Ptak Science Books

Strange Things in the Sky Department: the Sky-borne Seat of All Wisdom in the 12th century

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1486

Hildegard of Bingen (ca. 1098-1179) was a polymathic religious visionary¹, composer and writer who was a well-know intellectual whose work attracted the attention of people at all levels, not the least of which were several popes  In one version of the manuscript of her 150,000-word work, Scivias (Scito vias Domini, or "Know the Ways of the Lord" ) we find the following illumination, which is basically an image of the object that contains the nameless stuff of the human soul:

The image above—from the Wiesbaden manuscript and unfortunately only in a black-and-white, and found in Charles Singer's From Magic to Science (1928)²--shows Hildegard's vision of the soul entering the body. (There's a wide range of opinion concerning how much influence Hildegard had on these images—some say that she sketched out the outlines, or directed the illuminator, or had some sort of hand in the construction of the image, all with varying levels of involvement.³)

It is an extraordinary thing, trying to represent what gives the human-ness to people as seen from a 12th-century perspective, and in Hildegard's version/vision it is the soul, the very essence of the birth and death cycle of human nature.  It is resident as we see within a special place in the sky, the "the wisdom of god" (Singer page 226), and it passes from the vault of heaven into the fetus while still within the mother's womb.  It is in this square, evidently, that the essential matter of the creator can be found, and within that structure can be seen the essence of the stuff of human nature that is about to pass into the developing fetus through the tube-like connection. As Singer writes, quoting (loosely?) from the manuscript: "down this [the tube] there passes into the child a bright object, described variously as 'spherical' and as 'shapeless' which 'illuminates the whole body' and becomes or developes into the soul." (Singer, p. 226).

In the frontispiece to another ms of Scivias, we see Hildegard herself sitting and making a sketch on a wax tablet (a sort of Medieval chapbook, or hornbook, or slate/charcoal sketchpad that could be reused), showing that the images she created were the product of a higher source, of light from another metaphoric vault:

Notes

1. Hildegard said that she had these vision,s from a very early age, beginning at about 3.

2. This manuscript was removed from Wiesbaden during WWII and “sent to Dresden for safekeeping”, where it subsequently “disappeared”. “Destroyed” is more like it, as Dresden of course was the scene of an enormous firebombing campaign in the last days of the German involvement of WWII. There are still hopes that the ms lives somewhere in someone's grandfather's attic, perhaps taken in the third week of February 1945 as war booty, and then forgotten. "You guys burnt the place down, turned it into a single column of flame. More people died there in the firestorm, in that one big flame, than died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined." --Kurt Vonnegut, Jr

3. Historian of science Charles Singer and medical anomaly writer Oliver Sacks have both made strong cases for Hildegard to have been a migraine sufferer, though they do explicitly state that given that as the case it does not necessarily affect the vision that she had.

As found in the Wikiu article on Scivias:" Some authors, such as Charles Singer, have suggested that the characteristics of the descriptions of the visions and the illustrations, such as bright lights and auras, imply they may have been caused by scintillating scotoma, a migraine condition.[25] Oliver Sacks, in his book Migraine, called her visions "indisputably migrainous,"[26] but stated that this does not invalidate her visions, because it is what one does with a psychological condition that is important.[27] The resemblance of the illuminations to typical symptoms of migraine attacks, especially in cases where it is not precisely described in the text, is one of the stronger arguments that Hildegard herself was directly involved in their creation.[28]

It has also been suggested that the visions may have been due to hallucinogenic components present in ergot, common in that area of the Rhineland, at certain times of the year.[29]”

The contents of Scivitas:

 

Spirit-Generated Art, 1871: Far-outside Outsider Art

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 1402

This slim booklet,  Catalogue of the Spirit Drawings in Water Colours, Exhibited at the New British Gallery, Old Bond Street (London: 1871), offered descriptions of the work of  Georgiana Houghton (b. 1814), an artist who in some way communicated with the spirit world, and allowed her art to be guided by it. She writes in the very first paragraph of her catalog's introduction, "the execution of the Drawings my hand has been entirely guided by Spirits, no idea being formed in my own mind as to what was going to be produced..."  She explains that the spirits were definitely those of dead people, and after having heard of such possibilities of communication as early as 1859 set out to "obtain mediumship"  by holding hands with her mother at a small table for some months on end waiting for contact--which of course she says happened.  Sundays worked best, "as we should then be less disturbed by evil influences".   The spirits would communicate at first by table movement, then tapping,  and then through the alphabet by the use of a planchette. So it seems to me that given that she had abandoned her own input in the creative process (even though she had a history of formal art education or instruction), and that the inspiration she received seemed not to be her own, that Miss Houghton was an outsider-Outsider artist, pursuing the spoken artistic needs of others, and then providing her own interpretations of the forms and colors. (We offer the original copy of this catalog at our blog bookstore.)

It seemed that Miss Houghton was inspired by the spirit drawings of a Miss Wilkinson--it was then that she sought the artistic guidance of a dead artistic sister though without success, and then from a dead brother.  It was the brother who brought her into contact with dead Henry Lenny ("a deaf and dumb artist") who then guided her hands at first with the planchette, then with a pencil, and finally to watercolors. 

After ten years of her own spirit drawings, Miss Houghton produced for herself a four-month show at the New British Gallery on Old Bond Street, exhibiting 155 of her works, all exhibited in rented frames for the occasion.  Her reviews seem to have been very-light and  mixed at best,  and for all of her effort and trouble, she sold only one painting,  She did however produce a catalog of the exhibition, which was a great aid to the viewer as the interpretations of the meanings of the forms and colors that Miss Houghton used were written on the backs of the artworks, which were hidden from view by the frames--many of the paintings' meanings were annotated in the catalog.

Miss Stoughton was hardly alone in this field of representing what seems to have been a very actice after-life of the dearly departed, though it seems that not as many participated in her own brand of automatic representation than other methods of spirit communication.  She did appear at the beginning of what would become a significant culture of spiritualism, with spiritual manifestation, telepathic communication from one person to another and then to the dead, thought transference and  magnetisation.  The evidence of spiritual contact was produced on high levels, not the least of which were seances in which the dead appeared as floating ghosts filled with quiet or phantasmal groans and noises, sometimes luminous, sometimes leaving the medium's body as colored smoke, sometimes appearing as an electric spark, or an imprint on a photographic plate, or an aural shadow produced in iron filings, or an impression made in clay or other accepting materials².  They offered possibilities for hope and belief that are no less vigorous than our own today, save for their technological limitations.  (An interesting article, "Proof Positive, the Photomatic Body in fin-de-siecle Science, by Alessandro Violi, can be seen here.)

There is a very interesting article on Houghton and the exhibition by Rachel Oberter called  "Esoteric Art Confronting the Public Eye:  the Abstract Spirit Drawings of Georgiana Houghton" which was published in Victorian Studies 48.2 (2005) 221-232.  About the pre-Abstract abstract and proto-impressionist work, Oberter says:

"Given the lack of abstraction within Victorian visual culture, watercolors such as those painted by the artist Georgiana Houghton in the 1860s and 1870s seem shockingly out of place. In her work The Eye of God from 1862, we see a tangle of transparent straight, wavy, and spiraling lines flowing out of the left corner of the paper and up from the bottom edge of the page as white filaments float across the surface. No recognizable forms appear; all that is visible are lines and colors—yellow, sepia, and blue. There is an organic quality to the undulations, a sense of microscopic detail, and a feeling of being in a deep-sea world or otherwise mysterious place. The vagueness of the imagery contrasts with the specificity of the title, which evokes a dense underlying symbolism. Houghton attributed meaning to particular shapes, colors, and directions in her paintings. While her works were abstract, they remained representational."

"The most important tools for decoding these works are the explanations that Houghton wrote on the backs of the drawings [above] . These elaborate descriptions provide a key to the symbolism in the drawing, clarify the message of each work, and name the spirit who acted as Houghton's guide in the creative process. Houghton believed that these explanations were written by the spirits through her hands; they are automatic writings that complement her automatic drawings. The same spirit who inspired the drawing provided the interpretation on the back—the explanations, one could say, came directly from the source."

The catalog does give Biblical references for every one of the works, giving at least a location in the Bible for every artwork.  There are occasional (though sparse) longer descriptions of the work, though the great majority give Biblical citations for what each of the paintings represents. 

Also of interest is Ms. Oberter's description of the gallery event:

"...in 1871 she exhibited her works in a more formal venue: she organized an exhibition at the New British Gallery in Old Bond Street in London. The exhibition, entitled "Spirit Drawings in Water Colours," lasted for four months and consisted of 155 of Houghton's watercolors. She rented frames for the occasion and hung the watercolors against the walls of the gallery. This arrangement meant that the backs with the explanations would not have been visible. Yet it was still critical for Houghton that she convey this hidden information to her viewers. In her autobiography Houghton recalled: "The chief object aimed at in this Exhibition, was not so much to display the wondrous powers of the unseen intelligences, as to manifest unflinchingly to the world that true Spiritualism is inextricably bound up with the religion of the Sacred Scriptures" (Houghton, Evenings 2: 53). It was not enough for Houghton that the drawings serve as proof of communication between spirits and humans; it was also important that they convey the relationship between Spiritualism and Christian theology, particularly the insights that the spirits give about God and the Trinity."

 The artwork of Miss Houghton is an interesting blip in the history of Victorian art, and I'm not exactly sure what to say about it.  It certainly occurs during the first wave of Impressionism, and is wholly different from that new art form as well as the high Victorian fashion of the time; it also is entirely non-representational, an abstract art that precedes that revolutionary phase by about forty years.  Its a little puzzling to me, especially since Miss Houghton seems to have escaped virtually any sort of lasting review or critique.  But again Mrs. Stoughton is not alone in the non-representational art field apart from the automatic spirit manifestations--for example, in addition to an enormous literary output, Victor Hugo produced some 4,000 pieces of art, some of which are exceptional examples (to my mind) of non-representational art that came in a period decades before the Kandinsky and the rest.  Here is Hugo's "Evocation of an Island":

He was certainly outside the mainstream of Victorian art, and even well outside that of Impressionism. 

There was also Hilma of Klint (b. 1862), a woman who like Stoughton also represented the spirit world through her art, and who began painting in non-representational and abstract ways beginning in 1897/8, an example of which is below:

 
 

Miss Houghton went on to improve her representation of the spirit world through photography, a very wide selection of her work being available at the Keith De Lellis Gallery, here.

In the realm of extra-sensical belief, I'm not so sure that these brands of spiritualism would be too much different from any other belief in things that cannot be seen, or heard, or felt in any detectable way, a prayer by any other name.

Notes:

1. Our catalog was the property of William Crookes (with his bookplate, and with a signed inscription to him from "Miss Houghton")  who was an eminent British chemist and physicist and a pioneer in the field of vacuum technology (and remembered now mostly for the Crookes Tubes and his superior approach to experimentation).  He was interested in spiritualism from about the year 1869, pursuing it until his death in 1919.  He was hardly alone in his interests among highly-paced British intellectual elite:  Alfred Russell Wallace, Lord Rayleigh, Oliver Lodge and William James were all extremely interested in the spiritualism phenomenon.  Curious. 

2.

Imprints of ghost hands and faces produced by Eusapia Palladino, from Bozzano, Ipotesi spiritica, 1903, in C. Lombroso Ricerche..., 1909

 

An Alphabet of Unintentionally Semi-Absurd Motivational Images, Business Publications, 1930's

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1367

This alphabet fell into place almost by itself as I wandered through this maze of business motivational pamphlets published by Men of America Inc (of Chicago), all printed in the late 1930's to about 1941.  The design of the covers of this series is sensational (and I gulp wind as I say this) in very short and limited ways, just like it is sensational to watch a motionless penguin for a long time and then to see it suddenly turn its head to the left.  But these images served a very dedicated purpose when they were printed, and were even perhaps useful,or successful, as this publication saw at least 500 different numbers in this series.

Perhaps more interesting--where did these models come from? 

I think many of these covers are fantastic: charmingly naive, naively bizarre, cluttered with fantastically abandoned sentiments, and dripping with design elements all but forgotten and/or abandoned.  They are beautiful in their own special way.  And I'm not so sure that I wouldn't want to go back in time, read them and take their lesson to heart. (All are available for purchase via our blog bookstore.)

A is for AIM to keep workers happy and profit happier

B is for BURN and hoping for a better-built candle

C is for CAPITALIST, an exclamation point in a land of question marks

The Big Lie--Poland as an Aggressor Against the Reich, 1939

JF Ptak Science Books  Post  1298      (This is the second post written on this pamphlet--it is a stunner to me every time I see it. The earlier post was written in September 2008 and can be found here.)

Here’s an interesting entry from the instrumental librarians' tool WorldCat, a massive 75 million item book database that I use with some frequency, trying to determine whether some obscure-sounding/looking pamphlet or book is actually Not Around, like not in library collections.  (When something just isn't there, not located, it makes the work even more interesting to me.)

Poland’s Designs on Germany has the sound and feel of a piece of propaganda, right from the start, just from the supra-obvious title page and the very feel of the production.  Looking for my proof-in-the-pudding--the printing information and source for the information--I found none.  Another strike for the propagandist.  (And another interesting point: the phrase "Poland's designs on Germany" is a non-starter on Google, not located on the web, or in JSTOR, or in other pay-for web commercial communities.)

(This item is available for purchase at our blog bookstore.)

Then of course there was the content, which is a simple, serial distribution of The Big Lie, painting Poland as an aggressor, hungry for German land and people. So far as I can tell there is nothing truthful in this work whatsoever, or at least I should say nothing that is assertive to the point of Poland being an "aggressor". There are seven maps illustrating the points.  These are the great hallmarks of The Big Lie--a lie so vast that no one is supposed to think it possible that someone would tell a lie so fantastic, that no broadcast lie could be so incredibly big as to have been invented and told,  and so the lie must be true.  Hitler wrote about this admiringly in Mein Kampf, expressing an idolotry for the idea in print, recognizing it as a powerfull tool of subversion and propaganda, and then went ahead and followed the instructions. 

Then comes the entry in the WorldCat–I found that the year was 1939.  It would be in September of the year that Hitler would attack Poland and the war would begin.  Who would have thought that the Nazis were acting in self defense?

The WorldCat entry:

Poland's Designs on Germany as expressed since the British guarantee.  [Berlin W 62, Rauchstr. 27]  [Dt. Informationsstelle],
1939
23 S. : 7 gez. Kt. ; 8.
Other Titles:     Polnische Ansprüche auf deutsches Reichsgebiet. engl.
Locations    Library    
Germany    BAYERISCHE STAATSBIBLIOTHEK     
Germany    BIBLIOTHEK DES HERDER-INSTITUTS     
Germany    DIE DEUTSCHE NATIONALBIBLIOTHEK   
Germany    STAATSBIBLIOTHEK ZU BERLIN

And there it is: "Dt. Infomrationnsstelle" is the Deutsche Informationnsstelle, the German Information Centre.  The  GIC exists today in name only, but during the National Socialist period leading up to the war and during WWII it was an outlet for German propoagandistic works. There are no copies of this particular work, evidently, in libraries in the United States. This is too bad, because this is a tremendously insulting document, an insistent, insinuating, unforgiving document to the ridiculous, perverted manner of thought and logic of the Nazis.

The Sublime Antiquarian Art of Children, Part I

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1224

Among my favorite places in Washington, D.C.--a place where I lived for 29 years--are its cemeteries; in particular Rock Creek Cemetery, but more specifically, Congressional Cemetery.  Congressional is a big place, tucked away, sort of, away in Southeast D.C.--that is if you can tuck away a 30-acre piece of land. Congressional is an odd place, filled with many interesting people; its filled with their actual remains, and also their memories. There are many folks who have been interred in spirit in the cemetery, in cenotaphs; there are also many who have been laid to rest their temporarily, in the Public Vault, until conditions (in the old days) improved to have their remians received in their final resting place. 

Among those in the temporary funeneral housing were JQ Adams, William Henry Harrison, Dolley Madison, and Zachary Taylor. It may be one of the great vaults in the history of our country, a small place holding great people.

President Taylor.  General Taylor.  That's why I'm here right now.  He's the subject of these magnificent efforts by an unnamed child.  The boy, or girl, drew these images on the back of a section o fmap that was printed in about 1845-1850, just about at the time that Taylor was at his greatest height--a general, a famous militaryu leader, about to become president of the United States without ever having been elected to any office.  He was a gigantic figure at the time, and no doubt occupied some piece of mind of the artist who rendered him, The General.

I came to collecting childrens' art in a roundabout way--not so much "collecting" per se as in "finding" them.  They're difficult things to locate.

First of all, materials were scarce.  Paper, pencils, ink--these were not common things for kids to own in the 19th century, especially more in the middle and early parts of the century.  These items were expensive, especially if you were a kid in a working-class family who didn't have much of anything at all, anyway. In addition to a real crunch, a severity of absence, of the basic materials, the art that was made had to survive the artist's own hands.  And then it needed to survive being culled from family clutter for a generation. And another. And another. And another. And four more.  150 years of parents clearing out the clutter is a lot to survive. 

And so there doesn't seem to be much left.

I find them in flyleaves of old textbooks and such.  Its not as though there is are websites devoted to such things--at least not until now.

And so I'm selling two of the three portraits of The General that I own.  I'm keeping one.  They just feel superb, to me.

If you're interested in owning one, visit the blog bookstore, here.  I'm developing now a site for nothing but pre-1900 kid art. 

The artwork of children is a gorgeous thing, even when the children are not your own.  Its not that there is a sense of a certain charm, or charms--the words are just too weak. The vocabulary is more in the realms of the work being sublime, far more so than anything else.

 

Towering Classics of Lost Logic: the Japanese War Lords, Kaiser Wilhelm, U.S. State and Justice Depts as the "True Kidnappers" of the Lindbergh Baby

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1204  [Part of our Bad Ideas series.]

Sometimes things aren't what they seem, and then sometimes they're not what they seem not to be, and then there are these things, below.  These small pamphlets are very reaching examples of finding gold or silver or muffins or whatever in a sow's ear, finding a hope for belief where there wasn't room for any, logically speaking.  But there's always room for belief and faith, which takes on myraids of appearances, from believing in paper money to believing in heaven--in these cases, our writers believed in the unbelievable, creating and then believing in "innermost secrets" where there were no secrets and were no insides. 

Both of the examples below relate to the kidnapping of the 20-month-old son of Charles Lindburgh in 1932.  The crime was an extraordinarily national event, with seemingly everyone in the country following the case  During the two-month hunt for the baby and the subsequent trial and execution of the man who was seen as responsible for the child's kidnapping and murder, there were fantastic numbers of claims from people who had solutions to the mystery, or had been in contact with the kidnappers, or some other sad, imaginary relationship to the event.  The examples below [both of which are available for purchase at our blog bookstore] claim to have incredible insight into the real nature of the crime, which of course goes blindingly beyond the simple matters of the case and on to include massive colusions between the U.S. State and Justice Departments, "international bankers", F.D.R., Kaiser Wilhelm, and "the Japanese government".  And more.

The first example was published in 1942 by something called "The Mothers and Daughters Committee".  This group used the address of  280 E. 21St Street, Brooklyn, New York, which today is a six storey building with 96 apartments, and I suspect that the MADC back there in '42 was nothing more than a crank in apartment inthis building. The thinking is too confusing and the references too many amnd too busy to actually do this thing justice by de-threading it, but suffice to say it claims that the F.B.I. was shielding "the international criminals"who were truly responsible for the crime--I'm not sure how F.D.R. works his way in there but it has something to do with "international bankers", communist conspirators, traitors in the State Department, and "needy" lawyers, all brought together in a choking confluence to do harm somehow to American society and morality.

Now our second towering example is this four page pamphlet, received by the Library of Congress (and probably nobody else) on 1 October 1943, which divines the origins of World War Two and the kidnapping of the Charles Lindbergh baby to a complex and impossible cabal of Japanese “War Lords”, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, the assassination of Leon Trotsky, the League of Nations, Elihu Root,  “3 cent gallon kerosene”, the South Manchurian Railway, and some sort of “historical documents of posterity countersigned by Tokyo and Berlin” in the possession of Mrs. Renee Valentine (“Secretary”) of Staten Island, New York. 

The entire affair began with “co-tenants of the kidnappers band in small studio building owned by a relative of a former U.S. Senator” under the instigation of “Germany, Japan and certain Arnold Benedicts types” brought about by the end of the “Jap-Russo” War of 1905.

We are told it was an “inside job”.

Somehow Teddy Roosevelt gets involved with Kaiser Wilhelm in arranging for the Russians to pay indemnity to the Japanese in terms of a land agreement of Southern Manchuria, opening the way to exploitation of China by the Japanese.  Something else happens, the South Manchuria Railroad gets thrown in as well as four competing U.S. banks and Elihu Root and a failed League of Nations agreement which upsets a balance of power and brings “the Astors, Canterbury and the Guggenheims” into competition with the Japanese and Kaiser Wilhelm, doing something to the Treaty of Washington.

After this incredible and unconnected and partially non-existent series of events is both untangled and entangled before our eyes, the writer reaches the lonely and very solitary conclusion that “the necessary documents to prove these charges (??) could be secured through the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby”.  I was waiting for the  author to make a case for Lindbergh's real-life (and long held) Nazi sympathies, but that just didn't happen. 

I really have no idea of what the writer is talking about, but the failure of making any connection whatsoever with any of the “facts and circumstances” is magnificently appalling, and has moved itself from the realm of being so bad that it isn’t even “bad” anymore.  It is that singular sort of “badness” that makes the printed words seep into the paper and disappear before your very eyes, and the only thing that you can say is "wow". 

Extruding 3-D Shapes from 2-D Art to Create a Cubist vs. Art Deco Chess Set

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1129

Is there room in the history of invented art to reconstruct cubist and abstract paintings by imaging the objects that could’ve passed through the canvases to leaves their geometric footprint?  That is to say, if you took the Woolworth Building in NYC and passed it at an oblique angle through a large sheet of paper, and that paper was permeable enough and the building moving slowly enough to simply leave its “footprint” without tearing or deforming the surface of the paper, the resulting image may look a lot like figures in classic works in the history of art.

That is no revelation, really, as the Black Square or Airplanes Flying of Kasimir Malevich could’ve been made by every fourth item on your desk.  But what is interesting to me would be the reverse of this process, where you take that black square and reverse-engineer it, extruding whatever figure it was that could’ve made the black square into its three dimensional counterpart.
 
What comes immediately to mind for me in this regard is Claude Bragdon (1866-1946),  (a New York-based architect with a long set of sleeves for writing in upper dimensional planes of Theosophy and reincarnation and other similarly squishy reaches) who wrote a few interesting books on the fourth dimension and objects and space, writing two of them at a very interesting period of time for the history of physics and art (1912 and 1913). The books are interesting enough, I guess, and seem to perhaps have had an influence on some influential artists of that time,  but what is of interest here are tow illustrations. 

First is “the Projections made by a Cube in traversing a Plane” from Primer¹, showing the impact (at different levels) of a cube falling through a plane.  The second, “Personalities: Tracings of the Individual (Cube) in a Plane” from  Man², shows the “shadows” of the three-dimensional figures as they lived in their two-dimensional world.  It comes close to the impact of the cubes above, but really only depicts what two-dimensional creatures would see of the three-dimensional beings inhabiting their Bragdonesque world.  I like
the tracings more as impact points than 2-D renderings of 3-D objects, and in some ways they are very similar. (I have to say that I am surprised that given Bragdon’s expanse of taste and artistic ability that he didn’t arrange these images in an artistic manner–in that sense he entirely missed the boat on adding his own bit to the newly-formed Cubist world. He also reminds me of Emily Vanderpoel, who in her own way completely missed the new artform that she was serendipitously creating.)    

So when I look at something like a Malevich or Mondrian or even (but less so) at a Duchamp (Bride), I find it interesting to manufacture the base of the something that plunged itself cleanly through their canvas, pulling it out again, giving it three dimensions, and incorporating the thing as a piece in a chessboard–the chessboard being the pieces that made the shapes in the canvases resulting in the Art Deco vs. Cubist/Suprematist   Chess Set.   It would be interesting to choose two representative canvases for either style and  see if one (or a couple of ) object(s) could make all of the shapes in the two representative paintings,  populating a chessboard with sameness.

The bottom line, then, is how different or similar would the extruded three-dimensional figures be that were responsible for this impact in a two-dimensional surface be? 

(I am reminded too of Duchamp and John Cage sitting down to a game of chess and producing a musical composition via their moves, at  Sightssoundsystems, a festival of art and technology in Toronto, 1968. In this way too an artwork could be made with each move in a game of pieces used to make iconic shapes in the history of art.  "They did not speak. They did not sing, they remained, all of them, silent, almost determinedly silent; but from the empty air they conjured music. Everything was music..." Franz Kafka, Investigations of a Dog.)

Notes:
   
1..(Bragdon) A PRIMER OF HIGHER SPACE. (The Fourth Dimension). Rochester: Manas Press, 1913. 8vo, (12), 79pp, including 30 plates.Notes:

2.. (Bragdon) MAN THE SQUARE. A Higher Space Parable. Rochester: Manas Press, 1912. 12mo, 34pp, 9 illustrations.  

French Visionary Architect and Creator of Bad Taste: Jean-Jacque Lequeu.

JF Ptak  Post 1124

The history of bad taste is like a history of bad food--you need them to tell you what's good. -- Imaginary quote of Hank Hill

I you look hard at some of the leading styles of architecture and design of the 1880-1920 periods, you will see elements of the work of the great visionary architect, Jean-Jacques Lequeu,  The Rouen-born and Paris-educated Lequeu's major problem in this is that he was long dead in some forgotten place before any of this very-late recognition occurred.  Too late for accolade, too late to brand his isolation as something other than bizarre (famous people doing the same sorts of things would be "quirky"), and of course too late to get patrons or backers or clients for him to actually be able to build something.  Anything.  He had a brilliant command of fancy and imagination, coupled what extreme senses of design and composition and material, and also how to make something constructed of all of that stuff stand up. And that's certainly the promise that he showed when he and his more public-centric work were in favor.  But that was back before the Revolution--before the end of the American Revolution.  Things happened, and Lequeu would spend four decades in high obscurity and low solitude.

 He could've been just about anyone after this point, after his acceptable brilliance wore off:  instead, he became a government worker/draftsman, lived in a series of small apartments, and finally wound up taking residence in a brothel room, where he created unequaled images of imaginary/inspired architecture. And between his scrambling for a government existence and creating vast Utopian cities and complexes and bizarre anthropomorphic structure, Lequeu might also have invented Bad Taste, being an early version of Charm City's own John Waters (sorry Mr. Waters, but you know its true). By virtue of his station in life, I think, Lequeu was exposed to many sides of French impolite and exploratory society which he managed to witness, and capture, and portray in a manner vastly uncommon to almost every other artist of his day. 

I did want to concentrate just on Lequeu's self-portraits here, but I feel compelled to share at least a couple of Lequeu's fanciful and Columbian adventures into the world of Bad Taste--these are not by any means his great contribution to the history of art, nor do they come anywhere near his great architectural visions, but they are significant  For example, while others (actually, everyone else) was exploring reclining nudes in one refined way or another, Lequeu explored the image from a different angle:

Not only is the model in an unusual position, and in front of a mirror, but her face and head are completely obscured. A lovely piece of technical gaudiness, this still was not a crowd-pleaser in 1815.  Its not the only thing that Lequeu should be remembered for by any means....but it is something.

But on to Lequeu's fearless self-portraits:

 

I think that you've got to admire the guy for his out-loud living. 

Notes and examples of Lequeu's architecture, below:

New York City: Attacked by Tentacled Flying Saucers, Giant Flying Snakes, Glaciers, and Mining Missile Space Aliens, 1929-1941

JF Ptak Science Books   Post   1118

This is a simple, non-analytical image dump for some in a continuing series on images of New York City in fantastical and improbable situations--there's artwork that show the city being consumed by glaciers, drowned by the tide, ripped from the Earth and flung into the sun, floating in the sea, floating in space, sunken, and of course simply attacked by any number of different things, though most of those weren't real.  There is of course the great unknown classic that I stumbled across--the duplicate NYC on a duplicate Earth orbiting the Earth ((?!) and pictured at the end of this post). I doubt that there's enough for a dictionary of disasters, though there's plenty for a Doomsday Book.

For example the first image for this post shows a domed New York City--and in this scifi sub-classic,  like other major cities of the United States, NYC was suffering a catastrophic attack by winged snake monsters.  I don't know why  the dome is exploding because the snakes don't appear to be armed.

This does remind me of an image from the mind of Buckminster Fuller, who came up with an extraordinarily bad idea to protect NYC against thermonuclear weapons. (Fuller's dome appears here.)

 

Then there's this magnificent cover for November, 1929, featuring a tentacled flying saucer removing the Woolworth Building into outer space (as well as the Eiffel Tower by another brethern craft (the Earth appearing again, as nearly usual, without cloud cover):

And yet another destroyed Woolworth Building, this from January 1929, featuring an enormous glacier attacking the City:

And this vision of a decimated NYC, coming at the hands of giant hovering mining/missile space aliens:

And of course, the duplicate NYC on Extra Earth:

A Taxidermological Satirist Adventurer and PsychoBon-Vivant: a few Paragraphs in the History of Boredom

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1068

In the 19th century, when the rich were insane, they were simply eccentric; when the poor were insane, they were crazy.  Luckily for Charles Waterton (1782-1865), he inherited a large estate and could insulate himself from legal scrutiny and indulge his whims and interests.  Waterton would make a problematic biography, his life filled with front-line environmentalism, exploration, taxidermy, and natural history interests wrapped around a solid steel stake of bizarre personal behavior.  Money was his greatest curative, an elixir of great depth and more understanding than Dr. Freud could ever muster. But ultimately I think that with all of this behavior masked a terminal boredom--Mr. Waterton was both bored and boring.

Waterton wrote three volumes of Essays on Natural History and the best-selling Wanderings in South America¹, turned his estate into what amounted to be the first nature preserve, talked to bugs, barked like a dog, tried to fly from his outhouse, left his gloves at the top of St. Peter's, and on and on.  His portrait by Charles Wilson Peale shows him with a sharp eye, weird hair, and a cat head as his buddy on a book. 

Later in life he had a bitter dispute with JJ Audubon--this was mostly a one-sided affair, Waterton seeing mostly invisible complaints with the great ornithologist's work.  Audubon rarely responded to Waterton's very public and in-print diatribes, ending only when Waterton left England for New Zealand in 1839². 

The man did form a considerable collection of natural history specimens and medical oddities. 

Perhaps the most interesting thing for me to take away from Mr. Waterton are the subject headings of the biography written for him by his long-time fried, Dr. Charles Hobson, (Charles Waterton, his Home, Habits and Handiwork³), published in the first edition a year after Waterton's death (and somehow reaching a second edition three decades later).  The book is a very tough go from where I sit, and my main interest is just in the sub headings for the book's chapters.  For example, how could one resist the story of such an odd man when presented with chapters like these:

"Mr. Waterton recounts a conversation with a Man representing himself Skilled in Egg Gathering at Filey ..... "

"Remarkable Willow, from the Stump of which have sprung Twelve Stems, designated by Mr. Waterton "The Twelve Apostles," and one detrimentally influenced by a Storm being named "Judas "

"Securing of Pike by the Bow and Arrow a favourite Amusement of the Squire"

"Mr. Waterton "fairly floored" by Mr. Salvin's .clever Imitation of a Pig"

"The Ape Searching the Squire's head reminds him of a Cambridge anecdote"

"Special immunity in the female sex from death by lightning" (which is a loose, semi-statistical discovery of challenged means)

But once you open the book and make your way through Hobson's unusual prose, the book becomes almost instantly resistible.  And so my interest in Waterton wanes down to almost nothing--he seems like an interesting guy, but not so much so that it eclipses all of the egomaniacal stuff that went along with him. He seems to be made of the stuff that excludes friendship, and that leaves me out--and with which Waterton would have had no problem.

____

Notes.

1.  The book has not been out of print since it first appeared 170 years ago.  It is filled with adventures high and low, some of which are real, some not.  Adventuring in Guiana in the first third of the 19th century was an exotic affair--much more so than could really be imagined in general today--and so the book was a best seller. 

2. That's okay--the arguments defaming Audubon came to nothing, and Waterton was generally wrong in the main points if not no-wrong in a few minor ones.  I don't know what his problem was with Audubon and his great work, but it really doesn't matter. Audubon described one of Waterton's missives to him as a "scrubby letter", and I'm pretty sure it must've been so.

3.  The book is available on Google to be read in its full majesty here. I'd say "pass" to the general reader, but if you're in the exhibits/museum world, I'm sorry to say that it is probably a must-read.

There's much more that I left out about this man, but I just can't do any more:

"Charles Waterton," from the Catholic Encyclopedia

The Charles Waterton Home Page

Wanderings in South America, by Charles Waterton

A nice chapter appears on Waterton in Lynn Barber's The Heyday of Natural History, 1820-1870 (1980).

And a very nice appreciation of the man (with a much more useful stuff about his history) from the Pyromaniac blog.

Outsider Logic Department: the Fabulous Curative Necessity of Fatty Meats

JF Ptak Science Books LLC    Post 989

[see also my related posts on Women Meat Pioneers and of course Meat String and Curled Hair]

I have a suspicion that the author of Eat Meat for a Successful Life, G.H. Brinkler  (a “N.D.”, doctor of nauturopathy,  from the American School of Naturopathy and the tautologically-surprising “founder” of the “Brinkler Club”) had a compromised and possibly antagonistic personal history with vegetables.  And water, as Mr. Brinkler is also the originator of the “Brinkler Waterless Way to Health”, and a man who claims not to have drunk any water in 35 years. 

Most humans don’t do so well without water after a few days, though there are extreme cases where people have survived for several weeks without water. To have survived 1,820 weeks seems pretty much to be well on its way to being a vastly under-appreciated record of human endurance.

But the main story here of course is the meat, with the waterless bit woven through it like heart-ending marbling in a butt chop.  Meat, as we are told by Mr. Brinkler, is pretty much a “natural fixer” for just about anything.  Lazy in the morning?  A pound of pork on the broiler will cure that.  Sexual inadequacy?  Solved with meat (ingestion).  Poor memory?--the answer:  meat, and lots of it. And not only just meat; it definitely needs to be not lean. Big fatty meats are the greatest source of the desired “muscle food”; lean meats, unfortunately, are only “nerve foods”. Somehow the meat mixed with the waterless way induces the “nerve-ends” into a “more natural” and strengthened existence.

The Brinkler follower should also chew their meat less.  “The masticating fad might result in tiring the jaws and gross undernourishment”.

I could go on and pull further quotes out of context from this piece, but that would be mean. The pamphlet (1934) I have is the U.S. Copyright Deposit copy, and I suspect that there may not have been many copies other than mine. I think that all the man was trying to do was sell broilers. 

The (Really) Last Word in Skin Care, Lip Prep, Eye Sealing & Cavity Solidifiers: the Rubbery Chemical Appeals of Embalming Fashions

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 975

[Faint of heart, stop here.]

This carefree stroll through the geology of death prep and care comes to us via the Embalmers’ Supply Company (ESCO) catalog, of 1941, serving and selling to members of the embalming profession since 1886.  It provides the Practioner with all means necessary to scrape away facial muscle, cement the jaw, seal the eyes, color “old age” eyebrows, fill cancerous cavities, mold over gaping wounds, position the arms, contour the chin, scoop out the brain, replace the blood, pull out the bowels, and all other manner of removal/drainage/fillup, and then apply makeup to cover all suture wounds and other “deficiencies”.

 

I find the following interesting “quality” products:

Duo-Raa-Co Main Arterial Embalming, Incarnadines the Blood! “For the Main arteries!"

...and now with all risk of “Over-Embalming” totally eliminated!!”

Bruise Bleach (“for black eyes and bruises”)

VEINO Wound Filler
DERMA Lip and Eye Sealer

“CAVOS:  For Cavity Treatment! Hard firming…with Lessened Fumes!” and

“CAVOS Cavity Osmosis…with Less Fumes”

VEINO-ESCO-RA-CO (extra smooth arterial “with smoothing filling properties”)

“URANO: Arterial and Cavity ‘all purpose’ Fluid”

“SUTURE Incision Cement Powder (“for filling large wound & …”)

 

Then there’s a long solid line of filling, solidifying, non-parting, forming and fragrant ESCO products:

--Hardening and Preserving Compound” but more properly known as a “Drying and Filling” compound

--Fluid Color “for additional internal coloring”

--Dry Shampoo (“For cleansing discolored hair, old-age eyebrows and mustaches”)

--RIGIDINE Mouth Closure (“Use this specific for setting jaws”)

--Modifier Anti-Dehydrant (“Prevents parted lips”)

--Fragrine: “the practical use of Fragrine to the funeral director is wholly and solely in its delightfully fresh deodorizing fragrance!”
--Tissue Filler “for restoring normal contours to shrunken areas”

--Liquid Skin Pore Sealer” and “ESCO Incision Sealer”  (both work well in “wet” conditions.)

In addition to the chemicals is a long list of other necessaries (and no sundries), including all manner of scalpels, blades, rubber pants and bloomers, big black rubber gloves, “surgical” tables, spreaders, scoopers, closers, and then of course enormous suturing appliances with huge bobbins of thread. 

And such was the American way of death, for some, in 1941.

 

The real Alice in Wonderland: Plus Alice in Miniland and Guinness Stout

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 966

Now that the new Tim Burton Alice film is out, let's not forget that there was a real Alice on which Lewis Carroll's Alice was based.  She looks, well, pretty formidable. (Alice Liddell.)

 

A photo by Carroll of Alice at a younger age.  In spite of his logic and math and Snark and Alice, Carroll's "artistic" photos of children are pretty creepy to me. 

New York City: Missing (1902) & Reproduced in Outer Space (1941)

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 940

NYC has certainly had its imaginary/creative trials and tribulations over the last 400 years or so, but I must say that these two depictions of the state of the city are the most, well, unexpected as any I've ever seen.  The first comes from 1902 and is a forward-looking appraisal of the chances of New York City in the near-future.  The aeronaut tourists are being told by the aviator/carny--floating above Manhattan in the future, in the year 1920--that those chances are not very good, the city having disappeared under its own weight, sunk by the growing skyscraper¹ population in a ground loosened by too-numerous tunnels.  The cartoon is a joking editorial, of course, a riposte to the relatively new building jag that pushed big buildings to great new heights. [A post on more realistic views of the City of New York can be seen here]

The second image on the other hand is not a farce; it is one of the strangest (published) unintentionally Outsider, unintentionally Absurdist/Dada works that I've ever seen.  It appeared in a post at the very start of this blog (two years and 500,000 words ago) and it remains a capstone of Mondo Bizarro category².

This 1941 pamphlet isn’t so much “interesting” as it is interestingly illustrated, where all of the semi-coherent  interest resides, the text having left coherence far behind, somewhere, in it own intergalactic dust. 

This is the only known example of the depiction of an extra-terrestrial New York City pictured with the earth in the background. 

Huh?  Yes, this is the Big Apple in space—not its own space but THE space, outer space—somehow, impossibly, removed to some something-or-other (actually in this case, a “bubble”) that, while not being the Moon, was something like it, though not actually a solid and without gravity, floating on a base of floating effluvia and hope, but, well, you get the picture.  Whatever we’re floating on here (actually it is identified as the “perisohere” (don’t ask)) is very big and very very close to the home planet. 

The author, David Gordon, is certainly after something, but what that "something" is I just don't know. He starts things out for the reader asking a series of questions like “why does the earth and other heavenly bodies remain in the air and submerged”, answering them with other questions. 

In all of this Mr. Gordon produced a work of staggering incredibility, more so since it wasn't an intentional science fiction effort,  and in my book any time anyone reveals such a shocking piece of thought deserves a special kind of praise. I'm just thankful that the pamphlet was illustrated.

Notes:

1.  The word "skyscraper" appeared in print only nine years before this cartoon (Harper's Weekly, April 1893), thugh the necessary elements like heating and cooling capacities, electrical lighting, plumbing [with appropriate, siphon jet toilets], elevators with dependable brakes, had been in place since the 1880's or earlier.

2..  One of the other capstone publications written about here is the monumentally bizarre work on sculpting in fat and lard:

Odd Collections: 500,000 Wishbones

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 928

"One must go into oneself armed to the teeth"--M. Teste, Paul Valery

“Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still." --H.D. Thoreau

Sometimes odd images just need to be surfaced for the pure sake of it.  Such is the case with this glorious photo by Greg Villet¹ of Delphine Binger in LIFE magazine for  24 May, 1954 .   Ms. Binger ("a Manhattan spinster") actually collected the wishbones with a business utility in mind, fashioning them into objets d'os.

She purchased the wishbones for nothing, added a few bits of half-penny decorations, perfume, a pin, and SO! a piece of jewelry is born.  She evidently was able to sell her creations for $2.10 apiece, which in 1954 translates into 25 2009 dollars; so I guess if she sold some here and there she would be able to supplement her income.  Of course there's the issue of overkill on the bones:  she seems to have probably ten times ten times more than she "needs", so there is something else going on there.  

An old friend of mine--we'll call him Mr. Tulipfields, a brilliant mathematician/physicist/compsci guy with a deep appreciation for music--started buying classical cds when cds were a relatively new phenomenon.  Rare recorded material was being placed back into "print" at such a rate that he couldn't really afford the appropriate sound system to actually listen to all of his new purchases.  HE hurried into buying many of the cds because he thought that they would drop out-of-print again, and that he needed to act quickly.  I thought that the cds would stay available basically forever—as it turned out he was right (as usual) and I was wrong (ditto). And so Mr. T amassed an enormous collection of music—in the dozens of thousands—many of which are now impossible to find. 

In some ways my friend didn’t need the cd player—he already knew the music, could play it in his head.  Somehow he was keeping all of this music on course in forming this fabulous collection  And once he had explained his reasoning behind the whole effort, it all made perfect sense, and you’d wonder why he didn’t have 100,000 more choice cds.

On the other hand I’m not sure why Ms. Binger² needed her extra 497,500 bones—its not as though there would be much of a relative variation in them, from bone to bone.  I doubt that a  centimeter here or there would make much of a difference in a corsage bone display like the one Ms. Binger is wearing in this photo.  I guess she needed them for, well, something else.

Notes:

1.  I don't know much about Greg Villet.  He took a lot of preparations for this photo, stringing 5,000 wishbones on black string on a black backdrop--that is considerable dedication to the idea of an image.  I also know that he did some very significant documentary photography with Rosa Parks and the Montgomery strikes of 1955/6, which tells you maybe all you need to know about the man.  

2.  I can't help but wonder what happened to all of those bones on Ms. Binger's passing?