"The moon was up, though the sun hadn't set, and it had that glittering silveriness the early stars have in high altitudes. The heavenly bodies look so much more remote from the bottom of a deep canyon than they do from the level. The climb of the walls helps out the eye, somehow. I lay down on a solitary rock that was like an island in the bottom of the valley, and looked up. The grey sage-brush and the blue-grey rock around me were already in shadow, but high above me the canyon walls were dyed flame-colour with the sunset, and the Cliff City lay in a gold haze against its dark cavern. In a few minutes it, too, was grey, and only the rim rock at the top held the red light. When that was gone, I could still see the copper glow in the pinons along the edge of the top ledges. The arc of sky over the canyon was silvery blue, with its pale yellow moon, and presently stars shivered into it, like crystals dropped into perfectly clear water."
---Willa Cather, The Professor's House (1925)
In this scene from Cather's novel of modern life, The Professor's House (1925), the orphaned cowhand, Tom, describes the enchanting cliff-dwellings of the Mesa Verde. Once inhabited by the Anasazi Indians, these dwellings have remained untouched for centuries, preserved as if in "amber" by the sun and the dry climate. In Tom's account, he narrates his discovery of the dwellings and the amateurish archaeological project that he, his friend Roddy, and their housekeeper, Henry, pursue in the hope that the Smithsonian will take an interest in their findings. When Tom returns to the Mesa following an unsuccessful trip to Washington, he discovers that Roddy has sold the artifacts to a German trader. After a bitter feud, Tom evicts Roddy and remains on the mesa for a solitary summer.
This particular scene follows the loss of the men's friendship, their idealized family housekeeping-museum project, and the loss of the relics. Tom's description of these homes from a position below is one of the most vivid passages within the novel, and its detail and splendor suggests an oneiric home. The dismantling of the idealized or utopian home is a modern conceit for Cather, and this story is set within a longer story about (in the simplest sense) the loss of cultural meaning in the 1920s. Yet the intensity and purity of Tom's final experience on the mesa resonates with our very contemporary longing for wholeness and well-being. As Tom discerns, the unadulterated happiness he experiences in these final months will only be temporary. In a similar way, while we strive for happiness (almost as if it were a state that could be attained or sustained for any length of time) such moments are likely to be unpredictable and fleeting--something we grasp from a distance, in a flash of quickly changing color and light.
Showing posts with label relics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label relics. Show all posts
Friday, April 2, 2010
Monday, February 15, 2010
Masculine Charms
"Woodcarver Bert Ohnstad carved canes, bowls, totem poles, and a number of sculptures, but his masterpiece was his Friendship Cane, to which he devoted more than fifty years in the making. The cedar limb used to make the cane was cut in 1928, as Ohnstad led a Boy Scout troop on a hike in Oklahoma. A fellow scout leader gave Ohnstad a memento to attach to it, a tiny gold heart with an inscription of the Lord's Prayer. From then on, people gave him tiny charms and keepsakes to attach to what he had begun to call his Friendship Cane. Ohnstad carved little niches into the cane and embedded such wonders as a tiny 64-square checkerboard, a shark's tooth, and a petite compass taken from a deceased German soldier's wrist during World War I. Close inspection reveals six miniature peek-holes embedded into the body of the cane, which reveal glimpses of Niagara Falls ,the Golden Gate Bridge, the White House, a Greek nymph, the Washington Monument, and the Lord's Prayer. Other attachments include a diamond-studded Rotary pin, a gold coin, a locket, a tiny "arrow head," a Scottie dog charm, a charm commemorating the Piccard statosphere flight, an eagle mascot pin from the 15th Wisconsin Regiment of the Civil War, and a Norse Immigration Centennial Medallion. Ohnstad counted more than one hundred objects and images carved into, attached to, or embedded into the cane, which exists as a travel diary, masculine version of a charm bracelet, and a remarkable piece of art and Americana."
--Leslie Umberger, Messages & Magic: 100 Years of Collage and Assemblage in American Art
Leslie Umberger's account of Bert Ohnstad's Friendship Cane, a part of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center Collection, gives us a glimpse of an art form that clearly draws upon the much older tradition of the reliquary as well as the Victorian interest in keepsakes, secular relics, and tokens of friendship and memory. Ohnstad's cane, produced between 1928 and 1979, is the material record of those with whom his life intersected through friendship. His efforts to embed keepsakes within the cane and to create nostalgic "peep holes" suggests privacy, insight, and interiority--a glimpse of the artist and of the era. Yet in transforming the typically utilitarian cane into a numinous object, Ohnstad's artwork also prompts us to reflect more deeply about our own private history.
--Leslie Umberger, Messages & Magic: 100 Years of Collage and Assemblage in American Art
Leslie Umberger's account of Bert Ohnstad's Friendship Cane, a part of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center Collection, gives us a glimpse of an art form that clearly draws upon the much older tradition of the reliquary as well as the Victorian interest in keepsakes, secular relics, and tokens of friendship and memory. Ohnstad's cane, produced between 1928 and 1979, is the material record of those with whom his life intersected through friendship. His efforts to embed keepsakes within the cane and to create nostalgic "peep holes" suggests privacy, insight, and interiority--a glimpse of the artist and of the era. Yet in transforming the typically utilitarian cane into a numinous object, Ohnstad's artwork also prompts us to reflect more deeply about our own private history.
Monday, December 28, 2009
Mother Love
"At bedtime, instead of my charming boy, ... I found a lifeless corpse--laid out in the white robes of innocence and death. Though I wept and pressed him, he could not look at me. How could I endure it--much less compose myself--but by believing him gone to perfect rest and happiness.--there to wait for his father and mother."
---Diary of Louisa Park, qtd. in Robin Jaffee Frank's Love and Loss: American Portrait and Mourning Miniatures (2000). Frank accredits Louisa Park's diary entries for Dec 14 and 24, 1800 (American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA) and quotes from Nancy Schrom Dye and Daniel Blake Smith, "Mother Love and Infant Death, 1750-1920" Journal of American History 73 (September 1986), 332.
I have selected this quote from Robin Jaffee Frank's superb volume on portrait and mourning miniatures, a book that elegantly traces the history of this artistic and decorative form. This particular quote does not reference the portrait (or the material culture of mourning) that are the subjects of Frank's book, but it does suggests the sentimental underpinnings of the early nineteenth century that located comfort in portrait miniatures, hairwork, and other relics of the dead. What draws me to this quote, however, is the way that it captures the univeral aspect of grief --the seeming impossibility of "enduring" loss. The death of a child disrupts the natural order of things and cannot be fathomed. The acceptance of death that marked an earlier era gives way to the more reassuring promise of reunion between mother and child.
In my title, I tip my hat to the late blogger, Cancer Baby who died from ovarian cancer in May of 2006 at the age of 33. Her entry "(M)otherlove" a poem that documents her own mother's stunned --yet silent reaction--to her question, "What will you do if I die?" comes to mind as I work through Frank's art history work.
---Diary of Louisa Park, qtd. in Robin Jaffee Frank's Love and Loss: American Portrait and Mourning Miniatures (2000). Frank accredits Louisa Park's diary entries for Dec 14 and 24, 1800 (American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA) and quotes from Nancy Schrom Dye and Daniel Blake Smith, "Mother Love and Infant Death, 1750-1920" Journal of American History 73 (September 1986), 332.
I have selected this quote from Robin Jaffee Frank's superb volume on portrait and mourning miniatures, a book that elegantly traces the history of this artistic and decorative form. This particular quote does not reference the portrait (or the material culture of mourning) that are the subjects of Frank's book, but it does suggests the sentimental underpinnings of the early nineteenth century that located comfort in portrait miniatures, hairwork, and other relics of the dead. What draws me to this quote, however, is the way that it captures the univeral aspect of grief --the seeming impossibility of "enduring" loss. The death of a child disrupts the natural order of things and cannot be fathomed. The acceptance of death that marked an earlier era gives way to the more reassuring promise of reunion between mother and child.
In my title, I tip my hat to the late blogger, Cancer Baby who died from ovarian cancer in May of 2006 at the age of 33. Her entry "(M)otherlove" a poem that documents her own mother's stunned --yet silent reaction--to her question, "What will you do if I die?" comes to mind as I work through Frank's art history work.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
Heirlooms
Today's quote comes from Tovah Martin and Richard Brown's whimsical book Tasha Tudor's Garden. Text and image come together in this biopic to afford the reader/visitor intimate access to Tasha's world and the inspirations for her art. Her rustic home in southern Vermont was modeled after an 18th century farmhouse and created by her son Seth with hand-tools. Tasha's rootedness in the past is manifested in the roots of her garden and gardening practices as well. It is difficult to determine whether it is most accurate to describe Tasha as "out of sync" with the time period in which she was born or simply highly skilled at hitching historical time to the present. Her life seems to bear few of the "seams" of a reenactment of the past (in which one is always conscious of the closeness of the contemporary world--often jarringly so.) If time in the garden is cyclical, heirloom plants and heirloom practices confirm the linear nature of time by underscoring the importance of repetition in promoting remembrance. Yet the very concept of the heirloom also acknowledges the passage of time. The heirloom garden allows us to experience the excitement of the appearance--and reappeance of the past. Curiously, heirloom plants are relics of the past but also made brand new ...over and over again.
"If Tasha's garden is a fantasy, its vision is rooted in the past... She plants varieties that would have been perfectly comfortable in a cottage garden several generations ago. The oldest roses nearly extinct dianthus cultivars, heirloom narcissus dug from her mother's garden---these are the sorts of plant[s] that find their home with Tasha....we are bound together by a mutual respect for heirloom plants. Tasha lures her friends up to ther garden with descriptions of seldom-seen primroses, peonies, lilies, and cinnamon pinks. And we come to discover those plants and more combined with inspired artistry. We wander among divine daffodils framed in a lacework of crab apples and along forget-me-not paths disappearing into flowery glades. We become transfixed by this place lost in time. Then we tarry by lamplight until late in the evening, listening spellbound to stories of eccentric uncles with incredible green thumbs and chimney campanulas stretching nearly seven feet tall. We come to share the fantasy."
--Tasha Tudor's Garden, Text by Tovah Martin, Photographs by Richard W. Brown (1994)
"If Tasha's garden is a fantasy, its vision is rooted in the past... She plants varieties that would have been perfectly comfortable in a cottage garden several generations ago. The oldest roses nearly extinct dianthus cultivars, heirloom narcissus dug from her mother's garden---these are the sorts of plant[s] that find their home with Tasha....we are bound together by a mutual respect for heirloom plants. Tasha lures her friends up to ther garden with descriptions of seldom-seen primroses, peonies, lilies, and cinnamon pinks. And we come to discover those plants and more combined with inspired artistry. We wander among divine daffodils framed in a lacework of crab apples and along forget-me-not paths disappearing into flowery glades. We become transfixed by this place lost in time. Then we tarry by lamplight until late in the evening, listening spellbound to stories of eccentric uncles with incredible green thumbs and chimney campanulas stretching nearly seven feet tall. We come to share the fantasy."
--Tasha Tudor's Garden, Text by Tovah Martin, Photographs by Richard W. Brown (1994)
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Hair Part II: Pieces of Me
Today's quote for this multi-part series on Hair is taken from Helen Sheumaker's fascinating study, Love Entwined: The Curious History of Hairwork in America. This study traces the rise and fall of hairwork (hair jewelry, wreaths, portrait miniatures including locks of hair) as an object of sentiment and devotion as the once hand-made fanciwork became increasingly commercialized:
In the eighteenth century, the sentimental associations of hair were obliquely displayed; by the nineteenth century, hairwork and the sentimentality it conveyed was worn for others to observe. This practice revealed a paradox about sentimentality. While display of one's sentimentality was essential to being regarded as sentimental, that same exhibition could easily be construed as ostentatious, vulgar, and insincere. Fashion was constantly in flux, it was superficial, and it was self-aggrandizing. It opposed the sincerity that women in particular were supposed to possess. Fashion was expressed with goods, and therefore was opposed to the domestic sphere. Thus, those constant fluctuations in styles threatened to undermine the premise of sentimentality itself.
Even as hairwork revealed the dissonance between genuine emotion and frivolous fashionableness, it attempted a remedy. Hair's undeniable relationship to an individual asserted a sincerity of character that transcended the hypocrisy that fahionableness implied. The mid-nineteenth century was the height of the popularity of hairwork perhaps because as fashion was criticized as being particularly hypocritical, hairwork's genuiness was being asserted. On the one hand, hair jewelry was very much a commodity, buttressed as it was by marketing and salesmanship; on the other hand, it was exactly that which could not be completely commodified. Hair jewelry provided a way to forestall the apparent effects of fashion in the market and in the social world" (20-21).
--Helen Sheumaker, Love Entwined: The Curious History of Hairwork in America, (2007)
In the eighteenth century, the sentimental associations of hair were obliquely displayed; by the nineteenth century, hairwork and the sentimentality it conveyed was worn for others to observe. This practice revealed a paradox about sentimentality. While display of one's sentimentality was essential to being regarded as sentimental, that same exhibition could easily be construed as ostentatious, vulgar, and insincere. Fashion was constantly in flux, it was superficial, and it was self-aggrandizing. It opposed the sincerity that women in particular were supposed to possess. Fashion was expressed with goods, and therefore was opposed to the domestic sphere. Thus, those constant fluctuations in styles threatened to undermine the premise of sentimentality itself.
Even as hairwork revealed the dissonance between genuine emotion and frivolous fashionableness, it attempted a remedy. Hair's undeniable relationship to an individual asserted a sincerity of character that transcended the hypocrisy that fahionableness implied. The mid-nineteenth century was the height of the popularity of hairwork perhaps because as fashion was criticized as being particularly hypocritical, hairwork's genuiness was being asserted. On the one hand, hair jewelry was very much a commodity, buttressed as it was by marketing and salesmanship; on the other hand, it was exactly that which could not be completely commodified. Hair jewelry provided a way to forestall the apparent effects of fashion in the market and in the social world" (20-21).
--Helen Sheumaker, Love Entwined: The Curious History of Hairwork in America, (2007)
Monday, September 21, 2009
Material Memory
In this provocative article, Teresa Barnett defines a type of relic collecting that cannot be captured solely by the Victorian sense of material memory. She uses as her example the schoolteacher and collector Christian Sanderson whose home is now a museum in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania:
[Christian] Sanderson's commemorations were more interesting when they dealt with time itself, when they found a formal structure, that is, which somehow encoded a piece of the lost time they were attempting to preserve. Looked at in this way, his relics, solid objects though they are, can be seen as bits of congealed time. And they are at their most poignant--and intriguing--when, in their reified form, they manage to reenact the vanished time of their making.
To commemorate Woodrow Wilson's death, for instance, Sanderson saved the pages of a counting exercise his schoolchildren were working on as the school bell tolled for the funeral. That exercise may summon memory simply because it was literally "on the spot" at the significant moment, but in a twist that can be seen as a form of wit, it also summons memory through its simple mimetic form: "one, two, three, four, five," like the tolling of the bell itself, as if the children transcribed the knell of mourning onto the coarse paper of their exercise books. Looking at the counting exercise some seventy years later, then, is like summoning up a fragment of 1920s time.
--Teresa Barnett, "Tradition and the Individual Memory: The Case of Christian C. Sanderson" in Acts of Possession: Collecting in America, Edited by Leah Dilworth (2003)
[Christian] Sanderson's commemorations were more interesting when they dealt with time itself, when they found a formal structure, that is, which somehow encoded a piece of the lost time they were attempting to preserve. Looked at in this way, his relics, solid objects though they are, can be seen as bits of congealed time. And they are at their most poignant--and intriguing--when, in their reified form, they manage to reenact the vanished time of their making.
To commemorate Woodrow Wilson's death, for instance, Sanderson saved the pages of a counting exercise his schoolchildren were working on as the school bell tolled for the funeral. That exercise may summon memory simply because it was literally "on the spot" at the significant moment, but in a twist that can be seen as a form of wit, it also summons memory through its simple mimetic form: "one, two, three, four, five," like the tolling of the bell itself, as if the children transcribed the knell of mourning onto the coarse paper of their exercise books. Looking at the counting exercise some seventy years later, then, is like summoning up a fragment of 1920s time.
--Teresa Barnett, "Tradition and the Individual Memory: The Case of Christian C. Sanderson" in Acts of Possession: Collecting in America, Edited by Leah Dilworth (2003)
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Body Parts
This new exhibit at Houston's Menil Collection assembles a wide range of representations of fragmented bodies, including reliquaries, surrealist paintings and sculptures, and tribal arts that meditate on this theme. Upon entering the exhibit, the visitor encounters a set of mirrors installed at an angle that produces a fragmented reflection. The visitor is thus made a part of the displays in a manner that underscores the centurality of identity and selfhood to any discussion of bodily fragmentation:
Exaggerated scale is also deployed in a fifteenth-century French reliquary that contains bone fragments. Depicting an erect and over-sized index finger, it speaks to the continued vitality of the body, even after death, from which the bones issued. Similar themes can be addressed through a reduction of scale...In one photogram, Light Borne in Darkness, ca. 1951, the artists' hands appear ethereal and weightless. This, combined with the hands' diminutive scale, would seem to allude to those immaterial aspects of the subject--intentionality and consciousness--that cannot be captured by its physical boundaries.
--Mary Lambrakos, Curatorial Assistant, Menil Collection. From the exhibition pamphlet for "Body in Fragments" on display at the Menil from August 21, 2009--February 28, 2010.
Exaggerated scale is also deployed in a fifteenth-century French reliquary that contains bone fragments. Depicting an erect and over-sized index finger, it speaks to the continued vitality of the body, even after death, from which the bones issued. Similar themes can be addressed through a reduction of scale...In one photogram, Light Borne in Darkness, ca. 1951, the artists' hands appear ethereal and weightless. This, combined with the hands' diminutive scale, would seem to allude to those immaterial aspects of the subject--intentionality and consciousness--that cannot be captured by its physical boundaries.
--Mary Lambrakos, Curatorial Assistant, Menil Collection. From the exhibition pamphlet for "Body in Fragments" on display at the Menil from August 21, 2009--February 28, 2010.
Monday, September 7, 2009
Gifts
Julia Glass only hints at the significance of bodily gifts in this quote from her National Book Award winning novel Three Junes. The novel focuses on several different love relationships, including the one featured below between the intense NYC bookstore owner and art historian, Fenno, and his (temporary) partner, free-wheeling Tony:
Among those charms was Tony's talent for random gifts. A linen shirt the perfect cobalt blue of hyacinths. A beautiful if battered reliquary shaped like a miniature foot (a lid where the ankle would be, a primitive glass window over the metatarsals, because it had once purportedly held such a bone from the foot of a saint). A first edition of William Carlos Williams's Journey to Love (its title, I guessed, more a tease than a promise). Each gift presented without fanfare or occasion, wrapped in want ads or not at all, handed over as we walked along the street or sat together in a taxi, stalled in traffic. ("Here. Picked this up for you.")
---Julia Glass, Three Junes
Among those charms was Tony's talent for random gifts. A linen shirt the perfect cobalt blue of hyacinths. A beautiful if battered reliquary shaped like a miniature foot (a lid where the ankle would be, a primitive glass window over the metatarsals, because it had once purportedly held such a bone from the foot of a saint). A first edition of William Carlos Williams's Journey to Love (its title, I guessed, more a tease than a promise). Each gift presented without fanfare or occasion, wrapped in want ads or not at all, handed over as we walked along the street or sat together in a taxi, stalled in traffic. ("Here. Picked this up for you.")
---Julia Glass, Three Junes
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