Pressing problems

I confess, I am a maker too.

Historians are writers. Some interpret the job as storytellers, others as philosopher/theorists who dwell in the platonic world of ideas, others as proficient technicians who only follow the rule of good academia. Common terrain for everyone is the land of words. Sieged by armies of modern archeologists, collectors, and amateurs of vintage technology or folk art, historians need to find their niche and focus on doing what is their job: to write books.
Public historians are dismissed as half-historians perhaps for this precise reason, because to write books is not their goal. It could be, but in the interaction with the public that crowns the flag of public history writing books loses the monopoly of their attention.
What about Material Culture? Again the problem lies in the different nature of objects and words. Surely any word in any book is the result of the interaction among objects, from the relatively simple ink and pen to the sophisticated laser printers now in any office. Yet the middle-realm of words, half concept, half object, allows the historian to indulge only on the first part, relegating the past to a virtual world of ideas.
However, the world is concrete, and despite our theorization of it, real objects, the ones that you and me touch and use, are the actual heritage from the past. The historian often does not deal with this past at all, and even when it happens, the result is a book, and again the theory.
Reading David Pye and his analysis on the workmanship of risk and workmanship of certainty (human-made and machine-made in a nutshell) and Morozov’s article in the New Yorker on the Maker Movement the question on the connection between historians and the making process pops out clearly in my mind.

What is the meaning of life? Can I surf the gravitational waves? (sorry, not related, but I like Monty Python)

Or better:

Do the historians understand how the objects are made? If not, would it change the perspective that they choose in writing about the past?

Do the historians understand how the objects are made? If not, would it change the perspective that they choose in writing about the past?

Yes. Because I say so.
And because to understand how an object was made gives evidence on how the object was imagined, projected and the ideas that led to the object itself. There is a very good documentary on Gutenberg and the invention of the printing press with Stephen Fry . 

(HERE, highly suggested).

There is obviously no footnote, no index and shame of shames, no bibliography, yet you see the making of the press, you understand the difficulties, the different steps that led from the idea to the printing of the first books, the environment that seeded in Gutenberg the project for the object that definitely changed the world.
Talking about printing, how was my dear newspaper of 1916 made? Words, surely, but also paper, inks (it is colored!), and machinery. Will I be able to find out? I am almost as interested in this answer as to solution of what is the meaning of life.

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David Pye, “The Workmanship of Certainty and the Workmanship of Risk,” in The Nature and Art of Workmanship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968).

Evgeny Morozov, “Making It: Pick Up a Spot Welder and Join the Revolution,” The New Yorker (January 13, 2014) 

C’mon Indiana, no gold this time.

Let’s start with the end: “It is terribly important that the ‘small thing forgotten’ be remembered. For in the seemingly little and insignificant things that accumulate to create a lifetime, the essence of our existence is captured.”[p. 259]

From the title of James Deetz’s book, In Small Things Forgotten, it would seem that the focus for good history — archeology to be precise — is the small objects that are dug up from the layers of the past. In one sense it is, both because an archeologist passes most of his time in the field sifting through the dirt to find any small piece of pottery or any other material that had been manipulated by man, and because throughout the book Deetz masterly immerses the reader in the fascinating and sometimes even touching world of the people that lived and experienced their lives around these objects.

Yet Deetz in analyzing these objects takes serious care to highlight patterns. Anything coming from the past has the dual nature of evidence and narrative. From the smoke pipe to the house, but in a bigger sense also events, writings, ideas and, as reported in the book, music, all constitute the language that a world long gone uses to talk about itself; as with words, objects possess a meaning by themselves, but together they don’t just describe to an acute observer what they were meant for and how they were used, but they paint a picture of the society around them, its culture and religion.

Deetz in almost a romantic way dwells in the cemeteries, were his dialogue with Shakespeare’s Yorik does not bring an existential question on the human life — a question on which, at least for compassion, any historian should indulge in sometimes — but a very interesting description on the stylistic changes of the decoration on the gravestones. Deetz handles the dangerous argument with the efficient toolbox of archeology, double-checking and cross-referencing, using statistics and analyzing the properties of the materials.

The patterns pop out clearly from the carefully assembled investigation. From the single objects, even the single fragment of pottery, comes out the whole image. Clearly the past is lost, it is a memory with blurred contours: something is lost forever, like the burned-down house were Cato Howe, a freed slave that fought in the Revolution, lived from 1792 until his death in 1823. Cato is now only a name, even his face is lost, yet this somewhat depressing thought is counterbalanced by the present: we, the present, are his heritage, and we can reconstruct the past thanks to his actions, such as the structure of the foundations of the house that he built, the legal documents that attest that the community granted him some land, and the meager list of things that he left behind after his departure.

Two lessons are clear from In Small Things Forgotten: the power of the connection of objects, its “Aura” —if we want to steal from Benjamin’s theories from the last week—, and the strength of evidence, which comes only from research and accumulation of data.

Nothing new perhaps, but reading such a pleasant work renews again the passion for the lost little things of the past for us little Indiana Jones: he was an archeologist too! The newspaper is perhaps not as “valuable” as the Sacred Grail, but I bet that Indiana thrived for the action, not for the money.

Deetz, James. In Small Things Forgotten: [an Archaeology of Early American Life]. Expanded and rev. ed. New York: Anchor Books, 1996.

“What a fitting end to your life's pursuits. You're about to become a permanent addition to this archaeological find. Who knows? In a thousand years, even you may be worth something.” – Raiders of the Lost Ark

Let's not dig in the wrong place though.

Of Sea and Meteorology

Ah the memories of Art History, when the young green me was immersed in the study of beauty: magnificent paintings and objects, the lives of the artists of the past, the beautiful macros that show the painting techniques and the chisel of master sculptors. I loved the descriptions of how colors were gathered, shipped around the world in long journeys on caravels or caravans, then mixed with alchemical competence and applied layer by layer with techniques learned in a lifetime of dedication to the craft.

Then, to counterbalance the beauty of these studies, the insubstantial analyses on style: sometimes they were fascinating (moreover if well written), other times contorted and labyrinthine, but in general they left me with the unpleasant feeling that I had not learned much.

Jennifer T. Roberts paper[1] offered me both feelings. In the first half the transoceanic travel of the painting helps in showing a vision of a very large world now disappeared: the vast distances, the painting’s movement from hand to hand to its destination, the long delay between the making of the art piece and its exhibition. The analysis of how Copley carefully planned the theme of the painting is also interesting. Then the bitter taste of the pains of the undergraduate studies: the drapery and the perspective linking Copley to Empiricism, despite five hundred years of drapery painting and perspective studies that predated Copley.

Walter Benjamin’s paper[2] excels in showing the limits of my understanding. I could say that it is the language barrier, but I am perfectly aware that my mind is the problem. Between some very satisfactory (for my ego) errors and sparse concepts that I understood and appreciated, a dense fog obscured my general understanding of the meaning of the paper. Not language barrier, it was a meteorological issue.

Then the dense mist lifted; there was light again when Michael Yonan[3] and Charles F. Montgomery[4] blew off the haze. Yonan’s call for an Art History focused more on the materiality of the analyzed objects let me cheer in a very un-academic way. Montgomery’s practical guide to the evaluation of an object had the taste of a behind-the-scenes trip in the mind of one who has reached excellence: with clarity and nonchalance he leads through the multiple steps with the ease of a seasoned guide of a hidden wing of a magnificent museum.

The readings of this week confirmed what I miss and what I don’t of Art History: there is a limit to what we can deduct from an object, and the evidence that we have draws this border. Any analysis that is based on weak or no evidence is, in my personal view, just an opinion. The papers helped me in better defining the line; a lesson that I hope to use well in dealing with my beautiful object. That old magazine deserves some respect.

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[1] Jennifer L. Roberts, “Copley’s Cargo,” in Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 2014).

[2] Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Hannah Arendt, ed., Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 1969).

[3] Michael Yonan, “Toward a Fusion of Art History and Material Culture Studies,” West 86 th  18 (2011): 232-48.

[4] Charles F. Montgomery, "The Connoisseurship of Artifacts," in Thomas J. Schlereth, ed., Material Culture Studies in America (London: Altamira Press, 1999).

On the verge between material and fluffiness.

I am a pretty limited person. Well everyone is, but I studied art history, graduated, and yet I hate Duchamp.

This pisses me off.

My problem is actually worse because whenever I read art historians indulging themselves in self-referencing analyses of pieces of art without any concrete evidence I invariably felt sorry for them. They were probably quite happy in their successful careers so the problem is obviously mine.  It is clearly the same with Duchamp: in a nutshell I have probably an undiagnosed allergy to convolute thinking. Not to theory, I love theory, but the philosophical analysis of the world sometimes instead of helping the real world, creates a parallel universe of fluffiness.

Material Culture however needs a theory to create a scaffold for investigations on things and to extract useful information from them, yet there exists the same danger of falling into the trap of a “language of grotesque impenetrability”[1]. Tim Ingold[2] attempted the difficult task of focusing on the material of an object instead of on the materiality, while also offering good perspectives such as the nature of the raw material that we use (rarely raw, often a product of animals or plants) and how our experience of an object changes in different situations. 

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich in the second part of her paper[3] did an excellent job in showing how the concrete analysis of an object with good evidence can bring a new layer of information to the inquiry; the first part her interesting analysis that linked gender to furniture, shows a promising path but sometimes it rested on weak evidence.

The value of utilizing the things to bring up an underground vein of information unreachable by textual evidence shows up in all of these papers, but every technique needs some kind of organization, a collection of good behaviors to rely on. E. McClung Fleming[4] and Jules David Prown[5] provide two approaches. Prown’s example is particularly powerful, because he followed a methodological description with a practical example on a piece of furniture. Fleming on the other hand remained only on the theory, yet his organization is much more grounded on the practical aspects of an analysis of an object and yet very flexible and adaptable to the universe of different kinds of things.

On the metaphysical side of the spectrum are Carolyn Kitch[6] and Sam Anderson[7]; they can be excused for this capital sin because Kitch studies journalism and Anderson is a journalist himself. Jokes aside, their contribution is very useful in showing how the objects maintain traces of past lives and a certain character in themselves. Kitch skillfully implies that this character lies in the viewer, while Edmund de Waal, the famous potter interviewed by Anderson, leans towards the intrinsic metaphysical property of the object.

We can clearly excuse De Waal, because he is an artist, like Duchamp. You should excuse Duchamp too, if you consider him an artist; I still don’t like him.

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[1] Tim Ingold, “Materials against Materiality,” Archaeological Dialogues 14 (2007): 2.

[2] Ibidem, 1-16.

[3] Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “Furniture as Social History: Gender, Property, and Memory in the Decorative Arts,” American Furniture.

[4] E. McClung Fleming, “Artifact Study: A Proposed Model,” Winterthur Portfolio 16 (1981): 154-173.

[5] Jules David Prown, “Mind in Matter,” Winterthur Portfolio 17 (1982): 1-19.

[6] Carolyn Kitch, “Making Things Matter: The Material Value of Old Media,” American Journalism 32:3 (2015): 355-62.

[7] Sam Anderson, “Edmund de Waal and the Strange Alchemy of Porcelain,” The New York Times Magazine (November 25, 2015). http://tinyurl.com/oyj69y9.

From Here on, Material Culture!

Second Semester, another blog. Sorry dudes.

History infected me at young age, but on the path that led to my Graduate Studies other viruses paraded in and created a strange spectrum of intellectual interests. Mainly I perceive this weakness of my immune system as a virtue, but sometimes I wonder if a more focused interest would lead to an easier life. Academically I studied Art History as an undergraduate in Italy, then History as Masters with a thesis on a roman insurrection in 1867. Outside of academia I pursued a passion for electronics, programming, art, and poetry; I worked as a 3D and 2D graphic artist trying to combine the technological side of my soul with the intellectual one.

Modeling objects in 3D exercises both observation and analysis, because as a good forger the attempt to recreating reality in the virtual world requires a good attention to and understanding of details. This kind of craftsmanship, united to the education as art historian, led to an interest in the history of technology, which intersected the interest for military history. Technology always accompanied soldiers onto the battlefield, but in the second half of the nineteenth century a revolution changed the world: technology permeated the lives of people all around the globe in a whirlwind that excited the masses. Then the First World War arrived and these new technologies contributed to the massacre; the world acknowledged the danger hidden in the new things: the iron that created bridges and skyscrapers casted guns, while the chemistry that fueled the abundance of food and material created powerful explosives and poisons.

Times of change are always interesting: the second industrial revolution changed the vision and ideas of people, yet it evolved on a stream of objects which innovated the technical possibilities small step by small step. For this reason my expectations from the class are high; one must understand the language of things to decipher not only the messages coded between the words of the documents, but also those that follow the curves of an old telephone, or are ingrained in the patterns left on a metal surface by a precision lathe. If ideas shaped the world, objects made it in such a way that is as obvious as it is overlooked by historians, moreover those interested in warfare. With a powerful toolset that enables me to talk about weapons and technology with proficiency I will perhaps be able to nudge the discussion of military history from maps and maneuvers towards a social and technological history of the battlefield.

As an object to analyze during the semester I chose the issue of “La Domenica del Corriere” of 5-12 March 1916, the most popular Sunday edition of a newspaper in Italy at the time, with two beautiful colored illustrations on the cover and the back. 

The Magic Smoke

The conference Shared Authority: Public History, Social Curation, and Social Practice, organized by the Temple University Library on November 10 embraced all the focal points of Public History.

Erin Bernard illustrated her experience with the History Truck, a mobile oral collection lab that interacted with local communities helping them to revive their memory. Erin showed the fundamental importance of a strong connection with institution, neighborhood associations, and private citizens.

Cindy Little started her talk with her memories on a past project of her, similar to the History Truck for the intensive work with communities and the nomadic experience. It was a project that linked housing and heritage and played on the strong connection that everyone has for the place where we live. Citizens could share their memories on the neighborhood, on the experience they had in living there or they could retrieve information on the people that lived in their house before them.

Both these project relied on a strong participation of communities on the project, the highly interactive process that Michael Frisch (the third speaker) successfully baptized shared authority.

Frisch is scouting new paths on this ground: he is trying to develop IT technologies that offer a platform where common people can archive directly their experience or data. He is trying to utilize phone apps (Pixtory) and social media to create a virtual ambient were communities can constantly share and discuss about the past in an ambient that is practically academia-free.

After the conference, a group of us kept talking with Frisch. His ideas suggest a future that is still blurred and uncertain, but that surely comprises a higher interaction between people and technology also in relation to history. If this direction is certain and few have doubts about it, still the academia is slow in offering strong education on the digital world. We did have a more than interesting class on the argument and I already thought that this technological divide between historians and world is problematic. This conference reinforced my doubts: as historians, are we ready for the next generation of technology innovations and for the share of voice-power that they will bring with them? Will we burn in smoke like a resistor against too much power?

P.S. Magic Smoke 

Troopie from Muskogee

Strange fusion today: Merle Haggard’s good old days with the reenactors of Fort Snelling, Minnesota. It is like to mix fried chicken and clam chowder. It sounds terrible, but indulge me, there is “wisdom and absurdity mixed up together! Reason in madness!”[1].

The good work of Amy M. Tyson[2] indeed brings us into the world of Haggard and Shakespeare, because the principal characters of this book are on stage. From the early sixties to present time Fort Snelling every summer hires a group of reenactors for the season. They are not professional actors, not professional historians, not full time employees, but surely bring passion to a job that offers numerous challenges, starting from the recognition of a professionality that is undermined by both the fact that they work in costume and receive a meagre wage. The professional recognition of the reenactor is a major problem if we think also about the difficulty in acknowledging the numerous skills that such workers need to have, skills that are obviously exploited by the manager, but that don't produce a better job, which remains seasonal and highly volatile. A situation that increases the stress of the workers, already challenged by the bipolar nature of their lives, half in the past, half in the present, a difficulty that in some cases created very bad results, both in the workplace and in the "real" life of the workers. 

A big part of the book analyzes the concrete problematics that these workers have confronted in the past sixty years, describing aspects that should be known by historians when they are planning for events and locations where reenactors participate into the education of the public. In this the book is very interesting and with no doubt useful.

In addition to this almost technical instruction, the book illustrates many other problematic issues. One, common in every public history project that deals with the past, is the real difficulty in showing the dark aspects of past society: the situation of woman, of slaves or of minorities such as the Indians if represented properly in such reenactments is likely offensive for the public and can ruin the whole experience of the trip; the public, after all, is enjoying relaxation and vacation. 

The second problem is directly connected to the first: if the public has to be entertained and the reenactors must smile at every person, showing the joys of candle making and showing happy soldiers and happy women in a fort that did not host women and with all probability did not host even happy soldiers, what history is represented?

But, you know, the good old days of the happy troopie from Muskogee.

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[1] Shakespeare: King Lear; Act 4, Scene 6, page 7.

[2] Amy Tyson, The Wages of History: Emotional Labor On Public History's Front Lines, Public History in Historical Perspective (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013).