Inventory (I)

Mark Dion, Bureau of the Centre for the Study of Surrealism and its Legacy, 2005, left rear corner.

Inventory
by Jorge Luis Borges

To reach it, a ladder has to be set up. There is no stair.
What can we be looking for in the attic
but the accumulation of disorder?
There is a smell of damp.
The late afternoon enters by way of the laundry.
The ceiling beams loom close, and the floor has rotted.
Nobody dares to put a foot on it.
A folding cot, broken.
A few useless tools,
the dead one’s wheelchair.
The base for a lamp.
A Paraguayan hammock with tassels, all frayed away.
Equipment and papers.
An engraving of Aparicio Saravia’s general staff.
An old charcoal iron.
A clock stopped in time, with a broken pendulum.
A peeling gilt frame, with no canvas.
A cardboard chessboard, and some broken chessmen.
A stove with only two legs.
A chest made of leather.
A mildewed copy of Foxe’s “Book of Martyrs,” in intricate
Gothic lettering.
A photograph which might be of anybody.
A worn skin, once a tiger’s.
A key which has lost its lock.
What can we be looking for in the attic
except the flotsam of disorder?
To forgetting, to all forgotten objects, I have just erected
this monument
(unquestionably less durable than bronze) which will be
lost among them.

From Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Sand.

Alien Invaders

Threats to biodiversity and causes for the extinction of ecosystems and species are often summarised with the acronym HIPPO: habitat destruction, invasive species, pollution, overpopulation and overexploitation. Two recent artist’s projects are concerned with the i in HIPPO: Jacob Cartwright’s and Nick Jordan’s Alien Invaders: A Guide to Non-Native Species of the Britisher Isles and 2005 Turner Prize winner Simon Starling’s Henry Moore/Zebra Mussel project commissioned by the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto.

The former, a small artist’s book published by BookWorks, takes the form of an illustrated natural history guide listing invasive species introduced to the British Isles, such as the American Bullfrog, the Chinese Mitten Crab, the Giant Hogweed, the Grey Squirrel, the Pharaoh Ant, the Ring-necked Parakeet, the Ruddy Duck and the Wels Catfish. In the manner of a scientific guidebook, each entry gives information on the category and origins of introduction, problems caused by the introduction and efforts of control or eradication. It is only upon closer examination that one begins to doubt the scientific objectivity and reliability of the entries, which appear to be interspersed with rather obscure references and bizarre cultural anecdotes. The artists intervene by providing us with highly selective and sometimes dubious information. Thus we read under the heading ‘Origins of Introduction of the Grey Squirrel‘:

In ‘Dixieland‘, Gray Squirrels have long been desirable table fare, enriching the poor rural diet (Metzger, 1953). Skinned and simmered in broth until the meat falls off the bone, this traditional dish (called ‘limb chicken‘) was said to be a favourite of the young Elvis, and is typically served with jalapeno fritters and deep-fried grits.

(The reference ‘Metzger, 1953‘ isn’t traceable, since the book lacks both footnotes and bibliography; and do I need to mention that, quite fittingly, ‘Metzger‘ translates into ‘butcher‘…)

Simon Starling’s Toronto project involves sinking a replica of Henry Moore’s bronze statue Warrior with Shield into Lake Ontario, where it will become encrusted with Zebra Mussels, one of the most aggressive invasive species introduced to North America (for a synopsis of how English sculptor Henry Moore is linked with the city of Toronto, see here).

While Cartwright’s and Jordan’s book, sort of a cross-pollination of fact and fiction, of science and art, raises questions of authenticity and the impossibility of scientific objectivity and detachment, the Zebra Mussel project is concerned with issues of transformation and cultural colonialism. Both projects, which by far exceed instances of more ‘conservationist‘ environmental art from the 1960s onwards, are examples of how artists use processes of nature to reflect on broader cultural issues.

The Marvel of Minuteness

“Billet d’autobus roulé “symétriquement”, forme très rare d’automatisme morphologique avec germes évidents de stéréotypie.”
Brassaï, detail from Sculptures Involontaires, 1933.

I’m thinking about changes in scale as an instance of the marvellous at the moment, so here are some (patchy) notes:

• In 1936, the English collector and art patron Edward James wrote an essay entitled The Marvel of Minuteness, published in the Surrealist journal Minotaure. He analyses portraits by Lucas Cranach the Elder and Hans Holbein, focussing on their attention to detail, their “almost maniac precision,” which, according to James, gives them a surreal, hallucinatory quality. The opening paragraph is worth quoting:
  

  [...] there is something miraculous about minuteness and precise intricacy, something mysterious about a spider-like wealth of detail, something awe-inspiring which overwhelms us with the simultaneous conception of our own greatness and our own littleness. So felt King David of Israel when he looked at the stars, and so again do we when we lie in the long grass as children to observe the insect world where, even before hearing of Fabre, we know with intrigue and presentiment how intensely complex must be the lives and customs of that diversity of peoples, from the ants and ladybirds down to those curious flies and rare beetles whose names even adult persons seem to be specialists to have learned.

  (This might finally explain my fascination with Sir David Attenboroughs 2005 BBC natural history series Life in the Undergrowth, exploring the lives of invertebrates. Of all his programmes, it’s by far my favourite…)

• Two weeks ago, I picked up a copy of Harry G. Frankfurt’s On Bullshit in a book shop in Toronto. I had come across it earlier this year and made a vague mental note to read it some time soon, but I think what eventually convinced me to buy it was its small size, its compactness.
• Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century collectors of curiosities were attracted to minuscule objects: see for example the famous cherry stone in Dresden’s Green Vault which, when viewed through a magnifying glass, reveals 185 carved faces.
• There’s also a 11 x 13 mm fruit stone on display at David Wilson’s Museum of Jurassic Technology: “the front is carved with a Flemish landscape in which is seated a bearded man wearing a biretta, a long tunic of classical character, and thick-soled shoes; he is seated with a viol held between his knees while he tunes one of the strings. In the distance are representations of animals, including a lion, a bear, an elephant ridden by a monkey, a boar, a dog, a donkey, a stag, a camel, a horse, a bull, a bird, a goat a lynx, and a group of rabbits: the latter under a branch on which sit an owl, another bird and a squirrel. On the back is shown an unusually grim Crucifixion, with a soldier on horseback, Longinus piercing Christ’s side with a lance, the cross is surmounted by a titulus inscribed INRI.” (see MJT website)
• The Surrealists’ interest in Karl Blossfeldt photographs of magnified plant parts.
• Went to see an interesting little exhibition at Cube Manchester with R. last week: The World is my Imagination. Media-Model-Miniature. It’s about shifts in scale and “model worlds which replicate physical and imaginary spaces, while reflecting existences and habitats, personal memories and longing.”
• See Susan Stewart’s fabulous book On Longing. Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection.

Towards a more sedentary lifestyle.

Max Pollak, Sigmund Freud at his desk, 1914, etching.

With my resolutions to stay here all summer and get as much writing done as possible falling apart, I admire the 18-year-old Freud who wrote jokingly to his friend Eduard Silberstein:

I am one of those human beings who can be found most of the day between two pieces of furniture, one formed vertically, the armchair, and one extending horizontally, the table, and from these, as social historians are agreed, sprang all civilization, because they have a justified claim to the predicate sessile or ˈsedentaryˈ. Since this position does not involve all parts of the body in equal measure, and the nobler parts protrude above the tabletop to a considerable degree, I am compelled, for the due occupation of both, to engage in two activities: reading and writing.

Quoted from Penelope Curtis and Jon Wood (eds), Freud’s Sculpture, exh. cat., Leeds: The Henry Moore Foundation, 2006.

Codex Seraphinianus

Eye-fish. Or fish-eyes? From Luigi Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus.

Names that keep cropping up when it comes to alternative modes of classification and encyclopaedic thinking include Italo Calvino, Georges Perec and, above all, Jorge Luis Borges. A strong contender for breaking up this triumvirate could be Roman architect and graphic artist Luigi Serafini, author of a very rare and mysterious book with the title Codex Seraphinianus, first published in 1981. Serafini created an encyclopaedia of an imaginary universe in the style of Borges’s Encyclopaedia of Tlön, complete with drawings, charts and graphs as well as undecipherable lists, explanations and captions in fictive lettering.

My first reactions to reading about it in this online article were:

1. It’s definitely intriguing. Wonder is just one click away. But although googling it up may be quick and convenient, it can only be an unsatisfactory substitute for holding a real copy in your hands, leafing through it, throwing it on a dusty pile of books, picking it up again, earmarking your favourite passages and passing it around.

2. Since existing editions and re-editions are extremely limited (amazon sells copies starting from $550), how much of the book’s fascination is due to its rarity, and how does its availability on the Internet (or access to information on it) change this?

3. The cover image of a couple that makes love and successively metamorphoses into an alligator sends shivers down my spine - but of the very unpleasant kind. Wonder might be a mixture of awe and uneasiness, but sometimes the uneasiness gets the better of you.

4. “Discover for yourself, reader, such wonders as the purple-caged citrus, the spider-web flower, the parfait protea, and the ladder weed. This is a world inhabited by weird half-sentient flora such as the tadpole tree and the meteor-fruit, by the lacy flying-saucer fish, the wheeled caterpillar-rumped horse, and the metamorphic bicranial rhino.” Excuse me, but the first thing that comes to my mind is a Herbology and Care of Magical Creatures class at Hogwarts.

It’s holiday season.

Postcard from Paul Éluard’s collection.

Two Hundred and Forty-three Postcards in Real Colour
by Georges Perec

For Italo Calvino

We’re camping near Ajaccio. Lovely weather. We eat well. I’ve got sunburnt. Fondest love.

We’re touring around Malta. Lovely weather. We share our meals with some very correct English people. Back around the 10th.

We’re cruising off the Yukatan. Ideal weather. Everything just right. I caught a baby shark, 30 kilos! Love.

We’re at the Hôtel Zircone. It’s very warm. We eat so well! I’ve got sunburnt. Kissy-wissies.

We’re travelling through Greece. Gorgeous siestas beside the sea. Have met loads of very friendly people. We think of you often.

On holiday in Denmark. Weather good. Very beautiful beaches. Danish girls are quite something! Back on the 6th.

A big hello from Ipanema. Extraordinarily beautiful. Fiesta under the coconut trees! I have to be back on the 5th, alas.

We’re in the heart of the Black Forest. Seasonal weather. Splendid excursions. A bit of fly fishing. Love.

We’re really covering the Everglades. Well worth the trip. Sublime. I’m getting to be a champion water-skier. Love.

We’re visiting Florida. Sublime weather. Heavenly hamburgers. A bit homesick all the same. Love.

A letter from Djerba. Superb weather. Couscous I love you. I’m as red as a crayfish. Home at the end of August.

We’re travelling through the Lake District. Très romantique, but no risk of getting sunburnt. Home on the 19th.

We’re travelling round the Peloponnese. Sun strong. I have a big hat, we’re very happy. Hugs and kisses.

We’re playing at being explorers on the Atlantic Coast. Long sunbathing sessions. We eat just like the hogs we are. A thousand regards.

Extract, from Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces.

Il pleut.

It’s Raining

it is raining women’s voices as if they were dead even in memory
you also are raining down marvellous encounters of my life o little drops
and these rearing clouds are beginning to whinny a whole world of auricular towns
listen to it rain while regret and disdain weep an old fashioned music
listen to the fall of all the perpendiculars of your existence

From Guillaume Apollinaire, Selected Poems, translated and introduced by Oliver Bernard.

The McSweeney’s Book of Lists

Doing research on idiosyncratic lists and taxonomies earlier this week, I came across McSweeney’s, well, list of lists. It’s also available in book form (Mountain Man Dance Moves: The McSweeney’s Book of Lists). Here’s a small selection (do I need to mention that doing research, in this case, means googling up…):

Four Simple Steps to Becoming More Decisive

Thomas Hobbes’s “State of Nature” Adjectives That Befit My Hangover

We Have Ways to Make You Talk

Clint Eastwood Film or Gay Porn?

Actual Titles of Victorian Periodicals

Words Never Used in the Titles of Remotely Good Films

Variants of Walking, As Defined By The United States Department of Agriculture

IKEA Product or Lord of the Rings Character?

Complete List of Creatures in a Land Called Honah Lee

Secret Canadian Superweapons in Development

Dialects of the Common Bumblebee

The Bezoar and the Magical Antique Shop

Bezoar or cow’s hairball, Minnesota Historical Veterinary Museum
(included in Mark Dion’s Cabinet of Curiosities for the Weisman Art Museum, 2000).

Sifting through my reading notes scattered about in four notebooks and countless word files today, I came across the following entry:

HP uses a bezoar as an antidote to a poison that threatens to kill his best friend RW (bezoars (hair balls from stomach of ruminants) much treasured by owners of cabinets of curiosities for magical/healing powers).

Voldemort collects trophies (such as objects formerly owned by the founders of Hogwarts’s four houses), and to bring them into his possession, he plunders an old witch’s wunderkammer-like collection:

“…the elf scurried out of the room, which was so crammed with objects that it was difficult to see how anybody could navigate their way across it without knocking over at least a dozen things: there were cabinets full of little lacquered boxes, cases full of gold-embossed books, shelves of orbs and celestial globes and many flourishing pot plants in brass containers: in fact, the room looked like a cross between a magical antique shop and a conservatory.”

(chapters 18+20, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince)

What a timely reading note find, since tomorrow will mark the nationwide release of the fifth Harry Potter movie! Uhm, and just in case anyone was wondering: I don’t think I’ll actually use this in my thesis.

Out of a whim.

Hubert Duprat, Phrygane, c. 1994.

A little bit of fin-de-siècle decadence today, since, reading Umberto Eco’s History of Beauty last week, I came across a passage of Huysmans’s À Rebours (1884) that reminded me of the jewel-encrusted cockroach and French artist Hubert Duprat’s manipulated caddis fly larvae (more about them some time soon). Des Esseintes, Huysmans’s eccentric protagonist, buys a turtle, and to match it with an opulent carpet, he has its shell glazed over with gold and encrusted with gemstones in the shape of a flower.

Illustration by Arthur Zaidenberg.

This turtle was the result of a whim that had suddenly occurred to Des Esseintes a short while before his leaving Paris. Looking one day at an Oriental carpet with iridescent gleams of colour and following with his eyes the silvery glints that ran across the web of the wool, the colours of which were an opaque yellow and a plum violet, he had told himself: it would be a fine experiment to set on this carpet something that would move about and the deep tint of which would bring out and accentuate these tones.

Possessed by this idea, he had strolled at random through the streets; had arrived at the Palais-Royal, and in front of Chevet’s window had suddenly struck his forehead,–a huge turtle met his eyes there, in a tank. He had bought the creature; then, once it was left to itself on the carpet, he had sat down before it and gazed long at it, screwing up his eyes.

[...] he resolved to have his turtle’s back glazed over with gold.

Once back from the jeweller’s who had taken it in to board at his workshop, the beast blazed like a sun in splendour, throwing its flashing rays over the carpet, whose tones were weak and cold in comparison, looking for all the world like a Visigothic targe inlaid with shining scales, the handiwork of some Barbaric craftsman.

At first, Des Esseintes was enchanted with the effect; but he soon came to the conclusion that this gigantic jewel was only half finished, that it would not be really complete and perfect till it was incrusted with precious stones.

[...]

Des Esseintes stood gazing at the turtle where it lay huddled together in one corner of the dining-room, flashing fire in the dim half light.

He felt perfectly happy; his eyes were intoxicated with the splendours of these flowers flashing in jewelled flames against a golden background. Then, contrary to his use, he had an appetite and was dipping his slices of toast spread with super-excellent butter in a cup of tea, an impeccable blend of Si-a-Fayoun, Mo-you-tann and Khansky,–yellow teas, imported from China into Russia by special caravans.

Breton, in one of his many lists in which he constantly forms and reforms the surrealist canon, calls Huysmans a surrealist avant-la-lettre.