We all know that toys come alive at night, but what about mid-century vintage paperback covers, such as you might find in the psychology or philosophy sections of a dimly-lit used bookstore?
Watching 55 minimalist covers from graphic and motion designer Henning M. Lederer’s 2200 title-strong collection begin to spin, drift, and seethe in the short animation above, I got the impression that they were the ones dictating the terms. Or perhaps Lederer is the vessel through which the intentions of the original designers—Rudolph de Harak and John + Mary Condon to name a few—flow. Covers is not an act of reimagination or crowd-pleasing irreverence, but rather one logical motion, elegantly applied.
Habitués of used bookstores may find their usual browsing habits slightly altered by the hypnotic results.
Lederer makes no bones about judging books by their covers. Strong graphics, not content, are the primary determining factor as to which titles he acquires. The stately geometrics set in motion here are relics from another age, but the uncluttered abstracts so favored by 60s era publishers are not the only genre to catch his eye.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her post-digital, pre apocalyptic dark comedy, Fawnbook, is now playing in New York City. Follow her @AyunHalliday
Hearing someone discuss the nature of art can easily grow tiresome — indeed, it has, as a subject, become something of a shorthand for the tiresome. But Marcel Duchamp, the French painter, sculptor, conceptual artist, and chess enthusiast, could do it right. He did it by getting straight to the point, a succinctness most famously demonstrated in Fountain, the simple, everyday porcelain urinal he signed and submitted as a work of art for display. The fact that the art world soon put Fountain (and its similar, mass-produced descendants) quite literally on a pedestal makes an observation about art more cleanly than thousands of words on the role of the artist in modern society ever could.
But where–whether you paint on a canvas, chisel into a block of stone, or make a purchase at the plumbing store down the street–does this impulse to make art come from? Do artists consciously create their work, acting out creative decisions made within, or do they merely give form to artistic impulses received from… elsewhere? And what do we talk about when we talk about the work of art the artist ultimately produces?
“In the creative act,” Duchamp says, “the artist goes from intention to realization through a chain of totally subjective reactions. His struggle toward the realization is a series of efforts, pains, satisfaction, refusals, decisions, which also cannot and must not be fully self-conscious, at least on the aesthetic plane. The result of this struggle is a difference between the intention and its realization, a difference which the artist is not aware of.” This gap between what the artist “intended to realize and did realize,” Duchamp calls the art coefficient, “an arithmetical relation between the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed.”
But none of it matters, in Duchamp’s thinking, unless someone else actually thinks about the work of art. “No work of art — no balloon dog, no poem mentioning cold-water flats, no four-minute-and-thirty-three-second performance by silent musicians — is a great work until posterity says so,” writes the Paris Review’s Rebecca Bates in a post on the lecture (and a “sort-of Dadaist Mad Libs” recently made out of it). She quotes Duchamp in a 1964 interview with Calvin Tomkins: “The artist produces nothing until the onlooker has said, ‘You have produced something marvelous.’ The onlooker has the last word in it.” According to Duchamp’s perceptions, we, as posterity, as the onlookers, have the last word on all work, even Duchamp’s own. So go ahead and yammer a bit about the nature of art; doing so not only keeps the art alive, but made it art in the first place.
Darwin had no real use for the original manuscript once galley proofs came back from the publisher. So one can imagine father Charles giving his kids the only worthwhile paper in the house to draw on. It seems flippant now, but at the time, it was perfectly normal.
Researchers surmise that the majority of the art comes from three of the 10 children, Francis, George, and Horace, all of whom went into the sciences as adults. The illustrations are colorful and witty, drawn in pencil and sometimes colored in watercolor. Birds and butterflies are drawn and colored with attention to detail. Some creatures are imaginary, like the green fish with legs carrying an umbrella, and there are short stories about fairies and battles too.
Overall, the drawings show a Darwin who was a family man and not a reclusive scientist. We’re just glad that the kids let dad do his work in relative silence.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
If you visited The Tate Modern in recent years, perhaps you saw the large, 130-foot art installation covering a concourse wall. Created by illustrator Sara Fanelli, the “Tate Artist Timeline” provided museumgoers with a sprawling roadmap showing the major artistic movements and important artists of the 20th century, moving from Art Nouveau to more contemporary Graffiti Art.
Nowadays, you can revisit Fanelli’s educational timeline by purchasing a copy in a handsome book format. You can also watch the timeline play out in the video above.
Or, happily we’ve been informed by the Tate, there’s now an updated, interactive version installed in the museum. The video below gives you a preview:
We’ve all been to a museum with that friend or family member who just doesn’t “get” modern art and suggests it’s all a con. Conceptual art? Abstract expressionism? What is that?! Impressionism? Who wants blurry, poorly drawn paintings?! Arrgh!
Hey, maybe some of us are that friend or family member. Maybe our complaints are even more specific—maybe some of us are members of a “cultural justice” movement called “Renoir Sucks at Painting.” Maybe we show up at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts with signs parodying the cartoonishly terrible Westboro Baptist Church (“God Hates Renoir”) and demanding, with as much force as one can with a parody sign, that the Renoirs be removed from the company of worthier objets d’art.
One critical difference between the typical art hater and the Renoir Sucks crew: the latter do not object to Pierre-Auguste Renoir because his work is too hard to “get,” but because it’s too easy. Renoir, they say, painted “treacle” and “deformed pink fuzzy women.” As art critic Peter Schjeldahl writes in The New Yorker, “Renoir’s winsome subjects and effulgent hues jump in your lap like a friendly puppy.” Renoir is so far from avant-garde that Schjeldahl can peg his “exaggerated blush and sweetness” as an example of the “popular appeal” that “advanced the bourgeois cultural revolution that was Impressionism.” Ouch.
This kind of assessment gets no help from the painter’s great-great granddaughter, Genevieve, who responds to critics by quoting sales figures: “It is safe to say,” she writes, “that the free market has spoken and Renoir did NOT suck at painting.” By this measure, Thomas Kinkade and Sister Maria Innocentia Hummel were also artistic geniuses. The charges of “aesthetic terrorism” against Renoir come right out of the iconoclasm that functions in the art world as both meaningful dissent and successful gimmick (cf. Marcel Duchamp, or Ai Weiwei’s controversial, gallery-filling attacks on revered cultural artifacts.) But perhaps the honest question remains: does Renoir Suck at Painting?
Let us reserve judgment and take a look at another side of Renoir, a rarely seen excursion into book illustration—specifically the four illustrations he made for an 1878 edition of Emile Zola’s novel L’Assommoir (“The Dram Shop”). Described by the Art Institute of Chicago as “grittily realistic,” Zola’s naturalist depiction of what he called “the inevitable downfall of a working-class family in the polluted atmosphere of our urban areas” provoked many of its readers, who regarded the book as “an unforgivable lapse of taste on the part of its author.” It showed Parisians “an aspect of current life that most found frightening and repulsive.” Nonetheless, the novel became a popular success.
The four black-and-white engravings here—made from Renoir’s original drawings—are the impressionist’s contribution to Zola’s illlustrated novel. The choice of Renoir as one of several artists for this edition seems an odd one. (Zola, a friend of the painter’s, approached him personally.) Then, as now, Renoir had a reputation for sunny optimism: “he always looks on the bright side,” remarked one contemporary. Renoir’s “preference for creating images of beauty,” writes The Art Institute of Chicago, “made the illustration of the particularly seedy passages of the novel problematic, and some of the resulting drawings lack conviction.”
Instead of succumbing to the novel’s grim tone, Renoir’s original renderings, like the “loose wash drawing” in “warm, brown ink” at the top of the post, “gently subverted the dark undertones of Zola’s text.” Below the original drawing, see the engraving that appeared in the book. Book blog Adventures in the Print Trade concedes the plates “are of varying quality” and singles out the illustration just above as the most successful one, since “the subject-matter is perfect for Renoir, and the whole scene is brimming with life.”
As you can see from the two images at the top of the post, the translation from Renoir’s drawings to the final book engravings left many of his figures blurred and obscured, and introduce a dark heaviness to work undertaken with a much softer, lighter touch. Do these illustrations add anything to our understanding of whether Renoir Sucks at Painting? Who can say. It’s true that here, as in many of his well-known paintings, “the compositions tend to be slack,” as Schjeldahl writes. Nonetheless, the Art Institute of Chicago audaciously judges the brown ink wash drawing at the top of the post “one of the most important drawings the artist produced during the years of high Impressionism.”
They only add to my appreciation of Renoir, who does not, I think, suck. Even if his work can be, as Schjeldahl says, “high glucose,” I would argue that his sweetness and light provide just the right approach to Zola, whose novels, like those of other naturalists such as Theodore Dreiser or Thomas Hardy, contain much more than a hint of sentimentality.
Do you consider yourself well-educated? Cultured, even? By whose standards?
We may superficially assume these terms name immutable qualities, but they are in any analysis dependent on where and when we happen to be situated in history. The most sophisticated of Medieval doctors—a title then closer to the European “docent” than our general use of Dr.—would appear profoundly ignorant to us; and we, with our painfully inadequate grasp of church Latin, Aristotelianism, and arcane theological arguments, would appear profoundly ignorant to him.
What does it mean to be cultured? Is it the acquisition of mostly useless cultural capital for its own sake, or of a set of codes that helps us navigate the world successfully? In an attempt to address these fraught questions, Ashley Montagu, a student of hugely influential German-born anthropologist Franz Boas, wrote The Cultured Man in 1958. Rebecca Onion at Slate describes the book as containing “quizzes for 50 categories of knowledge in the arts and sciences, with 30 questions each.” In the page above, we have the first 22 questions of Montagu’s “Art” quiz (with the answers here).
You’ll probably notice right away that while most of the questions have definite, unambiguous answers, others like “Define art,” seem patently unanswerable in all but the most general and unsatisfactory ways. Montagu defines art in one succinct sentence: “Art is the making or doing of things that have form and beauty”—which strikes me as anemic, though functional enough.
Montagu intended his book to test not only knowledge of cultural facts, but also of “attitudes”: a person “considered ‘cultured,’” writes Onion, “would not just be able to readily summon facts, but also to access humane feelings, which would necessarily come about after contact with culture.” Many administrators of “culture”—curators, art historians, literature professors, etc—would agree with the premise: ideally, the more cultural knowledge we acquire, the more empathy and understanding of other peoples and cultures we should manifest. Whether this routinely occurs in practice is another matter. For Montagu, Onion remarks, a “cultured man” is “curious, unprejudiced, rational, and ethical.”
Given Montagu’s enlightened philosophical bent, we can charitably ascribe language in his book that itself seems prejudiced to our viewing this artifact from a distance of almost seventy years in the future. We might also find that many of his questions push us to examine our 21st century biases more carefully. His approach may remind us of frivolous internet diversions or the standardized tests we’ve grown to think of as the precise opposite of lively, critically-engaged educational tools. Yet Montagu intended his quizzes to be “both dynamic and constructive,” to alert readers to areas of ignorance and encourage them to fill gaps in their cultural knowledge. Many of his answers offer references for further study. “No one grows who stands still,” he wrote.
To see more of Montagu’s quiz questions—such as those above from the “Culture History” category (get the answers here)—and find out how you stack up against the cultured elite of the 50s, head over to Rebecca Onion’s post at Slate.
If you’ve ever had difficulty getting around in Yoknapatawpha—getting the lay of the land, as it were—Faulkner has stepped in again to help his readers. He drew several maps of varying levels of detail that show Yoknapatawpha, its county seat of Jefferson in the center, and various key characters’ plantations, crossroads, camps, stores, houses, etc. from the fifteen novels and story cycles set in the author’s native Mississippi.
Perhaps the most reproduced of Faulkner’s maps, above, comes from 1946’s The Portable Faulkner and was drawn by the author at the request of editor Malcolm Cowley. We see named on the map the locations of settings in The Unvanquished, Sanctuary, The Sound and the Fury, The Hamlet, Go Down, Moses, Light in August, and the stories “A Rose for Emily” and “Old Man,” among others. This map, dated 1945, had an important predecessor, however: the map below, the final page in Faulkner’s epic tragedy Absalom, Absalom! Most readers of that novel, myself included, have thought of Quentin Compson’s deeply conflicted, repeated assertions that he doesn’t hate the South as the novel’s conclusion. It’s a passionate speech as memorable, and as final, as Molly Bloom’s silent “Yes” at the end of Joyce’s Ulysses. Not so, writes Faulkner scholar Robert Hamblin, the novel actually ends after Quentin, and after the appendix’s chronology and genealogy; the novel truly ends with the map.
What Hamblin wants us to acknowledge is that the map creates more ambiguity than it resolves. The map, he says “is more than a graphic representation of an actual place”—or in this case, a fictional place based on an actual place—“it is simultaneously a metaphor.” While it further attempts to situate the novel in history, giving Yoknapatawpha the tangibility of Thomas Hardy’s fictional Wessex or Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, the map also elevates the county to a mythic dimension, like “Bullfinch’s maps depicting the settings of the Greek and Roman myths and the wanderings of Ulysses, Sir Thomas More’s map of Utopia, Jonathan Swift’s maps of the travels of Lemuel Gulliver.”
The Portable Faulkner map at the top of the post appears “in a style unlike Faulkner’s” and was “much reduced for publication in first and subsequent printings,” A Companion to William Faulkner tells us. The Absalom map, on the other hand, appeared in a first, limited-edition of the novel in 1936, hand-drawn and lettered in red and black ink, a color-coding feature common to “Faulkner’s many hand-made books.” Click the image, then click it again to zoom in and read the details. You’ll notice a number of odd things. For one, Faulkner gives equal attention to naming locations and describing events that occurred in other Yoknapatawpha novels, mainly murders, deaths, and various crimes and hardships. For another, his neat capital lettering reproduces the letter “N” backwards several times, but just as many times he writes it normally, occasionally doing both in the same word or name—a stylistic quirk that is not reproduced in The Portable Faulkner map.
Finally, in contrast to the map at the top, which Faulkner gives his name to as one who “surveyed & mapped” the territory,” in the Absalom map, he lists himself—beneath the town and county names, square mileage, and population count by race—as “sole owner & proprietor.” Against Alfred Korzybski’s famous dictum, Tokizane Sanae insists that at least when it comes to literary maps, “Map is Territory… proof of newly conquered ownership of a land”—the territory of a deed. Suitably, Faulkner ends a novel obsessed with ownership and property with a statement of ownership and property—over his entire fictional universe. In an ironic exaggeration of the power of surveyors, cartographers, architects, and their landowning employers, the map “spatializes and visualizes the concept of a mythical soil and the power of this God.” In that sense, it forces us to view all of the Mississippi novels not as historical fiction, but as episodes in a great religious mythology, with the same depth and resonance as ancient scripture or political allegory.
If we wish to see Faulkner’s map this way—a zoom out into an aerial shot at the end of an epic picture—then we’re unlikely to find it of much use as a guide to the plain-faced logistics of his fiction. It’s unclear to me that Faulkner intended it that way, as much as it’s unclear that Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot’s footnotes to The Waste Land serve any purpose except to distract and confuse readers. But of course readers have been using those footnotes, and Faulkner’s map, as guidelines to their respective texts for decades anyway, noting inconsistencies and finding meaningful correspondences where they can. One interesting example of such a use of Faulkner’s mapmaking comes to us from the site of a comprehensive University of Virginia Faulkner course that covers a bulk of the Yoknapatawpha books. The project, “Mapping Faulkner,” begins with a considerably sparser Yoknapatawpha map, one probably made “late in his life” and which “seems unfinished,” lacking most of the place names and descriptions, and certainly the assertive signature. With overlaid blue lettering, the site does what the Absalom map does not—gives each novel, or 9 of them anyway, its own map, with discrete boundaries between events, characters, and time periods.
If Faulkner wanted us to see the books as manifestations of a singular consciousness, all radiating from a single source of wisdom, this project isolates each novel, and its themes. In the map of Sanctuary, above, only locations from that novel appear. On the page itself, a click on the circular markings under each locale brings up a window with annotations and page references. The apparatus might at first appear to be a useful guide through the notoriously difficult novels, provided Faulkner meant the locations to actually correspond to the text in this way. But what are we to do with this visual information? Lacking any legend, we can’t use the map to judge scale and distance. And by removing all of the other events occurring in the vicinity in the span of around a hundred years or so, the maps denude the novels of their greater context, the purpose to which their “owner & proprietor” devoted them at the end of Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner’s maps, as works of art in their own right, extend “the tragic view of life and history that the Sutpen narrative has already conveyed” in Absalom, Absalom!, writes Hamblin: “Through the handwritten entries that Faulkner made,” in that map, the most complete drawn in the author’s own hand, “the landscape of Yoknapatawpha is presented primarily as a setting for grief, villainy, and death.”
After a frustrating day spent dealing with a tenacious ghost in my two-year-old laptop, I’d much rather visit the dreary bemusement park, Dismaland, than that soulless, slick-surfaced “genius” bar. It just feels more real, somehow.
Sadly for those of us in gloomy, defeatist moods, Dismaland, the artist Banksy’s high concept, multiple acre installation, was never intended to be a permanent fixture. It went the way of Cinderella’s coach earlier this fall, but not before photographer Jamie Brightmore managed to squeeze in amongst the great throngs of British curiosity seekers, camera in hand.
The weather was dreary for his three visits, and a security guard denuded him of his tripod, but he still managed to capture the dystopian scene on behalf of armchair travelers everywhere. A catalogue of horrors awaits you above in Dismaland: The Official Unofficial Film. He also paid close attention to the sound design of the apocalyptic getaway, understanding the audio component to such grim exhibits as Relentless Paparazzi and the horrifying merry-wheel, Corporate Scandal.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play, Fawnbook, opens in New York City later this fall. Follow her @AyunHalliday
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