of his sis­ter Sophie who died in child­hood.

The draw­ings date back to 1873, when Munch was only ten years old and insert­ed a series of his own illus­tra­tions into a copy of Grimm’s Fairy­tales. The final works date from 1943, the year before the artist’s death, when he made the self-por­trait above in pas­tel cray­on. Munch’s work, writes Rosen­thal, “is com­pul­sive­ly auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal.” Remain­ing a com­mit­ted bach­e­lor all of his life, he said that “his paint­ings were his chil­dren, even though he gave many of them a some­what Spar­tan upbring­ing, delib­er­ate­ly leav­ing them not only unvar­nished but exposed to the ele­ments in his vast out­door stu­dio or hung on walls, unframed and with nails through them.” The sev­er­al thou­sand draw­ings he fathered seem to have been treat­ed with more care. Delve into the enor­mous col­lec­tion at the Oslo Munch Muse­um site here, where you can also view many of the artist’s paint­ings and learn much more about his life and work through arti­cles and essays.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

30,000 Works of Art by Edvard Munch & Oth­er Artists Put Online by Norway’s Nation­al Muse­um of Art

Edvard Munch’s Famous Paint­ing “The Scream” Ani­mat­ed to the Sound of Pink Floyd’s Pri­mal Music

The Edvard Munch Scream Action Fig­ure

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Discover the Lost Early Computer Art of Telidon, Canada’s TV Proto-Internet from the 1970s

in Art, Technology | May 25th, 2018

Most of us got hooked up to the inter­net in the 1990s or there­abouts, though the true ear­ly adopters did it when per­son­al com­put­ers first blew up in the 1980s. But cer­tain Cana­di­an house­holds got online even ear­li­er, in the late 1970s, although not quite on the inter­net as we know it: they had Telidon, a phone line-con­nect­ed video­tex/tele­tex sys­tem that used a reg­u­lar tele­vi­sion as a dis­play. “It is no exag­ger­a­tion to say that the telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions mar­ket­place in Cana­da was gripped by Telidon fever from late 1979 to late 1982,” writes Don­ald Gilles in the Cana­di­an Jour­nal of Com­mu­ni­ca­tions. Fuel­ing that fever was “hope and belief in tech­nol­o­gy – sci­ence-based tech­nol­o­gy – as an agent of change, a bringer of nov­el­ty, and enhancer of life.”


When it first came avail­able, Telidon’s con­tent providers includ­ed “cor­po­ra­tions and inter­ests such as The Bay, Ency­clo­pe­dia Bri­tan­ni­ca and the Toron­to Star,” writes the CBC’s Chris Hamp­ton, but “a com­mu­ni­ty of arts-mind­ed elec­tron­ics wonks, tele­com prophets and oth­er curi­ous sorts coa­lesced around it, embrac­ing it as an art medi­um.”

You can see some of those Telidon cre­ators inter­viewed in the short Moth­er­board doc­u­men­tary at the top of the post. While busi­ness­es exper­i­ment­ed with pos­si­bil­i­ties of bank­ing and shop­ping through the sys­tem, artists pushed its bound­aries even fur­ther, using its now severe-seem­ing tech­no­log­i­cal lim­i­ta­tions as a cat­a­lyst for visu­al cre­ativ­i­ty. On some months, artist Bill Per­ry’s Telidon mag­a­zine Com­put­erese drew more view­ers than every oth­er provider com­bined.


Now, more than 30 years after its dis­con­tin­u­a­tion, Telidon has attract­ed atten­tion again. It turns out that its ear­ly-com­put­er-art aes­thet­ic has aged quite well, as seen in the exam­ples now being pulled from the archives and Insta­grammed by Toron­to new-media cen­ter Inter­Ac­cess. Orig­i­nal­ly found­ed to make Telidon devel­op­ment tools avail­able to the artist com­mu­ni­ty, Inter­Ac­cess launched this social media project as a way of cel­e­brat­ing its own 35th birth­day. Look­ing back on all the uses artists found for Telidon — every­thing from abstract qua­si-ani­ma­tions to a study of per­spec­tives on the Cold War — we can imag­ine how com­par­a­tive­ly bound­less the mod­ern inter­net would have seemed to them. But we might also won­der what that mod­ern inter­net would look like if it had a lit­tle more of their artis­ti­cal­ly and tech­no­log­i­cal­ly adven­tur­ous spir­it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Inter­net Imag­ined in 1969

From the Annals of Opti­mism: The News­pa­per Indus­try in 1981 Imag­ines its Dig­i­tal Future

What the Entire Inter­net Looked Like in 1973: An Old Map Gets Found in a Pile of Research Papers

Andy Warhol’s Lost Com­put­er Art Found on 30-Year-Old Flop­py Disks

Watch Bri­an Eno’s “Video Paint­ings,” Where 1980s TV Tech­nol­o­gy Meets Visu­al Art

The Sto­ry of Habi­tat, the Very First Large-Scale Online Role-Play­ing Game (1986)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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When Robert Rauschenberg Asked Willem De Kooning for One of His Paintings … So That He Could Erase It

in Art | May 24th, 2018

How to make a name for one­self in the art world? Every up-and-com­ing artist has to face that intim­i­dat­ing ques­tion in one way or anoth­er, but Robert Rauschen­berg, now remem­bered as a lead­ing light of the pop art move­ment, came up with a par­tic­u­lar­ly mem­o­rable answer. When in 1953 he got the coun­ter­in­tu­itive idea to make a draw­ing not by draw­ing, but by eras­ing, he at first tried eras­ing images he’d drawn him­self. This brought him to the real­iza­tion that not only should his eras­ing con­sti­tute more than half the process — “I want­ed it to be the whole,” he lat­er said — but that, to make a real artis­tic impact, he’d have to erase the work of some­one impor­tant.

The log­i­cal choice at the time: Willem de Koon­ing, then already con­sid­ered a mas­ter of abstract expres­sion­ism. “I bought a bot­tle of Jack Daniels and went up and knocked on his door, pray­ing the whole time that he would­n’t be home,” says Rauschen­berg in the inter­view clip above, “but he was home.” Even­tu­al­ly he sold the old­er and more emi­nent artist on the idea of tak­ing a draw­ing, eras­ing it, and turn­ing that into art of his own, a pitch no doubt assist­ed by Rauschen­berg and de Koon­ing’s already friend­ly rela­tion­ship. (The already vast dif­fer­ence between their artis­tic styles also took the notion of artis­tic pat­ri­cide out of the ques­tion.)

De Koon­ing at first resist­ed, but then dou­bled down: “I want it to be some­thing I’ll miss,” Rauschen­berg remem­bers him say­ing before pick­ing out the sac­ri­fice. Erased de Koon­ing Draw­ing, the result of two months of eras­ing and count­less spent erasers, “essen­tial­ly remained an under­ground, art world phe­nom­e­non for more than ten years after it was com­plet­ed.” So writes SFMOMA cura­tor Sarah Roberts in an essay on the piece. “Sig­nif­i­cant­ly, it was exclud­ed from numer­ous impor­tant solo and group exhi­bi­tions in the late 1950s and ear­ly 1960s, cru­cial years when Rauschenberg’s rep­u­ta­tion was becom­ing estab­lished inter­na­tion­al­ly.”

But slow­ly, over the years, word spread through the art media and social scenes, and now the 27-year-old Rauschen­berg’s brazen artis­tic act has a place among the prog­en­i­tors of con­cep­tu­al art. “Yes, the era­sure was an act of destruc­tion,” writes Roberts, “but as a cre­ative ges­ture it was also an act of rev­er­ence or even devotion—to de Koon­ing, to draw­ing, to art his­to­ry, and to the idea of tak­ing a risk and being open to what­ev­er comes as a result.” Though prac­ti­cal­ly unknown for quite a long time, Erased de Koon­ing Draw­ing can now hard­ly be for­got­ten — which takes eras­ing a respect­ed fore­bear’s work off the table as a means of name-mak­ing for young artists today, each of whom will have to find their own way to set off a slow-burn shock.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Robert Rauschenberg’s 34 Illus­tra­tions of Dante’s Infer­no (1958–60)

New Robert Rauschen­berg Dig­i­tal Col­lec­tion Lets You Down­load Free High-Res Images of the Artist’s Work

The MoMA Teach­es You How to Paint Like Pol­lock, Rothko, de Koon­ing & Oth­er Abstract Painters

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The Art of Europe’s Forgotten Avant-Garde Artists Now Digitized and Put Online

in Archives, Art, History | May 23rd, 2018

Eco­nom­i­cal­ly deplet­ed but filled with the desire to pose ques­tions about the future in rad­i­cal­ly new ways, post­war Europe would prove fer­tile ground for the devel­op­ment of avant-garde art. Though that envi­ron­ment pro­duced a fair few stars over the sec­ond half of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, their work rep­re­sents only the tip of the ice­berg: bring­ing the rest out of the depths and onto the inter­net has con­sti­tut­ed the last few years’ work for For­got­ten Her­itage. A col­lab­o­ra­tion between insti­tu­tions in Poland, Bel­gium, Croa­t­ia, Esto­nia, and Ger­many sup­port­ed by Cre­ative Europe, the project offers a data­base of Euro­pean avant-garde art — includ­ing many works still dar­ing, sur­pris­ing, or just plain bizarre — nev­er prop­er­ly pre­served and made avail­able until now.

For­got­ten Her­itage’s About page describes the pro­jec­t’s goal as the cre­ation of “an inno­v­a­tive online repos­i­to­ry fea­tur­ing digi­tised archives of Pol­ish, Croa­t­ian, Eston­ian, Bel­gian and French artists of the avant-garde move­ment occur­ring in the sec­ond half of the 20th cen­tu­ry,” meant to even­tu­al­ly con­tain “approx­i­mate­ly 8 thou­sand of sort­ed and clas­si­fied archive entries, includ­ing descrip­tive data.”

Cur­rent­ly, writes Hyper­al­ler­gic’s Claire Voon, its site “offers vis­i­tors around 800 records to explore, from doc­u­men­ta­tion of art­works to texts.  The major­i­ty of works stem from to the ’60s and ’70s, as a time­line illus­trates, with the most recent piece dat­ing to 2005. This inter­ac­tive fea­ture, which has embed­ded links to indi­vid­ual artists’s biogra­phies and exam­ples of their art­works, is one way to explore the well-designed archive.”

For­got­ten Her­itage thus makes it easy to dis­cov­er artists pre­vi­ous­ly dif­fi­cult for even the avant-garde enthu­si­ast to encounter. Vis­i­tors can also browse the grow­ing archive by the medi­um of the work: paint­ing (like Jüri Arrak’s Artist, 1972, seen at the top of the post), instal­la­tion (Woj­ciech Bruszewski’s Visu­al­i­ty, 1980), film (Anna Kuter­a’s The Short­est Film in the World, 1975), “pho­to with inter­ven­tion” (Edi­ta Schu­bert’s Pho­ny Smile, 1997), Olav Moran’s “Konk­tal” and many more besides.

Voon cites Mari­ka Kuźmicz’s esti­mate that about 40 per­cent of it, most­ly from Bel­gian and Eston­ian artists, has nev­er before been avail­able online. Debates about whether an avant-garde still exists, in Europe or any­where else, will sure­ly con­tin­ue among observers of art, but as a vis­it to For­got­ten Her­itage’s dig­i­tal archives reveals, the avant-garde of decades past, when redis­cov­ered, retains no small amount of artis­tic vital­i­ty today.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dis­cov­er Euro­peana Col­lec­tions, a Por­tal of 48 Mil­lion Free Art­works, Books, Videos, Arti­facts & Sounds from Across Europe

Every­thing You Need to Know About Mod­ern Russ­ian Art in 25 Min­utes: A Visu­al Intro­duc­tion to Futur­ism, Social­ist Real­ism & More

Enter Dig­i­tal Archives of the 1960s Fluxus Move­ment and Explore the Avant-Garde Art of John Cage, Yoko Ono, John Cale, Nam June Paik & More

25 Mil­lion Images From 14 Art Insti­tu­tions to Be Dig­i­tized & Put Online In One Huge Schol­ar­ly Archive

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Robert Rauschenberg’s 34 Illustrations of Dante’s Inferno (1958–60)

in Art, Literature | May 23rd, 2018

Per­haps more than any oth­er post­war avant-garde Amer­i­can artist, Robert Rauschen­berg matched, and maybe exceed­ed, Mar­cel Duchamp’s puck­ish irrev­er­ence. He once bought a Willem de Koon­ing draw­ing just to erase it and once sent a telegram declar­ing that it was a por­trait of gal­lerist Iris Clert, “if I say so.” Rauschen­berg also excelled at turn­ing trash into trea­sure, repur­pos­ing the detri­tus of mod­ern life in works of art both play­ful and seri­ous, con­tin­u­ing to “address major themes of world­wide con­cern,” wrote art his­to­ri­an John Richard­son in a 1997 Van­i­ty Fair pro­file, “by uti­liz­ing tech­nol­o­gy in ever more imag­i­na­tive and inven­tive ways…. Rauschen­berg is a painter of history—the his­to­ry of now rather than then.”

What, then, pos­sessed this artist of the “his­to­ry of now” to take on a series of draw­ings between 1958 and 1960 illus­trat­ing each Can­to of Dante’s Infer­no? “Per­haps he sensed a kin­dred spir­it in Dante,” writes Gre­go­ry Gilbert at The Art News­pa­per, “that encour­aged his ver­nac­u­lar inter­pre­ta­tions of the clas­si­cal text and his rad­i­cal mix­ing of high and low cul­tures.”

Crit­ic Charles Dar­went reads Rauschenberg’s moti­va­tions through a Freudi­an lens, his Infer­no series a sub­li­ma­tion of his homo­sex­u­al­i­ty and repres­sive child­hood: “The young Rauschen­berg… came to see Mod­ernist art as a vari­ant of his Tex­an par­ents’ fun­da­men­tal Chris­tian­i­ty.”

The most straight­for­ward account has Rauschen­berg con­ceiv­ing the project in order to be tak­en more seri­ous­ly as an artist. Such bio­graph­i­cal expla­na­tions tell us some­thing about the work, but we learn as much or more from look­ing at the work itself, which hap­pens to be very much a his­to­ry of now at the end of the 1950s. Though Rauschen­berg based the illus­tra­tions on John Ciardi’s 1954 trans­la­tion of the Divine Com­e­dy, they were not meant to accom­pa­ny the text but to stand on their own, the Ital­ian epic—or its famous first third—providing a back­drop of ready-made iron­ic com­men­tary on images Rauschen­berg ripped from news­pa­pers and mag­a­zines such as Life and Sports Illus­trat­ed.

“To cre­ate these col­lages,” explains MIT’s List Visu­al Arts Cen­ter, “he would use a sol­vent to adhere the images to his draw­ing sur­face, then over­lay them with a vari­ety of media, includ­ing pen, gouache (an opaque water­col­or), and pen­cil.” Steeped in a Cold War atmos­phere, the illus­tra­tions incor­po­rate fig­ures like John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, who, in the 50s, Gilbert writes, “served as one of Joseph McCarthy’s polit­i­cal hench­men dur­ing the Red Scare.” We see in Rauschenberg’s col­lage draw­ings allu­sions to the Civ­il Rights move­ment and the decade’s anti-Com­mu­nist para­noia as well its reac­tionary sex­u­al pol­i­tics. “Polit­i­cal and sex­u­al con­tent… need­ed to be cod­ed,” Gilbert claims, in such an “ultra­con­ser­v­a­tive era.”

For exam­ple, we see a like­ly ref­er­ence to the artist’s gay iden­ti­ty in the Can­to XIV illus­tra­tion, above. The text “describes the pun­ish­ment of the Sodomites, who are con­demned for eter­ni­ty to walk across burn­ing sand. Rauschen­berg depicts the theme through a homo­erot­ic image of a male nude… jux­ta­posed with a red trac­ing of the artist’s own foot.” Maybe Dar­went is right to sup­pose that had Dante’s poem not exist­ed, Rauschen­berg “would have been the man to invent it”—or to invent its mid-20th cen­tu­ry visu­al equiv­a­lent. He draws atten­tion to the poem’s auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal cen­ter, its sub­ver­sive humor, and its den­si­ty of ref­er­ences to con­tem­po­rary 15th cen­tu­ry Ital­ian pol­i­tics, adapt­ing all of these qual­i­ties for moder­ni­ty.

But the illus­tra­tion of Can­to XIV—depicting “The Vio­lent Against God, Nature, and Art”—also encodes Rauschenberg’s vio­lent tram­pling of artis­tic con­ven­tion. Many crit­ics see this series as the artist’s reac­tion against Abstract Expres­sion­ism (like that of De Koon­ing). And while he “may have felt a cre­ative kin­ship with Dante,” writes Gilbert, “he also admit­ted to the art crit­ic Calvin Tomkins his impa­tience with the poet’s self-right­eous moral­i­ty, a state­ment like­ly direct­ed against this Can­to.” Like his 1953 Erased de Koon­ing Draw­ing, Rauschenberg’s Infer­no draw­ings also per­form an act of erasure—or the cre­ation of a palimpsest, with Dante’s poem scratched over by the artist’s wild, child­like strokes.

In recog­ni­tion of the way these illus­tra­tions repur­pose, rather than accom­pa­ny, the Infer­no, MoMA recent­ly com­mis­sioned an edi­tion of Rauschenberg’s 34 draw­ings, accom­pa­nied not by the straight trans­la­tion by Cia­r­di but poems by Kevin Young and Robin Coste Lewis, whose por­tion of the book is titled “Dante Comes to Amer­i­ca: 20 Jan­u­ary 17: An Era­sure of 17 Can­tos from Ciardi’s Infer­no, after Robert Rauschen­berg.” Rather than view­ing the illus­tra­tions against Dante’s work itself, we can read their par­tic­u­lar Amer­i­can pro­to-pop art char­ac­ter against lit­er­ary “era­sures” like Lewis’s “Can­to XXIII,” below. See the full series of Rauschenberg’s 34 illus­tra­tions at the Rauschen­berg Foun­da­tion web­site here.

Can­to XXIII.
by Robin Coste Lewis

                “I Go with The Body That Was Always Mine”

Silent, one fol­low­ing the oth­er,
the Fable hunt­ed us down.
O weary man­tle of eter­ni­ty,
turn left, reach us down
into that nar­row way in silence.

Col­lege of Sor­ry Hyp­ocrites, I go
with the body that was always mine,
bur­nished like coun­ter­weights to keep
the peace. One may still see the sort of peace

we kept. Mar­vel for a while over that:
the cross in Hel­l’s eter­nal exile.
Some­where there is some gap in the wall,
pit through which we may climb

to the next brink with­out the need
of sum­mon­ing the Black Angels
and forc­ing them to raise us from this sink.
Near­er than hope, there is a bridge

that runs from the great cir­cle, that cross­es
every ditch from ridge to ridge.
Except—it is broken—but with care.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Free Course on Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy from Yale Uni­ver­si­ty

New Robert Rauschen­berg Dig­i­tal Col­lec­tion Lets You Down­load Free High-Res Images of the Artist’s Work

Hear Dante’s Infer­no Read Aloud by Influ­en­tial Poet & Trans­la­tor John Cia­r­di (1954)

Artists Illus­trate Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy Through the Ages: Doré, Blake, Bot­ti­cel­li, Mœbius & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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The Art of Sci-Fi Book Covers: From the Fantastical 1920s to the Psychedelic 1960s & Beyond

in Art, Books, Sci Fi | May 21st, 2018

If you’ve nev­er seen Gen­tle­men Bron­cos, the lit­tle-seen third fea­ture by the Napoleon Dyna­mite-mak­ing hus­band-and-wife team Jared and Jerusha Hess, I high­ly rec­om­mend it. You must, though, enjoy the pecu­liar Hess sense of humor, a blend of the almost objec­tive­ly detached and the hearti­ly sopho­moric fixed upon the pre­oc­cu­pa­tions of deeply unfash­ion­able sec­tions of work­ing-class Amer­i­ca. In Gen­tle­men Bron­cos it makes itself felt imme­di­ate­ly, even before the film’s sto­ry of a young aspir­ing sci­ence fic­tion writer in small-town Utah begins, with a tour de force open­ing cred­its sequence made up of homages to the pulpi­est sci-fi book cov­ers of, if not recent decades, then at least semi-recent decades.

The style of these cov­er images, though ris­i­ble, no doubt look rich with asso­ci­a­tions to any­one who’s spent even small part of their lives read­ing mass-mar­ket sci-fi nov­els. To see more than a few high­er exam­ples, watch “The Art of Sci-Fi Book Cov­ers,” the Nerd­writer video essay above that digs into the his­to­ry of that enor­mous­ly inven­tive yet sel­dom seri­ous­ly con­sid­ered artis­tic sub­field.

Its begins with the world’s first sci­ence-fic­tion mag­a­zine Amaz­ing Sto­ries (an online archive of which we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture) and its pieces of fan­tas­ti­cal, eye-catch­ing cov­er art by Aus­tria-Hun­gary-born illus­tra­tor Frank R. Paul. In the mid-1920s, says the Nerd­writer, “these cov­ers were prob­a­bly among the strangest art that the aver­age Amer­i­can ever got to see.”

It would get stranger. The Nerd­writer fol­lows the devel­op­ment of sci-fi cov­er art from the hey­day of the Paul-illus­trat­ed Amaz­ing Sto­ries to the intro­duc­tion of mass-mar­ket paper­back books in the late 1930s to Pen­guin’s exper­i­men­ta­tion with exist­ing works of mod­ern art in the 1960s to the com­mis­sion­ing of new, even more bizarre and evoca­tive works by all man­ner of pub­lish­ers (some of them sci-fi spe­cial­ists) there­after. “You can walk into any used book store any­where and get five of these old pulp books for a dol­lar each,” the Nerd­writer reminds us. “And then the art is with you; it’s in your home. As you read the sto­ries, it’s on your bed­side table. It’s art you hold with your hands. It’s not pre­cious: it’s bent, fold­ed, and creased. And above all, it’s weird.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Enter a Huge Archive of Amaz­ing Sto­ries, the World’s First Sci­ence Fic­tion Mag­a­zine, Launched in 1926

Enter the Pulp Mag­a­zine Archive, Fea­tur­ing Over 11,000 Dig­i­tized Issues of Clas­sic Sci-Fi, Fan­ta­sy & Detec­tive Fic­tion

Pulp Cov­ers for Clas­sic Detec­tive Nov­els by Dashiell Ham­mett, Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie & Ray­mond Chan­dler

36 Abstract Cov­ers of Vin­tage Psy­chol­o­gy, Phi­los­o­phy & Sci­ence Books Come to Life in a Mes­mer­iz­ing Ani­ma­tion

Down­load 650 Sovi­et Book Cov­ers, Many Sport­ing Won­der­ful Avant-Garde Designs (1917–1942)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Tom Wolfe’s Groundbreaking Work, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Gets Released as a Limited Collector’s Edition, with Each Copy Signed by the Author 

in Art, Literature | May 21st, 2018

Taschen recent­ly released a col­lec­tor’s edi­tion of The Elec­tric Kool-Aid Acid Test to com­mem­o­rate the 50th anniver­sary of Tom Wolfe’s rol­lick­ing account of Ken Kesey and the Mer­ry Pranksters’ acid-fueled road trip across the Unit­ed States, aboard the psy­che­del­ic school bus known as “Fur­ther.” With the pass­ing of Tom Wolfe last week, the release of the col­lec­tor’s edi­tion takes on some added impor­tance.

When The Elec­tric Kool-Aid Acid Test first came out in 1968, Eliot Fre­mont-Smith wrote in The New York Times that “it is not sim­ply the best book on the hip­pies, it is the essen­tial book.” The book “is print­ed in black and white, but the words come through in crazy Day-Glo–fluorescent, psy­che­del­ic, at once ener­getic and epicene.”

The new Taschen edi­tion is some­thing dif­fer­ent. The abridged text is pub­lished in “tra­di­tion­al let­ter­press, with fac­sim­i­le repro­duc­tions of Wolfe’s man­u­script pages, as well as Ken Kesey’s jail­house jour­nals, hand­bills, and under­ground mag­a­zines of the peri­od.” “Inter­weav­ing the prose and ephemera are pho­to­graph­ic essays from Lawrence Schiller, whose cov­er­age of the acid scene for Life mag­a­zine helped inspire Wolfe to write his sto­ry, and Ted Streshin­sky, who accom­pa­nied Wolfe while report­ing for the New York Her­ald Tri­bune.” There are also pho­tographs by poet Allen Gins­berg.

In total, Taschen has pro­duced 1,968 signed copies of the col­lec­tor’s edi­tion, each signed by Tom Wolfe him­self. The cost is set at $350.

If you nev­er spent time with The Elec­tric Kool-Aid Acid Test and want to read a sim­ple paper­back edi­tion that costs less than $10, you can find a copy here.

Note: We belong to the Taschen affil­i­ate pro­gram. So if you get a copy of the col­lec­tor’s edi­tion, it ben­e­fits not just you and Taschen. It ben­e­fits Open Cul­ture too. So con­sid­er it win-win-win.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Tom Wolfe (RIP) Tell Studs Terkel All About Cus­tom-Car Cul­ture, the Sub­ject of His Sem­i­nal Piece of New Jour­nal­ism (1965)

The Acid Test Reels: Ken Kesey & The Grate­ful Dead’s Sound­track for the 1960s Famous LSD Par­ties

Ken Kesey’s First LSD Trip Ani­mat­ed

Aldous Hux­ley, Dying of Can­cer, Left This World Trip­ping on LSD (1963)

Ken Kesey Talks About the Mean­ing of the Acid Tests

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