JF Ptak Science Books

Warhol, Paint-by-Numbers, and Nothing

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I wonder if Mr. Billy Collins has ever approached the ineffable connection between paint-by-number art and Andy Warhol?  It seems that paint-by-number (PBN) came from nearly nowhere, a near state of being nowhere and nothing, just after WWII, to the point of selling millions of sets by 1952. 

It was an astonishing thing, really, how the PBN craze took over America.  And it just so happens that 1952 was the first one-man show for Andy Warhol, and was also the beginnings of the Pop Art movement, which seems to me a rush to the most common denominator trough the commoditization of consumerism and popular culture, creating art out of visible nothingness.   Warhol in particular trained his sites on images that were already twisted around people’s neurons and living in their memories.  Art was made from images injected into the heads of consumer buying units, a delightful confusion of imagination and the already imagined, a reaction to a familiar sub rosa advertised image.

Perhaps Warhol’s art was part of a larger whole, an illustrator to a bigger point, a performance unintended to stand alone.  But that is what happened, the art separated from the wider message, and soared to great acclaim. 

 Warhol seems more like a paint-by-number color memorist, filling in the blanks of an already-mostly-formed memory burned into the long term memory via years of advertising and severe repetition.  Nearly the entire broadcast industry was created to support this memory-making process:  Seinfeld, Spongebob, The Office, Your Show of Shows, and all the rest, created not necessarily for your pleasure but as a series of  interchangeable 11-minute-long placeholders to hold the viewer/listener to the point where they would be exposed to 180 seconds of product identification.  It is the repetitious memory formation that the folks depended upon so that when you go down the supermarket aisle looking for an 89-cent can of tomato squeezings called “soup” that the 799 exposures to the Campbell Soup Company’s product line will direct you their way, a primitive bit of biological programming.  And for all of the trimmings and philosophical-critical digressions, Warhol capitalized on creating art on vast shared memories, coloring in a shared image, reaching into the minds of millions for something that everyone could see and understand—and not have to think about, not lose one neuron in interpretation, and enjoy it like an comfy old slipper. 

 

Where Warhol succeeds and PBN fails is at the art/appreciation point—few people took the PBN seriously as an art form, mainly because it wasn’t presented as such, except for those who somehow took the thing too seriously. Warhol took his creations seriously from the very beginning—and perhaps there was really nothing more than the defense of his art that was the art itself.  It just seems to me that, in the history of art, it tool 1500 years or so for linear perspective to be rediscovered, another 500-odd years beyond that to bend and mystify nature in the form of Impressionism, and another 30 years to lose all recognizable natural forms all together.  And then after Braque and Duchamp and Kandinsky and the Blaue Reiter, and the Fauvism, Suprematism, Vorticism, Dadaism, Deco, De Stijl, Surrelaism, Concrete art, Abstract Impressionism, and on and on, that after all of this since Nude Descending, that we are lead to Pop Art and silkscreens of soup cans.  It just seems to me to be more about the packaging than the package, which might just well be a wrapped bit of nothing. 

A Beautiful Manuscript of Square Roots, 1830's

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2082

 

(Note: we'll deal with square root of  3 at another time...)

The author of this manuscript, Charles Fisher, took a solitary pleasure in calculating the square roots of numbers from 2  to 589, not bothering to write down the 24 perfect squares to 576.  (The sqrt being r² = x for every non-negative real number x.) From the few bits that I have checked the man seems to have done a good job back there in the 1830’s. 

I cannot determine where this book was written or who Mr. Fisher was, though it is possible that he was a (Baptist) Minister from the few short textual notes that pop up here and there. 

[This 140pp manuscript is being offered for sale at our blog bookstore, here.]

His work is pretty elegant.  Take for example his solution (and proof) for the square root (hereafter sqrt(x)) 309,

which the calculator living under this page says is 17.578395831246947    Mr. Fisher’s answer is 17 10/17 = 799/17=89401/989=309 100/989, and after some more involved arithmetic comes t the lovely proof number of   

4121989960986322995025 /13339773336525317136 or

309.00000000000000000007496379247

Which is getting pretty close. 

The only note that Mr. Fisher makes on his calculations is for the sqrt(193), which he notes as “the hardest number to find the approximate root of any between 1 and 200. I have found it after repeated trials and have this evening wrote it in as above. March 1^st, 1833. CF.”

Robot Man, 1915

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The Burroughs Adding Machine company did about as much as anyone to objectify the worker in America during the 1880-1915 period, making the worker a part of a machine within the machine. In a way it was like creating the Ford assembly line for people sitting down. 

The company was founded on the work of William S. Burroughs' grandfather, William Seward Burroughs (1857-1898 and native son of Rochester, NY), who created a mechanical calculator to help him add long columns of numbers in his job as a bank clerk. American Arithmometer Company was founded by him and others in 1886, later evolving into Burroughs Adding Machine Company (1904), Burroughs Corporation (1953), and then into Unisys (combining with Sperry Univac in 1986) before sliding away.

In any event the adding machine connected millions of people to a mechanizing process of what had previously been a mental operation--the flywheel in the side of the head of the clerk/accountant in this add for Technical World (More Fascinating than Fiction) for August 1915 wasn't too terribly far from the truth. Interesting that on the other side of the head of this fellow, behind the other ear, is a pencil. 

A Tiny Worm, 1839

JF Ptak Science Books   Daily Dose from Dr. Odd 

 

I'm just passing this engraving along--the last dot in the right-hand column in the engraving below (shown in more detail just below that) exhibits the life-size dimensions of the guilty worm.  The way in which the worm is presented is just very well done and beautiful in its own way. 

[Source:  The American Journal of Pharmacy, January 1839, volume 10, "Remarks on Ergot", by W.H. Miller. 

"They crept leisurly about, and seemed to regale themselves on the mouldy matter on the surface of the grain, which, through the microscope, resemed a saccharine paste..."

And the detail:

Richmond's Libby Prison in Chicago

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2082
 

Confectionary connections to interesting bumps in history wind their ways along many unusual paths.  One such story is that of physician/scientist/collector Hans Sloane (1660-1753) and his introduction of chocolate into England (as a result of a field expedition he took to Jamaica)--his involvement with chocolate was minor compared to everything else he did in his life, but the introduction of chocolate to coffee houses in London was not.  In any event it was his massive and superior collection of natural history samples, archaeological artifacts, and much else, that became the basis for the British Museum--the collections purchased from his estate for 20,000 pounds at the time of his death. 

Another example of a weirder candyland adventure is that of Charles Gunther (1837-1920), who was the driving force of moving the infamous Confederate Libby Prison to Chicago in 1893 to house his own collections of Civil War memorabilia and other interesting and Mondo Bizarro things. (He claimed to have--on exhibition--the original skin of the serpent from the Garden of Eden, complete in some sort of original frame decked out in Egyptian gibberishglyphics.) Here's an ad that appeared in the Confederate Veteran's first year of publication in 1893:

I wouldn't use the term "great" here--and I'm pretty sure that the word is being misused here in 1893 as well.

The prison was actually a converted tobacco factory, the buildings of which were constructed from 1845-1852, and located in central Richmond at Main and 25th Streets. Poor Luther Libby--a Mainer--came into possessions of the buildings for his business, which was subsequently seized by the Confederate government at the beginning of the war and converted into a hospital/officer's prison before it became the symbol of mistreatment and deprivation and harshness.  (Mr. Libby had nothing to do with the prison per se--he was just the last person with his name on the buildings.  He outlived the prison-with-his-name-on-it by 15 years--12 years if you count the use of the building to house Confederate leadership after the end of the war.)

Gunther collected big stuff, the biggest being the prison. He purchased it and had it dismantled, shipped up to Chicago, and then reassembled (with the help and advice of the prestigious architecture/design firm of Burnham and Root) where it operated as a museum from 1889-1895. Sensing a brighter future for the property, Gunther dismantled the building selling off chunks of it as souvenirs, and built a convention center on the site, filling the need for meeting space from the burning of the Chicago Coliseum in 1897.

This post could have gone another way very easily, winding up in the Things Out of Place Department--Libby in Chicago, the Statue of Liberty in Paris, London Bridge in Arizona, a duplicate Earth in the sky above the Earth,and so on--perhaps this on another day. 

On the Libby Prison relics from Chicagohistory.org 

Henry James' Beautiful Nothingness on Charles Dickens, 1865

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2081

[Picture source: PBS.org.]

At the tender age of 21 Henry James was deeply in love with words.  Sometimes he may have been in love with them for the sake of their sound and placement rather than their meaning, at least so when he was a young man...as he grew older, James became one of those few people who never wrote a bad sentence (according to Mr. McMurtry).  However, in 1865, he wrote some lovely-sounding sentences that were mechanically semi-pure if not accurate in what they were saying, but certainly sounded pretty in their pettiness.

It was in The Nation on 21 December 1865 that James wrote what is a very good example of this beautiful nothingness when he brought out his pen and stabbed Charles Dickens in the heart.

He was reviewing Our Mutual Friend, but he managed at the very beginning to say that it was not simply that this novel was not good, but that everything Dickens had written in the previous ten years--back to when James was 11--was "poor with the poverty not of momentary embarrassment, but of permanent exhaustion".  It is true that Dickens at this point was slowing down a bit--at least compared to himself, as he had previously written twenty novels in 18 years--and he had only another five years to live, but the novels of exhaustion of those ten years that James was referring to included  Little Dorrit,  A Tale of Two Cities,  Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend.  Four novels, ten years, three great classics. 

James writes that "...the word humanity strikes us as strangely discordant in the midst of these pages, for, let us boldly declare it, there is no humanity here..."  This is a very strange thing to say, given that Dickens semi-discovered a majority of London life that really never quite made it into public display in newspapers and novels except for their crimes, giving a face of grace and courage to the poor and middle classes.  And for all of that, Henry James tells us that Dickens may be a great humorist, but "he is nothing of a philosopher". 

Then there are these two low sentences:  "But when he introduces men and women whose interest is preconceived to lie not in the poverty, the weakness, the drollery of their natures, but in their complete and unconscious subjection to ordinary and healthy human emotions, all his humor, all his fancy, will avail him nothing, if, out of the fulness of his sympathy, he is unable to prosecute those generalizations in which alone consists the real greatness of a work of art. This may sound like very subtle talk about a very simple matter; it is rather very simple talk about a very subtle matter." 

James continues, as he begins to wind up is review, with some very sniffy and long-nosed observations (bolding mine):

"Such scenes as this are useful in fixing the limits of Mr Dickens's insight. Insight is, perhaps, too strong a word; for we are convinced that it is one of the chief conditions of his genius not to see beneath the surface of things. If we might hazard a definition of his literary character, we should, accordingly, call him the greatest of superficial novelists. We are aware that this definition confines him to an inferior rank in the department of letters which he adorns; but we accept this consequence of our proposition. It were, in our opinion, an offence against humanity to place Mr Dickens among the greatest novelists. For, to repeat what we have already intimated, he has created nothing but figure. He has added nothing to our understanding of human character. He is master of but two alternatives: he reconciles us to what is commonplace, and he reconciles us to what is odd."

I really am not sure what was driving Mr. James to the place he drove for, but it certainly seems very weird to me--perhaps he needed to sharpen his young quill on the bones of a popular and legendary older writer. In any event, James seemed to be trying to rush a certain patina of aged reasonableness here, and all he managed was to shine an ugly brass.

The full review, here.

And just for the record, here's a list of Dickens' books, all written somehow by one man:

Thomas Jefferson's Reading List for the Common reader

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2080

In 1771 Thomas Jefferson replied to a letter written to him by Robert Skipwith, the brother-in-law of Martha Wayles Skelton (who Jefferson would marry in the next year) outlining what he thought to be essential reading for the generally-cultured reader.  Skipwith wrote for a list of books "suited to the capacity of a common reader who understands but little of the classicks and who has not  leisure for any intricate or tedious study. Let them be improving as well as amusing and among the rest let there be Hume's history of England, the new edition of Shakespear, the short Roman history you mentioned and all Sterne's works."

[Jefferson's copy of Volataire's Philosophical Dictionary--a thinker much in his mind.]

Jefferson responded with the following list, published at the very useful Monticello.org site (The same site offers an interesting reading list for Jefferson and his world, arranged by category, here.) It was a time of both big change and settling-in for Jefferson--aged 28, a newish lawyer, just coming into practice in 1767, just inheriting his father's estate in 1764, just moving into newly-built Monticello in 1770, and marrying in the next year--and he gave the question a good strong thinking.  His list is of course very interesting: the books are loosely arranged under a few broad categories, and are listed mostly by author and a bit of the title, followed usually by the size of the book ("8vo" is, basically, what we would think of as a standard-sized book; "12mo" is about the size of a paperback; "4to" is a taller, wider book; "fol" is a folio, sort of in the atlas-size), an occasional price, and also some occasional publishing data. The leading category of book by far is the "fine arts", which occupies well more than half of the entire list.

It is interesting to note that Jefferson has only eight titles in the politics/trade/economics section, and has seven in the "criticism of the fine arts" area, which includes Hogarth's book on the analysis of beauty (strange and compelling to the non-artist like myself), and the newish Johnson's dictionary (published first in 1755), the big two-volume work purchased by Jefferson for 3 pounds. 

It might also be interesting to have a look at the Library of Congress exhibition of Thomas Jefferson's library (from 2008), here.

Big Time Big Bombs--Great Infographic, 1917

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I don't often see graphical displays of quantitative data utilizing quite so many images of shells, even when the image is comparing ammunition production.  This striking example is found in The Illustrated London News for July 15, 1917. 

 

Definitions of Columns and Shapes: d'Aviler & Vignola, 1710

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[Both of the following engravings are available for purchase via our blog store]

Over the years I've seen many architectural prints, and I've come to determine that I most enjoy the comparative views.  It is uncommon to see a single-sheet engraving dedicated to different forms of columns, as we see here in plate 93 (page 307)  of volume one of A.C. Daviler's Cours d'Architecture qui comprend les Ordres de Vignole...published in Paris in 1710. Daviler (1653-1701),was an architect and a student of Jean-François Blondel (1683-1756) who worked very extensively on the architectural theory of Giacomo Barozzi or Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola (1507-1573). Here he identifies and classifies 20 different types of columns, just to make sure that everyone was on the same page.   

Actually, the very first engraving in the work is dedicated to a definition of terms, establishing the basis for the forms that would be discussed over the following thousand pages.  It is an excellent way to start a book, making sure that everyone has a common identification for what standard words would mean. It is a standard and veery good idea but not often illustrated. 

 

And the detail:

Cigarette Bombs as Munitions of Peace, 1916

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2078  

 

 

Superweapons have been used against cities for quite some time in the new world of speculative fiction, and there had been real-life aerial bombings from hot-air balloons, but the first time that a bomb was dropped from a heavier-than-air airplane on anything happened just months earlier, on 1 November 1911, when Lt. Giulio Cavotti dropped a hand grenade from his Etrich Taube on the oasis of Tagiura, in North Africa during the Italo-Turkish War.  He dropped four parcels of hand grenades on the not-necessarily-military population at the oasis, injuring no one.  The attack was one of attempted vengeance, a payback by the Italians against the Arabs of Tripoli, in general, for having joined forces with the Turks to fight against them.

Five years later (including two years of World War) advertisers were feeling quite enough at home with the idea of aerial bombing to use it on a growing basis to sell stuff to people.  The idea of bombing people with cigarettes--"munitions of peace"--was another in a developing series of dropping-what-you-want-to-sell-to-people-from-aeroplanes.  Murad is striking, but it is far from the first ad to employ airplane bombing--a good candidate for that occured four years earlier and only a year after the practice of dropping real bombs from planes was established. That would be in this 12 May 1912 ad for Purgen, "the Ideal Aperient" dropped on military-style tents  of "Ill Health", "Loss of Appetite", Lack of Energy", and so on, all within the possibility of cure by this Purgen product. 

Purgen was a laxative; Murad was cigarette bombs. 

Motion Bones

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2077  


 

While looking through an issue of the Comptes Rendus for the announcement of the funeral of the great mathematician and all-around genius Henri Poincare¹, I found in the weekly issue (a fraction of an inch comprising the three-inch-thick half-yearly volume of papers published by the French Academy) this wonderful illustration.  It looks a bit like the superstructure to a Cubist dance, and bears a good strong attraction to many of the still images produced by Etienne Marey, maybe even a little like a mirrored representation of a stick figure skeleton of Duchamp's Nude Descending, which interestingly was finished in this same year. 

[Etienne Marey, ca. 1880/1]

There's also a bit of early dance notation that the image reminds me of, particularly Raoul Feuillet's publication of Pierre Beauchamp's Orchesography⁴ , a work published first in 1700  (and then in English in 1706) and dedicated to instructing people on the movements of the dance:

The image is an illustration for the article "Un nouveau cinematographie a images, tres frequentes", by P(ierre) Nogues, and was a technical rendering of a device that ran film through a projector at a very high speed.  Nogues (1878-1971) was an assistant and collaborator to Etienne Marey, who was one of the earliest and perhaps the greatest figures in early cinematography and who--like Eadweard Muybridge--successful managed to create articulate optical machines that could capture and record minute and fast motion in people, animals, blood, and so on.  Nogues and his contemporaries lie Georges Demeny, Francois-Franck and Lucian Bull were among the founding encyclopedists of motion.  The drawing above was an outline for a sprocket device that feed flexible film through a camera at very high speed (ultimately reaching some 380 frames per second).  It is a beautiful thing. 

[M. Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (Nu descendant un escalier n° 2, 1912.  It is interesting to note in passing that this painting was supposedly rejected in the Salon des Indépendants show of 1912 and then caused a massive set-to in the NYC Armory Show of 1913. The infighting and family strife in the Salon in the 1900-1912 period is so big and complex it would make a fine if drippy daytime television romance drama.]

Notes:

1. Poincare died 17 July 1912, aged 58; the announcement of the funeral for one of the intellectual kings of the 19th century appeared on page 263 in this issue for 22 July 1912. 

Enormous Title of Visionary Work Utterly Defeats Library Cataloguer

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2076   Outsider Logic  Daily Dose from Dr. Odd

 There appeared on this blog last week a post regarding a library cataloguer who was not threatened or defeated by a work with an enormous and meandering title. The good librarian got right to it, recorded the deed, and moved on. Today's installment of card catalog magic presents a Library of Congress librarian who decided that enough-was-enough, and that there was simply too-much-title to record, and so simply left the rest of it to dots and to the imagination.

Now for the pamphlet itself and the rest of the title:

The author of this 1938 pamphlet simply started to write on the cover and continued through the rest of the work, and ended on the back cover.  There was no title page, no chapter headings, just a collection of ideas with lots of lists and seemingly nowhere to go.  For a short work (36 pages) the author could've dedicated another quire to some blank space, which really doesn't exist in the pamphlet but which is surprisingly helpful even if the message you are trying to deliver is somewhat, well, outre.  There is a lot of very compressed talk about multi-dimensional spirit and conscience and bank deposits and replacing the dollar and tax collection with "circulation of values", and so on, deep into itself and a closed system of interpretation of the existence of the universe, harmony of spirit, and economic interpretations of "radio bulbs" and the (often misspelled) fourtth [sic] dimension.  The writing is exhausting and enumerated, and even though by its colossal subject matter and the complex brevity it should be a reliably porous document, it is fairly rigid and brittle. It is a visionary work that somehow worked its way into print, and I'm happy for that, and even it is impossible to keep up with its runaway logic it is still a good ride.

The author's representation of a semi-vitruvian spiritual anatomy of humans, called Spirisoulman:

A detail of the fabulously-decorated heart region:

And of course part of the plan for universal economics which somehow wraps up the theory of in I.R., or the Inductive Rightousness of Inductive Truths:

Early on in the history of printed books there was a practice of extended title pages, where there would be the title, and then "support literature" further explaining the title to sometimes some great detail, occasionally winging its way into a title 200 words long.  But that was pretty much before the 18th century and mostly before the 17th and mostly a not-common practice.  The gigantic title in the 20th century seems to be mostly relegated to the less-traveled-road variety of public thinking.

And the card catalog for the undefeated librarian mentioned above:

 

 

Minimalist Steampunk Cathedral, 1872

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There is an undeniable element of techno-elegance in design and engineering the Big Heavies the last third of so of the 19th century.  Sometimes the elements of holy technology comes int he form of a beautiful, nearly-overly designed chromatic steam whistle, constructed almost as a gesture to the inexorable march of metal intellect, an enriched piece of engineering as a topping to an even higher achievement.  Sometimes it is in the design of the superstructure for some major piece of machinery, as in the Nasmyth hammer, a device as big as a house and heavier, decorated around its perimeter with lovely flourishes.  And sometimes we are reminded of the search and discovery of the creative spirit in the reproduction of a schematic, presented in a slightly different way, to remind us of the fantastic belief in the developing technology of the Second Industrial Revolution.

Found Literary and Visual art in Telegraphy

JF Ptak Science Books    Daily Dose from Dr. Odd  

Source:  Cyber Heroes of the Past, here.

Just yesterday I wrote a quick post on the history of holes and the development of telegraphy--actually, of Charles Wheatstone's inventions, which relates to the item above. The telegram has a look of great found techno-nerd beauty, and the text is wonderful in a disjointed semi-unintentionally-absurd kind of way.

The text reads (according to this wonderful site on the history of communication), identifies the telegram being sent from Wagga Wagga, NSW, Australia in 1924, with the Morse Code transliterated as follows:

“Black pickles contractors Junee X Glass broken Paul Blamey Please send measurements your price fixing including cartige we take risk also state value of salvage X Sandy”

Generally, much of the traffic in telegraphy was generated by business, and this is, I am pretty sure, one of those, with a few cipher words thrown in to save space/time/money for transmital--but when it stands separately, it is a phrase of some wonder. 

Massive Six-Person Tandem Airplane, 1910

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Lt. J.W. Seddon (R.N.) designed this incredible two-aeroplane aeroplane in 1910, composed of molded steel tubes in the place of wires for its framework.  As the caption states, there wasn't another plane like it in existence--it was massive for the time,weighed 2000 pounds, had 1000 sqft of wing, and was powered by two 80 hp engines.  And in a number of ways it was a picture of the future. [Source: The Illustrated London News, 10 September 1910.]