Issue 1

Dana Ostrander

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Abstract

By most accounts, American painter Marsden Hartley’s fascination with the figure of the Native American was a short-lived affair, swiftly replaced by a mid-career turn toward Aryan subjects. Complicating this narrative, however, are Hartley’s late paintings like Madawaska – Acadian Light Heavy (1940), which depict bodies not immediately legible as ‘white,’ thereby alluding to the more complex history of racial mixing in New England. My proposed article argues that Hartley’s portrayal of his light-heavyweight model as an ethnically ambiguous resident of Madawaska, Maine exposes a more elusive history of intermixing between European colonizers and the Mi’kmaq and Maliseet tribes of the region – Maine’s true ‘native’ peoples. Moreover, I suggest that Hartley encoded his sitter as indigenous in order to emulate masculine stereotypes often associated with Native Americans – such as ruggedness, virility, and closeness to nature – thereby diverting suspicions about his own sexual nonconformity.

In order to signal nativeness in Madawaska, Hartley employed both textual and visual clues, such as the canvas’s blood-red backdrop and the sitter’s skin tone – which the artist described as “deep warm ivory with a rich red flush.” My research suggests that Hartley’s depiction of an exposed, muscular, indigenous body can be read as an attempt to emphasize a palpably male, and thus ostensibly heterosexual, figure. In this case, the purported sexual excesses of the ‘non-white’ Native served to naturalize the painting’s nudity, inclining viewers to displace any suspicions of sexual deviance onto the subject’s perceived racial identity rather than the artist’s own homosexuality. I ultimately propose that Marsden Hartley’s longstanding fascination with indigeneity speaks to a larger phenomenon within the Regionalist movement, whereby the descendants of European immigrants legitimized their own American nativeness by subsuming the ‘primitive,’ ‘natural,’ and ‘virile’ qualities they had once located in Native Americans.

Native/American:
Locating Indigeneity in Marsden Hartley’s Madawaska—Acadian Light-Heavy

By most accounts, Marsden Hartley’s fascination with the figure of the Native American was a short-lived affair, beginning in 1913 with a set of paintings that merged disparate tribal motifs into a Modern primitivist fantasy, and ending in 1922, with the publication of an essay series elucidating the merits of Pueblo culture.^[1] Scholars writing on Hartley’s later, figural paintings from the 1930s have consequently emphasized the artist’s affection for Aryan, rather than indigenous, subjects, pointing to the Northern European types that dominate these eroticized, archaic portraits. Hartley himself telegraphed this shift in 1932, as he prepared to conclude a yearlong stay in Mexico: “The soul of the indian is dark. . . . After I have gone north and by north I mean toward Scandinavia among the golden faced people I will probably see these dark ones more clearly. For this reason I already crave to look at faces whose substance is light if not always ‘light’ in nature.”^[2] The following year, firmly ensconced in Germany, Hartley seemed to recall his earlier prophecy, writing,

The blond races always represent light to me, and the others the absence of it; And I never felt this more keenly or more pleasurably I think than when I was getting on board the Orinoco last spring at the dock in Vera Cruz, [Mexico]. . . . There was such a gust of my rich native north coming out of those German faces of the crew that it seemed like I was headed toward the light again which I was.^[3]

Understandably, many scholars have interpreted these passages as presenting a clean temporal break between Hartley’s early career and his late career, following his return to Maine in 1937: they consider the former aesthetically European, primitivizing, and abstract, and the latter representational, Aryan, and deeply rooted in the New England scene. Wanda Corn, for instance, has suggested that after completing the Amerika series of 1914 (Fig. 1)—in which the artist amalgamated a diverse range of tribal motifs—“Hartley never painted another series of Indian-based works.”^[4]

In contrast, I argue that Hartley’s late paintings reflect a subtle but sustained investment in indigenous content, best exemplified by Madawaska—Acadian Light-Heavy (1940, Fig. 2).^[5] In doing so, I develop an idea that Donna Cassidy presents, but leaves unexplored, in her groundbreaking essay, “ ‘On the Subject of Nativeness’: Marsden Hartley and New England Regionalism.” Cassidy tellingly suggests that Hartley “viewed . . . Maine and Acadian fisherfolk through the lens of the primitive: he transformed them into the simple, the natural, the Other.”^[6] In my view, Madawaska and several contemporaneous paintings (Figs. 3, 4) signal otherness through the inclusion of bodies and skin not immediately legible as white.^[7] I ultimately suggest that Hartley intended these racially ambiguous subjects to evoke qualities traditionally associated with the Native, such as masculine virility, sexual excess, closeness to the land, and authentic “Americanness.” By presenting his subjects in this way, Hartley drew upon Maine’s indigenous past and conformed to a trend in New England Regionalist circles that urged a return to “primitive,” pre-modern roots.

Striking for its powerful solidity and provocative frontality, Madawaska—Acadian Light-Heavy depicts a light-heavyweight prizefighter, a young man of harmonious proportions, epic strength, and unrestrained virility. His sculptural body, unclothed and centrally placed, is distinguished from the crimson backdrop by a series of black paint strokes that outline the contours of his muscles, and by rays of raking light that illuminate his right profile, bicep, pectoral muscle, and hip. Hartley’s personal letters reveal that the sitter for this painting was a real-life pugilist in the Bangor boxing scene, “pulled up from the bowels of the YMCA” by the artist himself.^[8] The young man, named Lionel Daigle, was a member of an old family hailing from the rural community of Madawaska, Maine, where his father was well-respected for raising hogs and horses, and for logging.^[9] After meeting Hartley, Daigle went on to model for the artist’s classes at the Bangor Arts Society during the winter of 1940, and sat for a number of figural paintings, including three different arrangements of Madawaska.^[10] Yet the painting’s lack of sitter identification and heavy physiognomic abstraction—which renders his face angular and masklike—makes it clear that Madawaska was conceived more as an idealized typology of masculinity than as a portrait of an individual. In fact, Cassidy has insightfully pointed out that the painting’s content conforms to the regional trope of the Acadian strongman, perhaps serving as a self-conscious testament to Hartley’s familiarity with the vernacular culture of his home state of Maine.^[11]

Although Madawaska’s sitter may not initially register as racialized to contemporary viewers, comparing the work to Hartley’s paintings of Northern European and Anglo-Saxon men from the same period reveals its departure from the artist’s Caucasian typology and demonstrates racial encoding on both visual and textual levels. Following closely on the heels of works such as Finish-Yankee Sauna (Fig. 5) and Flaming American (Swim Champ) (Fig. 6), which were both painted in 1939 and feature blue-eyed, blond men with peachy-pink skin, Madawaska presents a figure who seems to fall well outside Hartley’s paradigm of whiteness.

 

While visual speculations about racial heritage are inherently flawed because of the instability of race as a material reality, I would argue that Hartley sought to delineate a noticeable difference between the bodies, complexions, and physiognomy of his Aryan subjects and their Acadian counterpart.^[12] In Madawaska, the prizefighter’s eyes are painted a dull black, to match his jet-black hair, and his skin is rendered in umber tones over a red ground. Known for his eugenic sympathies, Hartley indicated on various occasions his belief in supposed racial markers such as skin tone, eye color, and physiological build. On the topic of eyes, he wrote, “I can never tell myself what there is in dark eyes. I know there is imagination fancy faith and mysticism in all the degrees of blue ones—and generally a love of birth.”^[13] His decision to feature a model with dark eyes, then, places the sitter in a realm of apprehension and ambiguity. Originally painted fully nude, the fighter was also more anatomically exposed than his counterparts—at least until Hartley added a posing strap to the composition in a moment of apparent self-censure.^[14] Interestingly, the prizefighter carries no accessories that would explain his nearly full-frontal exposure; no boxing paraphernalia finds its way into the frame, but the sitter’s bronzed skin and barely-there garment—which almost suggests a stereotypically indigenous loincloth—ultimately function as shorthand for an animalistic, “primitive” quality that viewers of the 1940s would have seen as compatible with sensuous nudity.

There are several reasons to believe that Hartley may have used artistic license to depict his Acadian sitter as indigenous. First, his erotic portrayal of a racially ambiguous subject demonstrates surprising parallels with French colonial illustrations of New England’s original Native inhabitants. We see this most clearly in an engraved print dating to 1797 (Fig. 7), which, like the title of Hartley’s painting, identifies its subject as Acadian. Historically, “Acadia” was the name France gave to its colonies in northeastern North America—a region which comprised parts of modern-day Maine and Nova Scotia, and included the town of Madawaska, where Hartley’s sitter would eventually be born and raised. During the colonial era, the appellation “Acadian” commonly referred to anyone residing in the region, whether Euro-American or indigenous. The engraving attests to this fact, as it identifies a member of one of the five tribes that occupied the region as Acadian. Part of a series tracing variations in regional dress across the globe, this is one of the only plates to depict nudity—perhaps a result of stereotypes about the nakedness and sexual excess of North America’s “savage” peoples.^[15] The “Acadian” figure’s exaggerated musculature, exposed skin, and brute physical power—intimated in the image’s allusions to hunting—closely mirror the features of Hartley’s own Acadian boxer.^[16]

In spite of such resonances, most scholars of Hartley’s work have upheld the idea that his late paintings, including Madawaska, categorically depict Caucasian subjects; some have speculated that the presence of darker complexions reflects the impact of sun tanning on fair skin.^[17] This baseline assumption of whiteness can be countered in multiple ways. An example from Hartley’s writings shows that although he did occasionally conflate suntanned skin with racial otherness, his fantasies of Nativeness dissolved upon witnessing areas of white skin left unexposed to the sun. In one essay, he describes chancing upon a naked, “champagne blonde” Bavarian peasant sunning himself, “brown as a guerrero indian where the sun had burned his creamy flesh, and where the sun has not penetrated, the colour . . . almost girlishly fair.”^[18] Despite Madawaska’s prominent nudity, it is impossible to find any areas where the sun did not penetrate. Moreover, Hartley’s description indicates his adherence to complexion-based designations of race, and reveals his understanding of the suntan as a transformative feature with the potential to convert a Germanic subject into a member of the indigenous tribes of Mexico—and in doing so, to confer masculinity in lieu of girlishness. Elsewhere in Hartley’s private writings, the artist consistently characterizes French-Canadians—an ethnic category that encompasses the Acadian light-heavyweight—as dark in complexion. While boarding with a local family in East Point Island, Nova Scotia, during the fall of 1935, Hartley praised the maritime clan’s appearance: “Mrs. Mason is Germanic with an accent, & Mr. is without question Canadian French, so dark and rugged he is & the boys also. All of them look like cinnamon bears, & are terrifyingly powerful, & so quiet and childlike.”^[19]

Five years later, when rhapsodizing about his newly discovered model, Lionel Daigle, Hartley again observed difference at the level of complexion, calling him “tall with a powerful build and that amazingly rich color like the Provençales—deep warm ivory with a rich red flush on it and blue black hair.”^[20] As it turns out, these descriptors are uncannily similar to those Hartley applied to the Pueblo people following his visit to Taos, New Mexico, in 1918. When the Pueblo dances were at risk of being banned for their perceived lasciviousness in 1920, Hartley wrote articles in their defense, valorizing the performers’ “dark warm bodies, and their jet-blue hair.”^[21] His subsequent poem, “The Festival of the Corn,” makes specific note of the dancers’ “red young bodies flushing with an old flame of the sunset.”^[22] Elsewhere he declares that “the red of the west is coming up out of their loins,” which are “naked but for the breech cloth.”^[23] The parallels to Madawaska are numerous, from the celebration of nudity to the thematic importance of the skin’s “red flush.” The bold crimson backdrop of Madawaska begins to take on new connotations—perhaps referring to stereotypes of the purportedly “red-skinned” Native American, or even the blood running through the sitter’s veins—effectively connecting the subject to indigenous ancestors of the distant past.

One final piece of evidence supports the suggestion that Hartley sought to link his ethnically ambiguous model with a “primitive” past: the artist’s apparent reliance on Pablo Picasso’s African period to inform the aesthetic of Madawaska. In my view, the painting’s deep red and brown coloration, masklike abstraction, and geometric forms likely derive from Picasso’s 1908 painting Bust of a Man (Fig. 8).^[24] Comparing the two figures’ thick eyelids, dull black eyes, and long, highlighted noses reveals undeniable similarities. Furthermore, Hartley’s completion of Madawaska in the winter of 1940 neatly coincides with the Museum of Modern Art’s retrospective, Picasso: Forty Years of His Art. Bust of a Man appears both in the extant checklist and the accompanying exhibition catalogue, making it likely that Hartley encountered it in some form.^[25] Those familiar with Hartley’s early career will recall that in the 1910s he came to view Native American material culture as a precedent for modern American art, in the same way that African art had appealed to avant-garde Europeans. Strongly influenced by the primitivizing Blaue Reiter Almanac, he visited the Ethnographic Museum of the Trocadéro in Paris and spent time studying some of the 30,000 Native American artifacts in Berlin’s Museum für Völkerkunde.^[26] Like his European peers, he concluded that these objects provided “authentic” source material for his art. Hartley’s apparently renewed interest in primitivism during the late 1930s lends credence to the idea that he may have attempted to paint his sitter in the image of the “Native.” Paradoxically, however, Hartley’s late-career reliance upon European movements such as Cubism came at a time when he was, at least publicly, shunning effete foreign intellectualism in favor of American nativism.

Perhaps surprisingly, the figure of the Native cohered with the values of the 1930s art market, which embraced Regionalism as another foreign war loomed. As Hartley understood, the true “natives” of Maine were not French-Canadian or Anglo-Saxon folk, but members of the Mi’kmaq and Maliseet, Passamaquoddy, Abenaki, and Penobscot tribes. Europeans had begun colonizing the North Atlantic region at the beginning of the seventeenth century, adopting miscegenation (also known as métissage or francization) as an official assimilation policy. As early as 1603, Samuel de Champlain, founder of the first capital of Acadia, promised the Ottowan and Huron tribes that as soon as he could attract French settlers and fur traders, “our young men will marry your daughters, and we will be one people.”^[27] This practice continued for over a century, ensuring that, as one of the earliest developed colonies, “Acadia saw the first and highest degree of mixture.”^[28] Historians maintain that “few of the local . . . French Acadians belonging to long-established regional families would have been ‘full bloods’ by the mid-1700s.”^[29] From this we can deduce that Hartley’s boxer, Lionel Daigle, was likely of mixed or Métis ancestry, since the surname “Daigle” can be traced back to one of the founding French Acadian families of the Upper St. John Valley in present-day northern Maine.^[30] Settling in the ancestral hunting and fishing territory of the Maliseet people in 1785, the Daigle family lived peaceably alongside indigenous populations for generations.^[31] In fact, even the Acadian town name of “Madawaska”—from which Daigle hailed, and to which Hartley would ultimately refer in the title of his painting—was originally derived in 1785 from a Mi’kmaq word that roughly translates to “the land of the porcupine.”^[32]

While Lionel Daigle’s ethnic heritage ultimately remains uncertain, knowledge of the Daigle clan’s longstanding history in Maine may have provided Hartley with the impetus to import tropes of Nativeness into his painting. Born in Lewiston, Maine, Hartley was intimately aware of the state’s complicated colonial history. He was an avid reader, and particularly enjoyed literary works that highlighted interactions between Euro-Americans and Maine’s indigenous inhabitants. These included Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie (1847) and Robert P. T. Coffin’s Kennebec: Cradle of Americans (1937)—both of which referred to Maine’s lengthy history of intermarriage between French traders and Native American women. Coffin, in particular, lauded the benevolent influence of Native Americans in converting colonists from effete Europeans to strong Americans:

One of the greatest errors of history is the impression it constantly leaves of one race’s completely supplanting another. We meet it in history touching on Maine and the rest of America. The French-Indian War ends. The Indians end. As if our Maine ancestors could have lived next-door neighbors to the Abenakis for two hundred years and still have remained European. It is like expecting a book to lie open out in Maine’s sunlight and not change color. People who lived with Dawn men drank in a lot of splendor from them. . . . The Indians slowly vanished, but they left the mark of their culture on almost every moment of the colonists’ lives.^[33]

In Coffin’s tale, white settlers are enriched through contact with indigenous tribes, their changing complexions symbolized by a book’s pages darkening in the sun. In addition to Coffin’s text, Hartley was also voraciously consuming Henry David Thoreau’s writings while painting Madawaska; these included The Maine Woods (1864), which emphasized the lingering presence of the Native American and referred to Maine as “the home of the moose, the bear, the caribou, the wolf, the beaver, and the Indian.”^[34]

By the early twentieth century in New England, “authentic” Native Americans living outside of mainstream culture were thought to have disappeared, owing to the twin forces of intermarriage and assimilation.^[35] For many, Maine’s northern landscape, climate, and folksy inhabitants even aligned the state more closely with Northern Europe.^[36] Nevertheless, in the late 1930s Hartley registered an acute awareness that Maine’s populations were the product of a more diverse racial hybridization. In his unpublished essay “This Country of Maine” (c. 1937-1938), he describes the region’s “surface variation in types” as resulting from an influx of French-Canadians, Finns, Swedes, and Portuguese. Like Coffin, Hartley advocates for racial mixing, contending that “the fusion of Yankee with these various bloods produces a fine new type with viking appearances and Yankee behaviours.”^[37] Hartley’s eugenic investments, which tied physiology to race and emphasized advantageous breeding, were likely also a product of the hybridization rhetoric that had circulated within the Stieglitz circle since the 1910s. Art historian Lauren Kroiz has argued that members of Stieglitz’s circle viewed Modern art as an ever-evolving product of constructive miscegenation, whereby aesthetics were “infused with new blood” derived from “primitive” sources.^[38] She further contends that many Modern artists appropriated non-Western abstraction in an attempt to evoke unrepresentable concepts such as the soul, after naturalistic depictions of anatomy had failed to materialize them.^[39] Using this interpretive lens, the facial abstraction of Madawaska evokes racial otherness both literally, by mirroring Picasso’s African masks, and metaphorically, by hybridizing dissonant modes of representation—realism and abstraction—in service of a new breed of modern art.

Interpreting Madawaska’s light-heavyweight boxer as a product of constructive miscegenation prompts questions about the function of indigeneity in the artist’s late-career return to his supposedly “native” Maine, and the influence of primitivism in the broader Regionalist movement. I would suggest that Hartley’s 1930s turn to tropes of Nativeness reflected anxieties about sexuality, manhood, and American identity dredged up by the specter of a second world war, while also catering to the Regionalist imperative of a return to American land. For Hartley, internalizing the mythical traits of what he called the “Redman” fulfilled the societal expectations for masculine virility, closeness to nature, and authentic Americanness that were handed down from the arbiters of the art world and from U.S. culture more broadly.

Primarily at stake in Madawaska is a strategic construction of sexuality that is both erotic and seemingly heteronormative. As the Great Depression began and Prohibition was repealed, the U.S. government began to reassert control over vice districts that had sheltered homosexual subcultures in large cities, and moral reformers tightened restrictions on sexual freedoms and visibility.^[40] Championing traditional gender roles, American art critics such as Samuel Kootz eviscerated Modern painters working in the 1930s—including Hartley—for their “eunuch-like refinement,” “hopeless emasculation,” and “Puritan attitude against sensuality.”^[41] He instead demanded that artists “attempt to find themselves, no matter whether their discovery shall come from the heart, brain, eyes or hips.”^[42] By all accounts, this libidinal provocation prompted nothing less than an existential crisis for Hartley, whose own homosexual preferences remained inexpressible due to severe obscenity laws.^[43]

Yet ten years earlier, while visiting Taos, Hartley had found a subject he believed capable of conveying homoerotic sensuousness while sustaining the guise of heteronormative masculinity. His many tributes to the Pueblo people allude to a unique culture of sexual laxity. In “The Festival of the Corn,” Hartley describes the dancers mingling: “A man, a boy, a man, a boy, a man.” The poem arrives at a climactic resolution as he writes, “The last saps of the / red-man are pouring down my thighs and arms….Red / lips are spreading trumpet-flowers-ready to catch the / corn-juice as it falls.”^[44] Defending the dances against religious censorship, Hartley complained:

The worst that [Christianity] taught us was abnegation of the body . . . The redman . . . taught our pale mentality what the red understanding of the universe is . . . That nothing in art shall endure or in life for that matter, without the explicit inclusion of the body. Complete understanding includes the clear conception of the beauty of the body even in its sensuous frankness.^[45]

Hartley thus dispensed with artistic prohibitions against nakedness and homoeroticism by legitimizing sensuousness as a natural bodily state that indigenous populations exemplified.

To be sure, sexuality was also inextricably tied to masculinity during Hartley’s lifetime. Victorian-era scientists had been successful in linking male effeminacy and homosexuality, and these erroneous conclusions retained social currency into the early twentieth century.^[46] As the United States prepared to enter World War II, military draft boards ejected alleged “sexual deviants” from the ranks by conducting physical examinations that screened recruits for suspiciously effeminate traits.^[47] When one army major wrote to a military doctor inquiring about the physiological markers of homosexuality, he received a photograph (Fig. 9) and accompanying description that highlighted the sitter’s “feminine pelvis and waistline, female distribution of pubic hair, great muscular weakness, [and] no hair on lips or chin.”^[48] Worth noting is the fact that Madawaska’s pugilist displays none of these characteristics; instead he exhibits thick chest and facial hair, exaggerated musculature, and a sturdy build.

Given this cultural suspicion of effeminacy, boxing provided the perfect alibi for appreciating male nudity under the cover of a sport whose obvious masculinity implied the heterosexuality of its participants. Queer theorist Thomas Waugh has used the phrase “alibi of athleticism” to describe how the scrutiny and appreciation of the male body was deemed culturally appropriate in the context of certain distinctly male spheres, such as the physical fitness community.^[49] In the mind of the public, the perfect male physique contained none of the pathological traits frequently associated with homosexuality, and was thus above suspicion.^[50] The alibi of athleticism allowed for the mass production and circulation of palpably homoerotic images, by legitimizing semi-nude content that would otherwise be deemed obscene.^[51] Hartley appears to have subscribed to one publication that would have featured such images, titled Strength & Health. A cover from its February 1938 issue, extant in his archives, exemplifies the magazine’s standard fare: positioned next to headlines about virile sexual desire and patriotic strength is a hyper-masculine, nude bodybuilder (Fig. 10).

In work and in life, Hartley incorporated the alibi of athleticism that he discovered in such publications. Inner-city YMCAs, such as the one in Bangor where he met the young man who would model for Madawaska, were popular cruising spots where homosexual men could encounter working-class, “straight” men under the pretense of a shared interest in physical fitness.^[52] Fellow American painter Paul Cadmus had not-so-subtly alluded to this phenomenon in the 1933 painting YMCA Locker Room (Fig. 11), which depicts dozens of undressed men crowded and overlapping evocatively within the steamy confines of a YMCA basement.^[53] When two versions of Madawaska went on display at the Hudson D. Walker gallery in New York in 1940, Hartley gave them athletic titles to justify their partial nudity, carefully including the fighter’s weight class and the addendum “For a Training Gym”—despite the fact that none of the canvases found its way into such a venue.^[54] He would certainly have recognized the acceptability of male nudity within prizefighting pictures, already established by iconic artistic precedents such as Thomas Eakins’s Wrestlers (1899) and George Bellows’s Stag at Sharkey’s (1909). Finally, there was even a precedent for depicting non-white boxers, as in Bellows’s Both Members of this Club (1909, Fig. 12), which portrayed two fighters, one white and one black, locked in a tense struggle with the former clearly outmatched.^[55]

If pugilism functioned as an alibi for male nudity, it also carried a certain patriotic prestige and symbolized America’s ethnic diversity during the late 1930s, as the nation was ineluctably drawn into conflict with the Axis powers. Whereas early twentieth-century boxing matches had pitted the African-American heavyweight champion Jack Johnson against a series of “white hope” challengers intended to reinforce racial hierarchies, by 1938 racial divisions were superseded by national ones. For at least a few years, the American public was provisionally united against a common German enemy. In 1937 Joe Louis became the second black heavyweight champion in world history and was promptly tapped to fight Germany’s Max Schmeling—a battle that assumed the epic proportions of a duel between Nazi fascism and American freedom.^[56] Suddenly, white Americans found themselves rooting for a black contender, taking to the streets in celebration when Louis delivered a victorious knockout punch in the first round. Hartley’s conception of a non-white boxer who symbolized patriotism and American rootedness may have taken partial inspiration from similar newsworthy events, which, in an unprecedented fashion, positioned America’s racial diversity as a source of strength and a challenge to Nazi ideals of ethnic purity.

As much as any other sector of American society, the art world was heavily invested in maintaining standards of masculine virility for artists during wartime. Espousing nationalism, xenophobia, and homophobia, prominent artists—including American Scene painter Thomas Hart Benton—lambasted effeminacy and homosexuality as unpatriotic, European, and reeking of Nazism. Artists were forced to position themselves in opposition to these traits in order to sell their work.^[57] Hartley must have sensed that his career was particularly vulnerable, given his identification as a gay man and his status as a former expatriate known for working in a European Modernist style. As discussed elsewhere, he had successfully pivoted toward Native American subject matter twenty years earlier, when similar anti-German sentiment curtailed his sales in the wake of World War I. Setting off for Taos in search of a more rugged, American subject matter, Hartley opined, “We whites have had to borrow quickly because we have no tradition and no racial background . . . War has, as I have said, sent the painters and the poets home, and they have been obliged to observe native excellencies and indications.”^[58] Dissuading fellow artists from turning to Europe for inspiration, he pointed them to a source allegedly untainted by civilization: “American painters must first learn to arrive at first-hand contact with [the American landscape]. It shall not come by way of effete conventional methods. . . . They have to learn the redman’s calm and the redman’s contact . . . it was their traditional ‘at-homeness’ that created their arts for them.”^[59] Echoing Regionalist beliefs in the power of the land to shape character, physiology, and morality, Hartley deified the “Redman” as “the one truly indigenous . . . esthete of America.”^[60] Only by drawing upon Native American sources, then, was he able to present himself as Europe’s masculine, heterosexual foil.

If indigenous culture provided a paradigm of masculinity in spite of sexual laxity, it was thought to be the direct result of Native Americans’ rootedness in the American soil. Aligning himself with trends in nativism and eugenics, Hartley argued that the land was capable of producing health, physical fitness, and masculine vitality, citing the figure of the Native as his primary example. Scholars of indigeneity maintain that this “close to nature” trope “essentializes aboriginal identity, places the ‘native mind’ in an ahistorical, timeless past of primordial unity with nature, and creates an unbridgeable gulf between ethnic groups.”^[61] We see this oversimplification occur when Hartley describes the Pueblo as “at all times . . . the natural expresser of . . . the great theme of nature which occupies his mind, and body, and soul.”^[62] Of course, Hartley was acting as part of a broader cultural program of primitivism that isolated the supposedly “vanishing” Native American as the sole hope for American progress in the face of modernization.^[63] Critic Edgar Holger Cahill cautioned that European Modernism had transformed Americans into “Machine People” carrying ugliness to its apotheosis within the walls of a “sordid industrial Babel.”^[64] He exhorted painters to follow the example of Native Americans, a people “close to the soil,” rather than concocting a “sophisticated or consciously cultivated naïveté.”^[65] Physicians such as Iwan Block speculated that the “vibrations of modernity” caused conditions such as homosexuality, recommending instead a return to the pre-modern.^[66] When faced with anxieties over European influence, Hartley’s antidote was the figure of the Native American, whom his acquaintance, anthropologist Edgar Hewett, had once called “a race of distinguished physical type . . . free from our infectious scourges, tuberculosis and syphilis, and the resulting physical deformities and mental degeneracies.”^[67] The supposed pinnacle of good breeding, the Native American was for Hartley the American land’s magnum opus.

At a basic level, Madawaska’s mythical vision of a nude, Native body as the pinnacle of masculine fortitude can be read as an attempt to divert attention away from the artist’s own homosexuality and onto a vigorously male, and thus ostensibly heterosexual, figure. In this case, the purported sexual excesses of the non-white races served to explain and naturalize the near-nakedness of Hartley’s model. As a result, viewers of the 1940s may have been inclined to displace any suspicions of sexual deviance onto the subject’s perceived racial identity rather than the artist’s own homoerotic investments, thereby sparing Hartley from discrimination or censorship. In a broader sense, though, Hartley’s longstanding fascination with indigeneity speaks to a larger phenomenon in certain circles of New England Regionalism, whereby the descendants of European immigrants legitimized their own American nativeness by subsuming the supposedly “primitive, natural, and virile” qualities they had once located in Native Americans.

Taking into account Hartley’s professed faith in the veritable Americanness of the Native, and his subtle inclusion of indigenous cues in late works like Madawaska, it seems that Native American culture may have exerted more of an influence on the American Scene movement than previously acknowledged in art historical scholarship. Historian Robert Dorman’s thorough study of Regionalism between 1920 and 1945 supports such a notion: “In the decade or so after [World War I] and prior to the onset of depression-era politicization,” he writes, “the regionalist movement took shape and rose to the task of cultural rejuvenation, seeking inspiration from the fresh materials of indigenous America—specifically, from Native American tribal cultures.”^[68]

I would contend that the success of Hartley’s late paintings such as Madawaska, and perhaps some of the successes of the Regionalist movement more broadly, depended on the imperialist propensity to appropriate qualities once associated with Native Americans and reattribute them to white “folk” populations.^[69] This was especially true in areas such as Maine, where Mi’kmaq and Maliseet tribes had long been assimilated through government-sponsored intermarriage. Madawaska thus represents an experimental attempt by Hartley to adopt qualities of Nativeness, as Maine’s Euro-American colonizers had once done, in order to achieve local belonging following his expatriate voyages.

Although Hartley continued to paint Caucasian sitters during the same period, he focused specifically on ethnic groups who had immigrated to Maine in prior generations and had successfully integrated. He studiously avoided German or Bavarian subjects in favor of less controversial ethnic groups—largely French-Canadian, Anglo-Saxon, and Scandinavian—that he believed constituted a new generation of “Yankee” through their intermarriage with longstanding Maine families. Daigle effectively represented another “surface variation in type,” a flexible hybrid who simultaneously managed to appear Native, French-Canadian, and quintessentially Yankee. In painting such a figure, I believe Hartley was attempting to attain masculinity, heterosexuality, and American rootedness by association. Through his indigenous sitter, Hartley became publically linked to these purportedly regional qualities. Meanwhile, his style of presentation subtly othered Daigle, conforming to racial stereotypes about sexual excess and thus ultimately offsetting suspicions about homosexuality. In other words, Madawaska effects a kind of switch, reconfiguring the two men’s identities in a way that was more comfortable and less threatening to the artist.

By the mid-twentieth century, the word “native,” when used in a New England context, was often unconventionally deployed to indicate white rootedness and belonging. Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has argued that, traditionally, “We have tended to use the word native for persons and groups who belong to those parts of the world that were, and are, distant from the metropolitan West. . . . When we find authenticity close to home, we are more likely to label it folk than native, the former being a term that suggests authenticity without being implicitly derogatory.”^[70] It is unusual, then, that Hartley’s voluminous writings contradict this norm, ascribing “nativeness” to himself and his fellow countrymen. In the wake of European instability that made trans-Atlantic identification unappealing, Hartley and his peers came to view themselves as the rightful inheritors of America’s local, indigenous culture—the aesthetic descendants of the Pueblo, the prodigal son of Maine, a new “native” to incorporate the old. Fittingly, Hartley promoted his move back east in 1937 as the “return of the native,” anticipating a glorious reunion with what he termed “my native soil.”^[71] He simultaneously praised fellow “American primitives” for creating art defined by its “simple visual pleasure” and rejection of “hocus-pocus intellectualism.”^[72] Mobilizing “nativeness” as a biological characteristic resulting from one’s place of origin and breeding, Hartley sought to demonstrate his American, masculine, heterosexual, and Regionalist qualities.^[73] Following his lead, art historians have tended to accept Hartley’s self-attributed nativeness without dispute, not recognizing that to do so erases Maine’s more complex history of racial intermixing and cross-cultural exchange that traces back to the colonial era.^[74]

My sustained analysis of Madawaska—Acadian Light-Heavy and its sociopolitical context aims to reveal how Hartley experimented with racializing the subjects of his paintings in order to co-opt the mythic qualities of regional rootedness, masculine virility, and closeness to the earth that he had previously conferred upon Native Americans. In contrast to the standard narrative that Hartley abandoned indigenous influences in the 1920s, I propose that by the 1940s he had, in fact, subsumed them. As he himself once wrote, “It is from the redman I have verified my own personal significance.”^[75]

Endnotes

^[1] I wish to extend my thanks to Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library and the Bates College Museum of Art for furnishing archival permissions; to the organizers of symposiums at the Colby College Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago for allowing me to present my research publicly; and to Hartley scholars Bruce Robertson and Randall Griffey, who provided early feedback and exceptional guidance.

^[2] Quoted in Donna Cassidy, Marsden Hartley: Race, Region, and Nation (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2005), 255.

^[3] Quoted in Cassidy, Race, Region, and Nation, 253. Hartley also describes this occasion in his autobiography: “The last swelter at Vera Cruz—no more of the grandiosity of that kind of nature—the look of any sea a comfort really . . . and the sense of one’s own North—leaps up now to cool the eyes and the senses. Back to the Anglos and the Aryans who have light in their faces—enough of the dark face and the dark concept— the face that gets darker the longer you look. A ship in the near offing—ready for the outward, the North—northward now.” Marsden Hartley, Somehow a Past: The Autobiography of Marsden Hartley (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), 155.

^[4] Wanda Corn, “Marsden Hartley’s Native Amerika,” in Marsden Hartley, ed. Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 82. Carol Troyen has concurred, writing that Hartley “no longer felt the need to include tepees or motifs from Native American pottery in his paintings, as he had in work from the second decade of the twentieth century, to achieve the truthfulness that so-called primitive art represented to him and many other early-twentieth-century Modernists. Furthermore, to an artist who had spent most of his working life in sophisticated European art centers, Maine itself was primitive and exotic.” (Carol Troyen, “The ‘Nativeness’ of ‘Primitive Things’: Marsden Hartley’s Late Work in Context,” in Marsden Hartley, ed. Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 241.)

^[5] My usage of the term “Native American” is tempered by an acknowledgement of its problematic status, stemming from its tendency to gather hundreds of distinct tribal nations under one generic label. As W. Jackson Rushing writes, “’The Indian’ was an abstraction of Euro-American creation, one based loosely on facts but mostly on preexisting ideas, themes, and motifs in Western culture.” Rushing, Native American Art and The New York Avant-garde: A History of Cultural Primitivism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 1. Although I continue to employ the term “Native American” for practical purposes, I have made an attempt to designate specific tribal affiliations whenever possible.

^[6] Donna Cassidy, “ ‘On the Subject of Nativeness’: Marsden Hartley and New England Regionalism,” Winterthur Portfolio 29, no. 4 (Winter 1994): 241. While I borrow from Cassidy here, my conclusions about the role of race in Hartley’s late work differ from those presented in her subsequent book, Marsden Hartley: Race, Region, and Nation. She ultimately argues that race was a spiritual rather than material or biological concept for Hartley, even in works such as Madawaska, which appear to depict non-white bodies. Although this may be an accurate representation of Hartley’s beliefs at a certain moment of his life, I would argue that Cassidy neglects to discuss how Hartley’s late work seems intentionally to materialize the outward, anatomical “signs” of race in order to evoke nostalgia for the Native Americans who once populated New England. See Cassidy, Race, Region, and Nation, 260.

^[7] Examples include works by Hartley such as Canuck Yankee Lumberjack at Old Orchard Beach, Maine (1940-1941); On the Beach (1940); and Three Friends (1941).

^[8] Marsden Hartley to Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones, January 26, 1940, Marsden Hartley Collection, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn. (hereafter YCAL).

^[9] Marsden Hartley to Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones, January 26, 1940. I was able to discover the young man’s identity, which was previously unknown, by combing through Hartley’s letters dating from 1939 and 1940.

^[10] Although my dissertation chapter examines each of the three arrangements, in this article I have chosen to discuss only the first arrangement. I do this for various reasons. First, I feel it is the most compelling and successfully executed canvas of the trio. More important, however, is the fact that it is the only arrangement that imports facial abstraction from Pablo Picasso’s primitivizing African period. The other canvases, in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Crystal Bridges Museum, possess a greater degree of naturalism. What specifically interests me about this first arrangement are Hartley’s attempts at concealment—the cache-sexe painted over the sitter’s groin, the encoding of his face as “primitive,” and the strong racialization of the sitter’s nudity as a distraction from his homoeroticism.

^[11] Cassidy, Race, Region, and Nation, 53.

^[12] I should note here that the concept of Native American identity presents additional complicating factors to the already unstable idea of race. The majority of tribal nations determine membership by considering whether an individual’s shared history with the tribe warrants tribal citizenship. This model of belonging effectively undermines traditional Western notions of race, which have located identity in biological factors such as skin color or bloodline. What follows is an attempt to analyze Hartley’s physical encoding of indigeneity, problematic as it may be.

^[13] Quoted in Cassidy, Race, Region, and Nation, 275.

^[14] Judith Barter et al., American Modernism at the Art Institute of Chicago: From World War I to 1955 (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2009), 246.

^[15] Andrea Smith, “Not an Indian Tradition: The Sexual Colonization of Native Peoples,” Hypatia 18, no. 2 (2003): 73.

^[16] The subject also wears a wampum headdress and body tattoos as testaments to his “otherness.”

^[17] Donna Cassidy, “The Invisibility of Race in Modernist Representation: Marsden Hartley’s North Atlantic Folk,” in Seeing High and Low: Representing Social Conflict in American Visual Culture, ed. Patricia A. Johnston (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 260.

^[18] Quoted in Cassidy, Race, Region, and Nation, 191.

^[19] Quoted in Marsden Hartley, Ronald Paulson, and Gail R. Scott, Marsden Hartley and Nova Scotia (Halifax: Mount St. Vincent University Art Gallery, 1987), 41. Not only does this description ascribe the Masons’ “cinnamon” complexions to their ethnic heritage, but it also attaches adjectives such as “quiet and childlike,” which Hartley had frequently employed in the 1920s to valorize American Indians.

^[20] Marsden Hartley to Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones, January 26, 1940.

^[21] Marsden Hartley, “Red Man Ceremonials: An American Plea for American Esthetics,” in Art and Archaeology 9, no. 1 (January 1920): 10.

^[22] Marsden Hartley, “The Festival of the Corn,” Poetry 16, no. 2 (May 1920): 62.

^[23] Hartley, “The Festival of the Corn,” 62, 60.

^[24] The painting was, in fact, referred to as Tête Nègre at the time of the Picasso retrospective, making its racial subtext more apparent than the current title does. Alfred H. Barr Jr., Picasso: Forty Years of His Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1939): 65.

^[25] Barr, Picasso: Forty Years of His Art, 65; Randall Griffey, “Marsden Hartley’s Lincoln Portraits,” American Art 15, no. 2 (2001): 47. Griffey suggests that Hartley would have seen this exhibition, although he does not provide specific evidence. For context, MoMA’s Picasso retrospective ran from November 15, 1939, to January 7, 1940. Hartley’s completion of the first two Madawaska arrangements dates to late January and early February of 1940.

^[26] Cassidy, Race, Region, and Nation, 172-174. Cassidy adds, “The German fascination with Native American culture at this time did not escape Hartley’s attention either. Karl May’s popular Wild West stories, the Native American art in the Blaue Reiter Almanac, and the paintings of August Macke and Max Beckmann all equated Indianness with simplicity, nature, and an untamed America and undoubtedly helped to cultivate Hartley’s own interest in Native American societies and his views of their culture as well.”

^[27] Saliha Belmessous, “Assimilation and Racialism in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century French Colonial Policy,” The American Historical Review 110, no. 2 (2005): 327.

^[28] Devrim Karahasan, “Métissage in New France: Frenchification, Mixed Marriages and Métis as Shaped by Social and Political Agents and Institutions 1508-1886” (Ph.D. diss., European University Institute, 2006), 150.

^[29] Harald E.L. Prins, The Miʼkmaq: Resistance, Accommodation, and Cultural Survival (Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1996), 67-68.

^[30] “Cultural Identity: Who We Are,” Acadian Culture in Maine, University of Maine at Fort Kent, acim.umfk.maine.edu/who_we_are.html.

^[31] Belmessous, “Assimilation and Racialism,” 335.

^[32] Ronald Stewart, Land of the Porcupine: Growing up in Madawaska (Yarmouth: Salt Ponds Press, 2004).

^[33] Robert P.T. Coffin, Kennebec: Cradle of Americans (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1937), 76.

^[34] Quoted in Barry Stephenson, “On Being ‘Close to Nature’: Identity, Politics, Place,” Time and Mind 5, no. 1 (2012): 20.

^[35] Philip Joseph Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 104-105. In Deloria’s words, “Now, the noble savage—still offering cultural criticism and justifying imperial conquest—could be found most comfortably residing inside American national boundaries. The absorbed Indians wearing white man’s clothes represented the ambivalent success of American imperialism. . . . If noble savage Indians now found themselves inside American society, the Indianness most desired by white Americans also reversed, moving from interior Indianness to exterior authenticity.”

^[36] Cassidy, Race, Region, and Nation, 274.

^[37] Marsden Hartley, “This Country of Maine,” in Cassidy, Race, Region, and Nation, 303-304. Hartley concludes this section on race by remarking that “it becomes a kind of game to settle for yourself just what the backgrounds are of all the faces one meets.”

^[38] Lauren Kroiz, Creative Composites: Modernism, Race, and the Stieglitz Circle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 56.

^[39] Kroiz, Creative Composites, 65.

^[40] Vernon A. Rosario, Homosexuality and Science: A Guide to the Debates (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2002), 76; Michael S. Sherry, Gay Artists in Modern American Culture: An Imagined Conspiracy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 20.

^[41] Samuel M. Kootz, Modern American Painters (New York: Brewer & Warren, 1930), 20.

^[42] Kootz, Modern American Painters, 16, 21.

^[43] Randall Griffey, “Encoding the Homoerotic: Marsden Hartley’s Late Figure Paintings,” in Kornhauser, Marsden Hartley, 211. Griffey pinpoints this moment as a nadir in Hartley’s artistic development: “More than just another unfavorable review, Kootz’s cutting remarks in 1930 underscored the precarious borders of Hartley’s closet and punctuated the lowest critical point in the painter’s troubled career.”

^[44] Hartley, “The Festival of the Corn,” 63.

^[45] Marsden Hartley, “The Scientific Esthetic of the Redman, Part I: The Great Corn Ceremony at Santo Domingo,” Art and Archaeology 13, no. 3 (March 1922): 118.

^[46] Rosario, Homosexuality and Science, 15-17. In 1886, the sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing coined the term “sexual invert” to describe patients who expressed an attraction to people of their own gender; he believed that men who possessed stereotypically female traits had reversed genders in the womb, which resulted in their non-normative attraction to men. Although the linking of gender and sexual desire was based on conclusions derived from an exceedingly small number of cases, the concept of “sexual inversion” remained the dominant medical model for another forty years.

^[47] Griffey, “Encoding the Homoerotic,” 216-217.

^[48] Quoted in Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 63.

^[49] Thomas Waugh, Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from Their Beginnings to Stonewall (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 188.

^[50] Waugh, Hard to Imagine, 188-190, 200.

^[51] Though homosexual pornography, which extended to depictions of full-frontal male nudity, would remain illegal until 1962, physique culture’s impetus to expose each and every well-developed muscle to the viewer provided a conceit to come as close to the depiction of sensual male nudity as possible. Waugh, Hard to Imagine, 279.

^[52] John Donald Gustav-Wrathall, Take the Young Stranger by the Hand: Same-Sex Relations and the YMCA (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 172-173. Allan Bérubé adds, “YMCA hotels in nearly every city, from Harlem to Honolulu, from Tacoma to St. Louis and Miami, were active cruising grounds throughout the war.” Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 110.

^[53] Paul Cadmus’s painting, Fleet’s In!, was infamously censored upon its debut in 1934. Intended for display in an exhibition celebrating the contributions of Civil Works Administration artists to “the cultural life of the nation,” the painting was confiscated by a retired Navy admiral before the show opened. Owing to its depiction of bawdy sailors cavorting with civilians in New York City’s Riverside Park, it was deemed a dishonest representation of the armed forces and an embarrassment to the American Navy. The censorship was widely publicized, both within and beyond the art world. As a 1937 Esquire article stated, “For every individual who might have seen the original at the [art gallery], at least one thousand saw it in black and white reproduction.” Quoted in Richard Meyer, “A Different American Scene: Paul Cadmus and the Satire of Sexuality,” Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexually in American Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 39. Such a public act of censorship may have, in turn, inhibited Hartley’s willingness to exhibit full nudity or suggestively homoerotic content in a public setting, especially without an alibi.

^[54] Recent Paintings of Maine: Marsden Hartley (New York: Hudson D. Walker Gallery, 1940), YCAL. Booklet published in conjunction with an exhibition, March 11-30, 1940.

^[55] Bellows likely intended this painting to allude provocatively to the African-American heavyweight Jack Johnson, who had become world champion the year prior, in 1908. Marianne Doezema, George Bellows and Urban America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 104.

^[56] Benita Heiskanen, The Urban Geography of Boxing: Race, Class, and Gender in the Ring (London: Routledge, 2014), 99.

^[57] Sherry, Gay Artists in Modern American Culture, 24.

^[58] Marsden Hartley, “America as Landscape,” El Palacio 5, no. 21 (1918): 341.

^[59] Hartley, “America as Landscape,” 342.

^[60] Hartley, “Red Man Ceremonials,” 7.         

^[61] Stephenson, “On Being ‘Close to Nature,’ ” 26.

^[62] Hartley, “Red Man Ceremonials,” 9.

^[63] Deloria explains that Native Americans who were considered “outside the temporal (and societal) boundaries of modernity” represented (for anti-modernists) “positive qualities—authenticity and natural purity—that might be expropriated, not for critique (as in the case of the traditional noble savage) but as the underpinning for a new, specifically modern American identity.” Deloria Playing Indian, 103.

^[64] Edgar Holger Cahill, “America Has Its ‘Primitives’: Aboriginal Watercolorists of New Mexico Make a Faithful Record of their Race,” International Studio 75, no. 299 (1922): 83.

^[65] Cahill, “America Has Its ‘Primitives,’ ” 83, 80.

^[66] George Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle-Class Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 136-137.

^[67] Edgar L. Hewett, “America in the Evolution of Human Society,” Art and Archaeology 9, no. 1 (January 1920): 4.

^[68] Robert L. Dorman, Revolt of the Provinces: The Regionalist Movement in America, 1920-1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 60. Although Hartley found the Regionalists’ pretense of untainted nativism to be false and hypocritical in its disavowal of European influence, scholars such as Donna Cassidy and Randall Griffey concur that Hartley’s 1930s return to New England and subsequent self-promotion as “The Painter of Maine” were born of his desire to market himself within popular Regionalist parameters. See Cassidy, “On the Subject of Nativeness,” 244; and Griffey, “An Ambivalent Prodigal: Marsden Hartley as ‘The Painter from Maine,’” in Marsden Hartley’s Maine, eds. Elizabeth Finch and Randall Griffey (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2017), 113.

^[69] I leave it to other scholars to explore the influence of indigeneity on the broader Regionalist movement in greater depth.

^[70] Arjun Appadurai, “Putting Hierarchy in Its Place,” Cultural Anthropology 3, no. 1 (1988): 36-37.

^[71] Quoted in Troyen, “The ‘Nativeness’ of ‘Primitive Things,’ ” 241.

^[72] Quoted in Troyen, “The ‘Nativeness’ of ‘Primitive Things,’ ” 247.

^[73] The notable scholar of Native American history, Philip J. Deloria, has described this practice as “playing Indian.” In particular, he argues that Americans beset by the enfeebling anxieties of early twentieth-century modernization resolved their concerns through mimesis, whereby they “imitated and appropriated the Other viscerally through the medium of their bodies.” Deloria, Playing Indian, 120.

^[74] For instance, the recent exhibition catalogue Marsden Hartley’s Maine foregrounds Hartley’s “racial and Aryan biases,” and characterizes Maine as “composed of a eugenically desirable blend of Northern European, French Canadian, and, in some instances, Portuguese bloodlines”—effectively overlooking indigenous histories in the state. Randall Griffey, “An Ambivalent Prodigal,” 130.

^[75] Hartley, “The Scientific Esthetic of the Redman,” 119.

Author Bio:

Dana Ostrander is a Ph.D. Candidate in Art History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is currently completing her dissertation, titled “Down to a Science: The Vestiges of Clinical Photography in American Fine Art.” This project examines the collision between American art and science at the locus of the human body during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Previously, Ostrander earned an M.A. in Modern and Contemporary Art History from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and a B.A. in Art History and English from Wellesley College. Her research has been supported by grants from the California Arts Council and the University of Illinois Art History Program, as well as by a Wellesley College Horton-Hallowell Fellowship. She may be contacted at ostrndr2 at illinois.edu.

Return to the Table of Contents

Ramey Mize

University of Pennsylvania

Abstract

Popular perceptions and aesthetic renderings of artificial light evolved apace with technological developments in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Electricity held especially rich symbolic potential to the Italian Futurists, for whom the electric light bulb constituted a self-image. Joseph Stella’s fateful encounter with the Futurists in 1912 would later help to launch his own career, kindling within the painter a fresh understanding of the aesthetic richness of America’s technologically-preeminent landscape. Indeed, the dazzling force of Coney Island’s emblematic lights preoccupies Stella’s inaugural, critically-acclaimed picture, Battle of Lights, Coney Island, Mardi Gras (1913–14). Created under the aegis of the artist’s newfound vision, Battle of Lights amps up the Futurist electric topos to an almost unbearable intensity. But how exactly did Stella represent such profligate refulgence, such vivid surfeit? There are no discernible lamps, no obvious glimmers or chiaroscuro; electric light in this rendition instead adopts the heterogenous, hard-edged forms of discrete, surging shafts, multi-hued prismatic shards, and gem-like studs to comprise a single spell-binding mosaic.

This paper will explore the ways in which Stella’s Battle of Lights crystallized under the twin influences of both a Futurist vision and American mass culture and will marshal artificial light as its central gauge. In particular, I will submit that Futurist theories of electric light’s pictorial proportions were more literally and extensively substantiated in the American technological landscape and that such congruity enabled Stella to formulate a more heightened visual rhetoric for electricity as a unique optical spectacle. Finally, I argue that these newly-developed light technologies, from massive arc-powered floodlights to minute incandescent bulbs, as well as the rising complexity of special lighting effects and design, played a critical, little-studied role in the aesthetic logic of Battle of Lights.

“The Violent Blaze”:
Electrical Illumination in Joseph Stella’s Battle of Lights, Coney Island, Mardi Gras (1913–14)

Introduction: A New Brilliance

A late nineteenth-century print bears witness to a scene of peculiar recreation: a lively crowd of bathers wades through the gently lapping waves along the Coney Island peninsula, while, towering above them, something akin to a maypole burns brightly (Fig. 1).^[1] This steely sentinel of aquatic revelry was, in fact, an electric “arc” lamp, and its vivid supply of outdoor illumination made possible the new nocturnal activity known as “electric bathing.”^[2] Charles Brush introduced these arc lights to New York and the wider nation in 1880.^[3] Eager to capitalize on the invention’s commercial potential, the entrepreneur and owner of Brighton Bathing Pavilion, William Engeman, installed the new device at the foot of his bathing bridge that same year.^[4] Arc lighting, ranging from 500 to 3,000 candlepower, outshone gaslight by a vast margin, ushering in a groundbreaking quality and standard of brightness.^[5] As the New York Herald observed of the new technology in 1882: “The dim flicker of gas, often subdued and debilitated by grim and uncleanly globes, was supplanted by a steady glare, bright and mellow, which illuminated interiors and shone through the windows fixed and unwavering.”^[6] Compare, for example, the spectral glints of gaslights twinkling across the Thames in James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s Nocturne: Blue and Silver, Chelsea (1871) with the white-hot electricity from the arc lamp in the bathing print, which emits “powerful white rays” so distinct and “fixed” that they appear as solid forms, or brilliant blades cutting across the night sky.^[7] It is evident that light, in its electrical manifestation, was understood here as a concentrated, almost concretized entity, in striking contrast to the hazy glow of gas.^[8]

As this unlikely pairing demonstrates, popular perceptions and aesthetic renderings of artificial light evolved apace with technological developments. Electricity held especially rich symbolic potential to the Italian Futurists, for whom, as Peter Conrad has argued, the electric light bulb even constituted a “self-image.”^[9] The founding members of the Futurist movement proclaimed their preoccupation in no uncertain terms in the “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting” in 1910: “The suffering of a man is of the same interest to us as the suffering of an electric lamp, which, with spasmodic starts, shrieks out the most heartrending expressions of color.”^[10] A year earlier, their leader, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944), devoted an entire essay to the superiority and obliterative power of “three hundred electric moons” over nature’s original in “Let’s Kill the Moonlight,” published in Poesia in 1909.^[11] Futurist artists, most notably Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916), Gino Severini (1883–1966), and Giacomo Balla (1871–1958), engaged this theme in a host of provocative canvases, many of which appeared in the Futurists’ seminal exhibition in February 1912 at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris.^[12] Among the inflammatory installation’s attendees was the Italian-born, American artist, Joseph Stella (1877–1946).^[13] Stella’s fateful encounter with the Futurists would later help to launch his own career, kindling within the painter a fresh understanding of the aesthetic richness of America’s technologically preeminent landscape.^[14] In many ways, the United States, and specifically Manhattan, embodied the ideal Futurist landscape, a correlation that struck Stella full-force after his stint in Europe.^[15] He wrote of this subsequent realization:

And when in 1912 I came back to New York I was thrilled to find America so rich with so many new motives to be translated into a new art. Steel and electricity had created a new world. A new drama had surged from the unmerciful violation of darkness at night, by the violent blaze of electricity, and a new polyphony was ringing all around with the scintillating, highly-colored lights.^[16]

Among other hallmarks of modern, mechanistic life, the dazzling force of Coney Island’s emblematic lights animates Stella’s inaugural, critically acclaimed picture, Battle of Lights, Coney Island, Mardi Gras (1913–14), first exhibited at the Montross Gallery in New York City (Fig. 2). Created under the spell of the artist’s newfound vision, Battle of Lights amps up the Futurist electric topos to an almost unbearable intensity, as well it should; Luna Park, only one of three main amusement centers on the island, boasted well over one million electric lights by 1907.^[17] The New York Times, in its evaluation of the canvas, marveled at the work’s electrical surfeit: “It is the largest canvas on view, and it is certainly the most brilliant. There is probably not a single Coney Island light that did not get into the picture.”^[18] But how exactly did Stella represent such profligate refulgence? There are no discernible lamps, no obvious glimmers or chiaroscuro; electric light in this rendition instead adopts the heterogenous, hard-edged forms of discrete, surging shafts, multi-hued prismatic shards, and gemlike studs to comprise a single spellbinding mosaic. Stella produced a total of six Coney Island pictures between 1913 and 1918, and his long-term scrutiny of the site betrayed a deep-rooted interest in the intersection of design, technology, and sociology.^[19] This essay will explore the ways in which Stella’s Battle of Lights crystallized under the twin influences of both a Futurist vision and American mass culture and will marshal artificial light as its central gauge.^[20] In particular, I will submit that Futurist theories of electric light’s pictorial proportions were more literally and extensively substantiated in the American technological landscape, Coney Island in this case, and that such congruity enabled Stella to formulate a more heightened visual rhetoric for electricity as a unique optical phenomenon. Finally, I argue that these newly-developed light technologies, from massive arc-powered floodlights to minute incandescent bulbs, as well as the rising complexity of special lighting effects and design, played a critical yet little-studied role in the aesthetic logic of Battle of Lights.^[21]

Electric Light as Futurist Muse

It is not insignificant that the Futurists first beheld electric light on a grand scale in Paris, the very place where Stella would later observe the extent to which la Ville Lumière had influenced their aesthetic. Heinz Widauer claims that Paris “must literally have electrified Boccioni and Severini” when they arrived in 1906—unsurprising, given that the city had served as the site for both the International Exposition of Electricity in the fall of 1881 and the Exposition Universelle of 1900, events which championed major advancements in the realm of electrification, including but not limited to illumination.^[22] Electricity also made an impression on the artists’ mentor and instructor, Giacomo Balla, who had visited France six years earlier.^[23] By this point, Paris would have been thoroughly radiant at night, a result of innovations in voltaic arc lighting made first by Sir Humphry Davy earlier in the century, and then refined by the Russian inventor Paul Jablochkoff, who introduced the original arc lamps along the Avenue de l’Opéra in Paris in 1878.^[24] These lights generated a luminosity of such acute brilliance that it eventually became clear that they should be hung well above human height so as to avoid temporarily blinding pedestrians.^[25] In short, as Ernest Freeberg makes clear, “The light thrilled, but pained.”^[26] It was to this precise brand of lighting technology, as well its disorienting, luminous flood, that Balla dedicated almost an entire canvas, entitled simply Street Light (c. 1911, dated on painting 1909).

Like many early Futurist works, Street Light showcases a modification of the Italian painting technique known as Divisionism, a style which emerged around the same time as Neo-Impressionism in France.^[27] In response to contemporary optical and color theories, such as those set forth by the American physicist Ogden Rood (1831–1902), Divisionists in Italy sought to amplify the vibrational radiance of their work through the application and juxtaposition of pure pigments in a multitude of expressive strokes.^[28] Divisionism appealed to the Futurists both for its political and scientific directives, and for its aim to transmit subjective perceptions into a dynamic, aesthetic whole.^[29] In “Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto,” the authors touted Divisionism as an essential component of their artistic approach, primarily for its enactment of an “innate complementariness” which elucidates the polarities and friction intrinsic to a modern world.^[30]

Balla orients the glass bulb in Street Light slightly below a crescent moon; the lunar body, although visible, is almost smothered by the brutal scope of artificial light. The artist may have been working in direct response to Marinetti’s rhetorical vendetta against moonlight and call for “electric street lamps, with their thousand stabbing points.”^[31] The painting may also have been a visual pun on the arc lamp’s common characterization as an “electric moon.”^[32] The rays cast by the lamp assume a forceful presence rather than a benign gleam, very much in keeping with the true ruthlessness of the arc’s blaze. Balla’s divisionist marks take the form of innumerable, variegated “hooklets” which beam outward from the central light source in feverish waves, conveying an acute impression of the lamp’s inordinate voltage and blistering heat.^[33] The shape of these chevrons could not have been arbitrary, and was more likely the result of attentive observation: the arc light derives its name from the arch-like formation of the lamp’s electric current, conducted and maintained across two slightly separated carbon rods.^[34] While preparing for the painting, Balla spent a great deal of time in Rome’s Piazza Termini, a public space made vivid by many such lamps. As Thomas Cole has suggested, Balla may have been inundated with optical afterimages of these blinding arcs, later proliferating their ghostly hooks into a Divisionist torrent in the final picture.^[35]

Although Balla did not exhibit Street Light in the 1912 Futurist exhibition in Paris,^[36] the painting was nevertheless featured in the associated catalogue and exemplified the ways in which the Futurists translated individual psychosomatic experiences of modern culture into an equally modern literary or pictorial framework.^[37] In other words, the Futurists built upon literal traits of “mechanical muses” or emerging technologies—in Balla’s case, the “arc” of the arc lamp—to craft their own visual language, evocative of a supremely mechanistic world order.^[38] Boccioni also pursued graphic representations of the arc’s shaft-like illumination, with a special focus on its penetrative and divisive effects. In his painting The Laugh (1911), displayed in the Bernheim-Jeune installation, these luminous beams play a central compositional role. Shortly thereafter, Boccioni defined light’s role in the Futurist aesthetic in his book Futurist Painting and Sculpture (1913): “Often, a light, whether it be a ray from the sun or from an electric lamp, intersects an environment with a preponderant, plastic, directional force. In the Futurist painting, this current of light is considered a direction of form that can be drawn, exists as a form, and has the tangible value of any other object.”^[39]

The numerous electric globes that pepper the uppermost portion of The Laugh certainly correspond with this formal characterization: each projects its own precise, durable, and delineated ray, which strikes rather than suffuses the raucous interior. These beacons, through their divergent angles, augment the off-kilter mood while also directing the viewer’s eye into various points amid the fray, especially the picture’s protagonists: three tawdry prostitutes and their two gentlemen callers. The lights, moreover, expose the scene much as a spotlight would, throwing into sharp relief the fact that the coquettes’ allure is as artificial as their own.^[40] This analogy is fitting in that arc lamps exude a luminosity so piercing that they are used today largely as searchlights.^[41]

As Christine Poggi has discussed, Severini also investigated the interplay of electric light in modern settings of leisure and entertainment, especially cabarets and dance halls.^[42] Severini’s The Pan Pan at the Monico, for instance, envisions a vibrant, cacophonous crowd in a Parisian night club, dining and dancing beneath a flurry of angular lights.^[43] The artist clusters the sharp beams at the topmost register of the painting in a similar manner to those in The Laugh, but Severini’s light is truncated and does not plumb the throng below. Severini protracts his light’s scope, however, in The Milliner, another of his eight paintings exhibited at the Bernheim-Jeune. This work appears to have been realized in compliance with such penetrative principles as those espoused in Boccioni’s Futurist Painting and Sculpture and “The Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting”; the former trumpets light’s intersectional propensity, and the latter declares that perceptible forms interpenetrate each other.^[44] Accordingly, Severini increases the composition’s sense of movement through the division of both color and form, and employs the lofted, electric orbs as a central fomenter of this dynamism.^[45] The artist pictures the milliner’s face in duplicate, perhaps as a tribute to the “Technical Manifesto’s” insistence that “a profile is never motionless before our eyes, but appears and reappears,” and that “moving objects constantly multiply themselves.”^[46] The rays of yellow-white light splinter the female form into a miscellany of geometric planes of color.^[47] Light as a catalyst for scenic fragmentation is explicitly pronounced in the exhibition catalogue’s accompanying caption: “The electric light divides the scene into defined zones. A study of simultaneous penetration.”^[48]

These paintings harness artificial, electric beams as Futurist “force-lines,” or explosive, rhythmic rays that cast an image into flux and fracture, in homage to the disorienting essence of modern life’s sensory impact.^[49] Max Kozloff similarly observes: “The Futurists came to think of the picture zone as a flickering network of multiple stresses, charged with electrical currents, invisible forces now controlled by man.”^[50] In short, electric light physically conducted a scintillating current, and the Futurists strove to channel that force pictorially within the works comprising their debut; Stella came face to face with these canvases, and likely Boccioni, Severini, and Carlo Carrà (1881–1966), at the Bernheim-Jeune in 1912.^[51] It stands to reason that he would have also perused the exhibition catalogue, which included reprints of the “Founding Manifesto of Futurism,” “The Technical Manifesto,” and “The Exhibitors to the Public” statements.^[52] Stella came to know Severini personally during his remaining months in Paris,^[53] and he owned a copy of Boccioni’s Futurist Painting and Sculpture—he even wrote to the author in 1914 to relay his admiration for it.^[54] The influence of the Futurist program over Stella’s work in this period, therefore, cannot be overstated. Most frequently, art historians have noted the formal similarities between Stella’s Battle of Lights and Severini’s The Pan Pan at the Monico, which was also on view in Paris. While this work is certainly a fair precedent, it is important to consider Stella’s additional inflection by other Futurist works from this moment, and more specifically, by the Futurists’ treatment of artificial light in their painting and rhetoric.

Coney Island: Incandescence as Spectacle

The vertiginous abundance of electric light found at Coney Island, more than any other attraction, sparked Stella out of his initial creative rut.^[55] In his own words, he described the revelation:

For years I had been struggling both in Europe and America without seeming to get anywhere. I had been working along the lines of the old masters, seeking to portray a civilization long since dead. And then one night I went on a bus ride to Coney Island during Mardi Gras. That incident was what started me on the road to success. Arriving at the Island I was instantly struck by the dazzling array of lights. It seemed as if they were in conflict. I was struck with the thought that here was what I had been unconsciously seeking for many years. The electrical display was magnificent.^[56]

Although Stella later spoke of his efforts to capture the “hectic mood” of “the surging crowds and the revolving machines,” it is noteworthy that the park’s contentious lights struck the first and most resounding chord in him.^[57] The roiling illumination afforded by the “City Electric” held consistent sway in Stella’s artistic vision, as revealed in one of his prose poems about New York: “The searchlights that plow your leaden sky in the evening awaken and stimulate the imagination to the most daring flights, and the multicolored lights of the billboards create a new hymn of praise.”^[58] Stella’s paean conjures an image of legions of burning bulbs joining in with Marinetti’s Futurist chorus, expressed in the final declaration from the 1909 Futurist Manifesto: “We will sing of the vibrant nightly fervors of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons.”^[59] To be sure, the eponymous feature in Battle of Lights figures prolifically and variably, whether in the pearly globules and vivid pinpricks scattered throughout; the blunt, sharp-edged shafts toward the bottom register; or in the longer, more dramatic spears which dart across the upper portion. When held in comparison, the more condensed, triangular shards recall Severini’s luminous facets in The Pan Pan, and the sweeping searchlight beams seem to gesture toward those that crown The Laugh by Boccioni. Irma B. Jaffe likewise recognizes Stella’s polychromatic light shafts as directional “Futurist ‘lines of force’ ” in their own right.^[60]

Within this fluorescent squall, Stella embeds a medley of images that hint at several of Coney Island’s most iconic landmarks.^[61] Robin Jaffee Frank, in her exhibition catalogue Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, has painstakingly identified each of these “fragments of reality,” many of which were to be found in Luna Park, or the “Electric Eden,” as it came to be called.^[62] Suspended above the maelstrom at center is Luna’s electric steeple, or the “Kaleidoscopic Tower,” which not only blazed with thousands of incandescent bulbs, but also with the overwhelming power of revolving floodlights. The isolated crescents and pinwheels to the lower right of the spire mimic those that ornamented the park’s Surf Avenue entrance, while directly to the left, the spindly black spokes, “festooned with twinkling lights,” evoke the steel skeleton of the Ferris Wheel at Steeplechase, another amusement park nearby. A powder-blue coil to the right of center may approximate Luna’s celebrated Loop-the-Loop ride; several vague elephant-like profiles point to their actual presence at Luna for rides and tricks; and condensed words—such as “FELT” and “PARK”—refer through their particular font treatment to the signs that emblazoned both “Feltman’s,” a popular Coney Island diner, and the entrance to Luna Park. The “whirling vortex” in the lower left portion of the canvas symbolizes the procession of floats that accompanied the Mardi Gras festivities, and the flock of dark, flinty splinters that swarms upward from the bottom denotes the massive crowds lured by this annual, commercial variant of the pre-Lenten holiday.^[63] Stella does not exaggerate the gathering’s dense magnitude; the New York Times reported that this eleventh annual carnival “was witnessed by the largest crowd which ever attended the opening night of a Mardi Gras—350,000 persons.”^[64]

Spurred by the popular appeal of extravagant electrical demonstrations at world’s fairs and expositions, entertainment venues strategically hastened to include light within their design and attractions.^[65] As David Nye has made clear, the expansion of electrification within the United States transpired in tandem with the “first great period of American world’s fairs,” from the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia to the 1915 Panama Pacific Exposition.^[66] The four largest fairs—those which took place at Chicago (1894), Buffalo (1901), St. Louis (1904), and San Francisco (1915)—were coordinated by electrical corporations and consequently granted their installations pride of place.^[67] The Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo carries particular import for this study. Not only was it intended to commemorate a century of American technological progress, but it was also the meeting place of the eventual creators of Coney Island’s Luna Park, Frederick Thompson and Elmer “Skip” Dundy.^[68] These two men, both amusement concession developers and former competitors, collaborated to produce some of the Buffalo Fair’s most successful shows, including the “Darkness and Dawn” cyclorama and “A Trip to the Moon,” a whimsical ride that simulated space travel.^[69] Although their lunar landing would later figure among Luna Park’s myriad diversions and even inspire the name, it was the Pan-American’s massive illumination scheme that most deeply colored Thompson and Dundy’s design for their “colossal electric carnival.”^[70]

Luther Stieringer, an electrical engineer, with the support of Henry Rustin, the chief of Buffalo’s electrical bureau, endeavored to literally outshine the record-breaking light installation at Chicago’s 1893 Columbian Exposition.^[71] To achieve this, he eschewed arc lighting and instead encrusted every available “building, walkway, cornice, and window” with two hundred thousand incandescent globes, thereby introducing “nocturnal architecture.”^[72] The incandescent bulb had been perfected by Thomas Edison in 1878 through the implementation of a more durable carbonized bamboo filament, and its luminosity proved steadier than arc lamps and mellow enough for domestic use.^[73] In effect, Stieringer enhanced the fair’s architectural contours through “clusters and lines” of Edison’s lights, rather than through uniform arc illumination from below.^[74] This approach, called the “luminous sketch,” edited structures into stark “geometric shapes” upon nightfall, and endowed their raw outlines with glaring intensity.^[75] The midway’s “Electric Tower” functioned as an especially dramatic example of this method, coruscating with innumerable electric flares and erupting with spotlights at 390 feet (Fig. 3, Fig. 4).^[76] The playwright Maxim Gorky described these fiery profiles as they similarly appeared some years later on Coney Island: “A fantastic city all of fire [that] suddenly rises from the ocean into the sky. Thousands of ruddy sparks glimmer in the darkness, limning the fine, sensitive outline on the black background of the sky, shapely towers of miraculous castles, palaces, and temples. . . . Fabulous and beyond conceiving, ineffably beautiful, this fiery scintillation.”^[77]

The opening of Luna Park on May 16, 1903, provided visitors with the “greatest concentration of electric power ever attempted” and established a new paradigm for popular amusement.^[78] Pleasure increasingly mandated artificial illumination, a fact that entrepreneurs such as Thompson and Dundy quickly seized and publications like Electrical Age avidly promoted: “The American people are always eager to be amused and men of foresight and enterprise have long since realized that fortunes were to be made catering to this pleasure-loving instinct. But it cannot be done on a large or a successful scale without the aid of electric light.”^[79] Luna Park’s Kaleidoscopic Tower, standing at 200 feet, presented a smaller version of Buffalo’s earlier edifice; its 80,000 lights were advertised in souvenir programs as configuring as many as fifty geometric shapes and evolving through “1,100 changes before they repeat” (Fig. 5).^[80] Scientific advances in electricity thus furnished light with a newfound agility and vitality, and human beings with unprecedented control over its aesthetic properties. No longer dependent upon the wick or flame, the formless energy of electric light could both saturate and emanate a staggeringly diverse array of shapes and patterns.^[81] Edwin S. Porter’s short film, Coney Island at Night, although unable to convey the remarkable variety of color, nevertheless captures the pulsating rhythms and tonal contrasts projected by electrical radiance across the three main parks, Luna, Steeplechase, and Dreamland.^[82]

Stella’s Electric Palette and the Technological Sublime

As discussed earlier in this essay, the artist interweaves a panoply of “fragments of reality” and prioritizes the “rhythm of the scene” over an exclusively faithful visual representation.^[83] Scholars have demonstrated that the many implanted icons illustrate the park’s actual rides, buildings, and signage; with this in mind, it stands to reason that Stella’s interpretation of electric light would have also been obliquely tethered to the physical components of Coney Island’s illumination scheme. A closer look at several of Stella’s studies for the picture will buttress this proposal. In a preliminary oil, Battle of Lights (1913), Stella roughly delineates familiar facets of Coney’s fantastic landscape: the Kaleidoscopic Tower, Ferris wheel, decorative crescent moon, and several multicolored light beams which crisscross at center. Stella, however, manifests the image through predominantly divisionist strokes or an “enlarged pointillism”; John I. H. Baur has gone so far as to suggest that the style of this study most closely resembles “pre-Futurist canvases by Severini, such as his Spring in Montmartre of 1909.”^[84] Baur continues with another intriguing proposition: “It seems almost as if Stella had set himself this task of mastering the Italian artist’s earlier style before following him into Futurism.”^[85]

If we subscribe to Baur’s line of thinking, we can plausibly trace a Futurist progression in Stella’s preparatory oil sketches, one of which reveals a greater sensitivity to the nuances of artificial light’s appearance.^[86] In Luna Park (1913), Stella renders the scene’s irradiance once more in the form of multiple, rounded daubs, but this time, he also conveys it through sharp, solid “force-lines,” a number of which are especially prominent in the lower left quadrant. This subtle shift in mark-making indicates not only an increasingly Futurist aesthetic, but also the basic fact that Stella was registering and emphasizing electric light’s optical versatility to a greater degree. In Luna Park and beyond, electricity set individual bulbs alight, transforming them into concentrated orbs of luminosity, but its illumination extended far past the confines of any glass encasement, namely through the brilliant beams propelled by floodlights. The full repercussions of this more comprehensive appreciation came to the fore in the final picture; lights strobe and dapple, shimmer and probe, just as they did in real life as well as in the Futurist vision.

That being said, Stella’s visualization emphatically omits certain naturalistic effects, which is to say that his wild and diverse luminescence is not light per se, but sheer color. Stella sought to “electrify” his palette, professing that he used “the intact purity of the vermilion to accentuate the carnal frenzy of the new bacchanal and all the acidity of lemon yellow for the dazzling lights storming all around.”^[87] It is clear from this quotation that Stella selected particular shades for corresponding moods and sensations, and his use of lemon yellow or pure vermilion served to conjure both the violent intensity and artificiality of Coney’s spectacle. These and many other unadulterated hues vigorously bisect and jostle against each other, but do not commingle, and Stella endows each color-light facet with its own precise outline. As a result, the illusion of depth is diminished, yet not entirely eliminated. The light projections and sundry park structures interlace to such a consistent degree that a sense of monumental three-dimensionality remains, and this union of color and form exemplifies Stella’s “quest” for a “chromatic language that would be the exact eloquence of steely architectures.”^[88] To this point, the composition’s voluminous and frenetic tangle may even allude to the way in which electricity physically operated, spreading “weblike” through every locale imaginable, whether private or public, urban or rural, fit for commerce or leisure, plugging each entity into its “network of circuits and currents.”^[89]

The viewer, confronted with this mural-scale, riotous tableau, experiences a sensation of smallness that almost equals the diminutive stature of the “human” particles in the bottom register. The awesome proportions of the park’s harlequin fury, looming above the dark horde, accentuate the staggering nature of the park’s visual experience; Stella erects an image indicative of the “technological sublime,” or the “rupture or ordinary perception” experienced by most spectators in the face of such revolutionary, manufactured objects or scenes.^[90] Luna Park’s brilliancy overhauled night entirely, and indeed, Battle of Lights projects a shocking and disquieting oasis of artificial daylight, free of any vespertine pall.^[91] Stella’s incendiary and centrifugal design, moreover, bespeaks the very action of a dynamo, the machine that precipitated and pumped vast amounts of electricity across great distances—an indispensable device for powering Coney’s gargantuan amusement centers.^[92] The composition both tightly coils and releases this energy, and the patchwork of pictorial elements is most compressed in the lower section and at center, while the upper portion of the canvas is less cluttered and thus establishes an impression of skyrocketing movement. The “conflict” of Battle of Lights is not merely internal to the “lights” themselves; Stella’s electric nocturne also optically assails its spectators, a microcosm of the visual conflagration that distinguished Coney Island in the early twentieth century.

Conclusion: “Stupendous Patterns”

In sum, Stella’s formal realization of electric light and its effects supports a notion that has been widely upheld by art historians, but rarely studied in detail: that Battle of Lights reflected “a perfect combination of modernist subject and style.”^[93] Likewise, Barbara Haskell lauds Stella’s success in “aligning the subject matter of technological life to a style that encapsulated the dynamism and speed which technology engendered.”^[94] The Futurists aimed to yoke mechanistic matter to their visual rhetoric, and although Balla, Boccioni, and Severini accomplished vital steps toward such a formal union, their efforts were necessarily hampered by the fact that the European cultural context possessed neither the scale nor the intricacy of American technology and urban expansion.^[95] Wanda Corn has aptly suggested that Balla’s captivation by a single lamp in Streetlight would have been “utterly quaint and precious” to Stella; regardless, it is possible that Stella would never have discovered the power of this theme without the visual aid of Futurist canvases like it.^[96] Battle of Lights encapsulated the felt impact or, in a Futurist lexicon, the “dynamic sensation,”^[97] of Coney’s thoroughly modern and mesmeric vista, an experience poignantly characterized by E. E. Cummings in an essay on the island: “The thousands upon thousands of faces paralyzed by enchantment to mere eyeful disks, which strugglingly surge through dizzy gates of illusion; the metamorphosis of atmosphere into a stupendous pattern of electric colors, punctuated by the continuous whisking of leaning and cleaving ship-like shapes.”^[98]

Endnotes

^[1] This print is reproduced in Rem Koolhaas’s canonical urban study, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1994), 35. Unfortunately, Koolhaas did not provide any information as to the identification of the image, and I have been unable to locate it elsewhere in my own research. The depicted structure was originally dubbed “a kind of May-Pole in the water” by William Bishop in his essay “To Coney Island,” Scribner’s Magazine 20, no. 3 (July 1880): 355.

^[2] Michael Immerso, Coney Island: The People’s Playground (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 27. Immerso describes Coney Island’s location as “at the southern rim of the Borough of Brooklyn, not quite ten miles from Manhattan,” 12.

^[3] Joachim Homann, Night Vision: Nocturnes in American Art, 1860–1960 (Bowdoin, ME: Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 2015), 21.

^[4] Immerso, Coney Island, 27.

^[5] Jane Brox, Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2010), 108.

^[6] New York Herald, 1882, quoted in Brox, Brilliant, 123.

^[7] New York Times, 1880, quoted in Brox, Brilliant, 108.

^[8] Wanda M. Corn has drawn this distinction in the various “New York electric nocturnes” executed by American artists such as Joseph Pennell, John Sloan, Birge Harrison, Everett Shinn, Theodore Butler, and George Luks. Corn observes: “The artists of the new New York . . . clearly registered that their lights were modern, electric and standardized. . . . Their light was ‘harder’ than Whistlerian light, and its source in new technologies was well defined.” See Corn, The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915–1935 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), 171–72.

^[9] Peter Conrad, The Art of the City (New York: Oxford Press, 1984), 132. In a corresponding fashion, the Futurists regarded the past as tantamount to “the age of the oil lamp.” See the full quotation in “Variety Theater” (1913) in F. T. Marinetti, Critical Writings, ed. Günter Berghaus, trans. Doug Thompson (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006), 185.

^[10] Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini, “La pittura futurista: Manifesto tecnico” (Milan: Uffici di Poesia, April 11, 1910), trans. in Futurism: An Anthology, ed. Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 65.

^[11] Marinetti, Critical Writings, 28.

^[12] Anne d’Harnoncourt, Futurism and the International Avant-Garde (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1980), 16.

^[13] Joseph Stella was born the fourth of five sons in the mountain village of Muro Lucano in the southern Apennines on June 13, 1877. When he was eighteen, he joined his oldest brother, Antonio, in New York, and first studied painting under William Merritt Chase (1849–1916) at the New York School of Art. For an in-depth investigation into the implications of Stella’s trans-cultural identity, see Laura Blandino, “ ‘There’s no place like home, but where is home?’ Migrazione, straniamento e appartenenza nell’opera del pittore Joseph Stella,” Scritture Migranti 7 (2013): 157–183.

^[14] Corn, Great American Thing, 179. A German visitor to the United States noted that the Americans had “learned how to harness steamships, railways, the telegraph system, and agricultural machines to their uses . . . with a vigor and determination for which we Europeans have not example.” Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904), Sketches of Urban and Cultural Life in North America, trans. and ed. Stewart A. Stehlin (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 3–4.

^[15] Barbara Haskell also posits the glorification of New York as a “paradigm of modernity” by fellow European expatriate Francis Picabia (1879–1953) as fodder for Stella’s mature work. Following the opening of the Armory Show in 1913, Picabia was quoted in the New York American: “You of New York should be quick to understand me and my fellow painters. Your New York is the cubist, the futurist city. It expresses its architecture, its life, its spirit, in modern thought.” In Francis Picabia, “How New York Looks to Me,” New York American, March 30, 1913, no page number; cited in Barbara Haskell, Joseph Stella (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994), 39–42.

^[16] Joseph Stella, “Discovery of America: Autobiographical Notes,” ARTnews 59, no. 7 (November 1960): 41–42.

^[17] Immerso, Coney Island, 74.

^[18] “Guides are Needed at Cubist Art Show,” New York Times, February 3, 1914, 7.

^[19] Richard Cox, “Coney Island, Urban Symbol in American Art,” New York Historical Society Quarterly 60, no. 1/2 (January/April 1976): 41.

^[20] I am positioning my argument at the nexus of artistic modernism and broader visual culture upon the exhortation of historian John F. Kasson, who notes that the majority of previous scholarship on Stella has interpreted his work solely by virtue of its contributions to “high modernism.” Kasson rightly nuances such readings: “Stella’s Battle of Lights suggests that a powerful new modern way of seeing was created as much at amusement parks as in artists’ salons, and that artistic modernism was more deeply and complexly related to popular commercial art than we might initially imagine. . . . A work such as Battle of Lights fuses modernist idioms with the battles of modern mass culture that have continued up to the present moment.” See Kasson, “Seeing Coney Island, Seeing Culture: Joseph Stella’s Battle of Lights,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 11, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 101.

^[21] Here, I am building upon the following contention posited, but not extensively clarified, by David Nye: “Stella embraced the machine age and the special effects of the lighting engineers, not only making electrical technologies a central theme . . . but adopting its colors and lines as part of his visual vocabulary.” See Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880–1940 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 80. Other scholars, most notably Robin Jaffee Frank, Irma B. Jaffe, and Barbara Haskell, have more often explicated the components of the Battle of Lights that portray various aspects of Coney’s theme parks. To my knowledge, none have closely scrutinized the specific pictorial impact of electrical illumination.

^[22] Ernest Freeberg, The Age of Edison: Electric Light and the Invention of Modern America (New York: Penguin Press, 2013), 9; Heinz Widauer, “Divisionism in Italy: From Symbolist to Electric Light,” in Ways of Pointillism: Seurat, Signac, and Van Gogh, ed. Widauer, trans. Brigitte Willinger and Gerard A. Goodrow (Vienna: Albertina, 2016), 231.

^[23] Widauer, “Divisionism in Italy,” 231.

^[24] Brox, Brilliant, 102–103.

^[25] Brox, Brilliant, 104.

^[26] Freeberg, Age of Edison, 18.

^[27] Simonetta Fraquelli, “Modified Divisionism: Futurist Painting in 1910,” in Italian Futurism 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe, ed. Vivien Greene (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2014), 80.

^[28] Simonetta Fraquelli, Giovanna Ginex, Vivien Greene, and Aurora Scotti Tosini, Radical Light: Italy’s Divisionist Painters 1891–1910 (London: National Gallery, 2008), 13. For the original publication of Ogden Rood’s color theory, see Rood, Modern Chromatics: With Applications to Art and Industry (London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Co., 1879). The discoveries of the French chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul (1786–1889) were also implicated in the Divisionist approach, especially those included in his De la loi du contraste simultané des couleurs (Paris: Pitois-Levrault, 1839).

^[29] Fraquelli, “Modified Divisionism,” 80. For more information on Divisionism as socially engaged, see Giovanna Ginex, “Divisionism, Neo-Impressionism, Socialism,” in Divisionism and Neo-Impressionism: Arcadia and Anarchy, ed. Vivien Greene (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2007), 28–41. Gaetano Previati (1852–1920) was one of the preeminent pioneers of Divisionism in Italy; he greatly influenced the Futurists with his devotion to the integration of subjective insights and scientific ideas, as detailed in his various manuals on Divisionist theory, such as I principii scientifici del divisionismo: la tecnica della Pittura (Torino: Bocca, 1906).

^[30] Boccioni et al., “La pittura futurista: Manifesto tecnico,” 64–67.

^[31] In “A Futurist Speech by Marinetti to the Venetians,” Marinetti addresses the city’s inhabitants: “What we want now is that the electric street lamps, with their thousand stabbing points, slice into and violently tear apart your mysterious darkness, which is so bewitching and persuasive!” In Marinetti, Critical Writings, 166.

^[32] Fraquelli et al., Radical Light, 131; Brox, 107.

^[33] Heinz Widauer employs the word “hooklet” in his essay “Divisionism in Italy,” an apposite descriptor for Balla’s mark-making; see page 232. The carbon substance in arc lamps, when vaporized, can reach a temperature as high as 6500 degrees Fahrenheit. See “The Firm Form of Electric Light: History of the Carbon Arc Lamp (1800–1980s),” Edison Tech Center, accessed April 10, 2017, http://www.edisontechcenter.org/ArcLamps.html.

^[34] Sir Humphry Davy first coined the term “arch lamp,” which was later spelled “arc,” in response to the curved orientation of the current. See William Slingo and Arthur Brooker, Electric Engineering for Electric Light Artisans (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1898), 607. See also Thomas B. Cole, “Street Light,” The Journal of the American Medical Association 306, no. 16 (October 26, 2011): 1739.

^[35] Cole, “Street Light,” 1739. Cole speculates that Balla, after staring for great lengths of time at the street lights, may have suffered from “arc eye” photokeratitis, “a painful burn of the corneas resulting from unprotected exposure to the ultraviolet rays emitted by electrical arcs.” (It should be mentioned that Cole does not supply any particular citation for this claim.)

^[36] Balla certainly intended to exhibit with the Futurists in 1912, but Boccioni, by then “the mouthpiece of the Futurist movement,” ultimately refused his work’s inclusion, claiming that it was not sufficiently Futurist in style. See Widauer, “Divisionism in Italy,” 232.

^[37] Here I have in mind the connections drawn by Jeffrey T. Schnapp between the mechanical traits of an airplane propeller and the “argument and form” of Marinetti’s “Technical Manifesto.” See Schnapp, “Propeller Talk,” Modernism/modernity 1, no. 3 (September 1994): 153–178.

^[38] I borrow this term “mechanical muses” from Christine Poggi’s Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 19. Just as “Futurist painters . . . learned to take dictation from motors,” so too did they look to electricity for creative inspiration.

^[39] Umberto Boccioni, Futurist Painting and Sculpture (Plastic Dynamism), trans. Richard Shane Agin and Maria Elena Versari (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Trust, 2016), 126. Boccioni positions the Impressionist technique as a generative foil for Futurism: “Everything that in Impressionism was a simple fusion of tones, running no risk of being defined as either form or volume, becomes instead, in our pictorial and sculptural production, a resolute determination of planes and volumes that interpenetrate, chase after, and exert an influence on one another in their infinite variety of thickness, transparency, and weight,” 125.

^[40] Poggi, Inventing Futurism, 212.

^[41] Cole, “Street Light,” 1739.

^[42] Poggi, Inventing Futurism, 216.

^[43] Severini’s original Pan Pan at the Monico was lost and presumed destroyed. The artist later reproduced the painting from photographs in 1959. See John I. H. Baur, Joseph Stella (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1971), 31. For more on Severini’s thematic interest in dance, see Daniela Fonti, Gino Severini: The Dance, 1909–1916 (Milan: Skira and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 2001).

^[44] Boccioni, Futurist Painting and Sculpture, 126; Boccioni et al., “La pittura futurista: Manifesto tecnico,” 64–67. The manifesto proffers, “Our bodies penetrate the sofas upon which we sit, and the sofas penetrate our bodies,” 65.

^[45] Anne Coffin Hanson, Severini Futurista: 1912–1917 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Art Gallery, 1996), 35.

^[46] Boccioni et al., “La pittura futurista: Manifesto tecnico,” 64.

^[47] Poggi, Inventing Futurism, 216.

^[48] Quoted in Hanson, Severini Futurista, 67. It is important to distinguish that The Milliner and The Haunting Dancer were the only two works by Severini to be illustrated in the Bernheim-Jeune’s exhibition catalogue.

^[49] The Futurists defined force-lines in “The Exhibitors to the Public”: “All objects, in accordance with what the painter Boccioni happily terms physical transcendentalism, tend to the infinite by their force-lines, the continuity of which is measured by our own intuition. It is these force-lines that we must draw in order to lead back the work of art to true painting. We interpret nature by rendering these objects upon the canvas as the beginnings or the prolongations of the rhythms impressed upon our sensibility by these very objects.” See Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, and Gino Severini, “The Exhibitors to the Public,” February 1912, in Rainey, Poggi, and Whitman, Futurism, 107.

^[50] Max Kozloff, Cubism/Futurism (New York: Charterhouse: 1973), 119. Constance Classen also alludes to Futurism’s integral identification with the “electrical revolution,” and summarizes that, for the Futurists, “this electrification of the world would lead to visual aesthetics and eye-minded rationalism being superseded by a kinesthetic fusion of force, thought, and feeling.” See Classen, The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 185–86.

^[51] Stella wrote to Carrà ten years later: “We met at the Bernheim Gallery in Paris, at the first Futurist exhibition—and perhaps you will not remember me, as we have not seen each other again. Through from a distance, here in New York (where I have lived for years) I have always followed with interest and strong liking your lively work of an artist innovator, and I have always hoped, for the love that I bear my country of origin, for a show in New York of the bold and recent conquests accomplished by you and your companions to the glory of Italy.” Cited in Baur, Joseph Stella, 30–31.

^[52] Haskell, Joseph Stella, 38.

^[53] Stella would have become familiar with Severini through close mutual friends, among them the Italian, Paris-based painter Amedeo Modigliani (1884–1920) and the American artist and critic Walter Pach (1883–1958). See Haskell, Joseph Stella, 38.

^[54] Lisa Panzera, “Italian Futurism and Avant-Garde Painting in the United States,” in International Futurism in Arts and Literature, ed. Günter Berghaus (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2000), 231.

^[55] The 1913 Armory Show also catalyzed Stella’s trajectory toward modernism. By Barbara Haskell’s estimation, it was “less the art than the rhetoric employed to explain it” that encouraged him; the press repeatedly heralded the exhibition’s modernist works as “futurist art,” even though no official Futurist artists had participated. See Haskell, Joseph Stella, 38. Stella himself refers to the exhibition’s motivational influence: “Soon after the show I got very busy in painting my very first American subject: Battle of Lights, Mardi Gras, Coney Island.” See “Discovery of America,” 6.

^[56] He concludes: “On the spot was born the idea for my first truly great picture.” Joseph Stella, “I Knew Him When,” Daily Mirror, July 8, 1924.

^[57] Stella commented on the elements of the amusement park as they relate to Battle of Lights in more detail: “I felt that I should paint this subject upon a big wall, but I had to be satisfied with the hugest canvas that I could find. Making an appeal to my most ambitious aims. . . . I built the most intense dynamic arabesque that I could imagine in order to convey in a hectic mood the surging crowd and the revolving machines generating for the first time, not anguish and pain, but violent dangerous pleasures.” See “Discovery of America,” 6.

^[58] The poem is undated; for the full version in English, see Haskell, Joseph Stella, 219. The original Italian text is published in Irma B. Jaffe, Joseph Stella (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 146. I am appropriating Barbara Haskell’s term “City Electric” here to refer to New York. See Haskell, Joseph Stella, 171.

^[59] F. T. Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” in Marinetti: Selected Writings, ed. R. W. Flint, trans. R. W. Flint and Arthur A. Coppotelli (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1971), 41; originally published in Le Figaro (Paris), February 20, 1909.

^[60] Jaffe, Joseph Stella, 40.

^[61] Stella even exercised the synthetic Futurist working method put forth by Balla, Boccioni, Carrà, Russolo, and Severini in “The Exhibitors to the Public”: “In order to make the spectator live in the center of the picture, as we express it in our manifesto, the picture must be the synthesis of what one remembers and of what one sees,” 106. Stella’s friend Carlo de Fornaro recalled the following parallels in the artist’s approach: “Several weeks were dedicated to myriads of observations. . . in a manner of an artistic detective in a hunt for the solution of a pictorial mystery. He had to visualize the picture on a flat and square canvas. . . . Several nights were dedicated to meditation upon the execution in oils of his clear drama. . . . While discussing this artistic parturition, Stella remarked that after weeks of studies and cogitations the full-blown idea had flashed into his mind like an inspiration.” See Carlo de Fornaro, “Joseph Stella: Outline of the Life, Work, and Times of a Great Master,” unpublished manuscript (New York: 1939), 30–31, quoted in Jaffe, Joseph Stella, 40.

^[62] Robin Jaffee Frank, Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland 1861–2008 (Hartford, CT: Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, in association with Yale University Press, 2015), 40–43. Frank describes how she crowdsourced the identification of many of the attractions in her article “Coney Island Baby,” Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin (2015): 120–121. Contemporary reviewers made mention of the painting’s piecemeal attitude: “Here is a fragment of an audience watching a fragment of dancers. Fragments of steel construction are seen, fragments of architecture, a word or two from a sign, all packed in a confusion of lights,” The Christian Science Monitor, February 1914, 10.

^[63] These identifications between the actual Coney Island amusement parks and Stella’s composition are based on those enumerated first by Robin Jaffee Frank; for a more exhaustive list, see her volume Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 40–43. John F. Kasson explains that the yearly Mardi Gras staged by Coney Island “was not a pre-Lenten holiday but a special post-Labor Day celebration that had been instituted, improbably enough, as a fund-raising effort for the Coney Island Rescue Mission for wayward girls.” See Kasson, “Seeing Coney Island: Seeing Culture,” 95–96.

^[64] “Coney Mardi Gras Draws Huge Crowd,” New York Times, September 9, 1913, 7.

^[65] Freeberg, Age of Edison, 116.

^[66] Nye, Electrifying America, 33.

^[67] Nye, Electrifying America, 33.

^[68] Immerso, Coney Island, 60–61.

^[69] Immerso, Coney Island, 60-61. For a full description of the ride “A Trip to the Moon,” see John F. Kasson, Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 61.

^[70] Immerso, Coney Island, 62.

^[71] Nye, Electrifying America, 42–43. See also Judith A. Adams, The American Amusement Park Industry: A History of Technology and Thrills (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991), 38.

^[72] Sasha Archibald, “Harnessing Niagara Falls,” Cabinet, no. 19 (Fall 2005): no page number.

^[73] Brian Bowers, Lengthening the Day: A History of Lighting Technology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 69. Edison Electric Light Company promoted the incandescent lamp as infinitely preferable to the arc, and it would indeed eventually replace the former mode: “In the incandescent electric lamp we have a source of light free from the faults and possessing advantages foreign to either the arc light or gas. With these lamps, light may be distributed more uniformly; they can be furnished of a brilliancy ranging from sixteen to two hundred and fifty candles, or, by grouping, may be made to equal or even to excel the arc.” See Edison Electric Light Co., The Edison Incandescent Electric Light: Its Superiority to All Other Illuminants (Montreal: 1888), 9. Electric lighting became a standard domestic amenity by the late 1920s; for more information, see Mark H. Rose, Cities of Light and Heat: Domesticating Gas and Electricity in Urban America (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995).

^[74] Nye, Electrifying America, 44.

^[75] Archibald, “Harnessing Niagara Falls,” no page number. Louis Bell discusses the “luminous sketch” and Stieringer’s mastery of it at length; see Bell, The Art of Illumination (New York: McGraw Publishing, 1902), 283–89. Bell defines the technique: “The configuration of the lights to be used in the luminous sketch that seems needful for the best artistic results may be roughly determined by making by daylight, or better, near sunset, a rough, clear, line drawing of the scene to be illuminated from a rather distant viewpoint, the further as the scale of the work increases. Then the distribution of lights following the principal points and outlines of this drawing will give the main effects that one wishes to produce,” 283–84.

^[76] Bell, Art of Illumination, 285–86.

^[77] Maxim Gorky, “Boredom,” The Independent 63 (August 8, 1907): 309.

^[78] Adams, The American Amusement Park Industry, 47–48. Luna Park took the place of Paul Boynton’s Sea Lion Park, which had been established in 1895. By Lauren Rabinovitz’s count, there were two thousand amusement parks nationwide by 1912. See Rabinovitz, Electric Dreamland: Amusement Parks, Movies, and American Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 4.

^[79] “The Development of Summer Lighting,” Electrical Age, April 1, 1904.

^[80] Immerso, Coney Island, 65.

^[81] Kristen Whissel, Picturing American Modernity: Traffic, Technology, and the Silent Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 42. Whissel expands on this point: “As an invisible force sensible only through touch, electricity was known and experienced at the end of the nineteenth century primarily through its effects—light, heat, and motive force—and hence by whatever (signifying) machine completed its circuit,” 118. For more on the evolution and cultural ramifications of light’s increasing “disembodiment” through electricity, see Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

^[82] Frank, Visions of an American Dreamland, 40.

^[83] Frank, Visions of an American Dreamland, 40. Century Magazine investigated Stella’s expressive mode: “He has evolved a style of his own from various elements in the modern movement. Had he merely represented the physical appearance of the American fiesta, he believed that he could not have given the rhythm of the scene, which transforms the chaos of the night, the lights, and the strange buildings, and the surging crowds into the order, the design, and the color of art.” See “ ‘Battle of Lights, Coney Island,’ from the Painting by Joseph Stella,” Century Magazine 87 (April 1914): 853.

^[84] Baur, Joseph Stella, 31. Barbara Haskell makes the same connection; see Haskell, Joseph Stella, 43.

^[85] Baur, Joseph Stella, 31.

^[86] For information on two other Coney Island studies by Stella, both of which reside in the Hirshhorn Museum’s collection, see Judith Zilczer, Joseph Stella: The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Collection (Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution Press for the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 1983), 24–27.

^[87] Stella, “Autobiographical Notes,” 41. Peter Conrad draws the conclusion that Stella wanted “his colors to glare as blindingly as the lights to which they paid homage.” See Conrad, The Art of the City, 35. For more on Stella’s chromatic strategies, see Joann Moser, Visual Poetry: The Drawings of Joseph Stella (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990), 89.

^[88] Quoted in Moser, Visual Poetry, 89.

^[89] Whissel, Picturing American Modernity, 3–4.

^[90] Whissel, Picturing American Modernity, 129.

^[91] Electricity single-handedly paved the way for twenty-four-hour entertainment and production. See William J. Phalen, Coney Island: 150 Years of Rides, Fires, Floods, the Rich, the Poor, and Finally Robert Moses (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2016), 88.

^[92] Nadja Maril, American Lighting: 1840–1940 (Westchester, PA: Schiffer Publishing, 1989), 74.

^[93] Margaret Reeves Burke, “Futurism in America, 1910–1917” (PhD diss., University of Delaware, 1986), 109.

^[94] Haskell, Joseph Stella, 44.

^[95] Burke, “Futurism in America,” 2.

^[96] Corn, Great American Thing, 179–80.

^[97] Balla et al., “The Exhibitors to the Public,” 107.

^[98] E. E. Cummings, “Coney Island: A Slightly Exuberant Appreciation of New York’s Famous Pleasure Park,” reproduced in Coney Island Reader: Through the Dizzy Gates of Illusion, ed. Louis J. Parascandola and John Parascandola (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 191–93. This essay was originally published in Vanity Fair in June 1926.

Author Bio:

Ramey Mize is a doctoral student in Art History at the University of Pennsylvania. From Atlanta, Georgia, she holds a BA in Art History from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and her MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. The majority of her research and publications to date examine the intersection of nineteenth-century visual culture, war, and landscape across Europe and the Americas. Her scholarship has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Buffalo Bill Center of the West. Previously, she has served as the Anne Lunder Leland Curatorial Fellow at the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine, a Summer Fellow at the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Center for American Art, and a Curatorial Assistant at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Most recently, Mize co-curated the exhibitions “The World is Following Its People”: Indigenous Art and Arctic Ecology at the University of Delaware’s Old College Gallery and Soy Cuba / I am Cuba: The Contemporary Landscapes of Roger Toledo at the Arthur Ross Gallery, University of Pennsylvania; in June 2019, her exhibition Etch and Flow: Waterscapes by American Painter-Etchers, will open at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Since 2016, she has served as a managing curator of the Incubation Series, a student-run curatorial collective at UPenn. She may be contacted at rmize at upenn.edu.

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Phoebe Herland

The Institute of Fine Arts, New York University

Abstract

A painting by Jackson Pollock hangs next to a painting by Jean Dubuffet at the Tate Modern in London, set apart on a wall of their own. Both titans in their own right, Pollock is of course known as the progenitor of American action painting, and Dubuffet the French father of Art Brut. Geographically and methodologically they are distinct, but they are very often related in British thought. This contemporary hanging at the Tate is but one domino in a chain of comparisons made between Pollock and Dubuffet, which I trace back to post-war London. The first time these artists were seen in tandem was at an exhibition in 1953,“Parallel of Life and Art,” at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in London. It was organized in large part by photographer by Nigel Henderson.

A member of the Independent Group, a renegade group of artists in London’s post-war scene founded at the ICA, Nigel Henderson was the lone photographer among painters, sculptors, and architects. He had unique points of contact with both Dubuffet and Pollock, ultimately leading to their inclusion in “Parallel of Art and Life.” This paper triangulates the relationship between Henderson, Dubuffet, and Pollock. From London, France, and America, why were these artists compatible? How did they come to know one another? Why did Dubuffet and Pollock come to conceptually underpin the Independent Group, mentioned in their various projects so often and particularly as a packaged deal? For answers, I look to letters between Henderson and Dubuffet, largely unknown in the field of Dubuffet scholarship, and track the critical reception of Pollock in early British publications.

London lagged in its post-war recovery, artists noting a “stagnancy” in the very air. I argue that Pollock and Dubuffet, both of whom prioritize physical movement in their practice and in their personal mythology, were taken up by these artists as reprieve from dreary London. They were used by these artists to promote forward motion.

Action Photography Brut:
Nigel Henderson, Jean Dubuffet, Jackson Pollock, and the Streets of Postwar London

In 1956, Alison and Peter Smithson published an article in Ark, a magazine of the Royal College of Art in London, titled “But Today We Collect Ads.” In rhythmic, repetitive prose, the architects survey sources of artistic inspiration from years past, always returning to the refrain “but today we collect ads.” They contend that “glossies” and “throw-away objects,” the “piece of paper blowing about the street,” are now “the equivalent of the Dutch fruit and flower arrangement.”^[1] The Royal College of Art, it should be noted, is one of Britain’s most distinguished art schools. At the time, its program required students to engage with the classics and practice traditional life painting. “But Today We Collect Ads” radically threatened its institutional power. Taste-making, argued the Smithsons, has been transferred to the hands of the ad men, and no longer resides safely with fine art’s “ruling class.”^[2]

In the neoclassical building of another of London’s most esteemed art schools, the Courtauld Institute, architectural historian Reyner Banham led a cameraman through the halls in a documentary called “The Fathers of Pop” (1979). Banham, closely associated with the Smithsons, was part of the Independent Group, a postwar cohort of artists whose members hailed from some of the most prestigious art institutions in London. Classical music accompanies Banham’s recollections of student life at the Courtauld, his alma mater, in the early 1950s: as he explains, “We studied Cézanne, Michelangelo, Turner, the whole grand tradition of European art and civilization.” Banham makes his way to a balcony and peers over its wrought iron railing at a Chrysler car on the street below; the music cuts to jazz. In his student days, he recalls, the occasional sight of an American automobile from the library windows was a “vision from another culture.”^[3] Pastel paint and reflective chrome in motion, these cars must have provided startlingly bright relief from the grey dreariness of postwar London. They seemed to represent the future, “as alien as spaceships.”^[4] The American car became of central interest to the Independent Group; the motif perhaps reached its apex with Richard Hamilton’s 1957 oil painting Hommage à Chrysler Corp, which cemented the American car within the lineage of European painting.

The Independent Group formed at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London in the early 1950s. Members have differing recollections about what the group stood for, but it was clear what it stood against: the ICA chairman, Herbert Read, and more generally, stagnant tradition.^[5] The group’s name, according to Hamilton, stemmed from a matricidal impulse to stand independently from the ICA, which parented them.^[6] At the group’s first “real” meeting in 1952, Eduardo Paolozzi presented a cavalcade of images from his vast personal collection of magazine advertisements and newspaper clippings.^[7] This was a generative creative practice that would become fundamental to the group: But today we collect ads. Paolozzi, Hamilton, the photographer Nigel Henderson, and others incorporated these ads into a profusion of collages. It was a radical leap toward Pop Art that went largely unnoticed at the time. Today, as Banham’s documentary acknowledges, these artists are heralded as the “Fathers of Pop.”

For the postwar British artist, the loose, discarded advertisement “blowing about the street” and the flashy American car darting past the Courtauld Institute had a great deal in common. One is trash, the other is garish, and both are set in motion. We might say the same of Jean Dubuffet, with his interest in crude material, and Jackson Pollock, considered garish by virtue of being American—both of whom came to buttress the Independent Group conceptually, much as ads and cars did. References to the two artists, often in tandem, appear throughout writings by thinkers including Henderson, Banham, and the Smithsons.^[8] And while Dubuffet’s and Pollock’s frenzied and raw paint handling have been compared by critics outside Great Britain, the pairing met with special fervor in London.^[9] One a titan of Europe, the other a titan of America, Dubuffet and Pollock enabled Great Britain to triangulate its new postwar image. Comparing the two reveals similar methodologies based in movement: Pollock stalking his floor-laid canvas, engaging his full body in motion as he paints, and Dubuffet traveling the world in search of Art Brut materials, collecting them as the Independent Group collected ads.

A 1953 show at the ICA, Parallel of Life and Art (Fig. 1), placed Dubuffet and Pollock together in London for the first time—not physically, but through photographic representation. Organized by Nigel Henderson, Eduardo Paolozzi, the Smithsons, and an engineer by the name of Ronald Jenkins, the show contained 122 photographs. Their source material was diverse: an Etruscan funerary vase, Japanese writing, a news clipping of a bicycle race in the midst of a crash, and so on. One photograph, originally taken by Hans Namuth, showed Pollock in his studio (Fig. 2). Another represented Dubuffet’s painting Corps de dame paysagé sanguine et grenat (Fig. 3). Henderson and Paolozzi made the selections, while the Smithsons and Jenkins designed the hanging.^[10] Henderson, in large part, photographed the source material. Using a photographic enlarger, he dramatically distorted scale during the printing process. Under his lens, the micro often became macro and vice-versa; a magnified biological cell, it turns out, can be nearly indistinguishable from an aerial view of a mountain range. The show delighted in these comparisons, and actively invited them through its creative use of space. Photographs of diverse sizes were arranged at all heights and varying angles, effectively enveloping the viewer in a three-dimensional collage. As a visitor moved through the space, he or she would set a chain of dominoes in motion, each photograph seeming to resonate differently with those around it.

Although the exhibition was a concerted group effort, its joining of biology and fine art can be traced back to Henderson in particular.^[11] So, too, can the inclusion of Pollock and Dubuffet, with whom the artist had special points of contact. By tracing these relationships, we will come to find that the photographic work of Henderson constellates easily between the action painting of Pollock and the Art Brut of Dubuffet. Indeed, photography as a medium, though materially and methodologically distinct from the painterly practices of Pollock and Dubuffet, finds kinship with them through a shared interest in motion.

Henderson’s mother Wynn, with whom he lived in London’s Bloomsbury district from the age of sixteen, was an art-world socialite. Bloomsbury, in those days, played host to a close-knit group of iconoclasts including Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry, and John Maynard Keynes. From a young age, then, Henderson had access to a deep network of artists and intellectuals with whom he was comfortable engaging with as an equal. Wynn was a close personal friend of Peggy Guggenheim, and served as secretary during the years in which the collector ran the Guggenheim Jeune Gallery (Wynn had even come up with the gallery’s name, a play on the famous Bernheim-Jeune in Paris).^[12] Henderson would often help hang shows at the gallery, and his mother managed to slip a few of her son’s works into an Exhibition of Collages, Papiers-collés, and Photo-montages.^[13] This gesture either went unnoticed or was welcomed by Guggenheim, whom Henderson came to regard as “kind of a fairy godmother.”^[14] We can imagine the psychological empowerment her friendship would offer a young artist such as Henderson, allowing him not only intimate access to major works of art, but also access to the artists themselves. He struck up a friendship with Marcel Duchamp, for example, after the two hung a show together in Guggenheim’s gallery. From this meeting with Duchamp, Henderson gained what he described as a “first-person singular feeling.”^[15]

Henderson’s connections would become a boon to artists in the Independent Group who descended from humbler corners of Great Britain. Paolozzi, for example, was an Italian man in a still staunchly racist and classist London. Henderson happily introduced him to Guggenheim and others. The relationship was, it should be noted, mutually beneficial. Like many children of privilege in a self-consciously capitalist world, Henderson idealized the lives and perspectives of those marooned on lower rungs, a theme that recurs in his photographs of London’s East End.

Before his years with the Independent Group, Henderson attended the Slade, a well-established art school in London in step with the Royal College of Art. He studied drawing and painting, “for which he had little aptitude.”^[16] As in Bloomsbury, the network in which he embedded himself was crucial: artists he met through the Slade, such as Paolozzi and Hamilton, greatly influenced his work. When Henderson eventually found photography, it was by way of a pivotal gift from Paolozzi—a photographic enlarger—in 1949. He used the same photographic enlarger for Parallel of Life and Art, and it became fundamental to his practice.

The enlarger enabled Henderson to take a unique approach to photography, playing freely with scale and composition, and making photography almost as plastic as paint. His radical approach to photography caught the attention of one of his idols, Dubuffet. Henderson and Dubuffet most likely met in person before 1950, though the exact nature of this meeting is unclear.^[17] In 1954, they came in contact again, when Dubuffet encountered a number of what Henderson would call his “stressed” photographs at a photography show at the ICA. Dubuffet purchased six for his personal collection and followed up with a letter of thanks, encouraging Henderson to continue work in this vein.^[18]

What was it about these photographs that so appealed to the creator of Art Brut? Their crude materiality and process were, no doubt, central factors. A key feature of Art Brut is that artists gather their materials, subject, and style, “from their own depths, and not from the conventions of classical or fashionable art.”^[19] In this sense, the fact that the Slade disparaged photography and discouraged its pursuit, regarding it as “the Devil’s Domain,”^[20] qualifies the medium as an Art Brut material. Although Paolozzi and the Independent Group employed advertisements and photography in their work, Henderson alone produced photographic work.^[21] He thus was not influenced by a cohort of photographic fellows but was entirely self-directed. Of course, Henderson’s work did not entirely fit Dubuffet’s criteria for anti-cultural art. Henderson was, after all, part of the Independent group. He organized Parallel of Life and Art with his collaborators Paolozzi, the Smithsons, and Jenkins. Even from a young age he was a part of London’s art scene by way of his mother. One could further argue that photography itself, with its chemical and mechanical specificity, requires trained, insider knowledge. Still, Henderson, with his unusual and ad-hoc approach to photography, brings the medium close to what we might call “Photography Brut.”

Although it is unclear exactly which six prints Dubuffet purchased from the ICA show, at least one, and likely several, were from a series of bathers that Henderson made from a found Victorian lantern slide (Fig. 4).^[22] This was an uncharacteristically small-format series for Henderson, the images no larger than five and a half by three and a half inches, like postcards or personal snapshots. The lantern slide pictured boys bathing on a rocky beach near water’s edge, which Henderson printed with variously cropped compositions and aesthetic manipulations. One figure who appears repeatedly is a young boy in striped bathing trunks. He stands with his hands on his hips and looks outward, surveying the beach. Henderson reproduces the boy again and again in several small prints, but each time he appears differently, as if his reflection has been cast in a new funhouse mirror. In one image his body stretches across the entirety of the picture’s frame, his right foot dragged into the bottom right corner. In another, his image is flipped and printed in negative. His body recedes farther into the beach, and his left leg is pulled into elephantine proportion. Importantly, viewers are never given the source image in full; they receive numerous conflicting and incomplete accounts that create a sense of disorientation. There is no stable, “true” image in which to find one’s bearings.

Henderson refers to works such as these, in which he makes naïve, tactile interventions, as “stressed images.” To this end, he refers to his photographic enlarger as his “crude drawing instrument,” a phrase that not only evokes the unrefined process of Art Brut, but also relates the impersonal and mechanical photographic medium with the intimate and mutable quality of drawing.^[23] To create points of stress in the photographs—the disproportionate pushes and pulls in the picture plane—Henderson bends and folds the printing paper during the printing process, while also enlarging certain points within the composition.^[24] After printing, he flattens the paper again, and the image slips and slides in areas in which the negative was exposed at an angle. Cresting waves in the ocean, for example, become attenuated lines of light, pulled like taffy. A bather’s body drags like one of Salvador Dalí’s clocks. The residual creases in the paper become creeping cracks in the composition, alienating the bathers from each other, or worse, from their own limbs. These are ominous photographs, not altogether typical of Henderson’s oeuvre, which also includes street photography of children at play and cheerful collages of bright advertising images. Our expectations for small snapshots of a trip to the beach—expectations perhaps created by the aforementioned advertising images—are upended in this series. This is especially true for those iterations printed in negative, which read like topsy-turvy nightmares. The horizon line, if discernable, is often tilted; it is as if the fixed photographic image has detached from its source and spun like a top.

Here we come to a second, more subtle affinity between Dubuffet and Henderson: both value movement in their work. Dubuffet’s writings, for instance, frequently equate intellectualism with stagnancy and artistry with motion. “The intellectual functions all too often sitting down,” he writes, “in school, at meetings, during conferences—always seated . . . We might even say that school chairs wear down [one’s] clairvoyance along one’s rump.”^[25] For Dubuffet, the body and one’s clairvoyance, or creative ability, are deeply connected. If the body is idle then so is the mind. That the artist locates these seated intellectuals in schools, meetings, and conferences is significant, too—they are cloistered indoors, apart from the outside world. To those British artists rebelling against the Slade, the Royal College of Art, the ICA, and so on, this would have been a particularly appealing sentiment. By contrast, in an essay from 1945, Dubuffet writes, “An artwork is all the more enthralling the more of an adventure it has been, particularly if it bears the mark of this adventure . . . If [the artist] himself did not know where it would all lead.”^[26] The artist’s adventure is one that travels from one point to another, that leads somewhere. Further, as Dubuffet puts it, “the artist teams up with chance. It takes two to tango, not one; chance always joins in. It pulls to the right, to the left, while the artist leads as best he can.”^[27] Here, the artist is a ballroom dancer, the opposite of a seated intellectual. That the artist’s dancing partner is chance should, of course, immediately call to mind Pollock.

The photograph of Pollock selected for Parallel of Life and Art shows the artist in his studio, a painting laid on the floor in front of him. He crouches over it as if stalking prey. The painting takes up the entire bottom half of the composition, distancing Pollock from the photographic frame as he crouches over its far end. A second painting appears on the wall behind Pollock. Both are white with black drip marks, or at least appear that way in the black and white photograph; Pollock, dressed in black, seems to become one of those drip marks. Of the fine art entries in Parallel of Life and Art, including that of Dubuffet’s Corps de dame paysagé sanguine et grenat, Pollock’s is the only studio image. The artist’s right hand is blurred, proving its motion; the artist is valued more for his action than for his product.

Knowledge of Pollock in Great Britain would have been limited at the time his photograph was featured in Parallel of Life and Art in 1953. Henderson’s friendship with Guggenheim, Pollock’s great patron, would have given him special insight into the artist. The first time Pollock’s work was shown in Europe was, indeed, by Guggenheim in 1948 at the Greek Pavilion of the Venice Biennale. Pollock painted the works included there, Eyes in the Heat and Circumcision (both 1946), using a brush. His first drip paintings entered Europe two years later, in 1950, at the American Pavilion of the Venice Biennale. On view were three works: Number A1 (1948), Number 12 (1949), and Number 23 (1949). The pavilion was largely ignored, with the exception of those works by Pollock: a detailed description of how he worked with paint was “assiduously translated,” and inspired virulent reactions both for and against his art.^[28] An English critic, David Sylvester, was firmly against. In an article in The Nation, he wrote that the pavilion’s presentation represented “the seamier side of America—sentimentalism, hysteria, and an undirected and undisciplined exuberance.”^[29] Regardless of his negative judgment, Sylvester’s recognition of exuberance in the work of Pollock was not entirely incorrect.

As we recall, Banham referred to American cars as “visions from another culture,” emphasizing the otherness of America in Great Britain, a separation with which we can scarcely identify today. The comingling of American and British culture, now deeply rooted, was a trend just beginning at the time. Proponents of “Americanization,” typically young, felt that “the very air of America seems more highly charged, more oxygenated, than the atmosphere in England.”^[30] The war had lasting effects; shortages and rationing, for example, persisted until 1954.^[31] America had not faced the same consequences, a fact of which the British were acutely aware, and in many cases resented.^[32] As much as youth culture embraced Americanization, those who had weathered the war were far more skeptical. “Action Painting” was considered yet another American import, alongside hula-hoops and “barbecued chickens rotating on their spits.”^[33] The allure of Pollock and American cars to the Independent Group must have owed, in part, to the artists’ rebellious leanings. British high culture considered American design to be of bad taste, a denigration that the recalcitrant Independent Group wanted to claim for itself.  

Beyond Sylvester’s review of the 1950 Venice Biennale, not much appeared in print for British readers regarding the work of Pollock. The only other notable example was an article by Clement Greenberg printed in Horizon Magazine in 1947.^[34] In it Greenberg sings Pollock’s praises and firmly situates him as a distinctly American painter—specifically, an American city-dweller: “Pollock’s art is still an attempt to cope with urban life; it dwells entirely in the lonely jungle of immediate sensations, impulses and notions.”^[35] Greenberg places Pollock in a “jungle” of sensations and reduces him to his reflexes. Judging by the image Henderson and the others selected for Parallel of Life and Art, which again, shows Pollock crouching over his painting as if a hunter in a jungle of black painterly vines, Greenberg’s characterization seems to have resonated with these British artists.

Beyond these examples, and owing to the anti-American sentiment in Great Britain, knowledge of Pollock in the early 1950s would have traveled primarily by word of mouth.^[36] He was thus perceived within a framework similar to Dubuffet’s and the Independent Group’s distrust of academia and celebration of the streets and the common people who circulated in them—Pollock, perhaps, among them. This is a prominent theme in Dubuffet’s writings, which refer to the “language spoken in the street,”^[37] and describe vocational house painting more favorably than fine arts. For Henderson, a similar attitude appears in his body of street photographs taken in London’s impoverished East End.

Henderson and his wife Judith lived in Bethnal Green, in the East End, between 1949 and 1953. They resided there so that Judith might work on a sociological project, called “Discover Your Neighbor.” The project followed in the tradition of Mass Observation, a social research effort begun in 1937 to address one central complaint: “how little we know of our next-door neighbor and his habits.”^[38] Mass Observation’s leaders proposed a plan to redress this ignorance by compiling extremely detailed information, in the form of photographs and diaries, on the daily lives of “ordinary people,” collected and reported by other “ordinary individuals.”^[39] The project was essentially a public and mundane form of espionage: neighbors informed on neighbors, a slightly invasive prospect that was practiced without stigma. Judith Henderson, for her part, kept detailed records on the comings and goings of her and her husband’s neighbors, the Samuels.

Perhaps inspired by the activities of his wife, Henderson began taking brisk walks around this foreign, working-class neighborhood with his Rolleicord camera, a handheld, amateur device that became another crude instrument in his arsenal. The resulting images are often unfocused, as Henderson did not know how to use the camera properly.^[40] They are also often blurred; he took them while in motion, or while his subjects were moving. Neither of these facts particularly troubled Henderson. His interests in this project lay not in aesthetics, but in naturalistic observation and “reportage.”^[41] Henderson imagined himself as an explorer, or hunter, capturing the daily lives of poor and working-class Londoners. As Robin Kelsey argues in his book, Photography and the Art of Chance, there is a longstanding “structural proximity” between photography and hunting, strengthened by the emergence of hand-held cameras,^[42] such as Henderson’s Rolleicord. The term “snapshot,” it is worth noting, derives from hunting.^[43] Both the hunter and the photographer rely on their reflexes. As Henri Cartier-Bresson wrote in The Decisive Moment in 1952, the photographer composes a picture “at the speed of a reflex in action.”^[44] Speed and reflex both recall the American car and the work of Pollock. For his own contribution to this seemingly pervasive theme in postwar Europe, Dubuffet engages hunting as a metaphor in his writing as well. He describes “random accidents that the artist hunts for, a prey that he constantly calls to and watches for and traps.”^[45]

Henderson hunts for “random accidents” in his East End pictures. Chance encounters among billboards, advertisements, and graffiti are loaded with layered meaning. In a photograph he took of a young boy before a boarded up pub in Stepney, c.1949-53 (Fig. 5), for example, the word “STOUT” in the signboard at the top right becomes a double entendre, describing not only the pub’s selection of spirits, but also the pudgy boy standing in the bottom left.^[46] The street signs and symbols that Henderson caught in moments of poetic confluence with his camera were restaged for the gallery in Parallel of Life and Art. What the photographs and the exhibition share in common is a willingness to see affinities between objects and things, between Pollock’s drips and splatters. As Dubuffet writes, “there are many objects throughout the world that resemble and evoke one another. We ought to emphasize not the differences and peculiarities but the resemblances.”^[47]

The Smithsons occasionally accompanied Henderson on his walks through the East End, experiences that led Alison Smithson to refer to Henderson as “the original image finder.”^[48] The photograph, under this rubric, becomes an objet trouvé. As Henderson wrote in a letter, “for me the found fragment, the objet trouvé, works like a talisman . . . [it] intercept[s] your passage and wink[s] ‘its’ message specifically at & for you.”^[49] His wording reveals an underlying intuition about the magic of motion. Objects, or talismans, intercept people as they pass, implying that both parties are in motion. The phrase is more or less a reworking of Pablo Picasso’s famous adage, “inspiration exists, but it has to find you working,” only in this case the word “working” can be replaced with “moving.”

Robyn Denny, a British artist who studied at the Royal College of Art in the 1950s, recalled the atmosphere of London’s art scene as follows: “Europe was exhausted and wound down. Life in London was grey and austere, its art world more than ever prone to compromise and introspection. I felt the whole culture was flawed and frozen into fixed attitudes of expression and our art to have become shallow and self-indulgent.”^[50] Denny’s use of the words “frozen” and “fixed” are telling. These artists felt stifled and stagnant in their ivory towers—the ICA, the RCA, the Slade, the Courtauld. Dubuffet and Pollock might have offered these British artists a vehicle in which to escape. Indeed, perhaps it was because Dubuffet and Pollock were not British that they held special allure; they were anticultural as far as Britain’s borders were concerned.

Photographs may be frozen in time, but Henderson’s work proves to us that they can still have active lives. They can reinvent and procreate long past their moment of capture. The nimble photographer can reshape them, stretch them, recalibrate their borders. The open-minded curator can restructure their content through creative juxtaposition. Indeed, their reproducibility makes them mobile, and their mobility makes them street-smart.

Endnotes

^[1] Peter Smithson and Alison Smithson, “But Today We Collect Ads,” Ark, no. 18 (November 1956).

^[2] Smithson and Smithson, “But Today We Collect Ads.”

^[3] Fathers of Pop, directed by Julian Cooper, written and narrated by Reyner Banham (Great Britain: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1979).

^[4] Cooper and Banham, Fathers of Pop.

^[5] Dislike for Herbert Read in particular was somewhat arbitrary and mostly symbolic. As Alloway recalls: “What bugged me about Herbert Read was his idealism, he was committed to a very idealistic aesthetic in which high tasks were assumed to be proper for art, and so much got neglected . . . it was kind of unfair of me to [oppose him] because he was always so nice and helpful to me . . . but there was nobody much else to attack.” Cooper and Banham, Fathers of Pop.

^[6] Richard Hamilton remembers it this way: “I understood that the title ‘Independent Group’ came from the idea of rejecting the mother image of the ICA . . . it was a resentment of the ICA actually bringing all these people together at all. So we said, ‘All right, we’ll be together but we want to be independent of the ICA.’ ” Cooper and Banham, Fathers of Pop.

^[7] Cooper and Banham, Fathers of Pop.

^[8] Banham, for example, when defining the Smithsons’ architectural venture (which he called “New Brutalism”), found it easiest to do so in terms of fine art: “Non-architecturally it describes the art of Dubuffet [and] some aspects of Jackson Pollock . . . or Eduardo Paolozzi and Nigel Henderson among British artists.” In the sense that Dubuffet and Pollock were chosen to define the work of architects, the use of the word “buttress” is all the more apt. Dubuffet and Pollock, though foreign, became central to interpretations of the Independent Group in London. Banham, quoted in Ben Highmore, The Art of Brutalism: Rescuing Hope from Catastrophe in 1950s Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 29.

^[9] It is worth noting that the current hanging at the Tate Modern in London positions paintings by the two artists side by side, indicating that their relationship has been particularly enduring.

^[10] Dr. Kent Minturn identified the Dubuffet painting in email correspondence with the author, April 25, 2018.

^[11] Henderson had a lifelong interest in biology. He wrote to Chris Mullen, “a small visual fever can come over me when I find drawings and sections of micro stuff.” Victoria Walsh, Nigel Henderson: Parallel of Life and Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 2001), 15.

^[12] Guggenheim Jeune was a gallery venture located at 30 Cork Street in Piccadilly. It lasted two seasons, opening in January 1938 and closing its last show in June 1939. Its closure was in part due to the onset of the war, which saw Guggenheim leave Europe, and in part because it was wildly unprofitable—Guggenheim later disclosed in her memoir, Confessions of an Art Addict, that she lost roughly $6,000 dollars a month on its ambitious exhibitions. Peggy Guggenheim, Melvin P. Lader, and Fred Licht, Peggy Guggenheim’s Other Legacy (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1987), 30-39.

^[13] Guggenheim, Lader, and Licht, Guggenheim’s Other Legacy, 30-39.  

^[14] Walsh, Nigel Henderson, 15.

^[15] Walsh, Nigel Henderson, 15.

^[16] Walsh, Nigel Henderson, 19.

^[17] Walsh, Nigel Henderson, 8.

^[18] Walsh, Nigel Henderson, 30.

^[19] Jean Dubuffet, “Art Brut in Preference to the Cultural Arts” (1949), trans. Paul Foss and Allen S. Weiss, Art & Text 27 (1988), 33.

^[20] Walsh, Nigel Henderson, 49.

^[21] Roger Mayne came onto the scene slightly later, in the late 1950s.

^[22] Walsh, Nigel Henderson, 30.

^[23] The affinity Henderson identifies here between crude machinery and drawing is echoed in the language he uses to describe a boy riding a bicycle in another series of his stressed images: the boy is “doodling.” Walsh, Nigel Henderson, 28.

^[24] This was done “in order to stress a point or evoke an atmosphere.” Walsh, Nigel Henderson, 31.

^[25] Dubuffet, “Art Brut in Preference to the Cultural Arts,” 31.

^[26] Jean Dubuffet, “Notes for the Well-Read,” in Prospectus aux amateurs de tout genre (Paris: Gallimard, 1946), 69.

^[27] Dubuffet, “Notes for the Well-Read,” 69.

^[28] Aline B. Louchheim, “Americans in Italy,” The New York Times, September 10, 1950.

^[29] Jeremy Lewison, “Jackson Pollock and the Americanization of Europe,” in Jackson Pollock: New Approaches, ed. Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2000), 204.

^[30] Dominic Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles (London: Abacus, 2008), 127.

^[31] John F. Lyons, America in the British Imagination: 1945 to the Present (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 8.

^[32] One Briton, almost nine years after the war’s end, remarked, “Our precarious economic position today is in no small measure due to the fact that, in addition to the enormous financial calls upon us during the war years, we had to devote so much of our resources to pay for munitions of every kind to the U.S.A. which emerged from this war, as it did from the first, the richest and most powerful country in the world.” Lyons, America in the British Imagination, 37.

^[33] “From hula-hoops to Zen Buddhism, from do-it-yourself to launderettes or the latest sociological catch phrase or typographical trick, from Rock ‘n’ Roll to Action Painting, barbecued chickens roasting on their spits in the shop windows to parking meters, clearways, bowling alleys, glass-skyscrapers, flying saucers, pay-roll raids, armored trucks and beatniks, American habits and vogue now crossed the Atlantic with speed and certainty that suggested that Britain was now merely one more off-shore island.” Harry Hopkins, quoted in Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good, 127.

^[34] Horizon, a British cultural magazine, was founded during World War II by the journalist Cyril Connolly. Jeremy Lewison writes that it was “something of a barometer of intellectual views on America,” as it took a consistent interest in American events and characters. Lewison, “Jackson Pollock and the Americanization of Europe,” in Varnedoe and Carmel, Jackson Pollock, 202.

^[35] Clement Greenberg, “The Present Prospects of American Painting and Sculpture,” Horizon 16 (October 1947), 26.

^[36] “At the time, the importance of American art was not yet recognized, and the American art magazines, though available, were not yet read with the intensity of such French reviews as Cahiers d’Art. Writings on Pollock were therefore overlooked in the Britain of the early 1950s, and word of mouth was an important means of communication.” Lewison, “Pollock and the Americanization of Europe,” 205.

^[37] Jean Dubuffet, “Anticultural Positions,” in Jean Dubuffet: Towards an Alternative Reality, ed. Mildred Glimcher (New York: Pace Publications, 1987), 127.

^[38] Walsh, Nigel Henderson, 53.

^[39] Walsh, Nigel Henderson, 53.  

^[40] Walsh, Nigel Henderson, 49.

^[41] Walsh, Nigel Henderson, 49.

^[42] Robin Kelsey, “Stalking Chance and Making News, c. 1930,” in Photography and the Art of Chance (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2015), 181.

^[43] Kelsey, “Stalking Chance,”181.

^[44] Quoted in Kelsey, “Stalking Chance,” 201.

^[45] Dubuffet, “Notes for the Well-Read,” 71.

^[46] Walsh, Nigel Henderson, 54.

^[47] Kelsey, “Stalking Chance,” 201.

^[48] Walsh, Nigel Henderson, 54.

^[49] Hal Foster, “Savage Minds (A Note on Brutalist Bricolage),” October, no. 136 (Spring 2011): 185.

^[50] Quoted in Lewison, “Pollock and the Americanization of Europe,” 204.

Author Bio:

Phoebe Herland is a PhD student at the Institute of Fine Arts. Her scholarship focuses on post-war British and American art, with particular interest in cross-cultural exchange between London and Los Angeles. Since receiving her undergraduate degree from Bard College in upstate New York, Phoebe has held positions at the Guggenheim, the Armory Show, and Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York City. She may be reached at psh286 at nyu.edu.

Return to the Table of Contents

Ivana Dizdar

Columbia University

Abstract

Spanish artist Santiago Sierra pays groups of people — notably those in socioeconomically precarious positions, such as illegal immigrants, homeless people, unemployed laborers, drug addicts, and sex workers — to enact tedious, physically demanding, painful, dangerous, or humiliating tasks. In 2000, he hired four heroin-addicted sex workers to sit in a row and get a line tattooed across their backs. Aptly titled 160 cm Line Tattooed on 4 People, the piece was performed for a live audience at Salamanca’s El Gallo Arte Contemporáneo. In exchange for their participation in the performance, each sex worker received 12,000 pesetas: the price of a single shot of heroin.

Taking 160 cm Line as its focus, this paper considers Sierra’s practice and its proximity to practices of torture. The artist has been described as both socially-minded and abusive, as well as various corresponding and equally antithetical terms, attesting to the ethically complex nature of his practice. This paper concentrates on Sierra’s performances, the artist and his subjects, and constitutions of consent, agency, and power in the artist’s work. Using Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain as a primary theoretical source on torture, I argue that Sierra’s practice occupies a grey zone between art and torture, problematizing the distinction between the two.

The paper outlines, first, the ways in which Sierra’s practice diverges from the domain of torture through site, legal contracts, transparency, visibility, documentation, intention, adherence to certain social standards, and the non-limitation of freedom. Second — through considerations of power and subordination, the infliction of pain, psychological trauma, and the use or abuse of precarious life — the paper addresses Sierra’s work as it aligns with practice of torture. Occupying the slight but nevertheless existent margin where art and torture meet, Sierra’s work complicates the limits of art. If art shouldn’t approach torture, how can art reconcile this and its freedom?

Toward Art, Toward Torture:
Drawing the Line in the Work of Santiago Sierra

Four black chairs have been pushed against a white wall in the high-contrast video. All but one are occupied: three women sit as though waiting for something. They converse, perhaps somewhat nervously. As a fourth woman walks in and takes a seat, the others look around for a brief moment until their eyes settle on something beyond the scope of our vision, beyond the frame. We soon find out what: a tall figure in black, almost like a silhouette, walks into the shot holding what appears to be a long, slender metal rod. The positioning of the women makes the rod look less like an innocuous tool and more like an instrument to be used on someone. There is a looming sense of threat until, unexpectedly, all four women let out a simultaneous laugh. On closer inspection, though, we notice that one is rocking back and forth, another fretfully scratches her arms, and a third has placed her hand on her stomach as the look on her face shifts to an expression of uneasy anticipation. The laugh, we might presume, has been elicited by tension or anxiety.

Instructed by the figure in black, the women turn their backs to the camera and remove their tops. Now naked from the waist up, they straddle the chairs in a row, their faces against the wall. More people, most also dressed in black, now walk in and out of the frame, directing and adjusting the women as they settle into place. Two men, one bald and one in a leather jacket, and a woman in red extend a measuring tape and stretch it across the women’s backs, which are now curved, making the women appear smaller than before (Fig. 1). Although we cannot discern the men’s words, they are clearly discussing measurements, as though about to conduct a sinister experiment. According to their measurements, they make marks on the women’s skin. Next, the woman in red pulls up a portable table, topped with utensils, gauze, and a spray bottle. She will spend the next half hour tattooing a line across the women’s backs.

This action constitutes a work by Spanish artist Santiago Sierra, aptly titled 160 cm Line Tattooed on 4 People, which was performed and filmed in 2000 at El Gallo Arte Contemporáneo in Salamanca, Spain (Fig. 2). We learn that the women are sex workers with heroin addictions, whom the artist has hired to receive tattoos in a gallery in exchange for the price of a single shot of the narcotic. The artist comments that while the sex workers usually “charge 2,000 or 3,000 pesetas, between 15 and 17 dollars, for fellatio… the price of a shot of heroin is around 12,000 pesetas, about 67 dollars.”^[1] They now earn that amount in a half-hour sitting, during which they acquire a new and permanent mark on their bodies.

In other works, too, Sierra pays groups of people—notably those in socioeconomically precarious positions, such as illegal immigrants, homeless people, and unemployed laborers—to enact tedious, physically demanding, painful, dangerous, or humiliating tasks. The artist has been described as controversial, polemic, provoking, radical, and extreme—and, more interestingly, as both socially minded and abusive, and a host of equally antithetical terms.^[2] These descriptions attest to the ethically complex nature of his practice.

160 cm Line recalls the torture in Franz Kafka’s short story In the Penal Colony.^[3] In the story, people living in a penal colony have been routinely condemned for failing to conduct a relatively trivial task, such as saluting their commander in the appropriate fashion. Without knowing what will happen to them—as the officer speaks French and they do not—they are taken to be tortured by an apparatus that drills into their backs, impressing their sentence into their bodies. A glass wall allows anyone to watch as the victims bleed to death. Even the harrow, the part of the machine that holds the needle, is made of glass, so as not to obstruct the view of the torture from any angle. In Sierra’s work, meanwhile, it is sex workers specifically whose backs are inscribed: the artist marks bodies already marked by stigma, permanently labeling and grouping them together. It is as though the women have committed a crime, and the artist is impressing a visual sentence, or life sentence, onto their bodies. Why are the sex workers in 160 cm Line being punished? What is their crime? The use of a needle, which penetrates their skin to deposit ink, attests to a primary offense: the injection of heroin.

In this article, I consider how Sierra’s work, especially 160 cm Line, both differs from and aligns with practices of torture. I turn to Elaine Scarry’s discussion of torture in The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, referring to her analysis of the dichotomy between civilization (where art belongs) and decivilization (where torture belongs). Civilization and decivilization, according to Scarry, appear on the same path but move in opposite directions. They cannot coexist: “the very existence of each requires the other’s elimination.”^[4] However, as Scarry delineates, civilization can be reversed into decivilization. She provides, among others, the examples of medicine and law. Medicine and medical research can be used to save lives or, on the other hand, to inflict suffering in the context of torture. Similarly, law can be employed in the service of torture—for instance, when punishment is used to generate evidence.^[5] Although Scarry claims these two states are distinct and “mutually exclusive,”^[6] she complicates this notion by describing a particular moment wherein “the distance separating them is less, a moment in which they are not yet radically distinct but are only in the process of distinguishing themselves.”^[7]

It is this moment that interests me and to which, I will argue, Sierra’s work relates. If, as Scarry claims, there exists the potential for a reversal of civilization, then art too has the capacity, as do medicine and law, to move in the opposite direction: from civilization to decivilization. Sierra plays with this potential, deliberately positioning his work in a moment in which civilization and decivilization are “not yet radically distinct.”^[8] The artist occupies this complex conceptual space, problematizing the distinction between art and torture.

Toward Art

The differences between Sierra’s art practice and practices of torture must not be disregarded. Perhaps the most obvious element that distinguishes Sierra’s work from the realm of torture proper is that of site. Scarry claims that the room, a protective extension of the body, becomes a weapon in the context of torture. The room’s function as a shelter, a place of safety, is annihilated in the service of destruction: it is decivilized and converted “into an agent of pain.”^[9] In 160 cm Line, the women are not directly threatened by the space they occupy and may leave at the expense of their impending compensation. Unlike the torture room, a space of danger and captivity, the museum is generally a safe place—a culturally recognized and regulated institution with legal jurisdiction, rules, insurance, medical access, and general adherence to public standards of propriety.

It is not merely the physical location that serves as Sierra’s site: the artist also addresses local and otherwise relevant sociopolitical conditions, making much of his work distinctly site-specific. In museums throughout the United States, he has shown American veterans of the Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam wars standing for hours in gallery corners, their backs to the audience (2013); he did the same in a Bogotá gallery with veterans of the Colombian conflict (2011). In 245 Cubic Meters, the artist constructed a gas chamber inside a former synagogue in Pulheim, Germany (2006). The list of projects goes on, each more disturbing than the last.

As troubling as a performance may be, however, the artist always defines its conditions and makes them clear to the performer-participants. Torture often involves long-lasting or permanent detention and confinement; moreover, the length of detention is usually indefinite or undisclosed to detainees.^[10] This, in and of itself, is a form of psychological torture. Sierra’s works, on the other hand, encompass planned and transparently outlined temporal delineations and do not constitute true detention or even confinement. The freedom of the sex workers in 160 cm Line is not threatened: reevaluating or withdrawing her initial commitment to the artist, a woman may walk away from the scene with no (new) back tattoo, risking only the loss of financial compensation. Her participation is temporary and conditional on her continual commitment to stay and to carry on with the instructions she initially accepted.

While, per Scarry, torture does not involve consent, Sierra’s subjects consent to participating in his performances.^[11] The artist communicates transparently with the participants, not only regarding performance duration but also with respect to the forthcoming instructions, demands, actions, conditions, and compensation. The participants acknowledge the parameters he defines and agree to participate in exchange for some form of compensation. In fact, Sierra’s works employ legal contracts and are multi-consensual activities, involving the consent of several parties: the artist, the museum or gallery, and the participant-performers.

Sierra’s performances also diverge from torture in their intention. Sierra’s objective—artistic, conceptual, and above all critical—is antithetical to the torturer’s objectives, one of which, widely acknowledged by political scholars, is the extraction of information through interrogation.^[12] Such extraction, according to Scarry, actually serves as a pretense for other aims: she notes that the true objective of interrogation is the exertion of power, humiliation, and destruction.^[13] Sierra has no desire for information; instead, his outrageous instructions to his subjects, which result in outrageous performances, contribute to artistic production, social commentary, or the relaying of some counter-narrative—perhaps even an alternate route (or detour) to rectification.

In an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist in 2012, Sierra commented, “Art is always a good friend of power, and has always been very helpful in maintaining the structures of power. But in my case, it’s not what I pretend to do. I’m not obsessed with being an activist because while I admire activists, I can change nothing. But I can talk—this is something that not everybody can do.”^[14] His intent, then, relates to the raising of consciousness, and perhaps also to a desire to provoke potentially concrete responses. If this is true, then his work may align with a utilitarian approach: the artist has a greater good in mind when he puts his performer-participants, as well as his viewers, in uncomfortable or distressing situations.

In Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics, Claire Bishop compares Sierra to Rirkrit Tiravanija, who in 1992 famously turned a New York gallery into an open house and served visitors free meals of rice and curry (Fig. 3).^[15] Unlike Tiravanija, who fosters supposed social inclusion, constructing a kind of “microtopia,” Sierra produces and foregrounds blatantly asymmetrical social situations that deliberately generate tension. Sierra’s work, Bishop argues, holds greater democratic potential precisely because it does not attempt to reconcile social divisions and instead functions as an agent of productive antagonism, which allows for conflict and change.^[16] “While Tiravanija celebrates the gift,” Bishop writes, “Sierra knows that there’s no such thing as a free meal: everything and everyone has a price.”^[17]

Beyond its potential social value, Sierra’s work differs from torture on a material level: it produces and preserves evidence. Whereas perpetrators of torture seek to destroy evidence—those objects, spaces, and bodies that may signal what has occurred—Sierra exhibits and documents his performances, and then makes his documentation available for further exhibition.^[18] The artist recorded 160 cm Line on video: it is available for free viewing on YouTube and has been included in numerous gallery and museum exhibitions.^[19] Not only do we witness the actions and conditions of Sierra’s performances but we are also given access to participants’ comments and expressions: in 160 cm Line, the women speak among themselves throughout the piece, freely discussing their experience. The fact of their speech is in contrast to torture, which, as Scarry argues, attests to an inherent incompatibility between language and pain: language cannot properly express or explicate pain because pain is “language-destroying.”^[20] It is not Sierra’s intention to destroy his subjects’ capacity for language, nor does he attempt to prevent their expression of pain or anything else.

In torture, the destruction of language aids the destruction of evidence, but the opposite is also true. Judith Butler discusses the fact that countless poems written by Guantánamo Bay detainees in the early 2000s were destroyed by the military, while only a couple dozen survived and were eventually published.^[21] Their disappearance demonstrates that, in the context of torture, even if the subject’s capacity for language and expression exists, the destruction of evidence will—in most cases—extinguish it. The perpetrators of torture not only destroy but also manipulate or produce evidence: Butler is particularly concerned with the way events and conditions are positioned or framed through, for instance, photography. The photograph, through its very existence, through its inclusions and exclusions, presents a specific perspective: “in framing reality, the photograph has already determined what will count within the frame—and this act of delimitation is surely interpretive.”^[22] Sierra, on the other hand, documents his performances straightforwardly, aligning the camera with the perspective of a gallery visitor, refraining from cutting and editing. Moreover, he reproduces and shares the performances in multiple forms, including video, photography, and texts that describe the performances matter-of-factly.

In some ways, however, Sierra’s documentation may itself be problematic. The fact that the artist sells these materials is complex and troubling: while his subjects endure humiliation, exertion, or pain over a limited period of time, for which they are minimally (or not at all) compensated, Sierra continues to profit from their actions years—even decades—later.

Toward Torture

The sex workers in 160 cm Line each receive a tattoo, an unavoidably painful experience: a needle pierces the skin, causing a sharp sensation that is especially agonizing on certain areas of the body, such as the spine.^[23] Human hurt, according to Scarry, has always held an important place in the formation of civilization and the regression into decivilization. The beginning of civilization was marked by a significant change with respect to pain: in the context of sacrificial rituals, human hurt was replaced by animal hurt and, later, by no hurt.^[24] But in torture this progression reverses: there is a return to hurt, to human hurt—a manifestation of decivilization.^[25]

Furthermore, Scarry argues that torture possesses a structure consisting of three simultaneous parts: the infliction of pain, the objectification of that pain, and the conversion of the victim’s pain into the perpetrator’s power.^[26] These three elements, continually reflected in Sierra’s work, also appear in 160 cm Line. First, pain is a necessary condition of the work: the artist literally inflicts pain on the sex workers in order to realize his project. The work requires the use of a weapon—the tattoo needle, that “external agent of pain” that penetrates the women’s skin—and involves the production of a wound, “bodily damage” in the form of a tattooed line on each woman’s back.^[27] There exists an immense contrast between what the sex workers feel and what the artist feels: they, the subjects, are in physical pain while he, the perpetrator of their pain, “is utterly without pain.”^[28] Second, the work objectifies the women’s pain: Sierra does not push their pain into invisibility, but renders it deliberately and explicitly visible, evoking public torture. The artist makes visible, in Scarry’s words, that which is “usually private and incommunicable, contained within the boundaries of the sufferer’s body.”^[29] Third, in Sierra’s work, as in the context of torture, the subjects’ pain is tacitly understood as the power of the perpetrator: one naturally interprets the women’s pain as an expression of Sierra’s implicit dominance and control.^[30]

In Sierra’s work, power comes in many forms, some of its exertions preceding pain. A preliminary manifestation of control within the artist’s performances entails the organization of bodies.^[31] Sierra not only arranges his subjects’ bodies in space but also determines their positioning in relation to one another and to museum or gallery visitors. In 160 cm Line, the women are pushed against the wall, their faces away from the center of the room, with limited mobility and opportunity to look around and see what is behind them; meanwhile, visitors may observe them from almost any angle, fixing their gaze on their naked torsos. In Sierra’s work, just as in Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, there exists what Michel Foucault refers to as “dissymmetry, disequilibrium, difference” between the observer and the observed.^[32]

We might be tempted to believe that, in this situation, power rests fully with the artist and the viewers. However, Foucault argues that the “efficiency of power, its constraining force [has], in a sense, passed over to the other side—to the side of its surface of application.”^[33] In accordance with Foucault, we might say that the sex workers in 160 cm Line play a dual role in their subjection—that of the subjected but also that of key players in their own subjection.^[34]

In his essay The Law of Genre, Jacques Derrida discusses the same kind of transfer of power. He offers an analysis of Maurice Blanchot’s story La Folie du jour, in which two dictatorial doctors interrogate the protagonist, demanding from him a detailed account of his day. The protagonist, also the story’s narrator, finds himself in what Derrida describes as a “panoptic” situation in which a fascinating paradox arises.^[35] He is the doctors’ subject, subjected to their authority and power; and yet, as a subject, he assumes power, which they now must draw from him. They depend on him. In Blanchot’s story, the protagonist relates:

They interpellated my story: Speak! And it placed itself at their service. In haste, I stripped myself of myself. I distributed my blood, my privacy among them, I offered them the universe, I brought them forth to the light of day. Under their unblinking gaze, I became a water drop, an ink blot. I was shrinking into them, I was held entirely in their view and when, finally, I no longer had anything but my perfect nullity present and no longer had anything to see, they, too, ceased to see me, most annoyed, they rose, shouting: Well, where are you?^[36]

Although this transfer of power occurs in the context of subjection, it is certainly not favorable for the subjected. Unequal circumstances, intertwined with the problems of privilege and precarity, make subjection possible in the first place. Foucault lists a number of conditions that we can recognize in Sierra, including “status” and the “accumulation of profits.”^[37] Other descriptions pertain to the relationship or differences between Sierra and the women in 160 cm Line: “economic disparities,” “cultural differences,” and “differing positions within the process of production.”^[38] In this game of power and transference, Sierra and the women become partners in the Foucauldian sense: theirs is a relationship in which, ultimately, one individual exercises power over others.^[39]

Drawing from Foucault, Butler highlights a paradox of subjection, or a vicious circle, wherein the subject’s agency is the consequence of his or her subjection.^[40] She argues that not only is the subject formed by the transfer of power entailed by the subjection but also that this transfer is a condition of the subject’s very existence.^[41] Such dependency is one “we never chose,” but “that, paradoxically, initiates and sustains our agency.”^[42] Following Butler’s line of thinking, Sierra transfers his agency to the women in 160 cm Line, who become instruments of that agency during the process of their subordination. They are dispossessed of their own agency, which they must give up and, in turn, assume the agency Sierra gives them as their own.^[43] Furthermore, the sex workers’ desire to survive, to live, is—as Butler would describe—“a pervasively exploitable desire.”^[44] Sierra plays on their desire to obtain heroin, to fulfill a craving that, for them, may be tantamount to life. Their attitude seems to fall in line with Butler’s formulation: “I would rather exist in subordination than not exist.”^[45]

Perhaps this is why the women in 160 cm Line agree to participate not only in Sierra’s work but in a public performance, one that evokes public displays of humiliation and the infliction of pain that characterize certain kinds of torture. We might recall the opening section of Discipline & Punish, in which Foucault describes the public torture of Robert-François Damiens—hanged, drawn, and quartered.^[46] In her book, Scarry emphasizes spectacle’s central role in the violence of torture: torture, she says, is built on “repeated acts of display.”^[47] In 160 cm Line, everyone plays a role: the artist, the perpetrator, impels the sex workers to participate in a painful activity, self-consciously hurting and humiliating the women at least in part for the sake of spectacle.^[48]

What is in it for them? Sierra’s subjects clearly participate because they need whatever it is he offers in return. This premise is no different than from why most people work: out of necessity, to earn money, to support themselves, to live. Perhaps a more appropriate problem to consider is whether the participants consent because they have only worse, or nonexistent, alternatives—because they have to. If this is the case, we might interpret their consent as forced.

More precisely, the problem may not be whether the participants are able to choose freely but whether they are free agents to begin with. John Locke famously argued that, in order to be truly free, an agent must be able to exercise his or her preference. If that condition is not met, the agent acts out of necessity.^[49] The women who participate in 160 cm Line, we can reasonably assume, would not opt to participate in Sierra’s performance under preferable conditions. Their substance addiction further complicates their agreement to participate: Locke contends that the ability to suspend one’s desires is inextricably tied to one’s freedom. Since the sex workers are guided by their desire for heroin, what the philosopher would call an absent good, the value of their consent may be questionable.^[50] To quote an internet blogger who published a post titled “Santiago Sierra you are a cunt”:

This massive wanker pays the likes of drug addicted prostitutes enough money for their drug of choice to allow him [to] tattoo a foot long black line across their backs. Basically forever branding them as Junkies. When confronted about this sick, so called artwork, Sierra tells us that these participants have given their consent, therefore, leave him the fuck alone. How the hell he believes that these women are or were in any state of mind to consent leads me to believe he actually lives on Mars.^[51]

The blog post points to Sierra’s use, or abuse, of his subjects’ precarious lives. The artist specifically seeks and employs people in socioeconomically precarious positions to participate in his works. He capitalizes on the participants’ disadvantages to compel them to participate and to meet his needs; in exchange for their “labor,” he offers small sums of money or other, invariably meager, compensation. While the artist is a financially stable, successful, well-respected, white European male, most of his subjects are struggling with little or no income and are possibly desperate people—most of them people of color.

Take, for example, the work Polyurethane Sprayed on the Backs of Ten Workers (2004). Ten men have been lined up against a wall. They stand remarkably still, as though they have been instructed—or threatened—not to move. A man in a facemask, hired by Sierra or possibly Sierra himself, approaches the men and sprays them from head to toe with polyurethane foam. As the material hardens, they become a multi-bodied entity, completely immobilized under a thick, heavy, and possibly toxic layer of foam. Although the men appear protected to an extent, it is only plastic bags that cover their heads; it is not difficult to imagine how this protective measure could lead to suffocation. The men are Iraqi immigrant workers, hired by the artist for a performance shown at London’s Lisson Gallery. The performance appears unlike what one would expect to find in a gallery, however, and instead evokes acts of torture committed in Abu Ghraib.

Like the Iraqi immigrant workers, many of Sierra’s participants have an unstable or nonexistent legal status, existing on the periphery of or beyond the law. The artist seems to choose his participants from those whose lives are, in the words of Giorgio Agamben, near or past “the threshold beyond which life ceases to be politically relevant.”^[52] The women in 160 cm Line, we can suppose, are on the margins of society and lack social protection: they do not likely enjoy the same degree of societal support as those in more socially respected roles. Why are they, the heroin-addicted sex workers or the Iraqi immigrants, here in the first place? We can only imagine that severe circumstances have led them to a place where their paths cross Sierra’s. Their very misfortune makes them suitable candidates for his work: they are in a state of exception, included precisely by virtue of their “own exclusion” from mainstream society.^[53]

In many of Sierra’s works, including Polyurethane and 160 cm Line, subjects must face a wall, their backs to the audience: the artist does not emphasize their individuality but rather renders them anonymous. Sierra’s preoccupation with the line as a motif further emphasizes the subjects’ de-individualization and anonymity: the artist orders his subjects to evoke lined up criminals or prisoners, prime examples of people legally stripped of agency. The artist tattoos a line on the sex workers, and on a row of young men in another iteration of 160 cm Line. In another work, performed at Tate Modern, he instructs a group of homeless women to stand in a line facing a wall (2002). Sierra’s participant-performers appear as categories, and although a museum viewer might be sympathetic to a general issue or a specific predicament, it is not the individual participants he or she grieves.

Additionally, we may question the degree to which the participants’ lives are acknowledged as such: as Butler notes, “specific lives cannot be apprehended as injured or lost if they are not first apprehended as living.”^[54] Sierra actively seeks people in precarious positions in order to put them into even more precarious positions, thus Othering Others, exploiting the already exploited. Sierra opts for this approach to make a statement, instead of enabling the participants by compensating them for non-demeaning work or life-affirming activities. In the case of 160 cm Line, he enables only the sex workers’ addictions.

The alternative approach is taken by Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn who has constructed several outdoor immersive sculptures, or built environments, meant to encourage communal contribution and engagement. The artist paid low-income South Bronx residents to help him build Gramsci Monument (2013), which was installed in the area, amid a block of housing projects. Years earlier, for Documenta XI, Hirschhorn created Bataille Monument (2002, Fig. 4) in a suburb of Kassel largely occupied by socioeconomically underprivileged Germans and Turks. Both projects included libraries, one a radio station, and one a bar, among various other public and shared social and intellectual spaces. Some criticized the projects for being “inappropriate and patronizing,”^[55] and they indeed fall in line with the artist-as-savior phenomenon; yet they produced concrete (albeit temporary) positive effects in their respective communities and, in any case, resulted from an intent to uplift and empower.^[56]

By contrast, Sierra employs Iraqi immigrants only to render them faceless, both figuratively and literally, under polyurethane foam. He hires the sex workers in 160 cm Line, only to give them a mark that has no use; it could, on the contrary, conceivably hinder them in their work. The women’s lives are doubly precarious: they are not only sex workers—arguably already subject to some form of exploitation in their daily lives—but also drug addicts, dependent on a substance that is harmful and possibly fatal.^[57]

Drawing the Line

These performances maximize precarity for some, such as the women in 160 cm Line, and minimize it for others, such as Sierra. It is the women who enter a painful, potentially risky situation.^[58] We might consider that, because the body is exhaustible, Sierra pushes the sex workers further along in the inevitable process of depletion. Certainly, the work involves extravasation: the women lose lymph and blood, giving more than time and energy. In another work, the artist paid low-income Cuban men twenty dollars each to masturbate and ejaculate on camera (2000), and the tapes were subsequently shown at a Havana gallery. Sierra is interested not only in using the body but also in extracting from it.

The bodily extraction in these works relates to what Julia Kristeva defines as the expulsion of an abject: no longer the subject but not an object either. Abjection entails a disregard or disruption of borders, of structure, of order: what is meant to be unseen is made visible, revealed, breaking down the boundary between inside and outside.^[59] Scarry describes the collapsing of the same kind of boundary, an “almost obscene conflation of private and public,” as an integral aspect of physical pain.^[60] In Sierra’s work, bodily fluids, waste, and residual matter—such as blood and sperm—are extracted from the (ruptured) body. The women in 160 cm Line endure the disruption of bodily margins precisely because they live on, or beyond, social margins: taking her lead from Mary Douglas, who contends that bodily and other margins are highly linked, Kristeva argues that abjection has always corresponded with the “social and symbolic order.”^[61] Throughout the course of the performance, the women are pushed further beyond social margins by virtue of the visible abjection of their bodily secretion, their bleeding backs. Sierra’s work aligns with abject art, described by Hal Foster as art “drawn to the broken boundaries of the violated body.”^[62]

An exhibition on participatory art at the Tate Modern in 2018 paired, in one gallery, video documentation of 160 cm Line and an installation replicating the table setup in Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 0.^[63] For her 1974 gallery performance, Abramović laid out a series of objects—including thorny roses, scissors, nails, metal chains, knives, and a gun—positioning herself, too, as an “object” and allowing viewers to treat her body as they wished. For several hours, the viewers did just that: they used the objects and manipulated the artist’s body, undressing her, cutting her. In such a context, what does it mean to have actual pain inflicted on a body? It may be a work of art, but it is always also something else: it is pain—enacted and felt, material and real.

When it comes to the real, Abramović’s and Sierra’s works go beyond what Foster describes as art that “rejects illusionism” and instead strives to “evoke the real as such.”^[64] Foster cites Robert Gober and Kiki Smith (Fig. 5), whose sculptures—abject artworks—represent the damaged or violated body. The works of Abramović and Sierra already occupy the domain of the real: they put live bodies on display—some damaged to begin with, all subject to scrutiny and the potential of physical violation. Scarry notes that pain, for the sufferer, is undeniably real; whereas, for others, the sufferer’s pain remains unreal unless and until it is made visible.^[65] The horror of pain is “redoubled, multiplied, and magnified in torture because instead of the person’s pain being subjectively real but un-objectified and invisible to all others, it is now hugely objectified, everywhere visible, as incontestably present in the external as in the internal world.”^[66]

Artwork that involves visible pain testifies to the instability of another boundary easily collapsed: the one between art and life. Rhythm 0 would not be the last time Abramović put herself at risk—she would do so in Rhythm 5 in 1974 and Rest Energy in 1980, among others. Nor was 160 cm Line the only time Sierra put at risk the bodies of others. This is the primary difference between the work of Abramović (and other artists such as Gina Pane and Chris Burden) and that of Sierra: self-inflicted or self-organized pain versus the infliction of physical discomfort or pain on the other.

In her book Artificial Hells, Bishop cites Oscar Bony’s La Familia Obrera (The Worker’s Family) as a precedent for contemporary art’s use of live human subjects.^[67] In 1968, Bony hired a working-class Argentinian family to sit, eight hours a day, atop a plinth in a gallery.^[68] The work spurred outrage. More recently, the artist commented that he himself could not place the work in a single, stable category—it was not simply performance or body art, per se—and that he considered its liminality important.^[69] Both the inability to categorize the work and this liminality, Bishop writes, persist “in the critical queasiness that accompanies the exhibition of people in works of art today.”^[70] A history of human exhibitions echoes in Bishop’s description of Sierra as an artist who creates “a kind of ethnographic realism.”^[71]

In Sierra’s work, as in Bony’s, the use, or abuse, of the human body is essential. Liminality, categorical uncertainty, is essential too: Is it art? Is it torture? The infliction of physical pain on other people notably complicates Sierra’s as an art practice proper. This dynamic suggests a relationship, or possibly an overlap, between his work and practices of torture. Sierra’s position—or direction—on what Scarry calls the path of civilization and decivilization is an ambiguous one: always shifting, never stable. While his approaches and objectives differ from those of torture to varying degrees, we cannot draw a clear line that excludes the artist’s work from the domain of torture entirely.

Sierra’s work then, as I have argued, occupies the slim but nevertheless existent margin where art and torture meet. But what does it mean for a practice to occupy this strange, ambiguous place? What does it mean that the work exists, perhaps unresolvably, on the line between art and torture? Certainly, the artist tests the boundaries of art: Sierra’s work forces us to reconsider art’s capacity and its limitations, or its conceivably dangerous non-limitations. If a central task of civilization is to distinguish itself from decivilization, if works of art should not be acts of torture, how can we reconcile this and art’s freedom?

Endnotes

^[1] Fabio Cavallucci and Carlos Jiménez, eds., Santiago Sierra, (Trento: Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporanea, 2005), 164.

^[2] See Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October, no. 110 (Fall 2004) in contrast with Tom Eccles, quoted in Phoebe Hoban, “How Far Is Too Far?” in ARTnews 107, no. 7 (Summer 2018), http://www.artnews.com/2008/07/01/how-far-is-too-far/.

^[3] Franz Kafka, In the Penal Colony (London: Penguin, 2011).

^[4] Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985),166.

^[5] Scarry, Body in Pain, 48–49.

^[6] Scarry, Body in Pain, 166.

^[7] Scarry, Body in Pain, 166.

^[8] Scarry, Body in Pain, 166.

^[9] Scarry, Body in Pain, 46.

^[10] See Alfred McCoy, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007).

^[11] Scarry, The Body in Pain, 28.

^[12] Ibid., 41. See also McCoy’s A Question of Torture.

^[13] Scarry, Body in Pain, 26.

^[14] Santiago Sierra, interviewed by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Interviews: Santiago Sierra, ed. Juan Albarrán and Francisco Javier San Martín (Logroño: Pepitas de calabaza, 2016), 219–220.

^[15] Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” 55–58.

^[16] Bishop draws from Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s writings on antagonism, as well as Rosalyn Deutsche’s work on antagonism as an essential aspect of democracy. “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” 72.

^[17] Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” 70.

^[18] Scarry, Body in Pain, 18.

^[19] In addition to the video documentation, Sierra’s performance was photographed. The prints are available for purchase through at least one of Sierra’s gallery representatives, Lisson in London, and an edition of ten was recently at auction on the online commercial art database Artsy.

^[20] Scarry, Body in Pain, 26–27.

^[21] Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London; New York: Verso, 2015), 65.

^[22] Butler, Frames of War, 66–67.

^[23] However, although pain is immeasurable, it is reasonable to assume that, because Sierra’s participants are free to walk away if they so choose, the participants’ pain is not intolerable. People get tattoos of their own free will, and pay to do so, every day. Sierra seems to be prodding, among other things, the line between tolerable and intolerable pain.

^[24] Scarry, The Body in Pain, 169.

^[25] Scarry, The Body in Pain, 168.

^[26] Scarry, The Body in Pain, 59.

^[27] Scarry, The Body in Pain, 21.

^[28] Scarry, The Body in Pain, 41–42. The italics are mine.

^[29] Scarry, The Body in Pain, 32.

^[30] Scarry, The Body in Pain, 43–44.

^[31] Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 2012), 202.

^[32] Foucault, Discipline & Punish, 202.

^[33] Foucault, Discipline & Punish, 202.

^[34] Foucault, Discipline & Punish, 202–203.

^[35] Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” trans. Avital Ronell, Glyph, no. 7 (Maryland: John Hopkins University Press, 1980), 224.

^[36] Derrida, “Law of Genre,” 224.

^[37] Derrida, “Law of Genre,” 344.

^[38] Derrida, “Law of Genre,” 344.

^[39] Derrida, “Law of Genre,” 337.

^[40] Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 13.

^[41] Butler, Psychic Life of Power, 2.

^[42] Butler, Psychic Life of Power, 2.

^[43] Butler, Psychic Life of Power, 6.

^[44] Butler, Psychic Life of Power, 7.

^[45] Butler, Psychic Life of Power, 7.

^[46] Foucault, Discipline & Punish, 2–6.

^[47] Scarry, Body in Pain, 32. The italics are mine.

^[48] Scarry, Body in Pain, 41–42.

^[49] John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), Book II, Chapter XXI, § 8. Accessed online: J. W. Yolton (Ed.) Oxford: Oxford University Press. Oxford Scholarly Editions Online (2013). doi:10.1093/actrade/9780198243861.book.1

^[50] Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, Chapter XXI, § 47.

^[51] Brogan, “Santiago Sierra you are a cunt,” News from Nowhere, March 16, 2011, https://brogananneramm.wordpress.com/2011/03/16/santiago-sierra-you-are-a-cunt/.

^[52] Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 89.

^[53] Agamben, Homo Sacer, 109.

^[54] Butler, Frames of War, 1.

^[55] Bishop commends Sierra’s for producing a productive antagonism lacking in Hirschhorn’s. Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” 62.

^[56] Whitney Kimball, “How Do People Feel About the Gramsci Monument, One Year Later?,” Artfcity, August 20, 2014, http://artfcity.com/2014/08/20/how-do-people-feel-about-the-gramsci-monument-one-year-later/.

^[57] They are, of course, additionally precarious by virtue of their status as women. The scope of this essay does not allow me to go into depth about women and precarity, women and pain, or women and agency. I recommend Lois McNay’s Gender and Agency: Reconfiguring the Subject in Feminist and Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

^[58] “Tattoos: Understand risks and precautions,” Mayo Clinic, updated March 3, 2018, https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/adult-health/in-depth/tattoos-and-piercings/art-20045067.

^[59] Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 3–4, 53.

^[60] Scarry, Body in Pain, 61.

^[61] Anthropologists have studied primitive societies’ use of religious rites and practices of purification—the prohibition of filth—to shape the separation, or exclusion, of certain social groups. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 65– 69.

^[62] Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 152.

^[63] The exhibition was titled The Art of Participation.

^[64] Foster, Return of the Real, 152.

^[65] Scarry, Body in Pain, 56.

^[66] Scarry, Body in Pain, 56.

^[67] Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London; New York: Verso, 2012), 117.

^[68] Bishop, Artificial Hells, 113–117.

^[69] Bishop, Artificial Hells, 117.

^[70] Bishop, Artificial Hells, 117.

^[71] Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” 70.

Author Bio: 

Ivana Dizdar is a scholar and artist whose work explores the intersections of art, politics, and law. She is a recipient of a PepsiCo Research Fellowship from the Harriman Institute at Columbia University. Recent appearances include talks at Princeton University, New York University, the University of Toronto, and the International Consortium for Asian and African Studies at INALCO, Paris. Her eponymous performance persona is a pseudo-liberal art world magnate and Founding Director & CEO of Ivana Dizdar Projects, a multi-million dollar commercial gallery franchise with locations in North America, East Asia, Western Europe, and Central Africa. She may be reached at info at ivanadizdar.com.

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We could give this, our inaugural issue, a title ex post facto—something involving the words “American” and “Real”—but we are happy in this first issue for the themes to remain implicit, registered by Lapis as if by seismograph. Lapis is an effort to listen to and channel the concerns of early-career scholars in art, art conservation, art and architectural history, and archeology. Lapis is the stone and the pigment, the material and the art, the writing instrument and the receiving surface.

The four following articles deal with a range of art produced during a one-hundred-year period during which American art engaged the real in new ways, questioning the boundaries of art and life. To redraw the boundaries of art is a theme of modern art all the way through, and it took particular forms on this continent because modernity here progressed hand in hand with the subjection of native peoples (see the work of Marsden Hartley studied here by Dana Ostrander) and the trauma of slavery and its aftermath (an issue implicit in Santiago Sierra’s work, addressed here by Ivana Dizdar), and also due to the particular infrastructures of modern life here (as registered in the work by Joseph Stella discussed by Ramey Mize).The particular American formulation of these concerns then rebounded on Europe, especially after the war (as we see in the piece on the reception of Pollock and Dubuffet in London by Phoebe Herland).

The editorial board wishes to extend heartfelt thanks to our managing editor Conley Lowrance for his sure-handed and genial handling of the process that has led us to our first issue. His combination of focus and openness has allowed the fledgling journal to take flight, and we are grateful.

Sincerely,

Alexander Nagel
Faculty Editor, Lapis: The Journal of the Institute of Fine Arts
Professor of Fine Arts, The Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
 

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