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).

Nuggets of History

Society Hill is a beautiful, wealthy, elegant and yet disjointed neighborhood. My wife and I biked there multiple times enjoying the rows of townhouses under the shade of trees and the little cafes. The problem arises with the high-rise buildings of the Society Hill Towers, which interrupt the sky, and Interstate 95 that severs the neighborhood from the Delaware river.

Anyone that would like a walk in the past — and there are many who go to Society Hill for that — would need a great imagination to see how different the neighborhood was not only in colonial time, but even just sixty years ago. This area is like a cake: layer after layer different flavors offer the visitor a various taste of the past, but the saccharine icing of the urbanistic renewal of the 1960s kills in part its character; yet, it is part of the cake.

The area destroyed in the renewal of 1956 (from the documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPuqgOyu8iU)

Workshop of the World: Philadelphia has a strong heritage as a blue-collar city, and Society Hill, under the new elegant coat hides a past of workshops, immigration, and warehouses. I decided to include six stops, arranged in a circuit:

1: Powell House - Description of the house as a warehouse after 1904.

2: 3^rd Street - The neighborhood between 1880 and 1950: immigration and population; the industrial use of the area.

3: Dock Street - A fast jump back to the 18^th century; reasons behind the odd shape of the street (the street once was a creek, then a sewer, then a street).

4: Korean War Memorial Park/Urban Renewal: How was the neighborhood before the renewal? Brief history of the urbanistic planning of the area; the Korean War Memorial.

5: The Docks on the Delaware- The evolution of the docks and of the area from the foundation to the building of interstate 95, and finally today.

6: Bayuk's first factory - Showing the exact site of the factory, the industrial heritage of the area; the working conditions; the Phillies cigars in American art and Music.

Creating a guide from scratch requires a certain dosage of imagination, but what really steered my thoughts were class readings. Public history is like a walk on ice: between you and an effective exhibit there is a slippery surface layered with cliche' and often problematic interests of the public on which it is difficult to maintain a good balance. Clearly to read the practices and analysis of experienced public historians is more than helpful. Probably the most influential for my mindset were Andrew Hurley's Beyond Preservation (1), Tammy Gordon's Private History in Public (2) and Dolores Hayden's The Power of Place (3): the first offers interesting perspectives and problems in public history dealing with cities and neighborhoods; the second illustrates some well done projects on urban communities; the third is a window through which to peek at the public's taste for the past.

These books, but not only them, helped me in shaping my guided tour, the purpose of which is to cut the cake for the visitors, provide them with spoons and hope for an “Oh, that’s interesting!”. With this objective in mind, I tried to diversify the arguments behind every stop, keeping in mind the fil rouge of the Workshop of the World.

The Eureka moment is precisely what makes the study of the past interesting. I fortunately had a couple of them during my research for the material, such as when, searching between the tons of photos of the waterworks archives, I found the picture of old 3^rd Street: Shops on the sides, men busy in their day's work and a couple of kids interested in the photographer and his camera, the image shows a lost neighborhood where immigrants set down roots for their life and families.

Another golden egg was on the atlas of Philadelphia of 1910: I was searching for some interesting workshops, perhaps a factory or warehouse, something that could be illuminating and serve as a good example of the industrial history of the area, now buried under the new boxy shapes of the modern houses.

online map: http://www.philageohistory.org/tiles/viewer/

Nearby Powell house (on another map) there was a perfume factory, which would have been elegant  in the research for the interesting contrast between the pungent industrial area and the fragrance of the factory's product, but it did not offer any hook; the same was for a candy factory, just on the other side of the street of the house. Looking more at the map however, I saw that on the corner of Third and Spruce there was a cigar factory, perhaps not really politically correct today, but the strange name — Bayuk — was interesting enough. I did not know, obviously, that this building was the first factory of the brand which  later changed their name to Phillies, one of the most famous brand of the U.S., the same brand that appears on one of the most famous masterpieces of American art.

Edward Hopper: Nighthawks. 1942.

That is the kind of thrilling nuggets that you find sifting through the dust of the past; a job that is rarely easy and often (or at least for most of people, the normal one unlike me) boring. Patience and resilience are needed when you are trying to find the photo or the story that catches the attention of the guests, the ones that are not under the influence of history, or perhaps, just not yet.

Bombed museums

This week’s readings offer a dive into the argument of museology. Randolph Starn’s paper, A Historian's Brief Guide to New Museum Studies, delineates a brief history of the concept of a museum and its application: behind a language sometimes cryptic and verbose[i] the author explains the different forms that museums have assumed in the past, recreating a context in which it is possible to analyze today’s interpretation of a museum’s educative role in relation with the public and technology. The last part of the article is particularly interesting in offering an examination of today’s crisis of museums, opposed by two factors: a new appealing technology that is difficult to integrate into the old-fashion mausoleum and a general research of easy entertainment even in structure dedicated to education, which leads to the sometimes horrifying infotainment or edutainment. However, the author does not forget the new possibilities offered by a new interpretation of museums, more democratic and inclusive of the public.

Another big problem lies in the tension between their innovating compulsion and the mainstream perception of past. The strong educative role of museums tends to put under scrutiny the exhibits, in the constant attempt to show to the public the complexity of the past events, this often happens in ways that conflicts not only with the opinion of the visitors ( a struggle that could bring good results in the visitors themselves) but also with institutions. The case of the exhibit of the Enola Gay (the bomber that released the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945), well documented by Edward T. Linenthal in History Wars: The Enola Gay and other Battles for the American Past, offers a very clear example of how an honest depiction of the past can enter in dangerous minefields of blind patriotism, national pride and fossilized representation of past events. In the case in question the problem became even more acute because of the national relevance of the Smithsonian Institute and its role of memorial of national pride, role that can’t easily coexist with the one of educational instrument if the argument is historically related.

Ken Yellis in his paper Fred Wilson, PTSD, and me: Reflection on the History Wars understands the lesson from Enola Gay’s aborted takeoff but also acknowledges the success of another exhibit, Mining the Museum. While the first teaches the errors to avoid, the second offers an interesting and effective interpretation of the role of the museum as stage for a new interaction between public and historical analysis. A new language seems to be needed, a dramatized and artistic interpretation of the past able to feed the new appetite of a public in search for new stimulation.

Interesting for the analysis of non-academic driven museums is the book Private History in Public by Tammy S. Gordon. He explains the forces behind three different kind of historically driven environments, which he defines as Community, Entrepreneurial and Vernacular exhibitions.

The Community exhibit derives from a reappropriation of the control over heritage from communities that others defined before. These exhibits are often strongly related to folklore, religion, and ethnicity and sometime lack the high professionalism of the academic museums; however they miss also the “oversaturated high polished [of] cultural products”, which often alienates the public.

The Entrepreneurial and the Vernacular exhibits are interesting and borderline, because they offer an interpretation of the past private and public at the same time. The first category -- that defines a private organized and personally managed little museum, often linked with an artisanal workplace – is easily deciphereable as museum: these exhibits lack probably a deep interpretation of the past, but offer a genuine representation of it. The second category, the Vernacular, groups private collections in public environment, such as the memorabilia in bars and shops. Personally, I find difficult to imagine a bar full of collectibles as a museums, because it misses totally the active cultural interpretation of the past, but at the same time the insertion of this category in the book offers an interesting perspective on the real meaning of museum, a meaning that presently appears blurry while it waits a new definition.

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[i] Language that offers sometimes gems of sibylline splendor: “Objects are remarkably unobjective subjects, if we mean by objective stable, self-sufficient, or self-explanatory”.

Workshop of the World draft stops

2: 3^rd Street

Society Hill today is one of the most elite neighborhoods in Philadelphia. Going back in time of 100 years the elegance and quiet of its streets would disappear, and you would find a commercial and industrial area full of immigrants, shops and traffic. Between 1880 and 1910 white collar workers gradually moved from Center City to better houses in the suburbs. The big industries left the city for areas near the Schuylkill or in the North Philly. Society Hill, then an immigrant area, was a densely populated neighborhood where houses, workshop, small industries and big warehouses coexisted together. As you can see from picture n X (3^rd Street on  google drive) 3^rd Street’s atmosphere resembled closely the one you can see in movies such as Once Upon a Time in America; walking out of the Powel house you would have seen between the townhouses a candy and cigar factory (final stop).

3: Dock Street

Clear cobblestone on the ground, exclusive restaurants and trees create the modern day distinctive appeal of this particular street. As you can easily notice, the street does not follow the regular perpendicular pattern of Philadelphia’s streets. Its sinuous shape and its name come from the fact that the street was actually a creek (Dock creek) until 1820, when it became a sewer. By 1840 it was completely covered and transformed into a street. In the early years of Philadelphia on the sides of the creek there were the workshops that needed a water source, in particular potteries, brickmaking and tanneries[i]. All these industries were highly polluting and we can imagine how pleasant the smell would have been at Powell house! In the mid-nineteenth century, these workshops moved to the outskirts but Dock street remained a highly commercial area (as you can see from the photo n. X) surrounded by the various warehouses of the port. In the 1960s it was at the center of the major urbanistic review which resulted in its present-day appearance; the project also comprised the rebuilding of City Tavern, the most famous colonial tavern of the city, which had been demolished in 1854.