Tu paper es mi paper.

Sometimes I wonder if I am a pretty self-centered person. Perhaps it is mostly our human condition that force us to an inability to perceive anything outside of ourselves, but I always hope that the power of abstraction of our brains (or at least of mine, to return to the self-centered me) would permit to see the world — I should say imagine it — with a perspective different from ours. It would be a fundamental instrument of the student to “clean” their mind and receive the information in the most uninfluenced way possible, at least at the moment of the acquisition of new info.

This almost not human ability obviously is utopian. In addition, a better analysis could suggest that we learn only when we interiorize the knowledge, when the understanding enter in conversation with our precedent experience.

This is what happened with this week’s reading: it was almost impossible to me to separate my work on the 1916 magazine and the readings. Even if I fear that I lost some lessons, what really remained afloat were the parts that strongly bonded with my research.

For example, Igor Kapitoff[1] suggested the biography of objects, which for my magazine would lay down roughly like this:

-          Newspaper as a fresh product

-          Newspaper as an old product

-          The object as a relatively rare merchandise

-          The collecting object

-          The object as a personal memory

The last “age” of its life fits perfectly in the description that Kopytoff make of the “collective hunger” for object made not for lasting, a need that transforms the objects from worthless results of mass production to “singular.”[2]

Kopitoff, Daniel Miller, and Peter Stallybrass all show the power of Material Culture and a weakness in a theorization of the discipline. If in Stallybrass and Kopitoff this interpretation is probably coming from my personal struggle on the matter, Miller[3] dedicates ample space in describing this fascinating contrast of powerful practicality of a generally un-codifiable discipline.

However, even such a distrusting student as I am on these theorizations have to admit that there is power and possibility even in the often reductive and destructive theory. To create a system to understand chaos offers often a strong scaffold for the analysis.

Peter Stallybrass[4] offers a perfect example in this with his beautiful paper on Marx’s Coat. The analysis of Marx’s theories and works and the abstractions of Material Culture at the beginning slow down the reader, but when the practice of Material Culture free the theories from their own chains funneling the power of their messages in a delightful insight of Marx’s personal life that connects the philosopher to his ideas through his personal objects. If the theory is powerful, it is the practice around it that blossoms, clearing out the fog and letting me, clearly irritated by the world of abstraction, enjoy the fruitful results.

The final cherry on the cake was the connection that Stallybrass makes between Marx’s life and the technology, in particular with the invention and mass production of paper made out of wood pulp.[5] Because I am self-centered as probably everyone, dear Marx, tu paper es mi paper: a beautiful and colorful magazine of 1916.

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[1] Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as a Process,” in Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

[2] Ibid. 80.

[3] Daniel Miller, Stuff (Cambridge: Polity, 2010).

[4] Peter Stallybrass, "Marx's Coat," in Patricia Spyer, ed., Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces (New York: Routledge, 1998).

[5] Stallybrass, 200.

There is space for everything, in the landscape.

            To define Material Culture and its boundaries is a daunting task. Either the category is too broad or too narrow: everything is material and so everything could be inserted in to a Material Culture study, at the same time what is the point of a taxonomic organization if the group that we utilize encompasses everything?

            This week’s readings stretch the limits of Material Culture considering the environment itself as an object that deserves attention like a hand-crafted pot or a mass-produced stereo system. Surely the environment is a collection of objects and nobody with any rationality would negate the fact that the environment materiality is a fact, but to reduce the complex system of any environment could seem a reductive perspective. Yet to analyze the environment in its materiality offers powerful instruments to decode numerous aspects of the interaction between human beings and the landscape they live in. Indeed too often the environment is reduced to a too-theoretical and distant scenery that is disjointed from the decisions and lives of the people that inhabit it, while on the contrary the environment influences and is influenced strongly by human choices.

            Kenneth Ames[1] and Angel Kwolek-Folland[2] show clearly how strong the link is between the environment and society: the house and the workplace reflect not only the practical adaptations of the places where human beings live and work, but also the social expectations and etiquette rules that constitute the web of social interactions of modern and complex societies. Both the scholars describe situations of a very structured society such as the late Victorian one. The implications of their work however cast an interesting light even on contemporary times, and it is easy to ask ourselves questions such as the meaning in our lives of the homogenous Ikea furniture in houses or the new structures of office furniture and spatial separations in offices.

Regarding another era, more distant from us, is the work of Dell Upton[3], who explains the spatial dynamics in the life of slaves in Virginia during the eighteenth century. Social hierarchy and slave-owner interaction defined the space, creating shared areas and exclusive ones. The freedom and privacy of the woods for example allowed the slaves to set themselves temporarily free from the controlling eye of the owners.

            John Brinckerhoff Jackson[4] in one of the multiple and variegated chapters of his book analyses the woods as environment and its history. The perspective is totally focused on the interactions between men and the forest and this viewpoint can help us to understand the relationship between landscape and Material Culture. The forest itself is not the center of the study: the dendrochronology and the biological aspect of the life of trees could be part of it, but it is not the focus. Material Culture, inserting the landscape in to the list of tools with which men interact with, defines the environment as a medium that influences humans and is strongly influenced by them. Our eyes love the sweet slopes of Tuscany, their natural pleasantness attracts thousands of tourists from around the globe, but few of them know that every slope is the result of thousands of years of agriculture. Human hands made them.

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[1] Kenneth Ames, “Meaning in Artifacts: Hall Furnishings in Victorian America,” Journal of

Interdisciplinary History 9 (1978): 19-46.

[2] Angel Kwolek-Folland, “The Gendered Environment of the Corporate Workplace, 1880-1930,” in

Katherine Martinez and Kenneth L. Ames, eds. The Material Culture of Gender: The Gender of

Material Culture (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997), 157-79.

[3] Dell Upton, “White and Black Landscapes in Eighteenth-Century Virginia,” in Robert Blair St. George,

ed., Material Life in America, 1600-1860 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988).

[4] John Brinckerhoff Jackson, A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1994).

De Somniis

Plowing through the tough terrain laid out by Roland Barthes[1], two concepts caught my attention: the difference between the photograph as an uncoded object and the drawing as a coded one; and the linguistic connotation of most of the images.

I am troubled with this differentiation that Barthes makes between photographs and illustrations, because in a world with Photoshop and the marvels of computer graphics the distinction sounds artificial. Surely we should bear in mind that Barthes, writing in 1986, had not yet experienced the new technological marvels in the world of the image, but even only considering the analogic photograph, with the strong mediation of the composition, which was sometimes “artificially posed”, the choice of exposure, the modifications in developing the negative, and the opportunities that the photographer had in printing the photograph the borders between uncoded and coded become at more fuzzy. Yet perhaps I understand the direction of his meaning in that he was trying to separate the two mediums and consider the aspects that part the producer from the represented object. With this perspective the separation becomes more a distinction between the hand of the artist and the mechanical shutter of the camera.

The second consideration, the observation that most of the images that surround us are not pure images, but have a component of writing that is fundamental in communicating the message, caught my attention. If anyone looks at a photograph of Tokyo, it is difficult to understand the message of the colored advertising on the streets without reading Japanese. Images are direct, less mediated than words perhaps, but at the same time if they convey the message in a strong and fast way they miss the precision of the written word, the capacity to describe concepts that need a certain finesse.

In the pages of La Domenica del Corriere there is a clear mistrust of the image in this regard: the captions are long and descriptive. While the images brought the atmosphere, the adventure, and the action, the text supported them strongly with the context. The world in 1916 was a different one: few people traveled, even outside of their city (moreover in Italy), and there was no internet to provide a window to the world. Your room was your room only, and even if books could provide the exotic travel that most people could not afford, they did not provide the mental elasticity that we have in recognizing the context of a photo (which surely is still limited).

The illusions, deceptions, and trompe l’oeil that Wendy Bellion describes in her book[2] did not want captions. The solution of the mystery, the precise moment when the eye of the observer realized with marvel the trick of the artist was the final goal of the piece of art. A caption would have spoiled the whole experience. The eye was supposed to be confused and reader of the book looking at the images without captions can enjoy a little bit of what the viewer in real life would experience; when the mind of the observer does not understand the reality yet, the image becomes part of the tridimensional world: part of the architecture, of a landscape, or even convincing —allegedly— the cunning Washington to politely bow in front of a painting, thinking that it was a person.

            Bellion builds up a very interesting analysis of the illusions that early-republic citizen enjoyed, but still indulges perhaps a little bit too much in the “American bubble”, forgetting sometimes to connect well these illusions to the most likely sources of their inspiration in the old, dusty Europe.

Cornelis Norbertus Gysbrechts -Trompe-l'œil with letters and pens (1660-1683).

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[1] Roland Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image,” in Image—Music—Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977): 32- 51.

[2] Wendy Bellion, Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early National America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).