CABINET

A quarterly magazine of art and culture

Issue 4 Autumn 2001 US $8 Canada $12

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Contents

Columns
10
13
14
17

The clean room David Serlin

Colors Darren Wershler-Henry
Ingestion Allen S. Weiss
Leftovers Curtis C. Ebbesmeyer

Main
19
21
22
26
30
31
33
36
40
47
50
53
56
60
64
65
69
71
73
79
81
85

Scenic wallpaper Francesco Simeti

Stealth towers Kristen Dodge
Hidden talents: The camouage paintings of Abbott Handerson Thayer Emily Gephart
Hieroglyphs of the future: Jacques Rancire and the sthetics of equality Brian Holmes
By sea, by land, by air: Studio photographs from 1950s Lebanon
The traveling interview Dean MacCannell and Lucy Lippard
Hispaniola David Hawkes
Airport disease Matthew Rose
A fevered dream of Maya: Robert Stacy-Judd Jesse Lerner
Warhols dream Saul Anton
Warhols aura and the language of writing Tan Lin
Guggenheimlichkeit Carl Skelton
Marketing the prison experience in Tehran Golmohammad Rahati
Towards a military ethics at West Point: An interview with Col. Anthony Hartle Jay Worthington
The paper sculpture show Matt Freedman
Instant replay Eve Sussman
Door Paul Ramirez Jonas
Flame Pablo Vargas-Lugo
Coffee cup Sarah Sze
Folding chairs Allan Wexler
I tried! Jonathan Ames
Cover versions: The Communist Manifesto Geoff Cox

Animals
90
95
97
102
104
105
108
112
116
118
124

Where the wild things are: An interview with Steve Baker Gregory Williams
Fifteen theses on the cute Frances Richard
Bee Modern: An interview with Juan Antonio Ramirez Eric Bunge
Mapping behavior Tomas Matza
Bunny Rising Angela Wyman
Audition for a pair of koalas Kathy Temin
Animals on Trial Jeffrey Kastner
Beastly agendas: An interview with Kathleen Kete Sina Naja
Central Meat Market, London Andrew Cross
Recollecting the slaughterhouse Dorothee Brantz
The mouses tale Karen Rader

And
128

The lion in the Swedish winter Mats Bigert

Postcard Project Vadim Fishkin

Contributors

Jonathan Ames is the author of the novels,

I Pass Like Night and The Extra Man, and the
memoir, What's Not to Love?

David Hawkes is associate professor of

English at Lehigh University and the author
of Ideology.

Saul Anton is an editor at Cabinet.

Brian Holmes is a writer and translator based

in Paris.

Juan Antonio Ramirez is Professor of Art

History at Madrids Universidad Autnoma.
Steve Baker is Senior Lecturer in Historical
and Critical Studies at the University of
Central Lancashire in England.
Oliver Bernt is a professional architecture
photographer in Berlin, Germany.
Mats Bigert is one half of the Stockholmbased art duo Bigert & Bergstrm.
He is Cabinets editor-at-large in Sweden.
Dorothee Brantz is writing a doctoral
dissertation at the University of Chicago
on the history of slaughterhouses in
nineteenth-century Berlin and Paris.
Eric Bunge is an architect practicing in
New York. He is a principal of nARCHITECTS
and a visiting professor at Barnard College.
Bunge is a contributing editor at Cabinet.
Geoff Cox is an artist, teacher, and projects
organizer. He lives in London and works
at the University of Plymouth where he is
also part of CAiiA-STAR (Science Technology
Art Research).
Andrew Cross is an artist based in London.
Kristen Dodge is Cabinets ofce manager.
She is a recent graduate of Brown University.
Curtis Ebbesmeyer publishes the quarterly
non-prot newsletter Beachcombers Alert
concerning all things aoat.
Vadim Fishkin is a Russian artist based in
Ljubljana.
Matt Freedman is an artist based in
New York.
Emily Gephart writes on American art
and culture at the turn of the century. She is
currently pursuing a Ph.D. at MIT.
Col. Antony Hartle is deputy head of the
Department of English at the United States
Military Academy at West Point.

Britta Jaschinski is an artist based in London.

Jeffrey Kastner is a New York-based writer
and an editor of Cabinet
Kathleen Kete is the author of The Beast in the
Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth- Century
Paris. She is at work on a cultural history of
ambition in post-revolutionary France.
Jesse Lerner lives in Los Angeles, where he
writes, teaches, and makes documentary
lms. He is an editor-at-large at Cabinet.
Tan Lin is a poet and cultural critic based
in New York. He is a contributing editor at
Cabinet.
Lucy Lippard has written 20 books on
contemporary art and cultural criticism,
including Mixed Blessings: New Art in a
Multicultural America and The Lure of the
Local. She lives in Galisteo, New Mexico,
where she edits the community newsletter.
Dean MacCannell is recognized as the
founder of the eld of tourism studies with
his books The Tourist: A New Theory of the
Leisure Class and Empty Meeting Grounds.
He is Professor of Environmental Design and
Chair of Landscape Architecture at University
of California Davis.
Tomas Matza is a writer based in
San Francisco.
Sina Naja is editor-in-chief of Cabinet.
Karen Rader teaches Science, Technology,
and Society at Sarah Lawrence College.
She is currently completing a book on the
development of the laboratory mouse,
and beginning a new project on changing
modes of displaying biological science in
museums.
Golmohammad Rahati is a journalist and
documentary lmmaker living in Tehran.
Paul Ramirez Jonas is an artist based in New
York. He shares a love of minuti with several
of the editors of Cabinet magazine.

Frances Richard is a writer who lives in

Brooklyn. She is the non-ction editor of
the journal Fence and an editor at Cabinet.
Matthew Rose is a writer based in Paris.
David Serlin is an assistant professor of
History and American Studies at Albright
College, and is a contributing editor and
columnist for Cabinet.
Carl Skelton, New York: sculpture, video,
installation, long explanations.
Eve Sussman is an artist who shoots lm and
video and writes very short stories. She lives
and works in Brooklyn.
Sarah Sze is an artist based in New York.
Kathy Temin is an Australian artist based in
New York.
Pablo Vargas-Lugo is an artist based in
Mexico City.
Allen S. Weiss teaches at the Performance
Studies and Cinema Studies Departments
at New York University. He is the author of
many books, including Phantasmic Radio.
Weiss is an editor-at-large at Cabinet.
Darren Wershler-Henry, a writer, critic and
the editor of Coach House Books, lives in
Toronto. His second book of poetry, the
tapeworm foundry andor the dangerous
prevalence of imagination, was shortlisted for
the 2001 Trillium Prize.
Allan Wexler is an artist based in New
York City. He is represented by the Ronald
Feldman Gallery and teaches in the
Department of Architecture at Pratt Institute.
SFMOMA mounted a retrospective of his
work in 2001.
Gregory Williams is an art critic and writer
living in New York. He is also an editor of
Cabinet.
Jay Worthington is an editor-at-large at
Cabinet. He is also a founding member of the
New York-based non-prot theater company
Clubbed Thumb.
Angela Wyman is an artist based in New York.

Beasty
Books
A pleasure to read
as well as being a
substantial work of
scholarship.
Andrew Johnson,
Environmental Values
From Mickey Mouse
to the use of jackass
as an all-purpose
insult, images of
animals are integral to
Western culture. Baker
examines how these
distorted images affect
how real animals are
perceived and treated.
www.press.uillinois.edu/f01/
baker.html
Paperback, $19.95

Regan responds
thought-fully to his critics
while dismantling the
conception that all and
only human beings
are worthy of the moral
status that is the basis
of rights.
www.press.uillinois.edu/s01/
regan.html
Hardcover, $24.95

available from your bookseller,

or call 800.545.4703

The University of Illinois Press

BEIRUT

NEW YORK

arab image foundation

www.fai.org.lb

The Arab Image Foundation was established in Beirut in 1997 to

locate, collect, preserve, interpret and present the photographic
heritage and visual culture of the Middle East and North Africa from
the early 19th century to the present. The collection
provides insight into a period of crucial transformation in Arab
history and Arab lands. The foundation (or AIF) aims to
contribute to the study and understanding of the region and
its cultures, as well as to support contemporary Arab visual
production and analysis. Our database is available to artists,
curators and scholars for research and licensed usage; and to
the public primarily through publication and exhibition projects.

Printing In Real Time

Pre-Press Press
Post-Press Display Graphics
212.352.9500

www.dig-ink.com

160 Varick Street New York City

Celebrating 25 Years
Providing Independent Coverage of Contemporary Art

404-588-1837 www.artpapers.org

Columns

The Clean Room

Making the Jaipur foot
David Serlin
Allen Christian, a Minneapolis-based artist,
tells a story about a homeless Indian man he
knew years ago who wore a prosthetic leg.
Christian recalls how he met the man one
summer outside his former storefront studio,
another of the nameless acquaintances one
accumulates when living in an urban downtown area. I talked to him a couple of times
but mainly remember one evening we sat
on the bus-stop bench and looked out at
the skyline, says Christian. Several weeks
passed before he caught another glimpse of
the man. And then one day Christian spotted
the lone prosthetic leg standing all by itself
in a nearby vacant lot, as if it had been left
behind in desperate haste.
The Clean Room, David Serlins column on science and
technology, appears in each issue of Cabinet.
Colors is a column in which a guest writer is asked to
respond to a specic color assigned by the editors of
Cabinet.
Ingestion is a column by Allen S. Weiss on cuisine,
sthetics, and philosophy.
Leftovers is a column in which Cabinet invites a guest to
discuss leftovers or detritus from a cultural perspective.

What happened to Christians friend remains

something of a mystery. In fact, we know
more about the mans leg than about his
life. The plastic, padded leg, which Christian
keeps in his studio, is custom-made,
designed and crafted by a Western-trained
professional prosthetist, and costs thousands of dollars. Despite his mysterious
disappearance, the Indian was probably
someone from a middle-classor perhaps
even aristocraticbackground who had
fallen on hard times. Indeed, the notion that
Jaipur foot decorated with rings and nail polish.
Photo Raman Srinivasan

10

an articial leg can be a marker of economic

status or national identityespecially for the
national of a country often associated with
a developing or impoverished economy
is deeply intertwined with histories of prosthetic devices, however submerged such a
notion may be.
In early modern Europe, for example,
men or women of privilege commissioned
artisans to supply prostheses made of
carved wood, painted leather, and even
precious metals to replace body parts lost
to injury or illness. In the collections of
Londons Science Museum, an elegant
carved mechanical hand made for a Victorian concert pianist has circular patches
of green felt attached to its ngertips,
mirroring the delicate wooden hammers
inside the piano case. This was not a hand
made for digging ditches. In 19th-century
United States, the regular amputation of
limbs by battleeld assaults, dangerous
machinery, and transportation-related
accidents gave rise to another industrial
trade as a burgeoning middle-class demanded mass-produced, articulated limbs to
replace homemade peg legs and roughhewn hooks. Rural and suburban consumers
seeking these modern products of industrial
efciency and a more genteel sensibility
could order made-to-measure arms and legs
from manufacturers such as A.A. Marks
on the same day that they ordered home-

building kits from the Montgomery Ward

catalogue.
Over the past half-century, the use of industrial products such as stainless steel,
molded plastics, silicon, and berglass has
resulted in state-of-the-art prosthetics that
can cost tens of thousands of dollars. In
1997, for instance, the worlds of medical
commodication and sexual fetishism
collided when British designer Alexander
McQueen featured model and celebrity
paraplegic Aimee Mullins on the highfashion runway with a pair of $30,000
carbon-graphite legs. Many active in the
disability community argue that the discourse surrounding assistive technologies
such as prostheses gives too much authority
to prosthetists and engineers, rather than
to the patients themselves. This attitude has
been compounded by postmodernisms
continuing romance with prosthetic
tech-nologies, which Western historians
and theorists tend to treat as symbolic or
metaphorical objects rather than as everyday material tools used by individuals who
have read not a whit of Donna Haraway.
The ultimate proof of a successful prosthetic,
after all, resides not in space-age products
using DuPont chemicals or in customized
designs using CAD software but in the
amputees ability to become autonomous.
For this reason, the will to circumvent
medical expertise and improvise with homemade technologies runs high among the
mechanically inclined as well as the uninsured. The National Museum of American
History in Washington, DC, for example,
contains many ingenious examples of legs
fashioned out of wood, rags, scrap metal,
and wire donated to their collections as late
as the 1970s. Such vernacular legs may
have been unsightly but, the donors claim,
they were innitely more hardy than the
realistically rendered but often painful plastic
variety. Without some form of agency,
the amputee has no choice but to remain
forever dependent on an intricate web of
medical-industrial products and services
dened by multibillion dollar, for-prot
health-care providers, ensuring that access
to such technologies remains a singularly
First-World option.
In the mid-1960s, Dr. Pramod Karan Sethi
established a rehabilitation center for belowthe-ankle amputees in Jaipur, India, to
redress some of the basic inequities inherent
in prosthetic design and accessibility. Sethi
helped to develop a new kind of prosthesis
made from discarded rubber tires and other
industrial detritus available in abundance
in Jaipur and across India. His center trains
recent amputeesfrom street beggars to
middle-class housewiveshow to make

11

new feet. Once it is slipped over the ankle

stump, it can serve as a cosmetic foot
replacement, a weatherproof shoe, or both.
At a cost of about $5, it is a mere fraction of
the price of a Western prosthesis. Best of all,
if the patient damages, loses, or outgrows
his or her foot, he or she can simply make
a new one. Sethis invention has become
known internationally as the Jaipur Foot.
Over the past three decades, developing
nations have been drawn to the Jaipur Foot
as a viable alternative to costly prosthetics.
With the Jaipur Foot, patients retain
complete control of the material as well
as the method of their rehabilitation rather
than succumbing passively to the top-heavy
Western medical model. For his invention
and his vision, Sethi received in 1981 the
Magsaysay Award, the Asian equivalent of
the Nobel Prize.
Giving a prosthesis a local identity seems
to be a recurring motif. In the 1960s, for
example, the rst myoelectric armone
which uses electrical signals to stimulate
and amplify residual nerves in an above-theelbow amputees stumpbecame widely
known in the US as the Boston arm
because of its inventor, MIT mathematics
professor Norbert Wiener. Unlike sophisticated Western prosthetics, however, the
Jaipur Foot is a self-sustaining technology
made from local materials that is crafted and
maintained by the individual once he or she
has been given proper guidance. It is
paradigmatic of what many green activists
call an appropriate technology, since it
uses materials and production methods that
are sensitive to immediate economic
and environmental contexts. As Raman
Srinivasan has written, in an extensive
history of the Jaipur Foot to be published
later this year, the technology for making
this prosthetic device requires little in the
way of start-up capital or cumbersome
machinery, uses locally available materials
such as rubber and wood, and provides
ample scope for the expression of artistic
skills and artisanship. As a consequence,
it is not protected by intellectual property
regimes, thus making it widely available.1
One powerful photograph taken by
Srinivasan in 1986 depicts an Indian woman
who has customized her Jaipur Foot with
ornamental rings, nail polish, and even
traditional designs etched in henna.
The Jaipur Foot is also a beautiful example
of the ways in which vernacular technologies
can be used to challenge the legacies of
colonialism in order to promote both physical and cultural autonomy. As Srinivasan
has described, the history of the Jaipur Foot
is intimately intertwined with Indias history
under British rule. Sir Clemens Markham
sponsored the rst shipments of caoutchouc

(rubber) seeds to Ceylon in 1876. Within a

decade, Markham had established rubber as
a signicant export product within the global
distribution system of the British Empire.
Even after India gained independence
in 1947, rubber remained a compelling
symbol of the former imperial powers
transformation of the countrys physical
landscape. This is precisely what Sethi found
so liberating in rubber: it was a domestic
product that could be re-appropriated for a
completely different use.
In a sense, the Jaipur Foot provides a tting
conclusion to the exploits of 19th-century
European imperialism. In his recent opus
Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis shows
how European powers in India and Asia
created the conditions for vast starvation
by forcing their colonies to grow agricultural
products for global distribution rather than
local use.2 Davis argues that while tens of
millions of Asians died in the droughts and
famines of the 1880s and 1890s, imperial
power brokers and policy makers in
European capitals like London encouraged
their subjects to resist the temptation
of paternalistic aid, calling upon them to
become self-sufcient in the face of
adversity. Ironically, Indias development of
a late 19th-century rubber monoculture for
global use enabled a late 20th-century
rehabilitation model that emphasizes local
materials and local artisans and supports
local environments. These are self-sustaining
technologies, not ones that rely on external
resources or expertise. By contrast, it is the
citizens of Western countries, succored
at the breast of free-market economics, who
have been forced to accept a paternalistic
health care model that puts control and
expertise in the hands of powerful HMOs
and other bureaucratic medical organizations. Our dependence on the medicalindustrial complex is proof enough that we
have absorbed the legacies of colonialism to
the degree that we are incapable of retaining
control over our own bodies. It is we who
accept medical authority (and its attendant
expenses) in direct proportion to our physical vulnerability. This is the triumph of the
Jaipur Foot over not only the legacies of
19th-century British colonialism, but over
20th-century Western medicine in general.;
1 See Raman Srinivasan, Technology Sits Cross-Legged:
A History of the Jaipur Foot, in Katherine Ott et al., Articial
Parts, Practical Lives: Modern Histories of Prosthetics (New
York: NYU Press, forthcoming).
2 See Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nio
Famines and the Making of the Third World (New York:
Verso, 2001).

12

Colors
Ruby (and beyond)
Darren Wershler-Henry
The price of wisdom is beyond rubies.
Job 28:18
According to the Optical Society of America,
it is possible to identify somewhere between
7.5 and 10 million distinct colors. Ruby
is presumably one of them, but how would
we agree on which one it is? In his essay
How Culture Conditions the Colours We
See, Umberto Eco notes that the majority
of attempts to discriminate between colors
fail dramatically. In the Farnsworth-Munsell
test, which involves categorizing 100
different hues, 68% of the test subjects
(colorblind people excluded) make between
20 and 100 errors; only 16% of subjects
make fewer than 16 errors.1
Even if we could agree on a particular
shade like ruby (a dubious proposition,
evidently) odds are that we wouldnt be
able to discuss it. After pointing out that
the majority of the Farnsworth-Munsell
test subjects lack the linguistic means to
identify even the hundred colors in the test,
Eco observes that the largest collection of
color designations in English, A. Maerz and
R. Pauls A Dictionary of Color (New York:
Crowell, 1953), assigns names to only 3000
hues, and that of these 3000 names, only
eight occur in common usage. In other
words, average chromatic competence is
better represented by the seven colors of the
rainbow.2
The names of colours, concludes Eco (from
these and other scientic, linguistic, and
philosophical observations), taken in themselves, have no precise chromatic content:
they must be viewed within the general context of many interacting semiotic systems.3
So any useful discussions involving the
status of ruby must immediately move
over (the pun is irresistible) the rainbow and
into the realm of systems of cultural meaning and exchange.
Which brings us to the Ruby Slippers,
the most immediately identiable North
American cultural icon associated with
the color ruby since the making of the lm
The Wizard of Oz in 1939. But if we can
bracket Judy Garland and camp, and the
burning question of whether or not there
were more than seven pairs of slippers
made for the movie for just long enough
to compare the lm to the source text, L.
Frank Baums The Wonderful Wizard of
Oz, something much more interesting
becomes apparent: the ruby slippers were
originally silver.4

This disjunction leads to an examination of

the semiotic values of ruby, silver, and gold
as signiers of nancial exchange, and
how the reading of a key cultural text shifts
dramatically because of the seemingly innocuous decision made by one Noel Langley,
a screenwriter for MGM, to substitute one
of these hues for another.
This isnt just quibbling over details; theres
a serious argument to be made for reading
Baums Oz as a complex symbolic allegory
describing William Jennings Bryan and the
Free Silver Movement of the 1890s, and it
all hinges on the fact that Dorothys slippers
are silver, not ruby.
William Jennings Bryan believed it was
unnecessary for the government to maintain
gold reserves equal in value to all the paper
currency in circulation. During his presidential campaign, Bryan advocated the
coinage of silver at a xed ratio with gold
(16 ounces of silver coin for every ounce of
gold reserve), which he hoped would break
the Eastern banks monopoly on gold-based
currency, and simultaneously inate the
meager prices that farmers received for their
crops, easing their debt burden.
So then: Is reading Oz as a pro-Bryan
allegory dabbling in economic conspiracy
theory pseudo-criticism worthy of Ezra
Pound? Lets weigh the evidence.
Oz is the abbreviation for ounce, the ofcial unit of measure for gold and silver. The
road to the Emerald City, the seat of scal
and political power, is made of, um, yellow
bricks. Youre beginning to get the idea.
The allegorical reading of Oz was rst
suggested by historian Henry M. Littleeld
in his article The Wizard of Oz: Parable
on Populism.5 Littleeld argues that the
characters also lend themselves to allegorical interpretation. Dorothy (everywoman
from the Midwest) inadvertently slays the
Wicked Witch of the East (the bankers),
then heads down the golden road in her
new silver shoes (means of circulation) to
free the little people.
Dorothy accomplishes her task with the help
of the Scarecrow (an uneducated farmer),
the Tin Woodman (an industrial worker and
the epitome of alienated labor. The Woodman was originally a human being, but the
Wicked Witch of the East cast a spell on him
that caused him to chop off part of his body
every time he swung his axe; his esh was
gradually entirely replaced by metal prosthetics that rusted and failedas did the
factories themselves in the 1893 depression)
and the Cowardly Lion (Bryan himself, a
committed pacist and anti-imperialist). The

Wizard (President) turns out to be a carpetbagging opportunist, carny, and master of

illusions who is eventually debunked by the
scarecrow, educated by his recent experiences. Dorothy drowns the Wicked Witch
of the West (wiping out the drought) and the
Wizard ies away in a balloon full of his own
hot air, leaving the government of the land
of Oz in the hands of the enlightened triumvirate of Scarecrow, Tin Woodman, and Lion.
As with all allegorical interpretations, its
difcult to know where to draw the line with
Oz (as David Antin notes, Allegory is a very
corrupt gure, a gure notably incapable
of supporting fact).6 Over the years,
scholars have suggested, with diminishing
credibility, that the Flying Monkeys represent
the First Nations (Once, began the leader,
we were a free people, living happily in the
great forest, ying from tree to tree, eating
nuts and fruit, and doing just as we pleased
without calling anybody master.), Winkies
represent the people of the Philippines
(under US control after the SpanishAmerican War), and even that Toto represents the teetotaling Prohibitionists.7
Tenuous associations aside, problems
with reading Oz as a pro-Bryan allegory arise
when scrutinizing Baums actual politics.
L. Frank Baum was not a particularly political
animal, but was known to have marched in
several torchlight parades promoting Bryans
presidential campaign.
The ip side of the coin, though, is detailed
in David B. Parkers article The Rise and
Fall of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as
a Parable on Populism.8 Parker provides
two pieces of evidence that suggest that
Baum was actually a Republican, not
a Populist. The rst is that in 1890, Baum
bought a small newspaper, the Aberdeen
Saturday Pioneer. Parker remarks that the
Pioneer was obviously a Republican paper.
During the municipal elections that spring,
Baum editorialized in support of the Republican candidates; after they won, he wrote
that Aberdeen has redeemed herself
[a]fter suffering for nearly a year from
the incompetence of a democratic administration. Later that same year, Baum
editorialized against the Independent
movement that evolved into the Populists.
The second piece of evidence Parker
provides is that on 12 July 1896, the year
of the election that would mark what has
been called the Climax of Populism,
Baum published the following anti-silverite
poem in the Chicago Times Herald:
When McKinley gets the chair, boys,
Therell be a jollication
Throughout our happy nation

Ruby Road.
Photo Elena Grossman

13

And contentment everywhere!

Great will be our satisfaction
When the honest-money faction
Seats McKinley in the chair!
No more the ample crops of grain
That in our granaries have lain
Will seek a purchaser in vain
Or be at mercy of the bull or bear;
Our merchants wont be trembling
At the silverites dissembling
When McKinley gets the chair!
When McKinley gets the chair, boys,
The magic word protection
Will banish all dejection
And free the workingman from every care;
We will gain the worlds respect
When it knows our coins correct
And McKinleys in the chair!
Prominent Baum scholar Michael Patrick
Hearn quoted this poem in a 1991 letter
to the New York Times (20 December
1991), arguing that there is no evidence
that Baums story is in any way a Populist
allegory and that Littleelds allegory has
no basis in fact. A month later, Littleeld
himself recanted and agreed with Hearn,
writing that there is no basis in fact to
consider Baum a supporter of turn-of-thecentury Populist ideology. (New York Times,
7 February 1992).
The real irony, though, doesnt lie in Parkers
partial deconstruction of Littleelds allegory.
It lies in the fact that rather than recontextualizing Oz as an ironic or parodic allegory,
or pushing the whole argument into a kind
of De Manian treatise on allegory and unknowability, Parker turns around and contends that Oz is, in actuality, a Theosophist
allegory.9
Doncha love academics?=

1 Umberto Eco, How Culture Conditions the Colours We

See, in On Signs, ed. Marshall Blonsky (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1985), p. 167.
2 Ibid., pp. 16768.
3 Ibid., p. 173.
4 For information on this history, visit the following
websites: www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Hills/6396/
rubyslip.htm; www.ukans.edu/carrie/kancoll/books/baum/
oz02.htm; www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Hills/6396/
rubyslip.htm;
5 Henry M. Littleeld, The Wizard of Oz: Parable on
Populism, American Quarterly no. 16 (1964), pp. 47-58.
The entire text is available online at www.amphigory.com/
oz.htm.
6 David Antin, talking at the boundaries (New York: New
Directions, 1976), p. 149.
7 See www.ukans.edu/carrie/kancoll/books/baum/ oz14.
htm and www.geocities.com/Athens/Parthenon/ 6641/
ozpopul.html.
8 David B. Parker, The Rise and Fall of The Wonderful
Wizard of Oz as a Parable on Populism, Journal of the
Georgia Association of Historians, vol. 15 (1994), pp. 49-63.
The complete text is available at www.geocities.com/
Athens/Parthenon/6641/ozpopul.html.
9 See David B. Parkers Oz: L. Frank Baums Theosophical
Utopia, available at www.geocities.com/Athens/
Parthenon/6641/oztheos.html.

Ingestion
The epic of the cephalopod
Allen S. Weiss
Consider the cephalopod represented in
Victor Hugos ink-and-wash drawing of an
octopus, Pieuvre (c. 1866), a black, nearly
formless stain that evokes the morbid,
lugubrious aspect of this animal, described
by Hugo: One would say a beast made of
ash that inhabits the water. It is spider-like
in form and chameleon-like in coloration.1
As is the case for the most extreme examples of zoological and botanical classes,
such animals touch on the limits of monstrosity, evoking worldly fears and unconscious anguish. One can, in fact, localize
the source of the octopus as monster par
excellence, as a creature of nightmares and
terror, an icon of the horrors of death: It
was the moment when Victor Hugo, in Les
travailleurs de la mer (1866), substituted the
local word pieuvre, used only in the Channel
Islands, for the more common term poulpe.
One should remember that in French, the
word for the living animal is usually different
from that of the carcass to be transformed
into food-stuff. Hugos differentiation
between poulpe and pieuvre takes this
transformative logic one step further, for
while normally man eats poulpe, in Les
travailleurs de la mer the opposite is true,
as pieuvre threatens to eat man, in the most
horrendous of manners.
This moment of inestimable horror occurs
when the protagonist, Gilliat, in the process
of exploring rock formations on the coast,
is caught in the grip of a giant octopus.
This animal is a monster, the very enigma
of evil, a viscosity with a will, a boneless,
bloodless, eshless creature with a unique
orice equivocally and disquietingly serving
as both mouth and anus. Endowed with
eight powerful tentacles covered with
hundreds of blood-sucking suction cups,
the octopus borders on the chimerical
a medusa served by eight snakes
as if coming from a world other than our
own. Its attack is pure terror:
It is a pneumatic machine that attacks you.
You are dealing with a footed void. Neither
claw thrusts nor tooth bites, but an unspeakable scarication. A bite is formidable, but
less so than such suction. The claw is nothing
compared to the sucker. The claw, thats the
beast that enters your esh; the sucker, thats
you yourself who enters into the beast. Your
muscles swell, your bers twist, your skin
bursts beneath this unworldly force, your
blood spurts and frightfully mixes with the
mollusks lymph. The beast is superimposed
upon you by its thousand vile mouths; the
hydra is incorporated in the man; the man
Victor Hugo, Pieuvre, 1866.

14

15

is amalgamated with the hydra. The two

make one. This dream is upon you. The tiger
can only devour you; the octopus, what
horror, breathes you in! It draws you toward
itself and into itself, and, bound, stuck,
powerless, you slowly feel yourself emptied
out within that horrendous sack, that
monster. Beyond the terror of being eaten
alive is the ineffability of being drunk alive.2
Here, monstrosity gains a new dimension,
the reduction of anatomy to an absolute
orice. This indescribable horror
inexorably leads to the horror of the indescribable, as analyzed by Laurent Jenny
in La terreur et les signes, in terms of the
poetics of ungurability. The octopus represents a zoological manifestation of the
temptation of the void, the equivocation
of the formless, the horror of ungraspable
monstrosity. Jenny explains: Hugos
octopus is not satised being merely the
gravedigger of the living: the entire sensible
world comes to be buried within it piece
by piece, wayward residues with which its
monstrosity is nourished.3
In fact, it is zoologically the case that the
squid, and not the octopus, occasionally
grows to giant proportions. Indeed, Linnaeus
even included, in the rst edition
of his Systema Natur, a species referred
to as Sepia microcosmos, to describe the
giant squid; by 1861 the rst demonstrable
evidence of giant cephalopods was offered;
and such giant creaturesreferred to
as Kraken, Devil-sh, Blood-Suckers
continued to excite the popular imagination.
Hugo described the creative logic behind
this perversion of creation:
At certain moments, one would be tempted
to think that the ineffable which oats in
our dreams encounters, in the realm of
the possible, magnets that attract its lineaments, and that beings emerge from
these obscure xations of the dream.
The Unknown disposes of marvels, and it
makes use of them to compose monsters.
Orpheus, Homer and Hesiod only managed
to make the Chimera; God made the
Octopus. When God wishes, he excels in
the execrable.4
While Hugo criticizes God for creating
the octopus, that masterpiece of fright,
Lautramont turns this terror against its
own creator. In Les chants de Maldoror,
he imagines a creature to torment God:
Maldoror changed into an octopus, moving
against his body his eight monstrous arms,
each solid lash of which could easily have
embraced the circumference of a planet.5
But it is perhaps Jules Michelet who best
summed up, in La Mer (1861), the continual
source of fascination, in the literal sense

16

of the term, with such cephalopods: You

are more mask than being.6
In La Seiche (The Squid; or The Cuttlesh),
the autobiographical novel by Maryline
Desbiolles, the recipe for stuffed squid
divides the book into twelve chapters.
This recipe articulates both the narrative
and the symbolic structure of the book, all
the while marking the variegated trajectory
from reality to ction through numerous
digressions. The seductive, petrifying
squid that the narrator saw as a child in the
oceanographic museum in Monaco is made
the symbol of both life and death. For this
child, who emigrated from the mountains
of Savoie to the back country of Nice, the
simple experience of seeing a pissaladire
(a Nioise onion tart) emerge from an oven
was enough to make of that stove, the
doors of the unknown7; for the adult
author, the kitchen, and more precisely
the recipe for stuffed squid, continues
to offer the basis for a meditation about her
predilection for exploring both the unknown
and death itself.
The narrator explains, at one point, that,
But for the moment I only want the squid
for the fragility of its doubtful whiteness,
for the subtleness of its white coat,8 an
animal curiously whiter than milk, whiter
than snow. The unknown has, by denition,
no color; whence, for example, the intensity
of the terror inspired by Moby Dick.
This disquieting strangeness suggests
the necessity of establishing an iconology
of La Seiche, a book traversed by a constant
and disquieting slippage from white to
whitishness, from whiteness to whitening;
a tale in which white is neither color nor
light, but the very texture of existence, the
interior ber of desire and pain, and the
certain premonition of death. Given my own
family name, Weisswhiteness in its pure,
abstract state; a strange and foreign whiteness; a disquieting name for a writer
I cannot be indifferent to the gural play
derived from the authors name, Desbiolles,
equally linked (not directly, but through a
botanical intermediary) to the color white:
But I was even furthermore convinced
that whiteness was not as dreary as I had
thought when I learned that my name, that
of my father, came from the birch tree,
whose silver-white bark made it the most
attractive of all trees.9 And this name, this
onomastic whiteness, was also inscribed
in her culinary destiny, signied by rice,
that delicate and nacreous hyphen10 connecting her familys Italian origins and her
own birth in Savoie. This emigration was
marked by the passage from her grandmothers risotto to riz la bchamel, a rice
and a sauce that could not but evoke the
horizon of her childhood, the eternal snow

above the r trees.11 This whiteness

triumphed once again in the squid, symbol
of the strangeness that the South would always remain for her. But despite the monochromatic aspect of this creative matrix, the
squid symbolizes a complex existence: It
was really in the nature of this animal, with
its changing name and uctuating morphology, to plunge us into confusion from the
very beginning.12 Milky, murky waters have
always inspired writers and artists, whence
the duality of the iconography of La Seiche:
both a chromatic (or rather achromatic)
iconography of whiteness, and a zoological
iconography.
The psychic source of this cephalopodic
symbol of death is expressed, in all its terror,
by Artaud in Correspondance de la momie
(1927), a meditation on the question of
suicide: But this death is much more rened; this death multiplied by myself exists
through a sort of rarefaction of my esh.
The intelligence has no more blood.
The squid of nightmares spurts all its ink
to obstruct the outlets of the spirit; it is blood
emptied from the veins, meat oblivious
to the cut of the knife.13 While Artaud never
conquered the inner squid of his torments,
Hugos protagonist, Gilliat, vanquished the
giant octopus: Gilliat plunged the point
of his knife into the at viscosity and, with
a gyrating movement like the twist of
a whiplash, making a circle around the two
eyes, ripped off the head like one pulls out
a tooth. It was over. The entire beast fell.
It resembled a fallen piece of laundry.
The sucking pump destroyed, the void was
undone.14 As for Desbiolles, her accurate
knifeworktaking care not to tear the
beasts eshassured the success of the
dish, though the squid took its revenge
otherwise, in a more purely psychological
manner.
The narrative of La Seiche is polymorphous, vacillating between childhood and
adulthood, life and death, Eros and Thanatos, macrocosm and microcosm, gastronomy and psychology; when we reach
the point of the recipe where the narrator
ex-plains that, now we must stuff the phantom,15 the squid has already taken on an
excessive and incommensurable symbolism.
A dish is a symbol; inspiration comes from
aromas, tastes, techniques; but meaning
derives from elsewhere, from a place most
often unnamable and unattainable. In
La Seiche, the ambivalent phantomsquid,
self, death is founded on a confusion
of names, a rich polychromaticism
paradoxically existing within the connes
of whiteness, and a narrative enriched by
subtle allusions and complex correspondences. The narrator could indeed claim that,
La seiche, cest moi.

If, as Proust showed so well, childhood

culinary experiences provide the paradigms
that guide adult culinary pleasure and
discomfort, it is also true that the culinary
exists in a symbolic matrix far more complex
than that which uses food alone as its
metaphors: ...I bit into the sheet to keep
me from already sliding into the innitely
open pit. The little bellies were quite taut,
quite stuffed, quite swelled.16 The shudder
caused by an unexpected juxtaposition
that of the Pascalian theological black hole
of the open pit of hell revealed to the child
during catechism, and the white holes
constituted by the squids aligned on the
kitchen table many years afteris existential,
and not surreal; and the disquietude caused
by recognition of ones own mortality, while
not appeased by the cathartic effects of
the white host, was allegorized by the
squid. The hint of the abyss that spices
up the squids welcoming void is a subtle
manifestation of the sublime in cuisine,
that violent and scatological sublime that
establishes the metaphysical piquancy
of gastronomy. As Hugo reminds us in
Les travailleurs de la mer, All beings enter
into one another. Rot is nourishment.
The frightful cleansing of the globe. Man,
the carnivore, is also a burier. Our lives are
made of death. Such is the terrifying law.
We are tombs.17 Nothing is exempt from
this law, as is proven by the eating of the
gods. Indeed, for Maryline Desbiolles the
essence of cuisine is to eat death, to make
it ones own, to slowly masticate it, taste
it, to lick ones lips after it...18 We cook dead
esh, we cook death itself (well spiced),
we grasp it and tear it apart with our teeth,
before nally abandoning our own life to
it in turn. Yet these stages of life are not
chronological, and the psychological
structure of existence, like that of most
complex narratives, is one of hysteresis,
an anachronistic lagging of effects on a body
behind the cause, the displacement
of a previous inuence on a subsequent
response. Might this not be precisely the
structure of culinary sublimation?7
This article is part of a forthcoming book, Feast and Folly.
An earlier version of this text appeared in Critique #618,
1998. All translations are by the author.

1 Victor Hugo, Les travailleurs de la mer (1866), in Oeuvres

compltes, Roman III (Paris: Laffont / Bouquins, 1985), p.

279.
2 Ibid., p. 281.
3 Laurent Jenny, La terreur et les signes : Potiques de
rupture (Paris: Gallimard, 1982), p. 107.
4 Les travailleurs de la mer, p. 278.
5 Cited in Roger Caillois, La pieuvre : Essai sur la logique de
limaginaire (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1973), p. 89.
6 Cited in La pieuvre, p. 75.
7 Maryline Desbiolles, La Seiche (Paris: Le Seuil, 1998),
p. 105. An English translation of this work has appeared as
The Cuttlesh, trans. Mara Bertelsen (New York: Herodias,
2001). All references here are to the French edition.
8 Ibid., p. 12.
9 Ibid., p. 48.
10 Ibid., p. 45.
11 Ibid., p. 48. For another reading of white foods of
childhood, see Chantal Thomas, Blancmange with Almond
Milk, in Allen S. Weiss, ed., Taste, Nostalgia (New York:
Lusitania Press, 1997), pp. 17 19.
12 Ibid., p. 7.
13 Antonin Artaud, Correpondance de la momie (1927),
in Oeuvres compltes, Vol. I, Part II (Paris: Gallimard, 1976),
p. 57.
14 Les travailleurs de la mer, p. 285.
15 La Seiche, p. 52.
16 Ibid., p. 58.
17 Les travailleurs de la mer, p. 283.
18 La Seiche, pp. 2526.

Leftovers
Evangelical currents
Curtis C. Ebbesmeyer
Im an oceanographer specializing in
currents and what they transport. By day
I earn a living by tracking things like sewage
for a company whose reports are sold to
agencies. By night I track otsam. I rst
began following spills from cargo containers in 1990 when a ship spilled 80,000
Nike sneakers in the Pacic Ocean. A spill
of 29,000 bathtub toys (including yellow
duckies) kept me busy in 1992, and 1997
saw ve million Lego pieces spilled off
Lands End, England. At the moment 2000
17-inch computer monitors that spilled
in the Pacic last year are washing up on
shore. In 1996 I established the Beachcombers Alert newsletter and I now receive
reports about all manner of washed-up
debris from beachcombers from all over
the world.
Many of these beachcombers search for
the fabled message in the bottle but few
nd them. I have never found one but a
Dutch beachcomber, Wim Kruiswijk, ranks
as the all-time best. While searching for 19
years (1980-1998) along the coast bordering the southern North Sea, Kruiswijk
hauled home 435 bottled notes. Looking
for patterns, Kruiswijk divided them into
thirteen types:
# of bottles

Reason:

157
109
56

Seeking pen pal

Address only
Request for postcard of
nders hometown
Jokes
Religion
Love note
Class project
Daddys kids1
Drawings
Pornographic
Help requested
Advertisement
Pollution protest

36
27
12
10
9
9
4
3
2
1

Six percent of Kruiswijks nds carried

religious messages. These bottles were
from a get-a-free-bible institution in
Evreux, France; a preacher in Lowestoft,
England; six girls on a Mormon cruise;
and an ex-boxer who saw the light in Kent,
England. The Bible contains no less than
1,020 references to water (665) and
the sea (355). Walking on water. Paths
in the seas. Voices on the water. Read the
Bible often enough and certain phrases
virtually tell the devout to spread religious
tracts far and wide across the ocean:

17

The Lord is upon many waters.

Psalms 29:3
Cast thy bread upon the waters, for thou
shalt nd it after many days.
Ecclesiastes 11:1
Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my
tears into thy bottle.
Psalms 56:8
Shortly before World War II, the biblical
injunction struck 49-year-old George Phillips
on Puget Sound, Washington. The rst
to my knowledge to spread scriptures in
oating bottles, Phillips said, I was down
on the beach one day in April 1940, not far
from our home, and I saw the tide carrying
driftwood. Why couldnt I spread the gospel
in the same way? By 1940 the currents
of history had converged to make this idea
feasible. The year 1903 had seen the rst
machine-produced glass bottles, and literacy
had increased by the 1930s to the point
that many of the worlds poor could read
or nd someone who could. An alcoholic,
Phillips knew rsthand about spirits in
a bottle. Leaving behind the real estate
and the used car businesses, Phillips began
in 1941 to redeem bottles full-time from city
dumps, garbage cans, streets, and alleys for
his Worldwide Missionary Effort.
The ocean currents, virtually a planetary
postmistress, yielded 1,500 replies to
Phillipss 40,000 gospel epistles, his piety
bottles turning up on the Pacic Coast,
Mexico, Hawaii, New Guinea, and Australia.
A thousand pledged to stop drinking and
hundreds more vowed to return to the
church. After Hurricane Audrey devastated
Louisiana, searchers discovered two of
Phillipss missionary bottles unbroken
amongst the wrecked homes and corpses
at Holly Beach and Johnsons Bayou. They
had drifted some 10,000 miles in the six
years since being launched in July 1951.
Another story involves a Chicago businessmanhis business bankrupt and wife
estrangedwho ed to Mexico in 1951,
taking his 7-year-old son. Beachcombing
near Acapulco, the boy discovered one
of Phillipss bottles containing a sermonette
ending with: Be sure your sins will nd you
out. Jolted by the seas delivery of pointed
advice, the businessman returned home,
rebuilt his business, paid off his creditors,
and reunited with his wife. I owe it all,
he wrote Phillips, to that bottle that came
out of the sea.

My great grandfather was an early

missionary from the United States to the
Hawaiian Islands and I was born in Honolulu. I attended grammar school and on
completion I went to work. I started going to
sea in 1922 and for over twenty-ve years
I have been plying the ocean lanes of
the Pacic. I have known the Lord as my
personal Savior for many years but since
1942, when I joined the First Baptist Church
in San Francisco, I have felt a denite call to
serve Him more aggressively.
In 1947 the Lord brought Brother George
Phillips of Tacoma, Washington, and myself
together. On learning of the remarkable
blessing from distributing the Gospel in Tide
Bottles, I realized immediately that I was to
have a part in this ministry. Since then, it has
been my privilege to toss many thousands of
bottled Gospel Bombs in the oceans, sometimes 1,500 on a single voyage. Returns have
come from many foreign shores and from
the United States.
Captain Bindts Gospel Bomb had drifted
or laid buried for some 40 years. In addition
to George Phillips and Captain Bindt, a
dozen or so other ocean evangelists have
since released an estimated 300,000
scripture-lled bottles.2 Of late, the practice
has largely died out, but some drift on.k
1 Daddys kids are children who accompany their high-

ranking father on holiday aboard a cargo vessel.

2 This estimate is based on my interviews of the evangelists
and their relatives and acquaintances. The only other case
that rivals the scale of these evangelists efforts was by
Guinness beer in the 1950s when the company threw
200,000 specially designed bottles with messages into the
ocean as part of an advertisement campaign. On average,
one of these bottles still washes up on shore every year.

In 1997 a beachcomber discovered an old

bottle at the mouth of the Situk River in
Alaska. Inside, pamphlets from a colleague
of George Phillipss named Captain Walter
E. Bindt, preached salvation:
opposite and overleaf
Francesco Simeti, Scenic Wallpaper, 2001.

18

Main

Stealth towers
Kristen Dodge

If you have ever noticed an unusually stifflooking tree with an abnormally thick trunk,
frugally spaced branches, and an unchanging appearance through all seasons, you
have unwittingly identied a stealth telecommunication tower. Whether disguised as
a tree, agpole, or church steeple, a stealth
tower is the solution offered by tower
companies to local jurisdictions that refuse
the construction of tall metal structures
in the town square, a high-school eld,
or a local church. Each particular location
requires a customized stealth tower to best
suit the sthetic demands of that environment. Tower companies do not build palm
trees in New Hampshire.
In order to be functional, a stealth tower has
certain non-negotiable structural requirements. A stealth tower must accommodate
up to three carriers to match the minimum
capability of traditional towers, be con-

Above
Stealth cactus and palm telecommunication towers.
Courtesy of Larson Camouage

21

structed to a certain height in order to

provide adequate signal strength, and be
wide enough to house wires and other
internal equipment. These requirements
restrict the potential for effective
camouage.
Stealth design falls into two categories:
towers that imitate man-made structures,
and towers that imitate nature. Towers
that mimic man-made structures are more
deft at achieving invisibility. Stealth agpoles and church steeples, for example,
maintain their visible identities while
disguising their intended function. These
structures are in fact what they appear to
be, albeit with a hidden infrastructure.
Unlike the stealth towers that imitate nature,
the structural requirements of these towers
and their adopted frames are not in conict.
Even before telecommunication towers,
agpoles were stiff and steeples were tall.

Nature is less accommodating. Consider

the stealth palm trees with metal rectangles
integrated awkwardly into the false sway of
faux palm leaves. Even stealth cacti outdo
their prickly neighbors with their unprecedented height, width, and stiffness. Rather
than creating unseen towers, telecommunication companies have assembled
distinct and noticeable structures.
In the end, however, failed camouage
functions like a poorly designed costume,
lending the fake vegetation a certain charm.
The greater the gap between their hightech interiors and their low-tech exteriors,
the less threatening stealth towers become.
Perhaps the true stealth maneuver made
by tower companies has been achieved
not through camouage, but through
winning the affections of unenthusiastic
Americans.K

Hidden talents:
The camouage paintings
of Abbott Handerson Thayer
Emily Gephart

Combining a talent for observation, a

knowledge of optics, and a love of natural
history, the American painter and amateur
naturalist Abbott Handerson Thayer
(18491921) carved out a unique niche for
himself in the space between the discourses
of art and science.1 Consider the paintings
Peacock in the Woods and Red Flamingos,
The Skies They Simulate, both dating from
around 1909. These are two of the many
images demonstrating animal coloration
Thayer created with the assistance of his
students and colleagues for publication in
his book Concealing Coloration in the Animal
Kingdom, An Exposition of the Laws of
Disguise Through Color and Pattern: Being a
Summary of Abbott H. Thayers Disclosures.
These remarkable images illustrate Thayers
belief that all animal coloration, regardless
of its apparent visibility, was the result of
the natural-selection process that allowed
animals to go unnoticed by predators or
prey. Despite the evident fallacy of this
belief, Thayer made a signicant contribution
to the study of camouage by describing and
differentiating the ways in which animals
conceal themselves.
A rm proponent of Darwinism, Thayer
believed that the animal coloration he
observed was the result of fundamental
aspects of evolutionary development. Moreover, he believed that in the matter of animal
camouage, Nature was, in effect, acting as
an artist, using color and light intentionally
to create optical effects; Thayer equated Art
and Nature as agents in the processes that
had brought about evolutionary change.
Thayer was by no means the rst to observe
that animals used their coloration to hide
themselves in nature. However, in his
groundbreaking article The Law Which
Underlies Protective Coloration, written
in 1896 for the American Ornithologists
Union journal The Auk, Thayer elucidated
the principles of counter-shading, whereby
animals were made to appear at by
the use of graduated colors and tones of
feathers, scales or fur. This counteracts the
effects of sunlight and shadow, rendering an
animals coloration darkest where it receives
the greatest illumination, and lightest on
the shadowy regions of its underside. The
resultant reduction of the appearance of
contour makes the animal seem to lose its
volume and dimension. As a result of this
optical illusion, the spectator, Thayer wrote,
seems to see right through the space really
occupied by an opaque animal.2

Thayers rst scientic article received widespread and justied praise. Using the language of art and optics, he had, for perhaps
the rst time, explained precisely why many
animals seem to blend in with their surroundings. Thrilled by his success, Thayer
followed this essay with others, increasingly
supercilious in tone. In 1903, he extended
his powers of observation to elucidate
another principle of camouage, the disruptive (he used the term ruptive) effects of
patterned markings such as stripes or spots.
These markings disguise an animals contours by making its contiguous parts seem
unrelated to one another. This principle of
concealment proved to be temptingly and
dangerously elastic; virtually any kind of
coloring and patterning could be argued
to be ruptive under certain circumstances.
Despite his increasingly pompous attitude,
at this stage Thayer willingly acknowledged
that other scientists had reached similar
conclusions and he retained an open mind
about alternative forms of animal coloration.
He commenced lecture-demonstrations,
both in America and abroad, using illuminated shadowboxes containing sculptures,
stuffed animals, and decoys to orchestrate
elaborate performances of the principle of
counter-shading. His enthusiasm frequently
overwhelmed his audience: He vigorously
encouraged observers at a 1910 lecture at
the Smithsonian Institution to approximate
the viewpoint of a predator by lying facedown on their stomachs, a request which
the audience of ornithologists warily
refused.3
A popular society artist and renowned
gure painter in the 1880s and 1890s,
Thayer had been a leader of the American
Renaissance. He believed that his position
as an accomplished artist and an observer
of natural history made him uniquely qualified to understand and identify the principles
of animal coloration. He wrote in 1903,
Nature has evolved actual art on the bodies
of animals, and only an artist can read it.
Perhaps this degree of hubris was what led
him to subsequently take his ideas to utterly
absurd limits. In 1909, Thayer and his
son Gerald published the book Concealing
Coloration in the Animal Kingdom with
illustrations provided by Thayer in collaboration with Gerald, his second wife Emma,
and students Rockwell Kent and Richard
Meryman. Black-and-white photographs
were exhibited alongside paintings (repro-

duced in color) to demonstrate concealing

camouage in mammals, reptiles, birds, and
insects.
The book, written primarily by Gerald,
provided an exhaustive and valuable
compendium of examples describing and
demonstrating animal concealment. But
the introduction written by Abbott professed
a new level of arrogance. Thayer now
claimed that all animal coloration, even
the most amboyant, served only to conceal
the animal from detection. He boldly
proclaimed, All patterns and colors whatsoever of all animals that ever prey or are
preyed upon are under certain normal
circumstances obliterative. The brightest
coloration and patterning on an animal,
such as that of a uorescent amingo or
iridescent peacock, disrupts the animals
form, by destroying the apparent continuity
of surface. The eye of the observer, whether
predator or prey, skips over the patterns and
fails to see the hidden animal.
This is the reason why Thayer created such
apparently ludicrous, although beautiful,
paintings as Peacock in the Woods and
Red Flamingos, The Skies They Simulate.
Thayer submitted these images in his book
as evidence that ruptive coloration could,
under particular circumstances, serve to
conceal even the most vivid animal.
The scientic world reacted to Thayers now
preposterous assertions with predictable
skepticism and criticism. Former President
Teddy Roosevelt, himself an amateur
naturalist and world traveler, vigorously
attacked Thayers beliefs in his own account
of his African safaris, African Game Trails,
and in a series of subsequent articles.
Thayers reputation as a scientist suffered
because of this heated debate, which lasted
for several years and generated shrilly
written defenses published in a number
of magazines. However, it also secured
the attention of the general reading public,
which was not only fascinated by the
scientic discourse but by the personalities
of the individuals in contention.4
The stakes in the war of words over animal
camouage were enormously high for both
Roosevelt and Thayer. Roosevelt, making his
own bid for validity as an expert on natural
history, ridiculed Thayers apparent belief
that because an event could be imagined
and subsequently depicted in art, it therefore
must be fact. Thayer was indifferent to the
opposite
Abbott Handerson Thayer, Peacock in the Woods, 1907.
From Concealing-Coloration in the Animal Kingdom.

22

charges that art could not be used as

scientic proof, chastising Roosevelt and
other non-believers because they did not
put his ideas to the test. Indeed, Thayer felt
that he and his fellow artists were uniquely
capable of seeing beyond the limitations of
scientic thought. Thayer repeatedly invited
Roosevelt to visit his home for debate over
the points of dispute, but Roosevelt refused.
By this point, with so much of his fervent
belief in the value of art to the pursuit of
science on the line, Thayer was carried away
by his own willful need to be right. The artist
dismissed his increasingly vociferous critics
and was regarded by many as a crackpot.
What else would one be willing to claim of
a man who, determined to vindicate himself,
traveled to the West Indies, located a ock
of amingos at dusk, and lay down in the
swamp to see whether they would disappear against the background of the setting
sun from the perspective of a hungry
alligator? Yet, despite these investigations,
he failed to notice that amingos are active
during the whole day, are not preyed upon
by alligators in saline ponds, and feed
primarily on sightless organisms. Moreover,
seen against the light of the sunset,
a amingo will not appear to blend in with
it, but will stand out as a dark shadow
against the sky.5
Thayer seems to have been stubbornly
resistant to questioning and to contradictory
evidence. He maintained that because
an animal could be shown to disappear,
this therefore indicated that at one evolutionarily crucial point it did. For his argument
about concealing coloration and natural
selection to be correct, he thought, he
did not need to prove that every instance
of animal coloration worked against any
background. He merely needed to show
that sometimes, against certain backgrounds
and in certain conditions, his ideas did, in
fact, work.
Thayers beliefs about disruptive patterning
and coloration nally did nd considerable
practical use in the development of military
camouage. While the US government
had been resistant at the turn of the century
to Thayers exhortations that ruptive or
dazzle camouage could be useful in
wartime, by the advent of World War I,
they became a receptive audience. A special
group of artists, designers, and carpenters
designated Company A of the 40th
Abbott Handerson Thayer, White Flamingos, Red Flamingos:
The Skies They Simulate, 1909 (detail).
From Concealing-Coloration in the Animal Kingdom.

25

Engineers was enlisted as the Camouage

Corps to study and implement the principles of concealing coloration. The group
included several of Thayers colleagues,
students, and friends. Thayers last article
on the principles of camouage was
dedicated to elaborating the ways in which
optical effects could be used by the Allied
forces to confuse enemies on both land and
sea. Thus, although not himself an active
member of the team who developed military
camouage, Thayers beliefs about disruptive optics found both staunch support
and pragmatic use.
Toward the end of his life, Thayers style
of personalitythe restlessly inquisitive,
boundary-crossing, gentleman amateur
was out of favor. In American culture, his
kind was increasingly replaced by specialized, Taylorized corporation men, who found
their niche in society and remained there
life-long. Thayer overstepped the bounds
of his professional identity, attempting to
be simultaneously an artist and scientist,
ama-teur and professional. In the early
twentieth century, Americas artistic tastes
had irrev-ocably changed, and scientic
profession-alization increasingly discouraged
the kinds of serious dabbling that Thayer felt
was his greatest asset. Yet, as his career as
an artist waned, Thayer had taken the risky
step of following his passions, and ultimately
is remembered as a truly original thinker. In
todays corporate climate, Thayers method
of thinking outside the box seems both
courageous and admirable. However, his
example nevertheless reminds us about the
dangers inherent in disciplinary boundary
crossing; Thayer felt resistance to his ideas
stemmed only from his status as an outsider,
when in fact, his erce determination to
succeed as both a scientist and an artist, and
his stubborn pride in his accomplishments,
did not allow him to see the fallacies in some
of his best ideas.

1 For more on the artistic career of Thayer, see Nelson C.

White, Abbott H. Thayer, Painter and Naturalist (Hartford,

Ct.: Connecticut Printers, 1951); and Ross Anderson,
Abbott Handerson Thayer, exh. cat. (Syracuse, NY: Everson
Museum, 1982). Art historian Alexander Nemerov presents
an interesting view of Thayers obsession with camouage
in Vanishing Americans: Abbott Thayer, Theodore
Roosevelt and the Attraction of Camouage, American Art,
11:2 (Summer, 1997), pp. 5081. Nemerov suggests that
Thayers preoccupation with invisibility was not limited to
the natural world, but also reected issues involving social
ostentation and display prevalent in late-nineteenth-century
American genteel culture.
2 Gerald H. and Abbot H. Thayer, Concealing Coloration in
the Animal Kingdom: An Exposition of the Laws of Disguise
through Color and Pattern: Being a Summary of Abbott H.
Thayers Discoveries (New York: Macmillan, 1909).
3 Roy R. Behrens, Art and Camouage: Concealment and
Deception in Nature, Art and War (Cedar Falls, Ia.: North
American Review, 1981), p. 24.
4 Nemerov presents a fascinating examination of the social
circumstances underlying the correspondence between
Roosevelt and Thayer in Vanishing Americans, p. 79.
He argues that Roosevelt felt the very practice of
camouage was dishonest and cowardly.
5 No expert on the behavior or habitat of amingos myself,
I am indebted for these and other insights on the
methodological implications of Thayers work to Stephen
Jay Gould, Red Wings in the Sunset, Natural History, 94:5
(May, 1985), pp. 1224.

Hieroglyphs of the future:

Jacques Rancire and the sthetics of equality
Brian Holmes

Were not a surplus, were a plus. The slogan

appeared at the demonstrations of the
French jobless movement in the mid-90s
in journals, on banners, and on tracts printed
by the political art group, Ne pas plier.
It knitted the critical force and the subjective
claims of the movement into a single phrase.
To be a surplus (laid off, redundant) was
to be reduced to silence in a society that
subtracted the jobless from the public
accounts, that made them into a kind of
residueinvisible, inconceivable except
as a statistic under a negative sign. Excluded, in short: cut out of a system based on
the status of the salaried employee. Until
they nally came together to turn the tables,
reverse the signs, and claim a new name
on a stage they had created, by occupying
unemployment ofces in a nation-wide
protest during the winter of 1997-98. The
people with nothing erupted onto the public
scene. Were a plus, they said, intruding
through the TV cameras into the countrys
living rooms. Which also meant, Well drink
champagne on Christmas eve.
A way to grasp the sthetic language of
the French social movements in the 90s
and of the transnational movements now
emergingis through the work of Jacques
Rancire and his writings on the politics of
equality. In Disagreement (published originally in 1995), he confronted the philosophy
of government with the scandal of the
political.1 Government fullls an ideal of
order when it administers, manages, and
tries to totally account for a population;
but its reality is the police. The police keeps
everyone in their place, imposes the calculations of value, apportions out the shares
in society.
The political is an opposite process, and it
is rare. It happens when outcasts stand
up to say that the calculations are wrong,
when they refuse the names and the places
theyve been given (were not a surplus),
to claim both a share in society and another
name, which will signify their particular
addition to universal equality (were a plus).
This is because the equality of one speaking
being with any otherthe fundamental
presupposition of democracydoes not
exist in the abstract. It only becomes
universal each time it is proven, in a new
language and on a newly visible stage.
Equality is the groundless claim of a minority
to have the rights of any other group, to
be the demos, the people. But it is a claim

26

whose naked truth does not sufce; it has

to be put to the test, publicly veried. This
is why the political always takes the form
of a demonstration: a logical proof against
all prevailing logic, and the mobile presence
of a crowd against the xed frames of an
institution.
Rancires description was in synch with
its time. It anticipated the general strike
of French state workers in December 1995,
massively supported by the public, and
it accompanied the later revolts of the
homeless, the jobless, the paperless
the mouvement des sanswho rose up
to demand a new division and sharing
of the social whole, beyond the accounting
systems of the industrial state. But it also
offered a key that could reopen the airlocks
between the sthetic and the political.
In an essay written just after Disagreement,
Rancire explained that the political always
involves a disidentication with some aspect
of the existing communityfor example,
with the police state that expels the jobless
or the paperless. At the same time, it
requires an impossible identication with
the cause of the other.2 This impossible
identication suggests a new, subjective
gure of political commitment. Its paradigm
in France is the identication of an entire
generation on the left with the Algerian
demonstrators thrown brutally into the Seine
by the police in 1961. To identify with the
murdered Algerians was not to speak for
theman absurd idea, while their fellows
were completing a revolution in Algeria
but to live on in their place, in opposition
to a national institution that excluded certain
citizens (those of the former colonies) and
included others (those of the metropole).
That impossible identication would return
in the transnational, transhistorical assertion
of the students in May 1968, We are
all German Jews. And then again in the
specic legal and political context of the late
90s, with the public act, often performed in
theaters, of parrainage or god-parenting,
which meant taking a quasi-familial, quasilegal responsibility for an undocumented
individual.
This theatrical ction, like the poetics of the
68 slogan, points to the specically artistic
aspect of political engagement, sketched out
in a few pages of Disagreement. Rancire
begins by opposing Habermass view that
the surprise of sthetic experience, the

opening to the world effected by metaphor,

must be distinguished from the norms
of communicative action. He claims instead
that the uncertain reality of art, the shift or
transport of meaning that denes metaphor,
is an inherent part of every political dispute,
where the argument itself bears rst of all
on the legitimacy or even the reality of one
of the fundamental elements that congure
the disagreement (its place, its object, its
subjects). The place-changing action of metaphorone thing or person for another
is what allows the creation or extension
of a community of speaking subjects; and
this potential extension of a community
is needed for any argument about equality.
This is why the modern forms of political
group-formation, or subjectivization, are
historically linked to the emergence of an
autonomous, sthetic dimension split from
any practical manipulation of usable objects:
an unpredictable, innitely extensible realm
dening a world of virtual community
of community demandedsuperimposed
on the world of commands and lots that
give everything a use.3
Metaphors are the hieroglyphs of an
unknown language, the demand for an
unheard-of community. When the group Ne
pas plier, in collaboration with the jobless
association lAPEIS (lAssociation pour
lemploi, linformation et la solidarit), raised
Marc Patauts anonymous portraits above
the crowd in 1994singular faces above
a sea of demonstrating humanity
the question was not whether these meterhigh photographs, carried on a wooden
picket, really represented identiable jobless
people. The question was whether a social
issue could be extended beyond individual
cases, to call for a general reconguration
of society; whether each anonymous face
was potentially the face of the unemployed
peuple reclaiming its right to speak; and
whether the gesticulating debates on
Republic Square could compare to the ones
in the National Assembly. A visual uncertainty, a metaphoric possibility of onefor-another, intertwined with a political
argument bearing on proper or improper
names, on the proper or improper division
and sharing of resources, of roles, of sensuous reality. In lieu of an answer, the question
itself gestured toward a possible future
that could only be opened up, among
the existing divisions of the world, by an
argumentative logic knit together with
an artistic metaphor.

27

A Change of Regime
Rancires thinking of the political was
formulated during the long French slide into
recession and racism, when the status of
salaried labor was falling into tatters along
with welfare-state guarantees, when immigrants were being outlawed in the name
of union jobs and the unemployed were
being proclaimed the impossible political
subject. Yet the threat of the exible, transnational, networked regimethe so-called
economic horrorsparked original
forms of protest and debate. A breach
was re-opened, marked in political economy
by the work of Andr Gorz, Misre du
prsent, richesses du possible (Poverty of
the Present, Wealth of the Possible), which
turned the questions of exible work and
unemployment back on an entire system,
to explore the reasons for maintaining a
politics of scarcity in a society of automated
production.
That breach seems to have closed today.
Disagreement had already shown how
cer-tain forms of political consensus act
to freeze social identities, eliminating the
disruptive claims of equality. There is the
welfare-state conception of society as an
interplay of partners (unions, businesses,
public services); the neo-liberal idea that
society does not exist, only desiring, enterprising individuals; the multicultural vision
of separate, Balkanized communities, each
bound by their own beliefs. All exclude the
political conict formerly brought by the
subject called proletariatthe most recent
name of the antique demos or the revolutionary peuple. After integrating much of the
National Fronts racism, the French socialist
party has now found an original mix of the
rst two forms of consensus: They intensify
the neo-liberal program of exible transnational labor relations, in hopes of returning
to the salaried employment on which the
postwar social contract of the nationstate
was based! As though the challenges raised
by the mouvement des sans never even
existed.
But what is happening now is that similar
movements are expanding, proliferating,
in an attempt to meet their adversaries
on another stage: the stage set by the transnational corporations. This proliferation
involves an identication with the cause
of an impossibly distant otherMayan
peasant, Brazilian autoworker, Nigerian
tribesman, Indian farmer But to explore

the role of art in these movements, I think

we had better start with something much
closer to home: the language machine that
knits the transnational system together, and
the kind of labor that is done with it.
The Internet has widely (and rightly) been
seen on the left as providing the infrastructure for what is called digital capitalism.4 But what the leftist commentators
forgetone wonders why?is that the
simplest net application of them all, email,
has offered an extraordinary chance to what
Rancire calls the literary animal. As large
parts of the former working classes gained
education, refused industrial discipline, and
split away from their former position in the
social hierarchy, they became immaterial
laborers facing the new predicament of
exibilized conditions5but they also found
themselves in possession of a new writing
tool. And as they taught themselves to use
it and invented more applications every day,
what did they claim, against all prevailing
logic? That here, everyone is equal. The
virtual realities of the 1990s saw the return
of a utopia whose emergence Rancire has
chronicled in his accounts of the selfeducation of the artisan classes in the early
nineteenth century: Thus one can dream
of a society of emancipated individuals that
would be a society of artists. Such a society
would repudiate the divide between those
who know and those who do not know,
between those who possess or who do not
possess the property of intelligence. It would
recognize only active minds: humans who
act, who speak of their actions and thereby
transform all their works into ways of
signaling the humanity within themselves
and everyone.6
That dream was bound to run up against
what Rancire has called the society of
disdain. In the late 20th century it took the
usual form of the expropriation of a popular
language, and its replacement by manipulated simulacra. Yet even as the dominance
of the Internet by the commercial and
nancial spheres became clear, even as the
gure of the shareholder emerged as the
only one with a right to participate politically
in the new economy, political activism took
a new twist, and disruptions began appearing in the fabric of corporate and governmental speech.
Since 1993, the anonymously run ark
group has been launching parodies into the

ideological mix: consultancy and funding

for consumer-product sabotage, following
the actions of the infamous Barbie Liberation Organization; direct e-mail campaigns
promoting subversion, like the Call-in
Sick Day to celebrate the non-holiday (in
Anglo-Saxon lands) of 1 May; pseudo-ofcial
sites like gwbush.com, voteauction.com, or
gatt.org.7 Masquerading beneath a corporate-bureaucratic veneerlackluster logos,
deadpan graphics, pompous speechthe
ark web sites start off believable, waver
in mid-ight, then tailspin into scandalous
denunciation by an excess of liberal truth.
Another movement, Kein Mensch ist Illegal,
more recently took up the same kind of
strategy with its Deportation-Class campaign: web sites, a poster contest, information kits, super-activist mileage programs
all opportunities for Lufthansas stockholders
to nd out just how much it could cost them
to go on deporting illegal immigrants for the
police. Then, in a parody of the Oneworld
airline alliance, the Deportation-Alliance
emerged, with collaboration from ark
and many others. Meanwhile, a group of
slow-thinking Austrian lawyers stumbled
on the gatt.org site and wanted Mike Moore
of the WTO to come pep up their meeting
in Salzburg. Mike Moore declined, but
sent two substituteslater revealed to
be the Yes Menwho stood before the
unwitting lawyers to explain a vast but rather
shocking program for the extension of
free trade. The whole incident was documented on video (tactical embarassment,
as the activist Jordi Claramonte likes to say).
Through mimicry and imagination, groups
like ark create a short-circuit between
the anonymous, abstract equality of immaterial labor and the subjective exceptionalism of art. The mimic gives the private
principle of work a public stage. He constitutes a common stage with what ought
to determine the connement of each to
his place, writes Rancire in Le partage
du sensible. But this common stage is a
scene, not of stiing unity but of dissensus:
The mimic transmits blocks of speech circulating without a legitimate father, literary
and political statements that grab hold of
bodies and divert them from their destination, that contribute to the formation of
collective speakers who throw into question
the distribution of roles, of territories, of
languagesin short, political subjects who
upset an established sharing and division
of the sensible.8 ark or Deportation-Class

28

are ways for immaterial laborers to claim

a voice, a non-economic share, against the
stock-market rules of a shareholders society.
They are also vectors of a new kind of transnational collaboration or reciprocity.
They offer a way to rejoin the direct action
movements, Art and Revolution, Attac,
and dozens if not hundreds of other organizationsthe newest way into a much
older conguration of the sthetic and the
political, which is also called democracy.
The duplicity of art/work hardly began
with Internet. It reaches back to what
Rancire calls the sthetic regime of the
arts, which emerged, not coincidentally,
at the end of the ancien rgime. Aesthetics is
the name of an indistinction, where fact
is inseparable from ction, where the lowest can become the highest and vice versa.
The sthetic regime of the arts ruins the
historically prior regime of representation,
with its hierarchies, decorum, and strict
separation of genres, but also its Aristotelian
distinction between chaotic, accidental
hist-ory, and well-constructed, plausible
ction. Working initially through mimetic or
testi-monial techniquesrealist literature or
painting, photography or cinemathe new
regime determines the paradoxical beauty
of the anonymous subject, of whoever
or whatever: The ordinary becomes
beautiful as a trace of the true when it is
torn away from the obvious and made into
mythological or phantasmagorical hieroglyph.9 Before and beyond any modernist
or post-modernist program, the sthetic
regime makes art into an autonomous form
of life, thus simultaneously positing both
the autonomy of art and its identication
with a moment in a process of lifes selfformation.10 The understanding of activist
art begins right here, with the notion of lifes
self-formation.
Fictionable Futures
The originality of Rancires work on the
sthetic regime is to clearly show how
art can be historically effective and directly
political. Art achieves this by means of
ctions: arrangements of signs that inhere
to reality, yet at the same time make it
legible to the person moving through it
as though history were an unnished lm,
a documentary ction, of which we are
both cameramen and actors.
That would be one way to describe an event
like the Carnival against Capital, staged by

the 10,000 actors of Reclaim the Streets

in the City of London on 18 June 1999.
Wearing masks of four different colors,
the crowd wove converging paths through
the City, displaying signs, creating images,
knitting its mobile music and language into
urban realityweaving another world in
order to tangle with the one managed by
nance capital (and to tangle directly with
the police). The 18 June event taught us
to read a new story at the center of nance
capitalism. But no privileged viewpoint could
wrap up the lm, gather the whole
of this artwork into a totality and reduce
its contradictionsbecause the idea had
already crisscrossed not just Britain but the
earth, spreading and dividing like the wildre
of equality. By tracts, images, Internet,
and word of mouth; by collaboration and
spontaneous reinvention, the disorganization of Reclaim the Streets and the
Peoples Global Action network had mapped
out a new kind of world, in which collectives
in over 70 different countries could protest
against the same abstract processes of
neo-liberal capitalism, under vastly different
local conditions but on the same day. Did
the lm of Seattle, Prague, and so on
begin right here, with this artistic event?
But where was here? And what did the
event really consist of?
If anarchic, artistic demonstrations like 18
June are political, it is because they involve
a disagreement, a direct confrontation with
the existing divisions or shares of sensuous
reality. They make visible the invisible
government of the nancial institutions
(i.e. the new world police). But if they are
sthetic, it is because they bring a blur of
indistinction to the proper subjects, objects,
and places of the debate. They create
another stage for politics: like the protesters
in London opening a re hydrant to symbolically return a long-buried river to the surface
of the street, to reclaim that stream from
the layered abstractions of capital. Or like
the social forces in Porto Alegre displacing
the wintry Davos economic forum to the
summer weather of the South, turning the
agenda and the very seasons of capitalist
globalization upside down.
It is certain that such confrontations must
become more precise, more reasoned,
more explicit, if the new claim to equality
is to have any effect on the existing divisions
of the world. The sthetic plus of the
demonstrations must nd a way to return

to each local environment, to the specic

frameworks that govern the homeless, the
paperless, the unemployed. This is the risky
gambit that the far left is now making, on a
world scale. But to be explicit is not to speak
the opponents language (neoclassical economics)which would always be to play
an unequal hand in a losing game. Instead,
it is to engage in an unstable mimicry that
seeks to prove its claim to equality on a public stage, while inventing new signs, new
pathways through the world, new political
subjectivities.`
A version of this text appeared in German in the Austrian
magazine Springerin, vol. VII, no. 1, March-May 2001.

29

1 Jacques Rancire, Disagreement (Minneapolis & London:

University of Minnesota Press: 1999). Throughout this text

I will quote and summarize ideas by Jacques Rancire,
but the contemporary examples of political and sthetic
practice, and the conclusions drawn from them, are my
responsibility alone.
2 Jacques Rancire, La cause de lautre, in Aux bords du
politique (Paris: La Fabrique-Editions, 1998).
3 Disagreement, p. 57.
4 Cf. Dan Schiller, Digital Capitalism (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 1999).
5 On the refusal of industrial discipline and the emergence
of the immaterial, see the arguments and references in
Michael Hardt and Toni Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2000), chapters 3.3 and 3.4.
6 Jacques Rancire, Le matre ignorant (Paris: Fayard,
1987), pp. 120-121. My translation.
7 The rst two sites were forced to change names and can
now be found at www.rtmark.com, along with the other
ark projects.
8 Jacques Rancire, Le partage du sensible: esthtique et
politique. (Paris: La Fabrique-ditions, 2000), pp. 68, 63-64.
All translations from this book are my own.
9 Ibid., p. 52.
10 Ibid., p. 37.

The traveling interview: The rst leg

Dean MacCannell & Lucy Lippard

This is the rst installment of Cabinets

traveling interview. The idea for this
regular feature was simple. We were to ask
some-one, lets call that person A, to have a
conversation with someone, B, about a topic
of his or her choice. Bs sole promise was
to in turn have a conversation with someone
else, C, for the issue after. The participants
have full decision over whom they will
choose and what topic they will discuss.
Our hope is that we will travel into the
most astonishing nooks and crannies of
culture and society, that we will become
the ultimate tourists taken on a strange
exotic journey. And that, of course, is also
the problem with the idea of a traveling
interview. The fantasy of tourism in all its
troubling dimensions is at the heart of such
an idea. That is why our choice for A was
Dean MacCannell, whose book The Tourist
from 1976 established the parameters for
the serious study of tourism as a cultural
practice. His choice for B was art historian
and cultural critic Lucy Lippard, several of
whose books also address the question
of tourism and travel. Lippards interview
with C will appear in issue 5 of Cabinet.

Dean MacCannell: Your approach to

contemporary art in The Lure of the Local
and On the Beaten Track appears to valorize
regionally-based and place-specic art over
the great centers which purport to produce
art that is timeless and universal in its appeal.
Can you comment?
Lucy Lippard: To begin with, an either/or
approach isnt necessary. Im just more
interested at this point in my life in the
conventionally less valorized, having
ODed to some extent on high art, which
is often overrated and constructed as
high mainly in opposition to the low
which, being contrary, Ive often espoused.
I go to museums and monuments when
Im in a big city. But thats less and less now,
so I seek out other things. Ive heard the
stories of the famous stuff for most of my
life, but the stories of the anonymous, the
local, the funky, the de-valorized, are often
unfamiliar and therefore more intriguing.
(Hey, Im an Amurrican and I need to be
entertained; I need The New.) And the things
I like may sound offbeat, but are in fact the
stuff of really cosmopolitan travel. Reverse
snobbism.
When you are about to travel someplace
you have not been before, how do you go
about deciding what to see, to visit, who to
meet?

Top Farid Najjar, Chadia Najjar, and Nina Chahinian.

Zahleh, Lebanon, 1955.
Chadia Najjar Collection/FAI. Arab Image Foundation

31

Would you be willing to give some examples

from your collection of clippings of the offbeat attractions that you may want to visit
someday?
Well, I have visited the Rattlesnake Museum
in Albuquerque, and the ballpoint-pen
collection in the museum of the Pinto Bean
Capital of the World in Moriarty, N.-M. But
havent yet made it to the Cockroach Hall
of Fame in Plano, Texas, or the Museum
of Bathroom Tissue in Madison, Wisconsin,
or the Funeral Services Museum in Houston.
Im equally fond of the funky little local
museums that miserably misrepresent their
history but have their own charm. Once fell
for a two-headed calf (deceased) on a bluevelvet pillow in such a place in Nicaragua
years ago...
Is it possible to discern in your analysis
of tourist attractions and regionally based art
the foundation for an ethics of sightseeing?
Tourism is about curiosity, which killed
the cat. I havent worked out an ethics
of sight-seeing, and Im often all too aware
that even if I think Im being ethical, those
being seen have no way to know Im not
just as amoral as anyone else whos staring
at their places.
All tourists are intruders on one level or
another. If Im shy and reserved, I can be
seen as aloof and superior. If Im chatty
and friendly, I can be seen as matronizing
and rude. Tourists just have to take their
chances. In the city, most of us try to look
cool and somewhat knowledgeable; in a
small town we try to look like down-home
folks; in a truly foreign context (like
a New Mexico pueblo), I just try to be inconspicuous. All of this doesnt amount to
an ethic, so much as basic courtesy.

Its been a long time since Ive taken a very

long trip to one place. Living in the West,
I nd travel is as much driving as stopping.
Im big on views, but not necessarily those
that They want me to stop at. I look at
maps rather than tour books, though I
admit to having a basket of torn-out (and
torn-up) newspaper clippings about places
off rather than on the beaten track that
I might want to see if I ever go in that direction. Usually its pretty random. Wonder
whats down that road. Lets stop here.
Wheres a good place to walk the dog?
Dairy Queens often gure high on the list,
as do local cafes, museums, inaccurate
historical markers, archological sites,
tiny towns, general stores, trading posts,
etc. Im not a shopper (except in visitorcenter bookstores). The people come with
the place. If its a professional visit I might
look someone up Ive heard about or a
friend has directed me to or Ive hoped
to meet. Otherwise, any place is a surprise
package.

Add a camera and the ante is upped. Its

downright evil to take pictures of people
unless you are invited to. That can go for
their homes and landscapes too, if they
have opted for their privacy. (Last week on
the Navajo Nation I took a picture of a sign
saying not to take pictures and made sure
I didnt get the hogan behind the sign. But
if somebody had come along they would
never have believed me.) In some cases,
asking for permission works, but often thats
a power move, exploitation, etc. Its gotten

Middle "Baron Alinanan"

Zahleh, Lebanon, 1958.
Michel Saad Collection/FAI. Arab Image Foundation

Bottom Antoine and Nebil Sehnaoui.

Zahleh, Lebanon, 1958.
Sehnaoui Ziad Collection/FAI. Arab Image Foundation

Basic courtesy may be at the heart of ethics.

to the point where we dont seem to

remember without some kind of record,
and much as I love photographs, Im likely
better off without them much of the time.

If you could curate an entire region of the

United States, i.e., decide what should be
listed for the tour and how it should be
marked, what region would you chose?

How about local peoples who, either on

their own or with the help of promoters,
are selling their distinctive way of life as
a tourist attraction? Would you still feel
as scrupulous about photographing them?

Id love to curate the Southwest, since its

my current love and home. But I think that
instead of telling people to go here and go
there, Id recommend a random approach,
with lots of maps, a little knowledge, an
open mind, a sense of humor, a willingness
to risk discomfort or even (gasp) boredom.
One thing leads to another and who
knows whats in storeworking toward
something like William Least Heat Moons
deep map.

That constitutes an invitation as such.

Id probably wish them the best but decline
to participate, given my own snobbism,
authority problem, misplaced tourist
pride, and so forth. Unless, of course, the
promoters were irresistibly wacky or innovative, in which case they become artists.
Then anything goes.
There is an implied vision in On the Beaten
Track that the grid of tourist attractions in any
given place could benet from the intervention of artists. Can you elaborate on this
and mention how an artistic-tourist vision
of place may differ from a corporate-tourist
vision.
I probably overstated my case for artists to
be involved in the tourist business. Artists
might be just as bad as anyone else at
presenting a place they didnt know from
the inside (and insiders are all too aware of
the pitfalls, especially if they want to keep
on living there). But artists do tend to see
obliquely, even sometimes to see through.
My favorite kind of artist will present a marvelously cranky and critical viewpoint that can
open other eyes, but of course it might be
counterproductive vis--vis commercial
tourism. A few years ago I suggested that
performance artists be the tour guides
around Santa Fes still unrealized Railyard
area. But quirky local people would also
be good. Anyone who both respects the
place in question and has a sense of humor
and outrage. Ideally, ethically, I guess local
people would be better, and artists should
work with local people if theyre going to
pretend to give the inside story instead of
a bunch of condescending clichs. (They
could also provide a totally ignorant and
entertaining view, and variations thereupon.)
But none of this makes much sense
unless were talking about a specic site,
because each site comes with its own set
of premises (so to speak), its own rules, its
own inhabitants...

32

Ideally, no two people would do the same

thing, so there wouldnt be obvious destinations and a route cast in stone, and
towns done in by tourism. A custom tour
might take into consideration how good
or bad the tourist is at walking, talking,
listening, seeing, etc., and send him/her
off accordingly.
The missing link in most tourist planning is
those who are being toured, who are rarely
consulted about how they want their place
presented; what a community is proud
of; what is off bounds and on. (Of course
I probably wouldnt agree with half my
neighbors if we all spoke our minds.) This
is whats interesting (and frustrating) about
Native American lands. They know what
they want and they usually let you know in
no uncertain terms, having paid a high price
for the privilege. People living in ghettos
and barrios have perhaps unintentionally
scared tourists off and gure if youre wandering around their hood you must be either
dumber or hipper than you look.
I live in a lovely, quiet, picturesque village
(with both trailers and old adobe houses)
and I have my own tour that no guest of
mine escapes. However, Id think twice
about curating it into my list unless it
were the weekend of our Studio Tour, when
the place is crawling with very welcome
souls who are going to buy local art and
food. The balance would be hard to maintain
unless there were a remarkably sensitive
tourist bureau involved. What if every
destination were able to determine its own
symbolic capital (David Harvey), to draw
their own boundaries like the Indian pueblos.
Does becoming a tourist site mean you have
to sell your soul, or is there another way of

doing it? (And I dont just mean tasteful

exploitation.) Actually curating is an odd
term for this activity because the result of
curating is a show or an exhibition.
Its almost always static; everybody gets
the same initial experience. Even so-called
participatory shows tend to be hard to
customize. You can only go so far. In the
Southwest you can go really far out. If you
speak Spanish or Navajo or Tewa you can
go even further. Then again, curating means
caring for, so on second thought thats
kind of a nice term if followed to the letter.y

Hispaniola
David Hawkes

In ten days in Santo Domingo, I was robbed

three times: a personal record. Once, a selfstyled guide concluded our tour with a
classic example of extortion by threat of
violence. Once, a passing hooker grabbed
my testicles, a time-honored distracting
technique of pickpockets whose efcacy is
not reduced by familiarity. And once, the
hotel maid treated me to a demonstration
of the traditional local trompe loeil known
as the vanishing travelers check. Despite
my discomfort, the common factor between
these outrages forced itself upon me. Each
crime had been perpetrated by someone
ex-changing, or offering to exchange, their
labor for my capital, and in each case the
trick consisted in an unexpected violation
of the normal terms of that exchange.
I could take, I found, a crumb of consolation
from the thought that my predicament was
the expression in miniature of the economic
Zeitgeist.
None of my assailants was hawking or
producing anything materialeach of
them purported to be selling a service. The
service economy is frequently presented
as a postmodern phenomenon, but the
services offered by these bandits were all
very ancient. The status of workers in the
ancient service economy was servile, which
is to say they were slaves. And until late
in the 20th century, thinkers of Left and
Right alike were reluctant to consider the
provi-sion of services as truly proletarian
labor, especially when those services were
provid-ed by women. According to a certain
species of vulgar materialism, a proletarian
must be engaged in the production of material things. For if there is no visible endproduct to a workers labor, what has he
or she really sold in exchange for his or her
wages?
The answer to this question lays bare the
true nature of all wage-labor. Proletarians
are people who sell their labor-power for
money. They do not sell the product of their
labor, they sell their capacity for labor during
a given period of time. What the proletarian
sells is subjective activity itself. This is true
of everyone who works for a salary, so
that virtually everyone in the world today
is a proletarian. But in the service sector,
the nature of the transaction is more overt.
No physical product is exchanged, and it
therefore becomes clear that the worker
is actually selling his or her time: his or her
life and self. This blatant display of object-

33

ication led most societies to relegate those

whose labor is servile and non-productive to
the ranks of the un-free, legally dening
them as such by class and gender.
It is commonplace to say that the class relations of early capitalism have become globalized, so that the 21st-century inhabitants of
the northern hemisphere stand in relation to
those of the south as 19th-century capitalists
stood in relation to 19th-century proletarians. This development also entails a mystication of those relations. In Dickensian London, try as they might, those who lived by
capital could not escape regular contact
with those who lived by labor. But the only
way to come into signicant contact with
the real proletariat of the 21st century is
to travel, independently, to the third world,
and this is an experience which many Westerners assiduously avoid.
They avoid it largely because they suspect,
quite rightly, that their chances of being
robbed are very high. Neo-liberal propaganda and IMF statistics notwithstanding, the
most cursory stroll down the street in a city
such as Santo Domingo or, more emphatically, Port-au-Prince conrms that globalization has been an utter disaster for the
southern hemisphere. The proletarian continents of the postmodern economy are ten
times more Hogarthian than the workingclass districts of industrial London. Labor
and capital confront each other as starkly
as ever, but today the privileged partner in
this dichotomy nds it easy to turn its back
on the Other.
But the concept of the Other will not be altogether repressed. It returns, festooned with
voguish trumpery, in the various outlandish
forms of what Americans call theory. Unbeknownst to most theorists, the philosophical
heritage of the Other is found in Aristotles
dialectic of master and slave. A slave,
for Aristotle, is one who does not live for
himself but for an Other. The slave does
not pursue his own proper ends, and he
therefore does not meet the Greek denition
of a human being. Instead, the slave serves
the ends of the master: By performing
physical labor, he makes it possible for the
master to achieve full humanity, which is
understood as the pursuit of a spiritual or
intellectual telos.
The master/slave polarity is the historical and
philosophical ancestor of the contradiction

between capital and labor. Hegels great

advance on Aristotle was to point out that
the humanity of the master is actually
dependent on the labor of the slave, so that
the identity of the dichotomys privileged
term depends upon that of the other term,
rather than vice versa. In Marx, this breakthrough is refracted into the recognition
that capital does not have an independent
existence, but is merely objectied labor.
Here we have the origin of the postmodern
commonplaces that the self is dened
by the Other, that identity depends upon
difference, that existence precedes essence,
and so on.
For obvious reasons, Western theorists
usually do their best to forget the basis of
this idea and scamper off in happy pursuit
of its ramications for what they call
gender, race, and sexuality. Occasionally, however, circumstances press upon
them the importance of more signicant
matters, and in the 1990s, the quincentennial anniversary of Colns arrival in the
West Indies unleashed a ood of postmodernist reections on the economic signicance of the Other. In one such work,
The Conquest of America: the Question of
the Other, Tzvetan Todorov nds the root of
the genocidal European reaction to the new
world in Classical Greek philosophy where,
he claims, the fact of living with others, is
not generally conceived as being necessary.
In fact, however, the precise reverse is the
case. In Aristotle, the Other is absolutely
necessary; it is impossible to live a fully
human life without an Other. What Todorov
probably means is that the humanity of the
Self is predicated on the non-humanity
on the objecticationof the Other. And
everything suggests that this is no barbaric
doctrine now relegated to primeval history,
but rather the constitutive principle on which
the postmodern global economy operates.
The objectication of labor in the form of
capital is Aristotles master/slave dialectic
writ largeso large, in fact, that its characters are obscure to our myopic vision.
The opposition between bourgeoisie and
proletariat is not always or necessarily
an opposition between classes. It is one
external manifestation of the fundamental
contradiction between labor and capital,
or in other words, between slave and
master. This contradiction operates within
the psyche of the individual as much as

between classes; it also mediates the relationships between Northern and Southern
hemispheres, between men and women,
between life and death.
The history and cultures of Hispaniola provide a microcosmic lens through which such
global and cosmic polarities can be reduced
to legible size. If the postmodern West relates to the third world as Marxs bourgeoisie relates to his proletariat, then Haiti
plays much the same role in relation
to the Dominican Republic. Throughout their
history, the Spanish-speaking, mulatto DR
has consciously and openly constructed its
Kreyol-speaking black neighbor as the Other
in relation to which its own identity is formed.
A typical example, by no means the rst but
arguably the most inuential, of this thinking
is Jose Rodos Ariel (1900). The books crude
implications can be inferred from its title.
Rodo takes inspiration from Shakespeares
The Tempest, which is the central myth
through which the West has imagined
its encounter with the third world. In this
version, however, the global culture-clash is
re-invented as taking place within the island
of Hispaniola, with the Dominicans playing
the part of the intellectual, spiritual Ariel, and
the Haitians cast in the role of the physical,
bestial Caliban. This, at least, was the
reading preferred by Joaquin Balaguer,
the blind tyrant who ruled the Dominican
Republic for over thirty years until 1996.
Balaguers most famous book is The Island
in Reverse, in which he suggests that
Dominicans are, by denition, everything
that Haitians are not.
In 1996, the ninety-year-old Balaguer
announced that Haiti and the Dominican
Republic ought to live like Siamese twins.
Presumably intended as conciliatory,
the statement perfectly captured the
predominant Dominican view of Haiti as
a hideous, unnatural Other, grafted onto
an otherwise healthy body by some cruel
quirk of Nature. For over a hundred years,
the Dominican Republic has turned its back
on Haiti, turning it into the geopolitical
equivalent of the Elephant in the Drawing
Room. The fact of Haitis existence obviously
determines every aspect of life and culture
in the Dominican Republic, which responds
to this overwhelming impact by refusing
to acknowledge it, except through periodic
campaigns to expel the thousands of
Haitians who fuel Santo Domingos

34

economy with their labor on the sugar

plantations. Direct mail service between the
two nations was established only in 1998. It
is doubtful that many residents of Hispaniola
take advantage of it.
Although he was hated by many of his
subjects for his dictatorial rule, Balaguers
views undeniably tapped a deep vein in the
Dominican consciousness. For example, few
Dominicans consider themselves black,
although virtually all of them would have
been seated rmly at the back of the bus
in 1950s Mississippi, and many of them
are as dark as any Ibo or Yoruba. Enquiries
about the latter will be met with the reply
that such people are Haitian, but the
word refers to skin color rather than nationality, and is used for people whose families
have been in the DR for generations.
Conversely, in Haiti the term blanc means
foreigner rather than white; it is frequently shouted at bemused UN troops who
would indubitably be regarded as black in
their homelands.
Of course, it is hardly news that race is a
social construction. But it is still disorienting
to visit an island where black is white and
white is black. Although it is clearly unsustainable outside Hispaniola, as both Dominicans and Haitians quickly discover when
they move to New York, the two nations
understanding of the relation between
themselves and their Other structures every
aspect of life on the island. It has done so
throughout history, often with appalling
consequences. To take only one example,
in 1937 the Dominican dictator Trujillo
possibly with the connivance of his foreign
minister, the young Joaquin Balaguer
engaged in one of historys more blatant
attempts to purge the constitutive Other
by murdering 40,000 people he considered
Haitian. Whether or not they were actually
Haitian citizens is debatable and in any case
beside the point, which was that they were
black. Their bodies were thrown into the
river that marks the border between Haiti
and the Dominican Republic, which is called
the River Massacre. But the river did not
take its name from the massacre: It was
already called that, either after a previous
massacre or for more obscure reasons that
no one on either side of the border wants to
explain.
Such ironies would be comic were they not
so sanguinary, just as the mutual antipathy

between Haitians and Dominicans would

be laughable if its practical consequences
were not so pronounced. As with all such
dichotomies, the binary opposition between
the two nations is unequal. Listening to a
Dominican discussing Haitians is exactly
like listening to an aging white resident of
Washington Heights discussing Dominicans. They are black; they are uncivilized;
they sell drugs; they are prostitutes; they
spread AIDS. Above all, they are Other:
a deeply foreign, illegitimate and illegal
presence the very recognition of which
seems to demand its immediate expulsion.1
According to the mythology, Haitians living
in the Dominican Republic are doing one
of two things: The men are working in
the sugar cane elds, and the women are
prostitutes. Like all such myths, this one
contains a kernel of truth. That truth may
or may not be empirical, but it is certainly
ideological. From the Dominican perspective, what Haitians represent is the carnal,
the bodily. Physical labor, performed by
proletarian or prostitute, is intimately
identied by Dominicans with Haitians.
For one hundred and fty years, and still today, this psychological homology has been
expressed in the fact that many Haitians in
the DR are quite literally slaves. The major
political conict between the two governments concerns the plight of the Haitian
sugar cane workers, who are often coerced,
sometimes imprisoned, and frequently
unpaid. This situation would be impossible
without the underlying ideology by which
Haitians are understood to t the characteristics of Aristotles natural slaves.
In his epochal study of race consciousness,
Black Skins, White Masks, Franz Fanon
argues that Hegels version of the master/
slave polarity does not apply to the enslavement of Africans by Europeans:
I hope I have shown that here the master
differs basically from the master described by
Hegel. For Hegel there is reciprocity; here the
master laughs at the consciousness of the
slave. What he wants from the slave is not
recognition but work.
Fanon evidently does not understand
that work, which in this context means
alienated labor, is itself the form of recognition demanded by the master. In fact, it is
the labor of the slave that brings the master
into being. Capital is objectied labor, but

labor is not subjectied capital: Without

labor, capital would simply not exist. As
Hegel puts it, The truth of the independent
consciousness is accordingly the consciousness of the slave.
There is, then, a sense in which the Dominican Republic would not, and could not,
exist without Haiti. Dominican identity is
nothing more than the antithesis of Haiti.
Of course, all identity is predicated upon an
Other. But what is unusual, and instructive,
about Hispaniola is the fact that this process
of identity-formation is carried out deliberately and consciously. Dominicans will readily and proudly admit that their personal and
national identities are constructed through
the forcible expulsion of everything Haitian.
In turn, the Haitians have evolved a complex
mythological understanding of their role
in this polarity. The concept of the zombie
underlies all Haitian popular culture, because
it expresses a profound truth about Haitian
identity. A zombie is brought into existence
in order to work, and the gure
of the zombie reveals the true nature of
alienated labor. Labor objectied in the form
of capital is dead labor, dead human activity,
dead lifein other words, Death itself.
We could have no concept or understanding
of what we call life if we did not also have
a notion to express the Other of life, which
we call death. Life could not exist without
death, any more than the master could exist
without the slave, or Santo Domingo could
exist without Port-au-Prince. The revolutionary breakthrough in human consciousness will arrive when Prosperos nal comment on CalibanThis thing of darkness
I acknowledge mineceases to signify
a claim to possession and becomes a recognition of the Others constitutive role within
the Self.
It is perhaps a dening characteristic of
postmodernity that the opposition between
capital and labor is internalized. This process
is hardly mysterious. Just as capital and
labor are accompanied by distinct ideologies
when they are embodied in social classes,
so they prompt discordant ideas within
the psyches of individuals who, like most
individuals in the Western world, are
simultaneously proletarian and bourgeois.
They also structure encounters between
individuals. We are no longer, as Georg
Lukacs has said, an integrated civilization
that sees the destiny of the individual

35

reected in the movements of the stars.

But we can still discern the tentacles of
capitalism in the ngers of a pickpocket.7
1 Of course, such an expulsion would be impossible,
either economically or psychologically. In Civilization and
Its Discontents, Freud remarks on the peculiar fact that
peoples whose territories are adjacent, and are otherwise
closely related, are always at feud with and ridiculing each
other, as, for instance, the Spaniards and the Portuguese,
the North and South Germans, the English and the Scotch,
and so on. I gave it the name of narcissism in respect of
minor differences, which does not do much to explain it.
Freud is quite correct in his evaluation of his own theory
here. The myth of Narcissus, and of his love for Echo, is
indeed inadequate to describe the form of identity, which
is founded not on similarity but on difference. Narcissus
and Echo were unable to distinguish between Self and
Other. As Michele Wuckers recent study of Hispaniola,
Why the Cocks Fight, reminds us, Haitians and Dominicans
experience no such difculty. This is because there is a
constitutive imbalance in their relationship, an imbalance
which brings us back to the fundamental paradigm of
master and slave.

Airport disease
Matthew Rose

Im waiting for my identity, says Merhan

Karimi Nasseri, touching the lesion that has
erupted on his scalp as he inhales nearly half
of his Dunhill in one drag. He sighs, looks
around, smiles. Surrounded by a decades
worth of newspapers, magazines, clothes
and books, a Sony Walkman, an alarm clock,
and a pair of Lufthansa boxes containing his 1000 page-plus handwritten diary,
Nasseri, or Alfred as he is known, lives on
a 1970s red plastic bench in the departure
lounge of Terminal One at Pariss Charles de
Gaulle Airport. In November he will mark his
13th anniversary there.

detained for days, then weeks, then months,

then years.His limbo stretched on. French
human-rights lawyer Christian Bourget
took on the case and the media homed in.
Dozens of articles appeared in the world
press, and at least three documentary lms
were made. Oddly enough, with all the
attention focused on Nasseri, none of his
relatives or friends sought him out.

Merhan Karimi Nasseris story begins in

1977. Expelled from his native Iran for antigovernment activity, he bounced around
Europe for a few years before receiving
ofcial refugee status from Belgium in 1981.
Nasseri lived as a student there and traveled
to the UK and France without difculty until
1988, when he landed at Charles de Gaulle
Airport after being denied entry into Britain
because his passport and United Nations
refugee certicate had been stolen. He was

In 1995 the Belgian government, which

originally issued Nasseris refugee papers,
said he could come back and live in
Belgium. But after spending seven years of
his life in the airport, Nasseri proclaimed that
he was intent on living in the UK because,
he asserted, his mother was Scottish. (Hes
since claimed several nationalities, including
Swedish, then Danish and, briey, Finnish).
By then Nasseri, whod been getting along
well with the food coupons and occasional
gifts of money and clothes, had begun to
show the strains of waiting, and was afraid
to move for fear of arresta concern
Bourget said was totally unfounded. Finally
the Belgians agreed to reissue the original

Above
Nasseri in photo booth at Charles de Gaulle airport, 2001.

opposite and overleaf

Pages from Nasseris airport diary.

36

documents if Nasseri would come to

Brussels and sign them in person. But
Bourgets client protested that he couldnt
cross the border without his papers and
so again he refused.
With Bourgets persistence, the documents
were sent from Brussels, but again Nasseri
refused to sign them. Why? The papers,
he complained, listed his name as Merhan
Kamari Nasseri, which is not my name.
Nor was Iran his birthplace anymore. Alfred
explained his new name to one newspaper:
The UK immigration forms offer a space
for an adopted name, and I chose Alfred
because I thought it sounded nice. One day
I got a letter back from them addressed to
me as Dear Sir, Alfred, and so it just stuck.
Sir Alfred was born on an immigration form.
Identity is the key issue for Alfred, and the
contemporary international airport, symbol
of anonymous global nomadism, is perhaps
where it is best expressed. Piped-in muzak
and inaudible announcements for ights
that are boarding, delayed, or cancelled,
for missing persons and lost children, or
for reminders not to smoke, give airports
the quality of a restless dream. Its
participants are forever shifting, standing,
stretching, buying a magazine, turning a
page, crossing their legs, staring into a stage
lled with extras, and nervously checking
their passports, proof of who they are.
When I asked Alfred over a meal of Big
Macs on his bench if he was Iranian, he
said that he was not, and was still waiting
to nd out where he is really from, who
he really is, even where his parents are now.
The United Nations High Commission on
Refugees will establish my identity and my
place of birth, he said condently. He hasnt
had any contact with the UNHCR since
before Christmas 2000.
He blames Iran for many of his problems,
Dr. Philippe Bargain, chief medical ofcer
for the airport told one newspaper in 1999.
We have to convince him to sign his legal
papers with his original name. It is a ridiculous situation. Its not only ridiculous
but scandalous, says airport chaplain Pre
Fournier, who calls Nasseri a bel escroc
(a pretty swindler). Fournier believes he
not only has his passport, but he has plenty
of moneyfrom the lms and from what
people give him. Dr. Bargain, who sees
Alfred more often than the other principals

39

in the saga, nds him a pleasant man, but

admits, He is a bit mad He has all the
papers he needs, but he wont leave.
Theres nothing I can do for him anymore,
adds Bourget, who hasnt seen him in more
than two years. Now he cannot face the
possibility of leaving because he has a nest
there. And he feels that if he goes out he will
not be a media star anymore. His story is
nished. While the French police have
no legal right to remove him, they probably
wouldnt risk even a diplomatic effort to
get him to go. They dont want to try
anything because immediately dozens of
reporters would be there to tell the story,
says Bourget.
So Alfred sits and waits for the United
Nations High Commission on Refugees.
But when I called their Paris ofce to get an
update on his case, I was told, Its pure
folly, by a spokesperson. No, we are not
trying to locate his mother and father and
give him his identity. While the UNHCR
does work in the airports, largely in the
zone dattente helping foreign nationals
seeking asylum, Alfred has all the papers
he needs. There are no other papers for him.
The refugee no longer needs asylum.
The airport is a city of speed, maximizing
the commodication of modern life: ATMs,
fast-food restaurants, people-movers, hotel
services, rent-a-car desks, rental carts for
moving your lifes belongings, all compressed in an environment dedicated to
getting you in and out as fast as possible.
There is little present tense in the airport
few dawdle there for their own pleasure,
although in-ight magazines would have you
believe otherwise with their promotions of
duty-free shopping and upscale rst class
lounges. Gilded with promising ads of blue
skies, white beaches and lled with roaming
armed police, airports are the ideal places to
live out the future if you had no home and
wanted people to come to you.
Alfred lived within throwing distance of
the McDonalds for most of the booming
1990s. He celebrated Christmas and the
new mil-lennium at the little round table hes
acquired and positioned at the center of his
universe of carts and objects. He doesnt
speak French and says he does not dream.
He has no friends and little contact with the
airport employees although everyone knows
him. Certainly Alfred is an observer of

change as well as stasis, although what it

means to him is a mystery. He regards the
world through daily newspapers (his subscription to Time magazine was stopped by
the airport post ofce a few years ago).
But he has also observed the world change
around himthe McDonalds used to be
a Burger King; the CD vendor moved into
the push-scooter market.
To keep himself occupied, Alfred keeps a
longhand journal that details whom he has
met and things he remembers about his
case. Some points each day, he says.
But he doesnt have a mobile phone and it
isnt clear hed know how to use one; hes
never seen the Internet although he knows
he can be found on it (he showed me an
article on him printed out from the New York
Times web site). Alfred does, however,
know how to survive, and without paying
rent or taxes.
But maybe the slim balding man with the
trim mustache has found his place after all
as a celebrity homeless person. Indeed,
Alfred, whose closest neighbors are a
photo booth and a copy machine, is eerily
Warholian. And this in effect might explain
why, even after receiving in 1999 a special
European travel visa (which permits him
to voyage and live anywhere in Europe,
even the US), he refuses to leave. If he did
leave, it would mean tacit acceptance of an
identity.
As a gift for his time, I brought Alfred a book
I thought might open him up to life beyond
the asphalt and concrete gardens of Charles
de Gaulle, a paperback copy of Carl Sagans
Is There Intelligent Life in the Universe? I
will read this, he said, intrigued, thumbing
through the pages. Thank you.W

A fevered dream of Maya:

Robert Stacy-Judd
Jesse Lerner

The 1994 Northridge earthquake cracked

the faade of Robert Stacy-Judds Masonic
Temple (built in 1951) in the San Fernando
Valley in California. The structural damage
that the Mayan Revival-style building suffered
was so severe that the temple was deemed
unsafe and the lodge was closed. For a time
then, the building was an authentic NeoMayan ruin.1 The spectacle of these Mayan
Revival ruins, not those of the ancient
Yucatecan Maya, brings to mind the 19thcentury engravings used to illustrate travel
writings, such as Frederick Catherwoods
celebrated images for John Lloyd Stephenss
Incidents of Travel in Central America,
Chiapas and Yucatan (1841) and Incidents of
Travel in Yucatan (1843), which had originally
inspired Stacy-Judd. Like Catherwoods
engravings, the North Hollywood Masonic
Lodge, and other structures in this particular
revival style, attempt to stake a claim to the
distant Mayan past. By doing so, they aim
to naturalize a specic relationship between
the present and the past, an ideologically
charged turf-staking to which architecture
and archology both lend themselves
particularly well. Given the broad history
of the uses of Mesoamerican antiquities
and references to legitimize governments,
to evoke worlds of ancient mysticism, and
to forge hemispheric bonds, Stacy-Judd
stands out as a particularly idiosyncratic
gure. The multiple contradictions of StacyJudds life and rolesan Englishman in
search of an All-American architectural
style, and an importer of Mayan styles to
the Yucatn, their place of originall point
to the complexities of a life which reveals
much about Pan-Americanism, appropriation, and the diverse contemporary uses
of architectural styles lifted from Ancient
America.2
Robert Stacy-Judd (1884-1975) came to
learn of Mayan architecture through Catherwoods etchings. Having made this discovery, he abandoned his youthful irtations
with other exotic architectural styles:
ancient Egypt (Electric Picture Palace, Isle
of Wight, 1910-1912; Beni-Hasan Theater,
Store, and Ofce Building, Arcadia, CA,
1923-1924), Tudor England (Elks Home,
Williston, North Dakota, 1914-1915), and the
Islamic Middle East (in his designs for a 1916
auto show in North Dakota).3 The ancient
Maya, as evoked by his Aztec Hotel, were
not a phase for Stacy-Judd, but a life-long
fascination. He ltered his perceptions of the
ancient Maya through esoteric ideas about

the spiritual power of the ruins. Unlike other

more formalist and modernist appropriations
of the Pre-Columbian past, such as those by
Frank Lloyd Wright, Stacy-Judds buildings
reveal a sensibility that is more theatrical
than architectural. Stacy-Judd saw in the
Maya the mawkish story of a lost Eden,
enlivened by royalty and pomp, which he
dramatized in colorful costumes, amboyant
architecture, romantic poetry, and speculative literature. His greatest triumph was the
Aztec Hotel (Monrovia, CA, 1924-1925),
which achieved overwhelming popular
success, and earned praise in publications
ranging from the New York Times to the
trade magazines American Architect and the
Hotel Monthly. It was the Aztec Hotel that
launched Stacy-Judds career as a promoter,
explorer, and chronicler of the ancient Maya.
Stacy-Judd did not conne his professional
activities to architecture. He published
poetry and speculative rants, lmed a
travelogue, lectured, and recorded radio
broadcasts on archeological topics. He even
designed and patented the Hul-Che Atlatl
Throwing Stick, which he claimed was
derived from ancient Mayan prototypes.
As an archeologist, Stacy-Judds contributions are negligible. At a time when
the wild armchair speculations of Victorian
anthropology were fast becoming outmoded, he brought to the table a poorly
synthesized stew of ideas borrowed from
Ignatius Donnelly, James Churchward, and
Alice and Augustus Le Plongeon. But StacyJudds peculiar genius lay in his are for
showmanship, not in his scholarship.
He found his place in Southern California,
hobnobbing and frolicking with the
Hollywood crowd. Bette Davis turned to
him to satiate her curiosity about the Maya.
He even proposed a feature-length ction
lm set at Chichn Itz called The Scarlet
Empress for which he labored in his later
years on costumes and sets. Without the
opportunity to produce this technicolor
melodrama, without commissions for
anything other than prosaic San Fernando
Valley ranch houses, in the 40s and 50s
Stacy-Judds imagination ran wild at the
drafting board. He conjured up a number
of fantastic, never-completed projects,
such as the proto-Epcot Center village of
Native American reinterpretations called the
Enchanted Boundary. None of his later
projects ever garnered the high praise which
the Aztec Hotel won for him. How was
it that this Monrovia hostel captured the

imagination of so many? The 1925 Aztec

Hotel embodies the enormous vogue for
things Mexican, and represents a turning
point in the history of the Mayan Revival
Style in the United States, distinct from
both the more imperial era which it followed
and the Good Neighbor phase, which
coincided with the Second World War.
Earlier efforts to revive Ancient Mayan
building styles in the United States coincided with and embodied the spirit of a period
of hemispheric expansion. Following
the territorial enlargement resulting from the
US-Mexican and Spanish-American Wars,
North Americans ocked to exhibitions
where they could see something of these
recent, distant acquisitions. These included
displays of human specimens, antiquities,
and plaster casts of archeological curiosities.
P.T. Barnum was apparently responsible for
a hoax which toured the US and Europe,
a pair of microcephalics billed as descendants and specimens of the sacerdotal cast
(now nearly extinct) of the Ancient Aztec
founders of the ruined temples of that
country, described by John L. Stephens
Esq., and other travelers.4 Barnum was
not the only one hoping to capitalize on
the success of Incidents. In late 19th-century
New York, the Globe Museum, the Orrin
Brothers, and the Nichols Aztec Fair all
exhibited the last descendants of this
ancient race.5 This designation predicted
the imminent demise of the Indian, recasting
colonialism as preordained fate. The framing
rhetoric positioned Pre-Cortesian America as
a heritage without living heirs and available
to be claimed. In the 1893 Columbian
Exhibition in Chicago, Edward Thompsons
archeological casts included a life-sized copy
of the arch at Labna. Standing guard by the
arch was Desire Charnays cast of a Mayan
Indian, frozen in time like a fossilized human
being. These displays embody the climate of
westward expansion and Manifest Destiny
that shaped early American anthropology.
Thompson, who bought the ruins of ChichnItz and smuggled gold and jade from its
cenote (sacred well), and Augustus Le
Plongeon, who harnessed a dozen of his
Mayan laborers to the stone Chac Mol in
an aborted attempt to drag the object to
Philadelphia, exemplify this acquisitive age.
The removal of archeological loot went hand
in hand with the search for raw materials,
new markets, and land. The 1823 Monroe
Doctrine set the tenor for an American
foreign policy premised on the belief that
Robert Stacy-Judd in Mayan costume, 1932.
Courtesy Robert Stacy-Judd Collection,
University of California Santa Barbara Art Museum

40

the hemisphere belonged to the US. The

replicas of Mayan ruins that constitute the
origins of the revival style served as part of
the symbolic turf-staking which buttressed
this imperialist notion.6
In contrast, by the late 1930s the building
of Mayan Revival structures in the US had
gained an altogether different political
urgency. The repeated US invasions of
Central America, the Caribbean, and Mexico
in the second half of the 19th and early 20th
centuries had made Latin America suspicious and hostile to the colossus to the
North. Wary of this ill-will, the Good Neighbor Policy of the Hoover and Roosevelt
administrations championed policies of
mutual respect, cooperation, and nonintervention. The growing threat of fascism
in Europe heightened the need for hemispheric unity. Unlike the earlier unilateral
appropriations, the exhibitions and recreations of ancient Mesoamerica in the US in
the 1930s and 1940s were typically collaborative efforts in which both the US and Mexican governments participated.7 Of this era,
art historian Holly Barnet-Sanchez writes that
the United States government was not only
seeking a rapprochement with all of Latin
America but was also pursuing this policy
within a clearly dened language of shared
histories and cultures. Thus, by 1933 the
Other had in effect become one of us.8
Architecture offered an ideal vehicle for this
diplomatic move. Following the direction
anticipated by the Aztec Garden of the
Pan-American Union building (Albert
Kelsey and Paul P. Cret, Washington, DC,
1910), Mayan Revival architecture made
public declarations of a common American
heritage. San Diegos former Federal Building (Richard Requa, 1935), a bit of Uxmal in
Balboa Park, and Mridas Parque de las
Americas (Manuel Ambilis, 1946) where
stel naming the states of the Americas
proclaim the shared Mayan ancestry of
nations including Canada, Uruguay, and
Cuba, all embody this phenomenon. Neither
diplomatic offering nor colonial proclamation of ownership, the Aztec Hotel represents a transitional moment in US NeoMayanism, poised between the expansionism of the previous century and the diplomatic necessities of the Good Neighbor era.
Like P. T. Barnums failure to distinguish
between the Aztecs of Central Mexico and
the Mayan ruins described in Stephenss

account, the appellation Aztec for a

building which is based on the peninsular
Mayan style represents a conation of two
very distinct regions and cultures of Mexico.
The hotels designation was not so much
a misnomer as a concession to a North
American public that may not have read
Stephenss 1841 account. The ruins of Maya
in Central America, Yucatn, and Chiapas
were less well known to the North American
public than those of the Aztecs of the
Central Valley.9 However, that was changing.
The 20s represents a high watermark for the
North American fascination with Mexican
culture.10 That was the decade when
modernist dancer Ted Shawn toured middle
America with Francisco Cornejos costumes
and Martha Grahams performance in
Xochil, a Pre-Cortesian dance. Battery
company executive and amateur Mayanist
Theodore A. Willard published his mannered
archeological ction, Bride of the Rain
God: Princess of Chichn Itz and The City
of the Sacred Well. Stacy-Judds tour-deforce coincides with the inauguration of
the Carnegie Institutions Chichn-Itz
excavations (1923-1933), popularized in
periodicals like National Geographic.11 Ann
Axtel and Earl Morris published popular
autobiographical accounts of their work
with the Carnegie project. In 1923 the
Yucatecan governor Felipe Carrillo Puerto
opened a road connecting Chichn to the
outside world. As we shall see, Carrillo
Puertos motives for championing this
Revolutionary Mayan revival differed from
those of the Carnegie, but in practice their
agendas coincided. But of all these Jazz Age
visions of the ancient Maya, none was more
delirious than that of Stacy-Judd. His Aztec
Hotel opened to a United States primed for
Pre-Columbian spectacle.
The hype that developed around the Aztec
Hotel (a good deal of which was instigated
by Stacy-Judd himself) celebrated it as
the only building in the United States that
is 100% American.12 Turning to autochthonous sources was a frequent strategy for
North Americans in search of an authentic,
non-European identity. Often this search
called for face paints, secret rituals, and the
taking of indigenous appellations. Posing
in prole, as in a Mayan bas-relief, Robert
Stacy-Judd displays for the camera his
Mayan headdress and robes. By dressing
himself as a Mayan lord, the English
expatriate engaged in a venerable American
tradition of playing Indian that dates back

Robert Stacy-Judd, The Destruction of Atlantis, 1936.

Courtesy Robert Stacy-Judd Collection,
University of California Santa Barbara Art Museum

43

to colonial times, if not earlier. Blackface

and redface were old American strategies
that served diverse functions.13 Sometimes
a disguise for rebellions that protested
misrule, often a part of celebrations and
ceremonies, and always an assertion of
whiteness, this practice predates the Boston
Tea Party.14 Much like the rebellious Boston
colonials, Stacy-Judd donned his Indian
robes to cut the umbilical cord to Europe.
He joined members of the Improved Order
of the Redmen, the New Confederacy of
the Iroquois, and the Boy Scouts Order
of the Arrow in a 100% American search
for authenticity and rootedness through an
aboriginal disguise.
Stacy-Judds cross-cultural transvestism was
much more than a single evenings act of
symbolic rebellion. Building private houses
and public buildings throughout the United
States in the Neo-Mayan style, StacyJudd always took his appropriation of the
indigenous a step further. Stacy-Judds was
a double appropriation of alterity, paraphrasing, in a single structure, the Mexican and
the Native American. Paradoxically, subsequent to the genocide, Native Americans
became arguably that group whose names,
likenesses, sthetics, foods, dances, bodies,
etc. were appropriated more often than any
other ethnic group in the Americas. Within
architecture, however, the appropriation
of Native American forms was unusual in
1924, though precedents had been set by
movie theaters (the Aztec Theater, Eagle
Pass, Texas, 1915), at Worlds Fairs (the
Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the 1915
Panama California International Exposition in
San Diego) and by a few private homes.15
By evoking autochthonous America, the
Aztec Hotel anticipated the later Pueblo
Deco style popular in the 1930s. StacyJudds own Soboba Hot Springs Hotel and
Indian Village (San Jacinto, 1924-1927), with
its Pima and Yuma cottages, a cocktail of
Pueblo, Maricopa, and Hopi styles, probably
represents the apogee of this short-lived
architectural trend.16 Appropriations of
colonial Mexican architectural styles were
more common. At the time Stacy-Judd
designed the Aztec Hotel, the Mission
Revival was at its apex in Southern California. Later he produced buildings like the
Neil Monroe House (Sherwood Forest, CA,
1929), with eclectic blends of Mission and
Mayan elements. While Stacy-Judds Aztec
Hotel was not the rst architectural appropriation of Ancient Mexico, the reference

44

was unusual enough for him to make that

claim.
Stacy-Judds Aztec Hotel was built in the
context of a generalized taste for architectural exoticism that ourished in Southern
California in the 1920s. It is linked not only
to the Mission Revival in its regionalist evocation of an exalted history, but also to the
other whimsical references to the exotic in
the region, such as Manns Chinese Theater
(Hollywood, 1927) or the Samson Tire Works
(1929, today the Citadel outlet mall). Often,
the dialogue with the emerging cinema
industry is pronounced, either in the buildings function as movie palace or in references to distant locales, like the Babylonia
of D.W. Grifths Intolerance (1916) or the
Mexico-Tenochtitlan of Cecil B. De Milles
The Woman Who God Forgot (1917). Related
too is the rise of the whimsical roadside
vernacular architecture that Robert Venturi,
Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour
named duck, in recognition of a Long
Island diner shaped like (and specializing in
roast) duck.17 Contemporaneous Southern
California structures such as the Brown
Derby (1926), the Tamale (1928), and
Tijuanas Sombrero (1928) share a playful
sense of building as symbol. Yet in spite of
the relationships between the Aztec Hotel
and these other examples of quirky, exoticized, and movie-set architecture, StacyJudd found in the Maya more than simply
a revival style. The deeper resonances of
the image of Stacy-Judd in Mayan costume
evoke the ritual life of those millions of
middle-class American males involved in
secret societies and fraternal organizations.
Especially in the 19th and early 20th
centuries, the Freemasons, the Knights of
Pythias, the Odd Fellows, and hundreds of
smaller groups offered ritual, conviviality,
fellowship, and entertainment to citizens in
a society where social roles were in ux.18
Members of these groups might impersonate Druids, Romans, or Native Americans in
elaborate secret rites. One such group was
the Mayan Temple and Alliance of American
Aborigines of Brooklyn, New York, founded
by Harold Davis Emerson, Ph.D., D.D., in
1928.19 This temple, similar to Masonry,20
offered ritual, dance, and classes on hieroglyphic writing to its members. Here was a
natural constituency for the Mayan Revival
style. Though the Mayan Temple never had
sufcient resources to commission their
own building, they describe their quarters:

The Mayan Temple has now been completely

redecorated. Through the courtesy of Chief
Lynx and Brother Richard Bolanz, picturewriting and beautiful murals adorn the walls
and ceilings. On the frieze in Indian picturewriting is the story of the Mayan Temple.
Above it on the ceiling is the Mayan seal and
the various clan totems [] On the west
wall is a reproduction of a Mayan ruined city
buried in the jungle.21
Their newsletter provides an overview of the
concerns of the Brooklyn Maya. News briefs
report on the Carnegie Institution excavations and the evidence of ancient Mayan use
of the telegraph. Mayan astrology is employed to predict the future of Roosevelts New
Deal initiatives. Frequently, articles dispel
negative perceptions of the Indian as savage,
backward, prone to practice human sacrice, or violent. Credited or not, much of
their account of the Maya is derived from
the Le Plongeons.
For Masons and related groups, architecture
was a subject of paramount importance.
The Masonic quest for architectural perfection, embodied by the lost design of the
Temple of Solomon, probably originates in
their roots as Medieval British stone hewers.
This interest often led the Mason to paraphrase the ancient Egyptian monuments,
sometimes on an ambitious scale.22 But
followers of Augustus Le Plongeon, who
argued the Egyptian mysteries originated
with the peninsular Maya, turned to Native
American architecture. Not surprisingly
then, many of the major patrons of Mayan
Revival buildings are Masonic Lodges, theosophical groups, and other occult confederations. Robert Stacy-Judd found a
like-minded patron in the founder of the
Philosophical Research Society, Manly
Palmer Hall. Here the Mayan Revival style
embodied not Manifest Destiny, but a
supernatural destiny made manifest.
Southern California is only one of the places
where Stacy-Judd sought to promote his
Mayan Revival. The Stacy-Judd archive
includes proposed projects in Mexico City,
Ixtapalapi [sic], and Guatemala City. If the
Mayan Revival in Monrovia evoked the
exoticism of distant pyramids, in Mexico the
style took on completely different meanings.
Encouraged by the success of the Aztec
Hotel, Stacy-Judd set off to Yucatn to see
the original models and to promote his
designs. In Mrida he was invited to the

ofce of the state governor, as he describes

the visit in his travelogue:
My reason for visiting the Yucatan, primarily,
was to further my efforts in creating an allAmerican architecture and its allied arts. []
For one whole hour the interview lasted.
All things considered, the situation was
extraordinary. I had been given to understand the Yucatecan to be indifferent to the
potential wealth of his country, namely, the
Mayan ruins. I was amazed to learn that,
quite the contrary, he is vitally interested.
After I had nally answered numerous
inquiries regarding my adventures in Yucatan
up to that time, the Governor asked to see
my watercolor studies of Mayan adaptations.
And when we nally parted, he said in his
cordial manner, Dont forget, Seor, our
country is yours.
[] Glancing back as I left the Building of
the People, my eye caught sight of an oil
painting standing on an easel in the
open foyer. It was an oil painting of the late
General Carrillo, Governor of Yucatan.
He it was who commenced this structure,
intending it to be his residencebut alas!
he was murdered in 1924, while in ofce.23
Stacy-Judds assumption that the modern
Yucatecans were indifferent to the ruins
echoes the writings of other European
and North American travelers, including
Stephenss own Incidents. These accounts
consistently attempted to separate the
ancient Maya and their spectacular cities
from their contemporary descendants.
Stephens had lamented that so beautiful a
country should be in such miserable hands.
Though he rejected the wilder diffusionist
theories that circulated widely at the time,
he nonetheless believed that no remnant
of this race [of architects] hangs round
the ruins.24 Stacy-Judd learned that this
indifference was a self-serving misperception, propagated by writers like Stephens.25
Upon his arrival in Mrida, Stacy-Judd
discovered that the contemporary Yucatecans were so vitally interested in their
past that they had arrived at their own very
different Mayan Revival style independently
of him. The Building of the People (La
Casa del Pueblo), where the described
appointment took place, is in the Mayan
Revival style. Though the building, designed
by the Mexican architect Angel Balchini,
was completed in 1928, the fact that Stacy-

45

Judd mentions that the project was initiated

by Carrillo Puerto (governor 1923-1924)
suggests he was aware that the building was
almost exactly contemporary with his Aztec
Hotel.26 Stacy-Judds strange silence here
not only protects his claims as the rst to
revive the architecture of the ancient
Maya, but also elides his own position as
an importer of Mayan architecture to its
place of origin.
The Yucatecan version of the Mayan Revival
arguably predated the Mexican Revolution,
but it was under the auspices of the
Revolution that it ourished.27 As such,
it was part of a larger political and
social program, one which consciously
used culture as a means to elevate the
subaltern.28 In the Yucatn, the Revolution
came not as an organic uprising from
below, but as an imported phenomenon.29
The principal leaders, Salvador Alvarado
and Felipe Carrillo Puerto, were in some
ways like caudillos [strongmen], a Leninist
vanguard intent on jump-starting a radical
social movement among the indigenous
majority still emerging from an oppressive
system of debt-peonage bordering on
slavery. Monuments and public buildings
were an important part of their program
to stir pride in the glorious Mayan past.
In spite of the massive immigration of
Mexicans to Southern California in the
1920s, accelerated by the push of Mexican
domestic upheavals and the pull of labor
shortages in the US, the Aztec Hotel only
addresses an Anglo public. If Stacy-Judds
use of ancient Mayan motifs in Monrovia
and elsewhere in Southern California are
examples of a cultural appropriation of a
geographically and historically distant Eden,
in Mrida his project takes on an entirely
different character, that of a repatriation,
albeit one highly transformed. During his
stay in the Yucatn, Stacy-Judd came to
know the Revolutionary socialist states
version of the Mayan Revival. He was overwhelmed:
There is plenty of evidence that the
Yucatecan is awakening to an appreciation
of the civilization whose extraordinary
works lie buried in the jungle-growth fastness
of his country. As one instance,
the latest opera of Seor Luis Rosado
Vega, Yucatans favorite composer, was
Mayan, and the night of its premiere
production in Mrida was of red-letter
importance.[]

The story told of the Nahuatl introduction

among the Mayas of human sacrice,
and centered around the custom of
presenting a beautiful virgin as bride to
Yum Chac, the Rain God, in times of
extreme drought, the scene of action was,
of course, the now famous Sacred Well
at Chichen-Itza []
The costume designs were accurate
as to classical style and presented a
gorgeous appearance. They were by
far the outstanding features of the
performance and more clearly exemplied
the true ancient Maya than did either
the music of the settings. No New York
stage fantasy ever surpassed in costuming
the beauty and striking colorfulness
expressed in these cleverly-conceived
and artistic creations.30
Unlike those North American visitors who
came as leftist pilgrims, Stacy-Judd took
no notice of the radical social experiment
underway.31 What drew him was the
costume drama of the Mayan opera. Today
the visitor to the Aztec Hotel cannot help but
notice its state of disrepair. Richard Requas
Federal Building in San Diego (1935) has
been converted into the Sports Hall of Fame,
but the decorative Mayan trim is crumbling
off the sides. While many of the ruins
that inspired these structures have been
restored and found a second life as tourist
attrac-tions, the Mayan Revival buildings
have all too often fallen toward ruin.32 In an
age of NAFTA and the militarized border,
the ambitions of westward and southward
national expansion and the ideals of PanAmerican unity that inspired these buildings
are anachronistic. Fifty years after New
York stole the idea of modern art,33 when
glob-alization is often taken to mean Americanization, the search for an authentic
American style or for an architecture which
is 100% American seems a dated preoccupation. Todays Mayan Revival buildings
are more likely to be amusement park
attractions, located in places as distant as
Catalonia or the Bahamas, than monuments
to inter-American understanding and
cooperation. Yet in spite of the perceived
irrelevance or datedness of the ideas that
spurred on this revival style, the work of
Stacy-Judd anticipates the postmodern
turn in architecture. His collision of distinct
styles and geographically distant citations
in unrealized projects like The Streets of All
Nations (1938), with its Russian, Hindu,

French, and (inevitably) Pre-Columbian units,

remind contemporary viewers of theme park
architecture. The jumble of the Philosophical
Research Societys quotations anticipates
Frank Gehrys Aerospace Museum (Los
Angeles, 1984). Distant from the pared
down modernist primitivism of Frank Lloyd
Wrights Guggenheim Museum, StacyJudds is an alternate path that looks to both
the past and the future.B
Complete references and a bibliography for this article are
available at www.immaterial.net/cabinet.

1 Happily, the building has subsequently been repaired and

is now once again not only used for Free Mason meetings,
but is available for rent for weddings, parties, Bar Mitzvahs,
and other special occasions.
2 Robert Stacy-Judd was by no means the only advocate of
the Mayan Revival. Other proponents include Frank Lloyd
Wright, Alfred C. Bossom, George Oakley Totten, Francisco
Cornejo, Manuel Ambilis, Richard Requa, and many others.
3 Stacy-Judds colorful life and architectural career are
summarized in David Gebhard, Robert Stacy-Judd (Santa
Barbara: Capra Books, 1993).
4 Ester Allen, The Aztec Lilliputians of Iximaya, Mandora,
no. 3 (1993), p. 151.
5 Marjorie Ingle, Mayan Revival Style (Salt Lake City:
Peregrine Smith Books, 1984), p. 4.
6 More on this early history is available in the unpublished
dissertation (UCSB, 1996) by Tina Marie Llorante, The
Worlds Fairs of 1889 and 1893: Antecedents to Maya
Revival Style Architecture.
7 Holly Barnet-Sanchez, The Necessity of Pre-Columbian
Art: U.S. Museums and the Role of Foreign Policy in
the Appropriation and Transformation of Mexican Heritage,
1933-1944, unpublished dissertation (UCLA, 1993).
8 Ibid., p. 28.
9 Stacy-Judd writes in his unpublished autobiography: . .
. when the hotel project was announced, the word Maya
was unknown to the layman . . . as the word Aztec was
fairly well known, I baptized the hotel with that name,
although the decorative motifs are Maya. (p. 351).
Stacy-Judds autobiography is held in the archives of
the University of California Santa Barbaras Architectural
Drawing Collection.
10 Helen Delpar, The Enormous Vogue of Things Mexican:
Cultural Relations Between the United States and Mexico,
1920-1935 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press,
1992); James Oles, South of the Border (Washington, DC:
Smithsonian, 1993).
11 Sylvanus Morley, The Foremost Intellectual
Achievement of Ancient America, National Geographic
vol. 41, (January 1922), pp. 109-131, and Chichen Itza:
An Ancient American Mecca, National Geographic, vol.
47, (January 1925), pp. 63-95. In addition, the writings of
Alma Reed, Gregory Mason, and the much publicized aerial
photography of Charles Lindbergh helped popularize the
Ancient Maya in the 1920s.
12 Edward Lloyd Hampton, Creating a New World
Architecture, Southern California Business (April 1928)
pp. 16-17, 38, 45, 48.
13 For a reading of cross-dressing, minstrelsy, and what I
am referring to here as cross-cultural transvestitism, see
Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the
American Working Class (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1993).
14 David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness, revised ed.
(London: Verso, 1999), p. 104. See also Philip J. Deloria,
Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
15 Bruce Prices home for Pierre Lorillard (Tuxedo, NY,
1885), Otto Neher and Chauncey Skillingss Cordova Hotel
(Los Angeles, 1912), the rm of Allison and Alisons tunnel

entrance to the Southwest Museum (Los Angeles, CA,

1919-20), Frank Lloyd Wrights German Warehouse
(Richmond Center, WI, 1915), Hollyhock House (1917-21,
Los Angeles, CA), Imperial Hotel (Tokyo, Japan, 1916-22),
and Millard House (Pasadena, CA, 1923). In the Yucatn,
early examples include Manuel Ambiliss Masonic Lodge
(Mrida, Yuc., 1915) and Ambilis and Gregory Webbs
Sanatorio Rendn Peniche (Mrida, Yuc., 1919),
16 Gebhard, op. cit., p. 81.
17 Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, Mass.:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1996 [1972]),
pp. 74-75. See also Jim Heimann and Rip Georges,
California Crazy (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1980).
18 See Mark C. Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).
19 The holdings of the Southwest Museum (Los Angeles)
include copies of The Mayan, their newsletter, and their
Mayan Temple Handbook.
20 Mayan Temple vol. 1, no. 2 (1933), p. 5.
21 Mayan Temple, vol. 6, no. 7 (1941), p. 2.
22 James Stevens Curl, The Art and Architecture of
Freemasonry: An Introductory Study (London: B.T. Batsford,
Ltd., 1991).
23 Robert Stacy-Judd, The Ancient Mayas: Adventures in
the Jungles of Yucatan (Los Angeles: Haskell-Travers, Inc.,
1934), pp. 37-38.
24 Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and
Yucatan (New York: Dover, 1969 [1841]) vol. I, p. 59.
25 Melchor Jos Campos Garca analyzes the perceptions
of the ancient Maya in the minds of the 19th-century
Spanish-speaking Yucatecans in unpubl. diss., (UADY,
1987), La Etnia Maya en la Conciencia Criolla Yucateca,
1810-1861.
26 Balchinis Casa del Pueblo and other Yucatecan
examples of Mayan Revival architecture are documented in
Ileana B. Lara Navarrete, Estilos Arquitectnicos de Mrida:
Historia ilustrada, desde su fundacin hasta la actualidad
(Mrida: Editorial Dante, 1998) p. 71 ff.
27 When Porrio Daz visited Mrida in 1906, the city
built a series of commemorative Mayan arches to mark the
occasion.
28 For a useful introduction on the post-Revolutionary
Mexican renaissance, see Olivier Debroise et. al.
Modernidad y modernizacin en el arte mexicano, 19201960 (Mexico, D.F.: Museo Nacional de Arte, 1991).
29 This is the thesis, argued in great detail and quite
convincingly, in Gilbert Joseph, Revolution from Without
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1988).
30 Stacy-Judd, op. cit., p. 53.
31 I am thinking here of travelers such as Ernest Gruening,
John Dos Passos, and Bertram Wolfe, who were attracted
by the Revolutionary politics of 1920s Mexico.
32 The exceptions are often those buildings that have
been adapted to other functions. The Maya Theater of Los
Angeles, a 1927 movie palace no longer viable in the age of
the multiplex theater, now functions as a nightclub.
33 Serge Guibaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern
Art, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1983).

Warhols dream
Saul Anton

12 February 1972
I had slept badly. I decided to go out for
breakfast, but when I got down to the street,
there was no one there, and I thought, Andy,
you must be still dreaming. It was like New
York at eight in the morning on New Years
Day. Completely deserted. Everything shut.
Its my favorite time to be out, actually.
I decided to go to my favorite diner, the
Star Palace, on 37th and Madison. And
there, sitting alone at the window was,
believe it or not, Robert Smithson, who Ive
met a few times. He comes by sometimes,
but I think hes pretty shy, so Ive never really
spoken to him all that much before. That
Spiral thing he did out west is great, though,
everyone says. Ive seen the pictures and I
agree. For that alone, they should put him on
the cover of Time or some magazine like that.
They all think hes a genius. But I still cant
get through the stuff he writes in Artforum.
I get a headache almost right away.
Anyway, I walk in and hes sitting there
smoking and drinking Lipton and he asks
\me what I think we should do, like hes been
waiting for me all along. How about going
up the Empire State? he says, and I thought
that was pretty terric.

just buy the rug. Itd be cheaper than the

painting, which you cant even walk on.
B: Can we walk around the building before
we go up?
Bob puts on these shades, you know the
ones he wore in the lm, The Spiral Jetty.
All the kids at the Factory went out and
bought shades just like those. He looked
pretty cool, Ill give him that.
A: Around the whole block. Why? Doesnt
it look the same from all sides?
B: Not at all. Theres only one sun in the sky,
and it can only be in one place at one time.
That creates imbalance.
A: Oh yeah. I know all about your thing with
the sun, Bob. I saw your movie.
B: Theres no such thing as symmetry.
We try to create that, but the universe is
not symmetrical.
A: Its lopsided.
B: Its gyrostatic.

The strangest thing about this dream is that

I remember the conversation like I had
recorded it, but I hadnt. Whats weirder is
that he seemed to be there waiting for me,
and I knew hed be there. We didnt even
bother saying hello or any of that. It was as
if we just picked up the conversation from
where wed left off:

A: Yeah, well I cant wait to go up to the

observation deck. I hear its a good place to
make out on a really rainy day.

Andy: This is my favorite stretch on Fifth

Avenue. On weekends, its so deserted.
The rug stores have those giant silk carpets
in the windows, and theyre beautiful. Its
like being in a museum, and you dont even
have to pay for admission.

A: Obviously. But now there are those Twin

Towers down by Wall Street. But the Empire
State is still New York to me. If it were up to
me I would have built another Empire State
building just like this one, instead of them.
If I were in charge of the Empire State,
I wouldnt want it to be forgotten, like the
Woolworth building was, when it suddenly
wasnt the tallest building. Id want to have
another one.

Bob: I like the windows. Theyre so big.

I can imagine you doing rug paintings.
A: Actually, Ive thought about it, but Im
not sure. If I started to paint them, theyd
become work. Thats already ruined more
than a few friendships. Then what would I
look at when Im walking down Fifth?

B: The Empire State is the only place in New

York where you are actually taken out of the
urban desert. Its a doorway to another kind
of existence.

B: You could make them really big.

B: Well, two buildings still have the same

problem as one. It lives in the mind,
where people imagine going up a thousand
times before they actually do, and when
they get there, its not even close to what
they imagined.

A: Yeah, but then who could afford those?

If I wanted something like that, Id probably

A: Thats what I love about stars. You

imagine them in your mind a million times,

47

and then you meet them, and after ve

minutes, theyre picking their nose right
in front of you.
B: The Empire State is like that in a way.
Its all pretty and nice when youre walking
down Eighth Avenue, and you look up and
see it on the left, or youre downtown and
you see it uptown on the right, always in
your eld of vision, always telling you
exactly where you are. Its like a clock, only
instead of telling time, it tells space and
size. Thats where the landscape begins to
dene you instead of the other way around.
That building isnt just a monument. It is
a rupture in the fabric of time.
A: The twin towers are pretty nice, too, now
that I think about it. I mean, theres two of
them, and two is always better than one,
I always say.
B: Just because there are two of the same
doesnt mean theyre the same at all. There,
where we see two identical buildings lies
the beginning of the end of the old physics.
A: I would love to have a twin. It would
make things so much easier. You could send
one out to go to all the things you cant be
bothered with showing up at but have to,
you know, because you promised so-and-so,
and the other could stay home and watch
TV. The two of you could share the work
of one life and, in fact, youd get twice the
amount of life, since youd have all that time
to stay home.
B: I wonder what its like to go up to the
Twin Towers. Im thinking Id be up there
and I am seeing the world from the point of
view of a new species. I could see Brooklyn,
the Empire State, Queens, and the Hudson
River all at once. Id stand and turn in place
and all these things would become part of
my panoramic view, the moment that those
places entered my consciousness not as
distinct, disparate places, but as one unied
picture. When you can have that, the entire
history of art begins to melt into a diaphanous hallucination. The history of style
comes to an end, and theres nothing that
art history can do about that.
A: Now there, Ill put my two cents in.
The world will end before style does.
B: Its only once youre up there that you can
begin to experience the contraction of the

earth around you. At that point, our century

becomes like a whole millennium all its own.
Our eyes see what it took hundreds of years
for humans to chart.
A: All on the observation deck? Wow. And
meanwhile, theyre selling hot dogs.
B: Its only when you look over to the next
building that the whole thing is completely
dematerialized. Theres someone standing
on the observation deck of the other tower
looking at you from the next building. So
there you are, looking at each other, the two
of you, through those big binoculars they
have, instead of looking at the streets, or
looking for your own building down there
in the city. Youre looking at this guy whos
looking at you, and hes so close, right
there, as if hes standing in front of you.
And suddenly, you feel like a dumb tourist
because you can see your own stupid look
on the face of the other guy. Thats when
you begin to realize that the architect has
no control over what hes built. It may or
may not be a prime object, a unique place,
but whats confusing is that everyone else
gets to have it, too.
A: I think thats terric. Everyone gets to
experience it.
B: I mean, theres no way he could have
imagined that experience of two men
looking at each other from across two of the
same buildingshow disturbing that might
be. His intention was probably to make you
feel like a god looking out upon the world,
but instead, youre looking over at this guy
whos looking at you. Its then that you are
really looking out into the crystalline void in
the heart of reality. Thats when you see that
not only are you looking out on the urban
desert, on a new Mezolithic period, but that
the desert is only one side of a winding
spiral of time. And the whole time, all you
thought you were getting was a nice view,
something picturesque.
A: I wouldnt feel like an idiot. I would wave
and say hi.
B: But youre still oating up above the
world, where the form just escapes all
that talk about function. I mean, what is
the function of these two monsters?
These are better than the pyramids and the
ziggurats combined! And theyre even prime
numbers.

48

A: Huh?
B: A prime is a number that relates only
to itself and to one. It is a singular thing.
The Egyptians were fascinated by it.
The pyramids are, it turns out, kind of like
prime numbers. Theyre prime objects, units
of measurement.
A: If I had to make the Empire State Building
over, maybe Id choose the Twin Towers
instead. What bothers me is the idea that
every building has to be different. Why cant
they just nd the best kind of building and
once they do, make it all over the place.
The projects are kind of nice that way, except
that the buildings arent very nice. Brownstones are nice like that, but everyone knows
theyre just projects from a different time.
B: Theyre all parts of this giant hive. Lewitt
likes the grid, but to me, thats all about
abstractions, pure conceptual geometries.
New York, though, isnt about that. Its about
the hive. Except up here. From up here,
youd never think that there was any life
down there at all.
A: I somehow knew youd say something
like that.
B: And if you go up the Twin Towers, youre
thinking, okay, Im nally going to get a
birds eye view of this place, looking down
on it, and you look over and theres another
guy thinking hes god too.

good, Bob. Youd be a pretty good actor, and

I made a note to myself to see what I could
come up with for him.
B: Before we do, Ive got a confession.
A: Ah, I wish Id brought my tape recorder.
B: Ive never been up there before. And
Im not sure if I can go.
A: But it was your idea! Oh, I think Im
starting to understand. This is what you
mean when you wrote The arduous
thoughts of the Empire State ll one with
thoughts of extinguishments and vertigo.
B: Not exactly. Its just that I have problems
with elevators.
A: Well, Im not going to walk up, Bob.
B: Its like stepping into a time machine.
A: But I thought you ew around in
helicopters and small planes all the time.
B; Thats different.
It took a minute, but I nally got Smithson
into the elevator. I just stood there, waiting
for him, why I dont know. If it were anyone
else, I would have just pressed that close
door button and gone up. But everything
was strange today, and I somehow knew that
he would just get in and I was calm about it.

A: It must be pretty deating. Like there

were suddenly two of everything: two
Empire States, two Fifth Avenues, two
Broadways. They could just build New York
all over again, right across the river. Then,
if you want to go somewhere and its too
crowded, you just take a cab and go to the
other one. Thats almost as good as having
a twin. Or you could have both, a twin and
a twin city, and the two of you could go to
two of the same things. And there would be
no chance that youd mill in the same
circles. And then you come home and you
could compare notes. Youd never be lonely
againDo you want to go up now?

A : Just think youre not in an elevator but in

a really small apartment. Youre in the
bathroom, but theyve ripped the sink and
the shower out. And its in an awful building
where they didnt give it any windows,
either. And theres no TV.

Bob stopped and looked up, looked around,

then he looked at me. He looked like one of
those old-time Hollywood movie stars. You
know, the ones who squinted when they
were supposed to be acting. He looked at
me and squinted, and I thought, thats pretty

This is when we arrived on the observation

deck, and there was a beautiful breeze, and
it was like we were standing on the mast of
this immense ship called Manhattan. Isnt
that what it sometimes feels like: a ship,
except that its going nowhere.

B: All I can think of is tombs and death and

the pyramids.
A: And Stonehenge.
B: No, not Stonehenge. Thats different.
A: I thought you liked this sort of thing.

A: This is better than the ziggurats and the

pyramids put together.
B: I just said that! From here, were seeing
the world after artart without art.
A: There you go. Youre obviously feeling
better. Look, theres the Pan Am building.
I hear that Henry Kissinger likes to take
helicopters from there. A lot of other people,
too. Henry Geldzahler said he did it once and
it made him sick.
B: Andy, take a look around you. Dont you
think this is better than any superstar?
A: Seriously? Well, its not beautiful like a
Titian or Liz Taylor. Its beautiful like a Coke,
like TV. Every city should have an Empire
State, I think. But they should all be exactly
the same. Otherwise, it would just be so
competitive and childish.
B: When a civilization builds one of these,
art is just nostalgia.
A: All I know is that I would love to have
another Spiral Jetty. You could put one out
there just below the 72nd Street boat basin.
You could even have a few of them running
all along the west side. I dont think they do
much with those piers anymore, do they?
And I could have one at the beach house in
Montauk. That would be fabulous. We can
get Paul Morrissey to lm it.
B: The Empire State is part of the jetty, too.
A: Huh?
B: The Spiral is time.
A: Time? Well I know all about time, my
friend. I try to think of what time is and all
I can think is Time is time was.
B: Thats what I mean. The spiral: Time
is time was. Otherwise itd be a line. The
Empire State, despite what it looks like,
isnt a straight line. Its a built metaphor
for time because on this scale, it no longer
functions like a normal building. Its the
same thing I tried to deal with when I did
the Airport terminal project in 67. As an
aircraft ascends into higher and higher
altitudes, its meaning as an object changes
one could even say reverses. The value
of the object changes as it rises higher in
the sky. Its no longer a building trying to

48

add space. It transcends the rational

registers of standard meanings. This
observation deck is the space where this
building ceases to be a building and
becomes an instant of time.

make up this space, they can never turn

that into a history.

A: At least it isnt a tool shed.

B: Michael Fried would say thats authentic.

B: The thing about being up here, Andy,

is that its not at all like looking at your
portraits.

A: Edie?

A: Id say.

A: Shed be fantastic, beautiful, and

completely sultry, you know, in that way she
can do. Nothing authentic about that.

B: Being in the spiral, the world becomes a

lm. We pull ourselves up, oor by oor, so
that everything can be this view outside our
window, even though what we really want is
to be able to rub shoulders and mix and talk
and the rest of it.
A: Well, no secret about that.
B: Its the view that determines what an
apartment is worth. People will live in a
miserable cramped little closet so that they
can get the right view. But then, they get
their view, and they lose their sense of
where they t in. In the view, theyre left
out, and so they start climbing, thinking
that theres more above them. We think
we need a better view so we try to climb
higher.
A: Well, thats because the view is better,
wouldnt you say? Does anyone really
want to live with that deli in their window
their whole life. Every time they look out,
that same guy is standing in front of the deli
looking around with nothing to do. But
I know what you mean. I never like living
on high oors. Thats where I keep all the
shopping.
B: That place from where wed get this
amazing view, that place doesnt exist. Its
like a science ction story.
A: But what a sight this city is, huh? I could
just put a camera up and let the sun roll
across the sky if they hadnt done it a
thousand times already. Its such a clich,
but thats why its a clich, I guess. Its just
true.
B: What do you think an art historian
would say about that? Theyd say it was a
style in the period of so-and-so imitating the
style of so-and-so, but the innities that

A: Im thinking, we could put Edie up here

to do a show, and it could be spectacular.

B: No, the view.

B: I think Im ready to leave.

A: Thank goodness. Are you going to be
okay in the elevator?
B: Ill just have to close my eyes and pretend
Im in a small apartment and imagine a big
place.
A: Thats a great idea.
B: Are we down yet?
A: Ill tell you when we get there.
B: Okay. Good.e
The excerpt reproduced here is from a larger
work-in-progress.

Warhols aura and the language of waiting

Tan Lin

For Warhol, the world was a world of

likenessess. Language was no different from
television or lm or one of his photosilkscreen portraits: a recording medium that
allowed someones likeness to be transformed into something else in the eyes of
someone else. For Warhol, change made
some things beautiful, not in any objective
sense, but for others, which is to say that
change was generally mediated by outside
sources: Jewelry doesnt make a person
more beautiful, but it makes a person feel
more beautiful. Language doesnt make a
person who he or she is; it makes a person
feel more like him or herself. Increasingly,
the presence that attached itself to people
was associated with intangible things, with
shadows or with camouage, or with makeup, with the look of the commodity, with
what Warhol termed nothing, with negative spaces, and above all with fame.
Language, like lm or a photograph or
jewelry or make-up, because applied from
outside, lends a person a presence they
dont have by themselves. In The Philosophy
of Andy Warhol, in a chapter on fame,
Warhol gave that presence a more precise
term, aura, and distinguished it from
product. But then Warhol had a lot of other
names for those amorphous moments and
persons and locations that were not
precisely tied to a persons physical body:
beauty, fame, TV magic, screen presence,
fabulous, being on, something. Somewhat paradoxically, being on TV has the
same effect of producing presence, which
explains why Warhols greatest unfullled
ambition was to have his own TV talk show
where he could just list the mundane events
of his day, night after night after night. He
wanted to call it Nothing Special.
Change incites beauty: The red lobsters
beauty only comes out when its dropped
into the boiling water and nature
changes things and carbon is turned into
diamonds... Change is a byproduct of time
passing, and that is why so much of
Warhols writing takes the form of the
chronicles, keeping a diary, tracking business expenses, or recording events as they
happen. Such recording is a kind of waiting,
and, specically, a kind of waiting for exactly
the same thing to happen again. Waiting
for beauty is a way of irting with it before
it arrives. Warhol loved Marilyn and Jackie
because they were beautiful, and his photosilkscreen portraits of them are endless
irtations with who they are, and who they

50

are becoming (for us). Beautiful people are

sometimes more prone to keep you waiting
than plain people are, because theres a
big time differential between beautiful and
plain. Waiting, like those portraits, is serial.
Seriality is the best way to experience time
as repetition. Repetition is irtation that never
ends.
Most of Warhols lms and writings are
ostensibly vacant, auratic exercises in the
on-goingness of waiting for something
(which was usually nothing) to happen.
Looking at Jackie or the Empire State Building, I feel my eyes irting with the things
I am seeing. Love is a way of delaying
what we are seeing from happening, and
in Warhols works anticipation cancels out
remembering. Beauty never occurs just
once, especially in a disco or other tranceinducing venue. Warhol painted the Shadow
Paintings for a nightclub, where they blend
in and where they perfectly yet obscurely
mimic the motions of bodies on a dance
oor. In this way, they repeat what our
bodies are doing and, in repeating and
thus freezing our motions, they slow down
human time like a strobe light in a disco.
By so doing, Warhol was able to toy with
and also question the idea of beauty or
love that was no longer subject to pure
oper-ations of chance; all forms of chance,
like our desires, are radically systematized,
mechanically produced (repeated) in the
manner that commodities are fabricated.
In this manner, we fall in love mechanically
with the things we desire (to see).
Like simulated shadows on a canvas, like
commodities in relation to our desires,
make-up could be said to be at once articial
and external to its product. Make-up
creates the aura of a face or a thing that
never changes, that repeats itself ad
innitum. Make-up is a form of camouage
and it is the means wherein a commodity
makes itself apparent to our desires; just as
camouage mechanically unmasks the look
of natural foliage, so too does make-up
mechanically enliven a face that is not
quite the face we thought we knew, which
is to say that it produces in a mechanical
or articial way, the aura of a heightened
human sexuality, a kind of near-repetition
of our own desires to see our own desires
mirrored in someone else. The distinction
between a mere mechanical repetition and
more natural near-repetition fascinated
Warhol; by erasing and complicating that

distinction Warhol was able to delineate

subtle overlappings between boredom
and love, the affect-less and the affect laden.
In Warhol, we frequently gaze at a face that
is not quite the face we knew; a shadow of
a body that is not actually our shadow;
a painting that is a painting in camouage;
a soup can that is not exactly the soup
can that we see on a store shelf. Between
the world of unchanging (and commodied)
essences and the world of our everyday
perceptions, the idea of difference and similitude is simultaneously registered.

sense of sight and ultimately for not seeing:

I dont believe in it, because youre not
around to know that its happened. I cant
say anything about it because Im not
prepared for it. Death is the most heavily
camouaged thing in Warhol, and the only
thing Warhol didnt live in anticipation
of. We repeat what we want to see or
hear. Everything we see is a surrogate for
something we cant quite feel, and vice
versa. Reading is replaced by something
like reading; watching a movie is replaced
by something like watching a movie.

Change, like boredom, is the byproduct of

time passing. One might add that Warhols
paintings, like his novel A and his lms, are
the byproduct of time repeating itself, and
thus that thing known as desire. Warhol
is the most Platonic of modern artists. He
creates an endless series of simulacra of
Eternal Forms. All eternal forms shall be
converted into formulas (for the things we
see) and then repeated in perpetuity. Beauty
can never be had; it can only be irted
with. Waiting for something or especially
someone beautiful to show up is one of
the best ways of passing the time, as
Warhol pointed out on numerous occasions.
Warhol understood that commodities do not
wait for us, we wait for them, and the act of
buying something articial was really just the
anticipation of buying something real
(or vice versa). Emotions are interchangeable
with the things that produce those emotions.
A commodity is a thing waiting to happen
to a consumer who has no memory of time
passing. An emotion is a thing waiting to
happen to a person who has no memory
of (i.e. is irting with) time passing. Everything beautiful is serial, even a car crash
or a soup can. Everything is a repetition
of what we are waiting to see again. In
Warhol, we feel the things we are waiting
to see again.

Most of Warhols lms are about people not

changing because not changing was what
most people do most of the time. Change
is atypical. Not changing is also known as
boredom and Warhol liked boring things
(POP50), attenuated time frames, desultory
and unpredictable mechanical systems of
production, variable repetition, occasional
violence, open schedules, haphazard talk,
and blas mediation. A lm about the
Empire State building, a lm about a man
sleeping, a lm about a man getting
fellatedthese were ways Warhol irted
with things that were not yet happening.
That is why Warhol claimed to have never
grown up: Im missing some chemicals and
thats why I have this tendency to be more
of amamas boy. Asissy Im immature, but maybe something could happen
to my chemicals and I could get mature.
That is also why Warhol liked things that
are exactly the same: most people love
watching the same basic thing, as long as
the details are different. But Im just the
opposite: If Im going to sit and watch the
same thing I saw the night before, I dont
want it to be essentially the sameI want it
to be exactly the same. Because the more
you look at the same exact thing, the more
the meaning goes away, and the better and
emptier you feel. Not surprisingly, Warhol
disavowed orchestrating the destruction
(change) of particular individuals like Edie
Sedgwick. No one makes an artwork and no
one changes somebody else: When people
are ready to, they change. They never do it
before then, and sometimes they die before
they get around to it. You cant make them
change if they dont want to, just like when
they do want to, you cant stop them.

To repeat: Love is the desire to make beauty

repeat itself. Plato said that. That is why
Warhol makes us fall in love with shadows,
car crashes, camouage patterns, dead
celebrities who wear lots of make-up, and
doppelgangers. Looking at a Warhol lm or
a photo-silkscreen, the highly segmented
and Taylorized worker of the human senses
(eye or ear) is converted into a kind of psychedelia or trance production line. Waiting
becomes labor in reverse (the deathly labor
of doing nothing), a kind of camouage or
shadowing. Both are substitutes for our

50

The eye produces serial images, automatically, and without thought. The mouth
produces serial words, automatically, and
without thought. Eye and mouth are both

surrogate modes of being oneself. The

most interesting mode of being oneself used
to be having a memory. Not surprisingly,
Warhols two favorite surrogates were his
tape-recorder and his camera, which
functioned as his ears and eyes respectively.
Both lacked memory. Similarly, the screen
tests were about waiting for someone to
walk in and sit for a few minutes and manifest, as a kind of deaf-mute image, that
thing known as screen presence. For this
reason, beauty that occurs there occurs in
the background and still strikes its viewers
dumb. Warhol, in Monte Carlo, at the Hotel
Mirabeau remarks: Damian looked beautiful
in a navy-blue Dior. In Rome: Just then,
Ursula Andress appeared at the top of the
stairs. She looked beautiful. In Blow-Job,
the hustler nally comes after 41 minutes.
Somewhere in the middle of an eight hour
Empire, the ood lights go on and the
Empire State Building begins to shine or
give off something lmic, much like the face
of Marilyn or Jackie.
The lms (like his novel A) are experiments in
slowing down viewing (or reading) time or
creating a lag between clock time and the
rate at which we register perceptual
changes. One of the things that slow-motion
does is make change harder to see. Oddly,
boredom, which most people associate with
things not changing, creates for Warhol a
heightened state of anticipation, a place
where beauty might erupt. In this sense,
Warhols lms and novels mimic the endless
staying the same that is existence and the
endless continual change that is also and
simultaneously existence. One might say
that beauty for Warhol was that point where
boredom and change overlap. A typical
Warhol lm was shot at sound speed or 24
frames per second, but played back at silent
speed, or 16 frames per second, thus literally
slowing down the rate at which an image
changes and prolonging the rate at which
things stay the same. The slower speed
enabled Warhol to capture what he called
nothing: we ran it at a slower speed
to make up for the lm I didnt shoot. The
slowed-down lm heightens the fact that
something that we cant quite perceive
or register is going on in the background,
something unnoticed like wallpaper or
something accidentally recorded, like offscreen voices.
All of these repeated elements or serial
patterns are forms of nothing that make up

our day-to-day perceptions, the things we

almost register consciously. For this reason,
it takes much longer to transcribe or read
A then it did to actually say it. The best
language is the language that just takes
place somewhere in the background,
language we hear but dont remember,
language that merely lls up the time slowly
and completely without us fully processing
or consciously thinking about it. It is
often hard to tell who is speaking to
whom; arguments are left unnished; body
language is lost; only one half of telephone
conversations are recorded; when people
speak simultaneously, multiple voices are
often transcribed out of order. Transcribing
a life in this manner renders it almost
impossibly opaque and difcult to
apprehend, much less remember. Fame
is the best kind of background noise; it
obscures who we are not. The opposite of
being successful is being nothing. Fifteen
minutes is a short time for someone who
wants to be famous. Novelistic time, like art
time, is articially constructed to feign speed,
suspense, and resolution. Warhol preferred
boredom, empty spaces, killing time, and no
memory. My mind is like a tape recorder
with one buttonErase. If I wake up too
early to check in with anyone, I kill time by
watching TV and washing my underwear.
Maybe the reason my memory is so bad is
that I always do at least two things at once.
For Warhol, aura was inseparable from
change and exchange. What makes stories
change is other people telling them: Dylan
told Warhol he didnt destroy a painting of
Elvis (the rumor) that Warhol had given to
Dylan. Later, Robbie Robertson told Warhol
that Dylan had traded it for a sofa (the
purported truth). The language of A is
the language of gossip, of stories being
changed as they are exchanged, of the
endless mediation and shufing around of
things that happened or the nothing that
happened when language records the things
that happen everyday. Loving nothing is the
nest excuse we have for loving something
beside ourselves. Bridget asks, What did
you learn this year that you didnt know
before? Warhol replies, Nothing. Thats
why Im wiser. That extra year of learning
nothing. Fame and its handmaiden, attery,
comprise the two major ingredients of
Warhols world, and they are both spread
on the wings of talk: self-aggrandizement on
the one hand, self-attenuation on the other;
talk about ourselves blown out of all

52

proportion to who we are, and talk about

someone else because they are larger than
ourselves. Somewhere between fame and
attery, between wanting to be famous and
total self-abnegation, Warhol created his
surrogate: He claimed he wanted to be a
nobody, or better yet, a machine.
Language is the things that we say while
we are waiting for the medium to say them
with, which is to say, language is the
waiting (and passing the time while waiting).
That is why Warhol liked things that never
changed or that were exactly the same,
like McDonalds in Tokyo or McDonalds in
London. They too, are forms of waiting.
Witness Ondine, who confesses early
on that he cant read novels, presumably
because theyre all product and no aura:
I dont mind reading documentaries
or Schwann catalogs or lists of one sort or
anotherbut I cant take reading novels
I just cant do it. And that is how A begins:
with the language of someone Warhol is
fascinated by. The tape recorder nished
whatever emotional life [Warhol] might
have had. What gives it back to him, in this
novel, is Ondines aura, not his product.
But Warhol also understood that in a world
where everything is produced in order to be
consumed, the emotions that connect us
to someone elses aura cant really be
bought: Some company recently was
interested in buying my aura. They didnt
want my product. They kept saying, We
want your aura. I never gured out what
they wanted. But they were willing to pay a
lot for it.
Warhol never got his TV talk show, but
Ondine got his novel. Ondine is a surrogate
for Andy. Who is Ondine in A but a kind of
extemporaneous star of the words Warhol
speaks every day, a foil for who he is not?
Language isnt who we are, its a surrogate,
a person more fabulous and more beautiful
than we could ever be. Ondine was a
fabulous talker, but what produced his
aura was not Ondine, but a tape recorder.
Warhol remarks that he was fascinated by
certain people, and that this fascination
was probably very close to a certain kind
of love. As with a photo or portrait, so too
with someone elses language. Language
is a means of exchanging who we are (our
product) for someone we arent (our aura).
It doesnt matter who we talk to: In New
York I spend most of my morning talking on
the phone to one B or another. Ondines

language isnt Ondine; its Ondines aura,

because for Warhol, language doesnt just
determine who we are, it determines how
others see us. I think aura is something
that only somebody else can see, and they
only see as much of it as they want to. Its all
in the other persons eyes. You can only see
an aura on people you dont know very well
or dont know at all. Anyone could have an
aura or be beautiful. Warhols star system
isnt an ironic gesture; on the contrary, his
star system is a form of love, or to be
more precise, self-love, the love one cant
show to oneself in public. It was, in the end,
the ultimate form of sincerity: I need B
because I cant be alone. Except when I
sleep. Then I cant be with anybody.U

Guggenheimlichkeit
Carl Skelton

Guggenheimlichkeit is what happens when

the people making the decisions decide that
the interface is where the action is. There are
simple reasons for this, and simple reasons
to walk away from it.
Etymology
1 Gemtlichkeit is an aesthetic of familiarity,
comfort, and unhurried enjoyment of life,
much vaunted by the Viennese. Its not
about events, change, getting things done,
or bringing up anything embarrassing.
2 Heimelig is simply familiar, homey.
3 Heimlich: Theres the maneuver, but thats
not what this is about. The German word
Heimlich would be translated as surreptitiously, or on the sly.
4 Unheimlich: A Freudian psychoanalytic
term, generally translated as uncanny in
English.
5 Guggenheim: Yes, the museums. Not
because anybody there is special, but
because their Frank Lloyd Wright building
on Central Park was one of the rst modern
museums to explicitly invert the gureground relationship between the work and
the walls; also because Philip Johnson has
been quoted on the subject of Frank Gehrys
Guggenheim Bilbao: When the building is
this good, who gives a fuck about the art?1
An investment has been transferred.The
rst wave of modern art display may have
been misrepresented as neutral, universal.
In the last twenty or thirty years, its become
ofcially obvious that the art and architecture of the Family of Man school actually
articulated, and served, the desires of a
rather narrow segment of the Family, a.k.a.
Daddy. Now, the same rhetorical, symbolic, and technical devices penetrate with
all the more lubricated ease, by a more and
less explicit exhibition of the museum itself
as object of fascinated deconstruction,
whereby it is advertised as Pure Power.
Museum architecture and exhibition design
have a much narrower ideological range
than art, even in these tedious times. As the
facilities become more and more spectacular (I use the word spectacular
advisedly), the customer and the product
come to meet in a moment of mutual
embarrassment, whose brevity is its only
virtue. Its understood that the viewer will be

53

gone in ve minutes, the piece will be gone

in a month, and that in any case they are
both there for the sake of the building, which
is the real Social Sculpture, and which will
endure (real is used here as in real big, real
expensive, real slick, real site-specic).

admittedly very nice tile job had effectively

merged the two areas into a sort of double
vitrine, by reducing their separation to oorto-ceiling glass: two tableaux-vivants, each
offering the other an arrangement of glazed
people and products.

Examples

Design-ication/de-signication?
What we are calling Design these days is
a very small piece of discursive territory.
Its precisely for this reason that it is foregrounded: The prerogatives of client are
similar to those of patron prior to the First
World War. What ground was given up by
collectors and collecting agencies has been
reclaimed indirectly, simply by a shift of
emphasis from Picasso to Gehry, who can
call himself a tailor without calling his tness
into question.

1 Radio Guggenheimlichkeit: an author

whose name Ive forgotten, on tour for the

book he had written about a week he had
spent in one room with sixteen televisions,
described the experience as a snapshot of
American popular culture. If this use of the
word popular to describe television
doesnt give you chills, youll never really
understand Guggenheimlichkeit. Youll
have to live it completely; popular culture
describes a corporate cultivation of
popularity, but it also insinuates itself as
populist culture, which it is absolutely not
precisely because the populace is being
cultivated as a resource.

2 Zone Books put out a new edition of

The Society of the Spectacle so slick and

precious and expensive and copyrighted
that it had a closer afnity to Eau dIssey
than to the Situationist International. Thats
not an embarrassing mistake, either. Its
dtournement. Uncanny? Hmmm...

3 The medium is the competition: This effect

is not proper to art environments, and in
fact it is reaching its fullest realization online.
Consider AOL, which provides access to the
rest of the Web, but whose actual business it
is to keep you within its own environment instead.
4 The Pardo installation at Dia went a step
further in the explicitness of its re-orientation
of museum experience as design-ied, (in
the sense of a standardized narrative, a true
political theater of Agitational Shopaganda).
In this case, the artist re-designed the
bookshop and the rst-oor gallery into a
continuous and homogenized exhibition
space of candy-colored tile, populated by
an arrangement of Merchandise in its high
and low modes (high=unique artifact,
low=multiple inventory). On the gallery side,
I found myself ogling memorabilia such as
the original clay buck2 of Volkswagens
new Beetle (a life-size design prototype,
which happens to be made out of a
traditional artists materials, by hand); on the
shop side, I found myself browsing books
and editions. The application of an

The rules and limits of Design can pre-empt

the presumed de-regulation of Art, and art
consumption (think fuel). Think back to the
last time somebody said content to you,
as in the content of the piece. One may
speak of designing a program without
having to come right out and say arranging the content. This word, like program,
product, audience, says less about the
phenomenon to which it refers than it does
about a vast distance between the speaker
and what he or she is naming. Meanwhile,
the tiny gap between content and nontent
approaches zero.
Design and construction are now fully
alienated, in a way they never could be
when R.M. Schindler built his own house in
Los Angeles in the twenties. At this writing,
however, theres a show of his drawings and
photos at L.A. MOCA. A team of architects,
model-makers, graphic designers, and
photographers, et. al. have been brought
together to make the show really big. I had
been in the Kings Road house an hour
before, but it took me a minute to recognize
contemporary pictures of the interiorthey
had been shot so as to make the low ceilings
look high, and to make the simple carpentry
look perfect.
A drama is being performed at this level
(ination), as another is being played out
elsewhere (inversion): the re-orientation of
post-structuralist and feminist critiques of
the phallic modernist commodity-fetish,
a stereotypical object capable of erasing
(or at least eliding) local culture, identity,
and alterity across vast distances in a single

traveling retrospective. Over time, as art

objects have been de-powered in favor of
a self-reexive vivisection of the conditions
of dissemination and reception, museums
facilities have become monster fetishes of
another kind: simultaneously subject, object,
shibboleth, gure, and ground (Valhalla),
of Conceptual Designs at best, and at worst
Designer Concepts. This is not, obviously, to
be credited to the evil genius of Frank Lloyd
Wright, or Thomas Krens, or the Stepford
Wives Curatorial Committee. A building can
and must be bigger, more expensive, more
durable, and more specic than an exhibition.
What is being cultivated?
As the work comes more and more to
serve as transient interior surface event for
an architectural icon, the relatively mutable,
exible, and portable products of very small
numbers of people are consistently represented as subject to the sovereign and
ineluctable order of the strategies of institutions, whose mandate is purely and simply
to expand, by ination and extraction, from
and over their constituencies. Fetish status
shifts so easily from things a human can
make or mangle to artifacts and situations
only producible by an institution so big and
hungry that it must meet the mandates of
both public and private sectors of the economy at the highest levels, while reducing risk,
on a very regular basis. Result: the Chelsea
gallery district now blows your mind mostly
with its consistency.
In fact, Guggenheimlichkeit is just as
fundamental to the phenomenon of
breakfast cereal as it is to any oxymoronic
contemporary museum. Go to the supermarket, and walk down the cereal aisle.
A tremendous amount of energy has gone
into the production of elaborately extroverted graphic design, marketing, and
printing. Inside, however, all the boxes
contain the same plastic bag, which is
not on display. In the bag, there are pellets,
or akes, or colored balls, made of different
proportions of a standard mixture, the varieties of which span a very narrow segment
of the spectrum food <> candy.
Candy for assholes
The metabolisms of large cultural institutions
have been evolving, fast. As their bureaucracies expand and mutate, they come to
identify less and less with collections or
specic works of art, and more and more
with the programs and capital projects they

54

initiate on a grand scale. Whether public

or private, such organisms have actually
reversed the direction of their digestion.
A modern museum would have been built
to display power-objects to the public, and
in so doing demonstrate and justify the
status and sophistication of a benefactor.
A contemporary museum, on the other
hand, displays largely borrowed objects in
order to attract the largest possible audience; in order to justify the accumulation
of public and private resources; in order
to build a bigger box, which is the product,
so to speak. The same institution that used
to produce contact between strangers and
commodities now consumes that contact
as fuel.
University-trained artists are particularly
susceptible to the toxic effects of this
smooth and creamy dead-end. Eventually,
the fetishization of the museum-object
as Cruel Mistress comes to represent it
as determinant, as the Main Event, and
Immovable. Within the terms of panoptical
deconstruction, I can just relaxthe beast
will fondle or spank me at its pleasure, and
I know what it wants. The real question, the
interesting part, will come when I start to
admit that the bewildering uniformity of neoPop parodies of perfect ease carries something of an ideological order, which has
more to do with cultivating identity than
cruh-teaking it. Until then, the distinction
between art and exhibition design will
be real trivial.
Theres a basic rhetorical reason why there
can never be a parody of the after-the-fact
passive voice of curator, critic, historian.
When reading a critique, one often forgets
whether the author is bragging or complaining. Attempting to write a dissertation into
an object or installation only exacerbates
this weakness. Just as museums realize the
consensus of public and private sectors,
museums are the only art that museums
can make themselves, and that will never be
enough.
Guggenheimlichkeit is the hole left in the
middle of the gallery after the de-centering
sinks in. What was obvious before is now
just too embarrassing to even talk about:
Dissection-display-disclosure-disinhibition
of the circumstances and mechanisms
of communication is both necessary and
insufcient. The more art offers itself up
as the condensate of mass-marketing and

academic passive-aggression, the more

museums are driven into their own (very
limited) creative resources to make a
spectacle of themselves. This problem
can and should be considered in good
old-fashioned structural terms, as a simple
question of proportion: If your thesis
consists mostly of preface and footnotes,
dont publish it yet. It makes no sense for
artists to compete with the aprs-garde
borrow, acquire, arrange, uff-and-ay.
These games may truthfully reect postindustrial guilt, or exuberance, or a fantasy
of enough leisure time to get really, truly,
madly, deeply, numb.
They now proceed from the same
presumptions of inadequacy as General
Mills:
1 That the content/product is somehow
insufcient or simply invariant.
2 That its vehicle should expand anyway,
which is to say that it can never reach or
exceed an appropriate size.
3 That the creation of unsatised need and
desire are social goods.
4 That conception and implementation can
and should be segregated from each
other, and be performed by separate social
groups.
5 That the seductions of design are a
necessary, if not sufcient, supplement.
This cant be a conspiracy theory
What Ive been trying to describe is more
like a side-effect, a disorder, rather than
a hostile take-over or corporatist cabal.
Museums just cant get enough ller.
There is such a thing as an under-stimulated
reactionary force, and heres a perfectly
reasonable explanation for Guggenheimlichkeit: Its what you get when the administration nds itself setting the agenda,
which can only ever happen by default.
Media become ends in themselves when
they develop the capacity, which is the
need, to process more input than they get.
If conditions persist and the image-sphere
gets saturated with the products of such
an imbalance, expectations collapse and
people start to assume that there are only
two choices: the radical iconoclasm of
the Taliban, or the narcissistic cannibalism
of a Jeff Koons.

The medium is no excuse

Its important to remember that McLuhan
was a political conservative. The medium
is the message wasnt just a structuralist
catchphrase; it carried an invitation to falsely
assume that the medium is immutable, as
well as determinant. Its always a brokers
market, but that doesnt mean it always
has to be a brokers world. The Laws of the
Market can be disobeyed as easily as any
other command.
Why do you think its called Culture?
Because it comes in a plastic dish?
Lets at least admit that we think we know
that some things still have to be done the
hard way, in person.+
Special thanks to Ursula Endlicher for her help with the
etymology.
1 Philip Johnson, quoted in 53 Design Classics, One
Magazine (April/May 2001), p. 64.
2 Volkswagen New Beetle, Volkswagen AG Design Center,
full-scale model, 1995, steel, wood, hardfoam, clay, 59.5 x
68 x 161 inches, Collection: Volkswagen Design, Simi
Valley, California and Wolfsburg, Germany.

Marketing the prison experience in Tehran

Golmohammad Rahati

A warden took me by the arm as I put on my

blindfold and stepped out of my cell. He led
me down several corridors and had me sit
down somewhere; then a door swung shut
behind me. I peered out from under my
blindfold, and saw I was facing the wall, in
a concrete cell with no windows. Filming the
streets of Tehran for a documentary two
days earlier, Id been arrested on charges of
spying, and taken to Evin prison.
Sitting there blindfolded in a tiny concrete
cube in perfect silence, waiting for my
interrogator, was an extraordinary experience. Id never been as utterly terried in my
entire life. The word Evin, you see, bears
heavy connotationsthough nobody knows
the gures, everyone knows the anecdotes,
the many graphic details of how before
and after the Islamic Revolution, Evin was
the favored locus of systematic torture and
countless executions.
The door swung open and shut, then
someone pulled up a chair behind me and
just sat there, while those many graphic
details raced through my mind. He leaned
towards me.
Listen closely now, he slowly, emphatically crooned into my left ear. If you tell
the truth, well nd a solution for you. If you
dont, it will cost you dearly. Is that understood? Yes, I answered. A feeble, highpitched croak. I sounded like an
emasculated water toad.
So. Tell me something. And dont try to
act smart. Tell the simple truth. Which is
better? He paused. I waited. Belgium or
Iran? Ever since moving back to Tehran,
everyone from the janitor to the plumber to
the cab driver has been eager to know how
I would personally compare Europe to
the Islamic Republic. My interrogator was
obviously just as interested. Actually,
I managed, until yesterday, I would have
said I preferred Iran. He chuckled to
himself, and leaned back in his seat.
As any businessman or backpacker who
has been here will tell you, the Western
Gaze is a big issue in Iran, and you neednt
be Edward Said to see why. Once the Paris
of the Orient, an Aryan haven under the sexy
splendor of the Shah and his groovy Queen
draped in Yves Saint Laurent, now the
land of Gog and Magog, rarely has a country
been confronted with as many rich and

imposing stereotypes and fabulations. And

with life perhaps not imitating, but indeed
reacting and overreacting to art, things have
become a little muddled, touchy, and strained.
It is, of course, unlikely that an article such
as this will be very helpful. Many readers will
choose to see Evin as an allegory for Iran
itself: gloomy, oppressive, outwardly
unchanging, and embroiled in a desperate
attempt to look intimidating and civilized
at the same time (incidentally, dissident
cleric Kadivar not long ago coined a popular
phrase by calling Iran one big prison for
reformists). But the fact of the matter is,
an eyewitness account of Evin means
international media attention, even career
opportunities. All you need is a brief jail
term, then you capitalize on the aura of a
tortured political prisoner by publishing
embarrassing, sensationalist muck in the
rst person singular (I begged the warden
not to kill me.) These days, I nd it easier to
shamelessly cater to Western expectations,
for with my case still open, and the
Intelligence (or Information) Ministry
scrutinizing me from all angles before
reaching a verdict, it is the Iranian Gaze
which troubles me more than any other.
On the night of our arrest, we were
interrogated for 16 hours. Being Iranian,
but coming from abroad, my colleague and
I were a little too eccentric for the ministrys
liking. Why would expatriate Iranians make
a documentary on Tehran for a foreign
production company, if not for reasons
of espionage or sheer slander? Why would
anyone be lming highways and ofce
blocks, gas stations and billboards, if not
for some ulterior motive?
And yet I wonder whether, on that occasion,
the Information Ministry really employed
their celebrated, time-honored methods of
inquisition.
What is your opinion of Imam Khomeini?
Id say every human being has weak points
and strong points.
How interesting. Do tell us his weak
points.
He had none.
I see. So tell me, you disapprove of the
theocratic State, dont you.

Why should I disapprove? There was a

referendum in 1979.
You grew up abroad, and youre saying you
really dont disapprove?
And so on.
Earlier, I had looked on as they searched my
apartmentfamily letters, old snapshots of
teenage beach parties, a tape collection of
1970s Easy Listeningand was pummeled
with even more questions, none of which
I could answer convincingly. Particularly
when it came to my photographs of Tehrans
concrete wastelands, and my monarchist
memorabilia. How to convince a member
of the secret service who just ushered you
through Tehran handcuffed in a BMW with
tinted windows in the middle of the night
that the city holds a very photogenic, quasineo-modernist air. How to explain ironic
retro-kitsch to an enormous, heavily armed
gentleman in a black suit who just assured
you youve dug your own grave?
When arrested, wed been lming Shariati
Street, near the Revolutionary Courthouse.
It so happens that the courthouse had been
recently bombed by an armed opposition
group, the Mojahedin. To make things
worse, it so happens the Mojahedin had
previously lmed the complex. So our case
was a little difcult to explain, as ironically
kitsch-retro, and as thoroughly quasi-neomodernist as Shariati Street may have
seemed to us.
In fact, Tehran is practically off-limits
for cameras, since there is hardly a
street without a police station, a military
compound, a headquarters for an Islamic
committee, or an annex to some Ministry.
Even hospitals are considered State secrets,
and are not to be lmed. Last year, the
municipality nally started urging the army
to move out of the center, having determined that military institutions were using
ten percent of the city space.
The irony here is that a tremendous effort to
survey and discipline the city has amounted
to so little. On the one hand, prostitution,
drugs, teenage delinquency, illicit sociosexual mingling, and hypercritical public
debate are all very much out of control.
And on the other, much as the gigantic
propaganda murals offer easy targets for
grafti and paint bombs, the concentrated

mass of government paraphernalia repeatedly falls prey to armed attack on behalf of

resistance groups, and has proven an
endless source of anxiety and paranoia for
the government more than anything else.
Moreover, the citys disordered, unbridled
growthTehrans population has quadrupled since 1980encourages a certain
sense of chaotic repose. At the very least,
the sprawling, anonymous urban fabric
alleviates what would otherwise be a more
pervasive sense of control and supervision.
Many of those who have lived in other cities
actually speak of a bizarre sense of freedom
that is particular to Tehran.
As for Evin prison, as an urban-architectural
space, its arguably a masterpiece. When
Evin is pointed out to the curious visitor, all
he or she can make out are dark brown, arid
hills along the Alborz mountains, with one
slope separated from its surroundings by a
fence. Only from certain rooftops, like that of
the Freedom Hotel (Hotel Azadi) towering
over the Evin neighborhood, can one see a
handful of buildings belonging to the prison
complex. A large part of the prison, however, blends neatly into nature, being built
underground, beneath the hills. I cannot
think of another landmark that is as elegantly
less-is-more and as imposing at the same
time. By merging with Tehrans stately
mountainous surroundings, Evin gains an
aura of inevitability. It comes with the city.
Listening to my cellmates over tea and
tasteless Montana Lights, I heard countless cross-comparisons of the many different wards the prison had to offer. Evin is one
big carceral Disneyland. With the impressive
selection of buildings, rooms, and cellars
that can be rearranged at will, anywhere
along or beneath the hillside, conditions
can be made to vary drastically, according
to whether youre a man, woman, cleric,
relative of a cleric, a political, celebrity
political, drug dealer, etc. Although all
sections are overcrowded, some cellblocks
are lthy, while others are immaculate.
Some offer grass, opium and alcohol, while
in others even pen and paper are impossible
to come by.
As architect Rem Koolhaas has pointed
out, nowadays, with pedagogical ideals and
agendas replacing each other at high speed,
by the time a prison is built, it is usually
already out-of-date. The advantage of certain

57

hypermonumental prisons, however,

lies in their lavish use of space. Thanks to
wasteful proportions, they can easily adapt
to new philanthropic regimes without any
changes in structure, and keep an air of
permanence while adapting from within,
often covertly betraying the very principles
they were founded on. No programmatic
break, but an architecture of revision from
within the penal colony. Such is the allegorical allure of Evin.

obvious revisions, such as a de-specialization of the prison staff, with recruits being
used to run administrative tasks. God bless
the recruits. They do their job, but in their
reluctant, fuck-am-I-doing-here manner,
often openly sympathizing with the prisoners, and, to quote the jailed reporter Baqi,
ostensibly treating the prison staff as
inmates. The intelligence agents are, for
their part, also undergoing changes, and
are sporting a new sort of lan.

More and more gures of the reformist

movement are openly admitting that mass
incarceration is part and parcel of the
reformist bargain. On the eve of the election
of President Khatami, mayor of Tehran
Gholamhossein Karbastchi (another key
reformist gure), laughingly blurted out,
Obviously, this means prison for the likes
of us. Karbastchi was eventually sentenced
to two years. And by now, the Evin Cultural
Center, as it is widely referred to, is so
packed with celebrities, its the single most
glamorous spot in Tehran.

If the New York Gambino Maa once

admitted it was The Godfather that taught
them how to walk and talk and look
convincing (and if it would be perfectly
normal, as it were, for the British MI5 to
seek inspiration in the likes of John le Carr
or Ian Fleming), it so happens that the
Iranian Information Ministry is itself the
most promising masculine paradigm of
our time, with the strongest cult potential
since Don Johnson. A sphere of innocence
untouched by the adulterations of mediahoned sex appeal, the Information Ministry
offers untapped authenticities, a promise of
fresh prototypes and tantalizing new styles.
Consider an interrogator in a turquoise suit
and beige rubber slippers, sporting a fourday stubble and an impeccable blow-dried
coif. Through 16 hours of interrogation he
uses the most polite and elegant renditions
of Persian etiquette as he brings you tea and
sugar and apologizes for smoking. Yet he is
also perfectly happy to scream, threaten,
and bang his sts on the table in a show of
exquisite, virile deftness. And he is but one
among many.

Prison memoirs are presently le dernier cri.

Some attempt to analyze recent events in
broad brush-strokes, others explain, in
detail, the practical, day-to-day workings
and prison routines. The titles of the
memoirs are telling: One Shouldnt be Afraid
of Evin (Kadivar); Evin isnt a Bad Place to
Be (Ebadi); I Dont Feel Out of Place in Evin
(Safari); Evin Hotel Is a Little Further Down
the Road (Lahiji). It seems like intellectuals
are joined in a curious effort to demystify
what is still Irans most legendary dungeon,
perhaps even preparing and encouraging
people to drop by sometime. The long road
to reforms leads right through Evin, quips
Mr. Kadivar. Playing on the Shahs onetime
promise that every Iranian would own a car,
Kadivar suggests every Iranian should be the
proud owner of a le in Evin.
A name that is often invoked these days
not least by superstar convict Akbar Ganji,
in a recent essay on political imprisonmentis that of Michel Foucault, with his
ruminations on surveillance and the ubiquity
of power. By contrast, when I rst came
to Iran three years ago, all the bookstores
around campus were displaying translations
of Friedrich Nietzsche, a rather more chestthumping, gung-ho sort of fellow.
As Evins place in the Tehran imaginary is
shifting, within Evin itself there have been

In the wake of the ongoing power struggle,

the Information Ministry has reportedly been
pervaded with bleeding-heart reformists.
The hard-core, those who found the liberal,
wishy-washy approach revolting and disgraceful, have regrouped under the auspices
of the Judiciary, which is responsible for
the current wide-scale arrests. Be that as it
may, for the rst time in a long time, political
prisoners are no longer subjected to physical
torture, which is principally reserved for
people in the business of drug dealing and
organized crime, and which is performed
by the dreaded Agahi, a subdivision of the
army. The politicals are now tortured
psychologically, which is at least as efcient
and destructive, but which holds certain
advantages: psychological torture doesnt
leave physical traces (apart from weight and
hair loss), and it isnt gritty and juicy enough

to stir the publics sense of imagination.

The very fact that Evin now contains nonpolitical prisoners attests to changes in
society at large. Iran is as poor as it has
been in a long time, and its criminological
panorama has shifted accordingly. My own
cellblock was a tutti-frutti of all sorts of
prisoners who were awaiting sentencing.
There was the one-legged army general
who had been caught with 250 kilograms
of opium. There was an Iranian who had
grown up in Hawaii and Tennessee, whom
everyone called Billy, and who was caught
with his buddys stash of heroin. There was
a handsome, soft-spoken historian who
had written too critically of Iranian wartime
policies, and who was psychologically
tortured for over a month. (They try to systematically destroy your every sense of self,
he told me.) Yet another was a conspirator
in a two-million-dollar bank scam, who had
been hung upside down naked and beaten
for days on end by the Agahi until he was
a mess of blood and broken bones. Khosro,
another cellmate, was a cigarette smuggler
from Kurdistan who quietly sang Shirley
Bassey songs (But if you stay / Ill make
you a day / like no day has been / or will
be again). And then there were the three
young men from Ahvaz who had made a
confused attempt to hijack a small charter
plane. We couldnt agree on where to go.
Some were screaming, Damascus!, others
were suggesting Dubai, someone was
saying Germany, they explained in raucous
Khuzestani accents. Their families had taken
part in the attempt, so their mothers and
fathers, aunts and uncles were all in Evin
awaiting sentencing.
I also met a member of the Mahdavia,
an armed opposition group that strives to
hasten the arrival of the Hidden Imam (the
Shii equivalent of the Messiah). Since
the Imam is scheduled to appear during a
time of unparalleled depravity, the Mahdavia
have decided they must topple the very
devout and righteous Islamic regime, in the
hope of sowing some decent corruption and
decadence on this earth. Yet another prisoner was a member of the afore-mentioned
Marxist-Islamic Mojahedin, who are just as
pointlessly trigger-happy as the Mahdavia,
and who entertain the bizarre idea that
they can bomb Iranians into spontaneous
upheaval against the government. They lost
all the popular support they had when they
extensively bombarded their own countrymen during the Iran-Iraq war. When it
Evin, Iran.
Photos Golmohammad Rahati

59

comes to high-prole opposition groups,

one mustnt forget the Monarchists, with
their nouveau-riche frumpiness and their
politics of nostalgia. The Monarchists are
based in Tehrangeles (the Iranian neighborhoods of L.A.), from where the exiled Prince
Reza occasionally uffs his feathers and
beams passionate radio transmissions to
his supposedly countless followers within
Iran. Who wouldnt rather put up with the
long, reformist road through Evin? I feel sorry
for any serious revolutionary these days.
Before being transferred to a cellblock
shared by forty prisoners, I spent a brief spell
in isolation. At one point, my interrogator
burst into the cell, holding all my signed
statements in one hand. He was upset.
Id forgotten to sign certain pages, and it
made him look silly in front of the public
prosecutor. As he was excitedly waving the
documents in my face, the door slammed
shut behind him, and he was trapped in the
cell, alone with me.
Wheres the bell?
We dont have a bell.
Awkward silence.
So what do you do to call the warden?
Take the blue slip of cardboard and hang it
outside the door.
He followed my advice. Another silence.
What do you do then?
You wait.
He waited. Then he started calling the
warden, gradually getting louder and louder
until, nally, he was screaming and violently
banging his pudgy sts against the steel
door. A wonderful moment. And deeply
symbolic, all things considered.o

Toward a military ethics at West Point:

An interview with Colonel Anthony Hartle
Jay Worthington

Founded in 1802 by Thomas Jefferson,

the United States Military Academy was
originally an academy for training military
and civil engineers based in part on the
French model of the cole Polytechnique.
Though West points curriculum has always
been heavily weighted toward engineering,
mathematics, and the sciences, a lively
debate has occurred throughout its history
as to the proper role of the humanities in a
military education. Colonel Hartle is Deputy
Head of the Academys Department of
English which administers the Program in
Art, Philosophy, and Literature. The author
of numerous books and articles on military
ethics, including Moral Issues in Military
Decision Making, Col. Hartle is also responsible for instruction in philosophy and ethics
to a group of cadets who will one day be in
command at the highest levels of decision
making in the US Army. Jay Worthington
met with him at the Academy to discuss the
evolution of ethics at West Point and in the
US Armed Forces in general.

What is the formal academic training in

ethics and moral philosophy that cadets
receive here?
Its not that easy a question to answer,
because I think what youre driving at is the
ethical component of character development, and we view that as a much broader
issue than what cadets receive in the
classroom. The Academy has a mission, like
every organization, and an important part
of that mission is graduating commissioned
leaders of character. That raises the question
of what we mean by that term.
West Point has in fact published a denition:
A leader of character seeks to discover the
truth, decide what is right, and demonstrate
the courage and commitment to act
accordingly.
You talk about the warrior spirit. Has that
denition evolved over the past few decades
that youve been here?
I dont think that its changed much at
all. What has changed is our attempt
to understand the process of character
development and to enhance that process.
And what evolution has occurred there?
By introspection and heightened awareness
of the interaction between personal experience and institutional structure. The watershed event during this period were talking
about was the 1976 cheating scandal here
at West Pointit made national headlines,
and a blue ribbon commission from outside the army came in to examine the overall
curriculum and to make recommendations, one of which, somewhat euphemistically, was to increase the offerings in
philosophy.
Why euphemistically?
We didnt have any.
Interesting. So before 1976, there were no
formal courses in philosophy here.
Right. So we established one, and all cadets
are now required to take one course in
philosophy. As you might expect, the
content of that course focuses on ethics to a
signicant degree. The idea here is to move
cadets from a place of knowing about
institutional values and adhering to institu-

60

tional standards to internalizing them,

accepting them as their own, and then
progressively moving them to the point
where they inuence others and their
thinking.
If West Points denition of character has
remained stable throughout this period,
how much have shifts in the moral world
outside changed the Academys sense of
the kinds of procedures it needs to use to
instill character in its students?
Quite a lot. During the 1950s and 1960s,
during my experience at West Point, there
was an assumption, not an altogether
reli-able assumption, but nevertheless an
assumption founded with some condence,
that there was a certain common perspective on core values in the cadets entering
the Academy. Of course, it wasnt altogether
reliable, but certainly, it was a more reasonable assumption to make in 1960 than in
2000.
Whats your short list of those values of 1960?
A commitment to the idea of honesty, an
understanding that the world is structured
and that most of the people with whom
one is going to interact will have the same
value perspectives that you do. Now, on the
other hand, we certainly recognize that the
people coming into the Academy are highly
capable and intelligent, but they come from
a widely diverse spectrum of backgrounds,
with widely diverse attitudes, and we know
that we need to do a better job of educating
them about values, about responsibilities in
an institutional setting, about the whole idea
of commitment to an institution and a profession, than we would have thought was
necessary 40 years ago.
Do you nd that the students here still arrive
with the expectation that they are entering a
lifelong profession? Certainly, the expected
career length of a young ofcer today is
dramatically shorter than it was in 1960.
Thats right, but Im not sure that we
surveyed student expectations in the 1950s
and 1960s. We do now, though, and
what we nd is that the majority of cadets
coming in are uncertain about their career
commitment.
Does that create a reluctance to fully enter
this morally differentiated military world?

I think it would be too strong to say that

theyre more skeptical, but theres certainly
a tendency to examine carefully claims that
the institution makes.
In ways that might not have occurred 40
years ago?
Precisely.
Without putting any negative spin on the
word, would you say that incoming cadets
have a more selsh attitude towards West
Point than in the past, viewing it as an
opportunity to get an education rather
than as an entry into the more traditional
military culture of duty, self-sacrice, and
the rest?
Certainly more self-centered, yes. And
its what youd expect, over the last ten
years.
Why, specically, over the last ten years?
Many of us see this whole period of
economic prosperity, the whole dot-com
concept, as being accompanied by a focus
on ones own interests, with less concern
about society as a whole and about service
to the community. So what do we do about
that? We put more emphasis on values here
than we have in the past.
How exclusive are these values? There
seems to be some debate over whether the
Armys core values program is expressed at
such a level of moral generality that it simply
describes characteristics that any society
would like to see in its soldiers and ofcers,
regardless of the morality of their actions.
I think thats probably true. It gets back
to the idea of the role of the laws of war
when we talk about the expected behavior
of the members of the military profession,
we nd that the boundaries are circumscribed by functional requirements, and
these functional requirements are further
circumscribed by the laws of war, the
customary practices of warfare. Ive argued
that we also have another signicant
constraint, and that is the values of society.
There are examples of behavior, permissible
under the laws of war, which might be
constrained by societal values. At the end
of the Gulf War, attacks on retreating Iraqi
forces, quite acceptable in terms of the laws
of war, were terminated because of the

61

adverse reaction of the news media and

the American public.
How stable do you see these core values as
having been over time?
That depends on your denition of core
values. If you talk about core values like
freedom, the rule of law, individual
equality before the law, commitment
to democratic institutions, theyve been
extremely stable.
You could argue that individualism, say,
only started to appear in a form recognizable
today with the reconstruction amendments
after the Civil War. Prior to the Constitutional
revolution in the 1860s and 1870s, it seems
hard to argue that universal equality before
the law was the sort of core value that you
seem to see as foundational to the militarys
code of ethics. What happens to your idea
of foundational, stable, social values if their
constitutional and ethical underpinnings have
been evolving over the course of the history
of the US?
Well, the processes have always been with
us, I would argue. If you think about the
whole frontier concept and the rugged
frontiersmanif thats not individualism,
I dont know what is. And thats been
with us from the beginning. Weve always
admired that spirityou can characterize
the revolutionary period as exemplifying
precisely that ideal.
So you dont think there has been evolution
in Americas understanding of its core
values, or even of the role of individualism,
for example?
Well, the manifestations of those values
certainly have taken different forms.
When we look at the pre- and post-Civil War
periods, things look a lot different.
You could also look at the 1930s
accelerating in the 1960sand see concern
with the right of citizens to certain procedural limitations on the power of the state
to act upon them. If you go back to the
turn of the [19th] century and before, you
dont see that as such a pressing concern.

We almost seem to be overwhelmed with

the idea of due process and individual rights
today, dont we?
We could argue about whether thats a good
or a bad thing in American society, but
it does seem like at least the form of the
relationship between individuals and the
state has evolved pretty signicantly over the
past century or so.
One might argue, though, that thats a
different manifestation in our society of a
continuing commitment to the rule of law.
It certainly looks a lot different now, but it
may be the same core value thats been
there all along. Does that help any? Maybe
not. It may be that looking at core values
that way makes them so plastic that they
dont give us much lift.
What is the militarys reaction as custom
and formal law diverge? One of the obvious
examples would be the laws of air warfare,
and the bans on bombing of civilian
targets, the attempt to maintain a bright
line between military and national infrastructure. These days, national infrastructure
often appears to be a primary target of the
US military.
Theres some sense in which people say
that this is an evolution of traditional concepts. Others, including some here, say that
we need to redene the military profession,
and that we need to consider that kind of
question in order to understand what the
limitations on the military should be.
Certainly, much of the just war tradition
appears to hang on a set of categorical
distinctions, between the civilian and military,
combatants and non-combatants, say, which
look increasingly hard to defend. How
does that apply when youre bombing the
electrical infrastructure of Serbia? Is the just
war tradition still the foundation of the ethical
training here?

Thats right.

Discussion of the just war tradition and the

codied laws of war are certainly included
in our course, but I wouldnt say that we
use that as our moral foundationwe turn
to ethical theory and core social values
for the moral foundation of what we teach
cadets.

Is that an example of a value thats evolving

over time?

What would you say is your moral foundation

here?

Were trying to generate a conception of

professional military ethics. Just war theory
doesnt necessarily play that big a role for
us. Its important to understand it, to
understand the relationship between this
tradition and the laws of war as they
exist today, and its really important to
look at the justications for the just war
tradition, which evolved from the religious
context into a secular context, and we
can construe that in terms of human-rights
theory. But its not foundational in the sense
you suggest.
Lets get back to my original question, which
washow necessary is it to the military that
core social values actually be stable?
Well, were tied to the core values of society.
If those are variable to an extent that they
undercut the militarys core ethics, then we
have a cognitive dissonance when it comes
to our value commitments.
And if this outer, societally limiting moral
boundary is in ux, what implications does
that have for the militarys sense of itself as
a morally coherent institution?
Well, I dont think thats the case. Having
said that, if the laws of wars and functional
constraints of the military profession are
xed, and this social limit changes, then the
institution has to react in ways that hierarchical, bureaucratic institutions have a lot
of trouble with.
How important to the army is the
differentiation between the military and the
civilian worlds?
To the extent that these values and the
behavior that follows from the values are
critical to the functional activity.
So you would argue that these are military
values to the extent that they are functional
requirements of military activity, and that
if civilian morality identically incorporated
this same set of values, there would be no
need to nd some additional differentiation
in order to set the military apart in some
way. So that theres nothing necessary to the
differentiating aspects of military morality;
it just happens to be that way?
Im not sure Id go quite that far, though
it is the case that commitment to a military
career includes commitment to what

62

General Sir John Hackett describes as the

ultimate liability. Committed soldiers commit
themselves to putting their lives at risk as
part of fullling their function in serving
society. That commitment sets the military
apart.

to the members of the US army. The Army

leadership may have concluded that
inuencing behavior is a sufciently
challenging goal. In implementing the
values program, we tend to focus on what
soldiers who adhere to the Army values do.

When did the core values program start?

In the mid-1980s. About that time we came
up with the four Cscourage, candor,
competence, commitment, the so-called
soldierly valueswhich was the idea of a
four-star general, and we had the ideas of
General Meyer, another four-star general,
who supported a set of professional values:
loyalty, responsibility, and seless service.
We combined the two sets in initiating a
values approach, which is embodied in the
Armys LDRSHIP program [Loyalty, Duty,
Respect, Seless service, Honor, Integrity,
Personal courage]. That was in the era when
we were trying to reconstruct the
profession.

To what extent does this concern for

professional values require West Point
to help cadets establish themselves
as autonomous moral individuals? Youve
written about the obligation of ofcers
to remain independent moral evaluators
of decisions both up and down the chain
of command, about the obligation to resign
in protest, if necessary, and to express
themselves about moral issues throughout
their careers.

Where does the Armys fascination with

moral acronyms come from?
Youd nd it in every military organization in
the world, I think.
Still, I wonder about the origins of the
impulse to come up with LDRSHIP or the
four Cs. Is there something at odds with
setting up a moral code but making it appear
that the underlying principles might be
contingent upon how comfortably they t
into an acronym?
Actually, LDRSHIP was an afterthought.
The sergeant major of the army came up
with that. That was enough to force the
re-labeling of courage as personal courage
so it would t into this easily remembered
label.
But wisdom and truth-telling ended up
being dropped because they didnt t the
acronym.
Thats not my understanding. Actually,
the guy who did the original drafting was
committed to an Aristotelian model, and
he wanted to provide enough intellectual
substance so that the manual would be
different from what we had provided in the
past. He did include wisdom, but in the
process of stafng this over the course of
two years it was winnowed out as not
the most effective way to present values

Theres a psychologist named Keegan who

has done a study of people in the professionsnot the military, specically, but the
professions generally. One research group
here at the Academy now is pursuing his
work. We talk about people who are at a
stage II development, which is roughly
people who are at the point of asking what
they can do for themselves within the limits
of their professional activities. At stage III
development, one commits him or herself
to achieving the purpose of the professional
activity, which sometimes requires subordinating ones own interests, and then theres
a stage IV, in which professionals make
autonomous choices within a framework
of understanding the professions purpose
and how it achieves its ends. Now there
have been some surveys, and they show
and this is all very loosethat cadets are
in the process of moving from stage II to
stage III, and that if we look at junior ofcers,
people up to the rank of major, attending
the command general staff college out of
Leavenworth, people are still in the process
of moving from stage II to stage III, though
there are larger numbers at stage III.
At what levels do you start seeing what
you call stage IV awareness become the
dominant professional norm?
The research is going on now, and Im
not sure what theyll come up with, but
thats one way to answer your question
about autonomy. Yes, were going to give
them the foundation for that. No, we dont
want to graduate programmed, robotic
soldiers. Now, how to do that is a real
challenge.

In West Points terms, whats involved

in establishing leaders as seekers after
truth?
Theres a ne line between the Aristotelian
approach and the Kantian approach. Its a
combination of education and training. We
want people who understand institutional
values, of West Point and the army, and we
want people who are competent. We also
want people who have the ability to react
to unexpected situations.
Morally and culturally unexpected situations?
Both. Because thats what we have young
people doing right now, in Bosnia and
Kosovo, and other places where we have
peacekeeping operations and multi-national
operations. Being mentally inexible or
dogmatic simply isnt adequate, so we want
people who have open minds. So I think
thats what we mean when we talk about
the pursuit of truth.
How much does the increasing importance
of missions other than war, such as
peacekeeping, affect the cadets sense of
their role in society? If the clearest ethical
justication for a military is that its manning
the ramparts, how do these new kinds of
missions affect the militarys sense of its
ethical place in society?
This year is the rst year that weve
implemented an effort to educate the cadets
about their professional identity. Thats a
shift in our program, education about professional identity. As part of that, the idea
of the military ofcer as a servant of society
is a central piece. Thats different from the
warrior ethic that youve seen in our literature. Thats different from being trained
to ght and win the nations wars as an
essential element of professional competence, because it says that the military is
to do what society requires. That may be
peacekeeping missions; it may be domestic
disaster relief missions; it may mean ghting
wars.
What is the cadets view of the value of those
kinds of missions, and of the social value they
imply for the military profession?
Theres an institutional bias against some
of these things, that somehow they detract
from our core mission of winning wars.
Thats not just here at West Point, thats

63

received from current faculty members, from

outside the institution; its profession-wide.
Its a change that I think will occur on a
somewhat bumpy road over the next decade
or so. But it is a change were aware of
as being signicant, and it makes a big
difference in the professional identity of
people here.

us when to go ght and who to ght, and

well decide how.

You now have a generation of cadets entering who were children when the coverage
of events like the sieges of Srebenica and
Sarajevo were being broadcast on national
news. They were at a formative age when
these humanitarian missions became
perceived as pressing. Are they more open
to them than older ofcers?

Sure.

Yes. This is a discussion that captains have

with colonels periodically here at West
Point. Colonels say that we really have to
work at changing peoples attitudes and
the captains say, Sir, theyve changed. We
already see that. That is the way we look at
the world. And the senior people say, No,
it isnt.
Are the cadets also more open to civilian
intrusions into what is perceived as the
traditional technical expertise of the military?
The land mines debate, in which tremendous
political pressure has been placed upon the
US military to accept a ban on the use of
land mines, would be a good example,
where the military seemed to perceive it as
an unwarranted civilian intrusion, on moral
and ethical grounds, into an area which
should more properly be reserved to the
expert judgment of the army.
One way to look at that is that its simply a
piece, an important piece, of what I talked
about before, about the concept of oneself
as a servant of society, in that were talking
about changing jurisdictions, and how the
boundaries of jurisdiction evolve and
move over time. If the way to ght a war
is exclusively the jurisdiction of the military,
then its an incursion. If that jurisdiction
is shared to some extent with NGOs, with
civilian perspectives, then its not an intrusion; its an area that is of concern to more
than just the military.
Hasnt military conduct always been subject
to larger social pressures and moral forces?
The perception was that the attitude of
military commanders was, The civilians tell

That seemed to be how the land mines

debate played out. At least some senior
voices in the military seemed to be deeply
skeptical of whether it was proper for civilians
authorities to interfere.

And this generation of cadets is now entering from a civilian world that has become
willing to make those sorts of intrusions.
Insistent on making those kinds of intrusions
might be a better characterization.
Thats fair. Is it changing the cadets
perceptions of the proper relationship
between civilian and military society?
I think so, yes. Achieving the same level of
commitment to principle with these shifting
attitudes is a matter we sort through on a
regular basis here. How do we best provide
the army and the country with ofcers with
the education, the background, and the
perspectives that best suit them to do what
the nation will require them to do?
And if that doesnt involve ghting
conventional threats to the nations security,
then so be it?
Well, the Chinese are coming, but they
havent arrived yet [laughs].p

The paper sculpture show

Curated by Matt Freedman

The artists and their projects

In my minds eye I can see what I want:

a magazine that turns into a sculpture
garden. Instead of just sitting there in your
easy chair thumbing through one copy
out of thousands of duplicate copies,
you are here asked to get up and dance
with the magazine, so to speak. Five paper
sculptures have been thought up for you
by ve benevolent and generous artists,
now guratively hovering over your
shoulders even as did your pipe-smoking
dada while you completed your yable
wood airplane.

Eve Sussman, Instant Replay

Going from the at to the real is a long

and difcult trip for a piece of paper to
take, and, since so much is riding on your
shoulders (and who knows how deft and
reliable you are?), it is by no means a safe
or predictable one. We have therefore
enlisted the services of Jonathan Ames
to go rst onto the thin ice: He has built (or
has attempted to build) the pieces in
Cabinets testing laboratories in Nevada
and has led a report. As I write this he has
not yet begun his labors, so I dont know
how things went for him. I hope it all worked
out nicely.
Whether you take a knife to these pages
and try to create your own Cabinet sculpture
park, or you prefer to maintain the projects
in their current pristine and archival virtual
state of unlimited potential is up to you,
of course. But who could resist?U

64

Paul Ramirez Jonas, Door

Pablo Vargas-Lugo, Flame
Sarah Sze, Coffee cup
Allan Wexler, Folding chairs

I tried!
Jonathan Ames

I am no good with my hands. Theres no

getting around it. I cant x anything. I cant
build anything. I cant take apart anything.
I even nd ATMs troublesome. The little
diagram on how to insert the card is very
mysterious to me. I also dont like having
to put gas in an automobile. I cant seem
to squeeze the handle correctly; its always
clicking. Thats why I prefer New Jersey for
motoring: Self-service pumps are illegal in
the Garden State.
So when the good editors of Cabinet asked
me to be a guinea pig for making cut-out art
objects, I said, Im no good with my hands,
which is something Ive said thousands of
times before in various situations, including
the rst sentence of this essay. But this
didnt stop the Editors from insisting I take
the job. I think their reasoning was that if
I could make the objects, then anybody
could. For example, most importantly, you
good readers of Cabinet.
So I was provided with the necessary
materials and sitting at my kitchen table,
I rst tackled Allan Wexlers chair. Using
an X-acto knife, I found it rather peaceful to
cut along the outlines of the drawing. Its
rather soothing doing a craft, though as
I cut away with that sharp blade on Mr.
Wexlers fascinating diagram, I did recall,
rather unhappily, my tenure in a psychiatric
hospital in 1987 where I participated in art
therapy. I nearly was disciplined when
I sculpted from a piece of clay a stunning
likeness of the Head Doctor. It was a
temporary moment of genius; never before
had I shown a air for Rodins mtier.
But there at the table, produced by my
angry ngers, was a clay efgy of my
then tormentor. One of my colleagues, an
unstable little fellow with large temples,
saw what I did and shouted, He made Dr.
D_______! The art therapy nurse rushed
over and I crushed the face to the table,
destroying the damning evidence.
Well, I put this unhappy memory away
and continued with the Wexler. I was very
pleased with myself when it was all sliced
up, but I then began to struggle with how
to fold the thing before me into a model of
a museum-worthy chair. So I meditated
on this, straining the bean to the utmost,
but I was rudely interrupted in my labors
by my landlord, who happens to be an editor
of Cabineta bit of cottage industry going
on here.
Overleaf
Jonathan Amess kindergarten report, 1969-1970

81

Hows it coming along, Jonathan? he

asked.
Just cut out Wexlers, I said, but cant
make a chair of it.
My Edit-Lord then impetuously grabbed the
bits of paper on my kitchen table and dexterously folded the thing into a pleasant-looking
little chair.
Youre like a parent stealing a childs
success! I whined. I was on the verge of
guring it out. Leave me alone from here
on. You hired me to be a guinea pig, so now
back off! He limped out of my apartment,
properly chastised.
With the tiny Wexler chair wobbling before
me, I decided to take credit for its handsomeness, despite my Land-Editors
meddling, and I moved on to Pablo Vargas
Lugos ame. Oh, did I excel at this! I was
a wizard with the scissors! But as I wielded
that sharp instrument, I had another
memory of another institution where I was
held at one time. In kindergarten, academic
year 1969/70, my only bad grade in 26
categories was: Coordination of small
musclescoloring, cutting, etc. And
alongside this damning label and bad grade
(an N for Not yet), which has followed
me for a lifetime, was a stick-gure drawing
of a child about to kill himself with a pair of
scissors (see accompanying photostat of
the actual report card, retrieved by my good
mother, Mrs. F. Ames of Oakland, N.J.).
Well, as I cut Vargas Lugos ame, I felt
vindicated. Who said I couldnt use a
scissors? A Mrs. Rea, thats who. But Ive
improved. I really have. The ame I cut out
is beautiful. Glorious. An excellent example
of the coordination of small muscles.
But unfortunately after that ery triumph it
was more or less downhill for yours truly.
I completely botched Paul Ramirez Jonass
door. I was supposed to make a portal and
ended up with confetti, though Im sure you
good Cabinet readers will fare better than
me. Maybe you were right about scissors,
Mrs. Rea.
Then there followed the disaster I perpetrated on Eve Sussmans horse race.
The words cone and cylinder in her
directions threw me for a loop, which
I guess is a mixed metaphor, but thats
because I was really mixed up. But Ms.

Sussmans work looks very interesting, and

the pictures of the horses are lovely. I did
rally at the end with Sarah Szes coffee cup,
but by this point I couldnt take much
pleasure in my accomplishment since my
nerves were completely shot, as if I had
been drinking too much coffee, interestingly
enough.
So there you have it, loyal Cabinet
readership. Measure yourself against me
and feel good! Make these lovely works
of art and soothe yourself. Cut and paste
and glue and be transported back to
childhood or to the art therapy sessions
at the psychiatric hospital you attended,
or simply stay in the momentwhich is
what all the gurus recommend anyway
and enjoy!W

Cover versions:
The Communist Manifesto
Geoff Cox

Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei was

rst printed as a pamphlet in February 1848,
in the ofce of the Workers Educational
Association (Communistischer Arbeiterbildungsverein), 46 Liverpool Street,
Bishopsgate, in the City of London. Since
that date it has been reproduced in countless contexts and editionsmaking it not
only one of the most widely read texts ever,
but one whose various covers speak of
the way the Manifesto has been received,
perceived, used, and abused across different
contexts and locations. How would one
begin to approach the design and packaging
of The Communist Manifestoto conceive
of it in terms of the books form and
function, its use- and exchange-value?

This work draws upon an earlier project, Manifest,

produced in collaboration with Tim Brennan & Adrian Ward.
See www.46LiverpoolSt.org/manifest.
Cabinet wishes to thank Simon Morris whose ongoing
Bibliomania project (www.bibliomania.org.uk) brought
Geoff Coxs collection to our attention.

The cover images include the metonymic

uses of plain red and the hammer and sickle;
images of chains or sticks; more gurative
depictions of workers stoking the res of
industry, trudging or uprising; paintings
such as May Day, 1929 by V.-V. Kuptsov;
a photograph of Marx (interestingly, without
Engels); and a young woman threatening
the reader with a machine gun. Given that
the relationship of appearance and reality
is fundamental to an understanding of the
Manifesto, its packaging doubly invites close
reading.
The sheer volume of publishing activity on
the Manifestos 150th anniversary in 1998
subjected it on an unprecedented level to
the rules and mechanisms of contemporary
marketing. One example is Versos The
Communist Manifesto: A Modern Edition
with its high production values and silky
red bookmark ribbon. Verso knowingly
described it as the Prada handbag edition
and it was received enthusiastically with an
edition of 32,000. By June 1999, it had sold
21,000 in North America and 3,400 in the
UK and other exports. Clearly, this indicates
something about the editions commodity
status and the market forces in which capital
appears to have successfully commodied
radical politics as something reducible to
both nostalgia and fashion, which is why an
engagement with the text itself seems all the
more urgent.
There is no Capitalist Manifesto, but if there
were, what might it look like?V

85

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The

Communist Manifesto, tr. Samuel
Moore (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1974).

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels,

Manifesto of the Communist Party
(Peking: Foreign Languages Press,
1977).

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels,

Manifesto of the Communist Party,
Malayalam edition, (Moscow: Progress
Publishers, 1978).

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,

Manifesto of the Communist Party
(London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1983).

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Det

Kommunistke Manifestet, tr. Frans
Masareel (Oslo: Falken Forlag, 1984).

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The

Communist Manifesto, tr. Samuel
Moore (Harmondsworth: Penguin
Classics, 1985).

Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto,

ed. Frederic L. Bender (New York: W.W.
Norton & Co., 1988).

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The

Communist Manifesto, in ed. Dirk
J. Struik, Birth of The Communist
Manifesto (New York: International
Publishers, 1993).

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The

Communist Manifesto, tr. Samuel
Moore (London: Pluto Press, 1996).

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,

Manifesto Comunista (Sao Paulo: Ched,
1982).
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The
Communist Manifesto (1848), ed.
Samuel H. Beer, (New York: AppletonCentury-Crofts, 1987).
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,
Manifeste du Parti Communiste (1848),
tr. Corinne Lyotard (Paris: Librairie
Gnrale Francaise, 1997).

Carlos Marx and Federico Engels,

Maniesto Comunista (Madrid: Bsica
de Bolsillo Akal, 1997).
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The
Communist Manifesto: A Modern
Edition (London: Verso 1998).
K. Marx and F. Engels, Komnist
Manifesto ve Komnizmin Ilkeleri, tr.
Muzaffer Erdost (Ankara: Sol Yayinlari,
1998).

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The

Communist Manifesto, ed. David
McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University
Press).

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The

Communist Manifesto, tr. Paul M.
Sweezy (New York: Monthly Review
Press, 1998).

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,

Kommunistiska Manifestet, tr. Per-Olaf
Mattsson (Stockholm/Malm: Vertigo
Frlag, 1998).

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,

Manifest Komunisticke Partije, tr. Mosa
Pijade ( Zagreb: Bastard Biblioteka,
1998).

Karl Marx and Friederick Engels,

Manifesto of the Communist Party (New
York: International Publishers, 1998).

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,

Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei
(Stuttgart:: Reclam, 1998).

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,

Manifesto of the Communist Party
(Moscow: 1999).

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,

Manifest, eds. Tim Brennan and Geoff
Cox (London: Working Press, 1999).

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The

Communist Manifesto, ed. Christopher
Phelps (New York: Monthly Review
Press, 1998)

Animals

Where the wild things are:

An interview with Steve Baker
Gregory Williams

Questions of identity and creativity have

been increasingly framed in contemporary
art and philosophy through the use of
animals and animal imagery. Steve Baker,
whose books include The Postmodern
Animal and Picturing the Beast, has written
extensively on attitudes towards animals in
20th- and 21st-century art, philosophy, and
popular culture. A founding member of the
UK Animal Studies Working Group, he is
also using this research to promote the
signicance of humanities perspectives
within the developing academic eld of
animal studies. Gregory Williams spoke
with him by phone.

In The Postmodern Animal, what are some

of the basic distinctions you draw between
modern and postmodern animals?
One of the pieces that I came across only
a matter of months before completing the
book was a video by Edwina Ashton called
Sheep [1997], in which shes dressed up in
this homemade, very clumsy-looking sheep
costume, telling a series of appallingly bad
childrens sheep jokes, wringing her hands,
looking incredibly uncomfortable, seeming
almost to be taking the mickey out of this
identity that shes put herself into. More than
any other single work, this piece lodged in
my mind and helped me clarify what
I meant by the distinction between the
postmodern animal and, lets say, some idea
of a modern or modernist animal. There was
no symbolism or metaphor involved, nothing
to keep the animal-as-other at a safe and
comfortable distance, but instead a sense
of the artist embracing and garbing herself
in this awkward, provisional, and rather
unattering identitygetting close
to the animal without worrying too much
about the consequences. And the idea that
the animal was performed here seemed
important, too. Painting seems to be a very
difcult medium for the postmodern animal
theyre far more often either performed or
presented rather than represented.
Im interested in your ideas about the animal
as an agent. Its worth considering to what
extent artists can work in tandem with
animals to give them a degree of subjectivity
as in, for example, Komar and Melamids
work with elephants.
Thats an interesting case, partly because
I think its really complicated to gure out
what exactly they were trying to do. Im
reluctant to criticize work of that sort too
much, because its clearly done for a good
cause: to raise money for the Asian Elephant
Art and Conservation Project that theyre
running in Thailand. But if you look at their
website www.elephantart.com and the way
in which they describe their book about the
project, they call it riotously funny but
at the same time theyre saying that it makes
startling revelations about the nature of
art itself. But as somebody pointed out to
me recently, the Alaska Zoo in Anchorage
has apparently had its elephants producing
paintings for years without ever claiming
that the results were to be taken seriously
as art.
previous page
The Blessing of the Animals, St. John the Divine.
Courtesy of the Cathedral

90

I think there are more interesting examples

than Komar and Melamid of artists working
in this kind of eld. Theres a French painter
called Tessarolo whothis must have
been back in the 1970s or 80sproduced
some paintings with a female chimpanzee
called Kunda. Unlike the majority of those
experiments from the 50s onward to get
chimpanzees to produce paintings and then
to debate whether or not they constitute
works of art, the pieces that Tessarolo
and Kunda were doing involved a kind of
exchange, with them both working on the
same canvas at the same time. She would
put some marks down, he would respond
to them; sometimes she would nd them
okay and make further marks, sometimes
shed actually erase his marks. And although
its not the same kind of playful or sthetic
exchange, the British artists Olly and Suzi,
who work in the wild painting predators at
very close quarters, have on some occasions
tried to get those animals actually to make
marks on the paintings themselves. This is
so that some kind of physical, visible trace
of the animal is still there when the painting
is subsequently exhibited. Of course they
wouldnt want to claim for a moment that
the mark-making done by a shark taking a
chunk out of a painting in itself constituted
art. But they are clearly interested in
negotiating a way in which those marks
might be incorporated into works that do
count as art.
How does the animal function as a kind of
tool for allowing humans to think through
their own identities? It seems that a lot
of artists youre writing about are trying to
envision a very far-out point in the dispersal
of xed identities, to the point at which
identities disappear.
There are several points that are raised
there. In terms of moving beyond identities,
I think youre right in saying that there
doesnt appear to be a xed point towards
which one could move. Certainly the way
in which, say, Deleuze and Guattari elaborate
their concept of becoming-animal in
A Thousand Plateaus as a creative, social
process in which there is a chance of
liberating oneself from being bound by
identities, presents the notion of becoming
as something that is not a matter of moving
from one identity to another identity. The
becoming is itself the point, and since in
their view all becomings are, in a sense,
becomings-animal, this gives the animal a

privileged and markedly creative place in

their philosophy.
Youve written about artists using animals to
destabilize meaning. Is it possible for artists
to avoid referring back to something known
and recognizable?
In terms of getting beyond meaning and this
phrase that I use about the unmeaning
of animals, essentially what Im trying to get
at is that as soon as one tries to use animals
to mean something or to inquire into what
animals mean, it becomes more difcult
than ever to escape a human-centered
perspective. A statement made recently by
the sculptor Anish Kapoornothing to do
with animals as such, but to do with this
idea of meanings and messages and so
onsuggested that giving messages is in a
sense the rst step toward the sentimental.
And for me one of the problems is that its
very difcult to think of how humans can
produce meanings that are not at some level
going to be anthropocentric and anthropomorphic. As soon as one gets into that, one
is potentially dealing with a sentimental
relation to the animal. Now, there are many
people who would say that sentimentality
has been given an unduly bad name in
relation to human thinking about animals.
But I think that art is arguably a special case
here because some of the artists Ive talked
to in researching this book have pets themselves, and have no particular objection
to the claim that they may be sentimental
about those animals. But they know that
they are working in a context where they
really cant afford to have their art labeled
as sentimental because to label it as
such immediately removes any degree of
seriousness or critical engagement from it.
This leads us to what Ive called the botched
taxidermy question. Its almost as though in
order to make any kind of serious statement
about animals they have to devise an
sthetic means which will not immediately
be open to being criticized as sentimental.
Something of the aggression, something
of the damage, something of the perversity
inicted on contemporary animal imagery
is simply to keep it on the right side of that
division between serious art and sentimental
art, given a history in the 19th and 20th
centuries of animal art being so overwhelmingly associated with sentiment.
There is an overwhelming amount of overtly
sentimental imagery out there which does a

certain kind of work, and thats ne. Im

not saying that one could shift to a culture
in which one simply got rid of greeting cards
that had sentimental animal imagery on
them. Im talking about a different kind of
work, work that uses animal imagery in
a much more self-conscious way. Its a way
which I guess is broadly related to the notion
of the artist that Lyotard had: the artist
as someone who has particular kinds of
responsibilities in the postmodern world
to work against complacency, to refuse what
he calls the solace of good forms, to continue to try to problematize things.
That reminds me of your discussion of
Deleuze and Guattaris notion of the
sorcerer in furthering this process of
becoming-animal. It concerned me a bit,
because it seems to position the artist as a
kind of mystical gure. What is the sorcerer
for Deleuze and Guattari?
Yes, the sorcerer. It does seem to be an
extraordinary word to introduce. But I think
its partly used tongue-in-cheekwe sorcerers, they call themselvesand partly
a means of avoiding or minimizing the use
of other more contemporary but equally
loaded terms, such as artist. Language
does a peculiar but particular kind of work
for them. Its to be taken seriously but not
always literally, addressing a reality but
often in deliberately arcane terms.
At one point they argue that the majority
of people will have somewhere in their
expe-rience memories of a kind of instant at
which in an exchange with an animal they
sud-denly got a glimpse of something that
wasnt to do with the ordinary boundaries
of human identity. Rather than thinking in
terms of some kind of utopia where one
got away from the worst effects of identity
thinking and its political consequences,
theyre looking instead to the ways in
which creative activitywhich in their
view is prompted by a thinking about, or an
interaction with, animalscan serve to open
up a model of experience that is quite other
than that which the psychoanalytic model
of the individual human subject would
ordin-arily allow. A lot of what theyre doing
in their exploration of becoming-animal is
concerned to see how one can get at those
instances, how one can prolong them,
inhabit them as artist or sorcerer, how one
can in a very sober and cautious manner
and those are their wordsseek to elaborate

an alternative to the psychoanalytic account

of what it is to be human.
To what extent do you think animals are used
as passive tools by artists while they work
through issues of subjectivity and identity?
There are quite a lot of dimensions to this
question. I ended up devising the term
botched taxidermy as a rather clumsy
catch-all phrase for a variety of contemporary art practice that engages with the
animal at some level or other. In some cases
it involves taxidermy itself, but in all cases
the animal, dead or alive, is present in all its
awkward, pressing thing-ness. I think what
many of the artists Ive been discussing are
doing in their presentation of the animal
as some kind of clumsy compound of
human and animal elements is to reinforce
the notion that the comfortable, utopian
conception of nature in which humans had
unmediated access to animals and lived in
some kind of unproblematic harmony with
them does not look like a practical way
forward, either in terms of how one thinks
philosophically about them, or in terms of
how on a practical level one might work for
the improvement of their living conditions.
What do you think about the sense of
responsibility artists should have toward
animals? What is your take on the Eduardo
Kac case, for instance?
The GFP Bunny artwork, with the transgenic
albino rabbit he named Alba that glows
green under uorescent light, you mean?
Thats a very interesting case, but it does
raise a whole set of problems. I just checked
his website www.ekac.org this morning to
see if thered been any developments in
his campaign to get Alba released from the
Inra laboratory in France and it doesnt seem
to have moved forward. Again, Im reluctant
to be critical of someone doing work of this
kind, because although I think that its an
unconvincing a way of exploring the issues
that he wants to address, there is enough
about what hes doing to suggest that its
done as a serious rather than as a deliberately controversial activity, and enough in his
own statements to suggest, whether or not
we would agree with this, that he is doing
it with a sense of responsibility. He actually
says at one point that responsibility is key
in what hes doing. And hes also quite
explicit about not wanting to be involved in
producing art that harms animals.

I think there is a considerable problem here,

which is that there is very little to distinguish
what he seems to have done in that French
laboratory in the name of art from the ways
in which an animal might be used in a
research laboratory with no art context at all.
In January this year reports were published
on work done at the Oregon Regional
Primate Research Center on the rst
genetically modied primate. And this rst
monkey had been produced using exactly
the same technology that Kac himself used,
with this green uorescent jellysh protein
inserted into its dna, in order to produce
an animal in which the progress of various
human diseases subsequently introduced
in that animals body can be traced and
monitored.

youve come across this group of Minnesota-based artists called the Justice for
Animals Arts Guild, who have started lobbying various state arts organizations and
funding agencies to try to limit the ways in
which artists can incorporate living animals
in their work.

So in that case it becomes used in a more

positive, constructive manner.

Within the art world, questions often arise

regarding the display of animals in galleries
and museums. For instance, Damien Hirst
puts his animals in vitrines within these socalled neutral white cubes and that supposedly removes them from the normal spaces
in which we would read meaning into them.

Im sure thats what the scientists would

argue. But whats particularly revealing
about that case of the rst gm primate is a
comment from one of the scientists involved.
He said, Were at an extraordinary moment
in the history of humans. And its almost
again as if the animal is actually invisible
there. The animal is simply the medium
through which this is done.
It reminded me of two other instances
where again the ethical issues seemed to
prompt rather surprising responses from
animal advocates. On the one hand you
have the notorious exhibition staged in
Denmark, I think early in 2000, by Marco
Evaristti, where he had taken ten ordinary
kitchen blenders and put a single goldsh
into each of them and invited the viewers,
if they wanted to, to turn these blenders on
and decimate the sh. Peter Singer, to my
surprise, was quoted in the New York Times
last year speaking out in support of that
exhibition, saying that it alerted the public
to the power that humans do have over
animals. At the same time one has Tom
Regan, another animal-rights philosopher,
having apparently spoken out quite strongly
against William Wegmans more recent
Polaroid photographs of his dogs where
theyre typically dressed up in human
clothes because he felt that the images
somehow deny the dogs their dogness.
I think what is genuinely interesting here is
the fact that artists are some of the people
who have been rendering those ethical
issues so complex. I dont know whether

To actually create a set of protocols?

Thats right. I think that theyre fully aware
of the fact that they may be open to the
criticism that theyre trying to engage in
some level of censorship, but they seem to
me entirely justied in taking the stance that
the intentions of an artist should not automatically override the interests of animals
that get drawn into that artists work.

But arent galleries and museums some of

the primary sites in which we encounter
animals, considering how many people in
urban centers rarely interact with animals in
any kind of natural environment?
Yes, I quite understand your reservations
there. What I would say is that long before
people get into galleries and see what artists
have been doing with animals there, no
matter how urban their lifestyles may be
theyll be pretty much familiar with wildlife
and nature lms on television. But one of the
other areas of shared knowledge which
I think is particularly problematic is the way
in which fairly recent lm technology around
computer-generated effects, animatronics,
and so on has been used in lms like
Disneys 102 Dalmatians and that terrible
second Babe lm. Animals can suddenly
do things like speak to each other across
the species barrier, which is nothing new
in itself, but they now do so with an extraordinary degree of lmic realism, so that
viewers cant easily assess the status of
what theyre seeing.
Even more recently, in Hannibal, the pack of
longhaired, tusked boars used in that lm is
an entirely real pack of boars, but apparently
its an animatronic boar thats used in one of
the gorier scenes. But watching the lm,
Beluga
Photo Britta Jaschinski

92

Fifteen theses on the cute

Frances Richard

there is no way that one could easily spot

where the distinction lies. I mention this
not to say what terrible uses this new technology is being put to, but rather to make
the point that when artists are manipulating
their animal imagery in a gallery its usually
at a level thats much, much more evident.
Its rather ironic that one has such a number
of artists who seem in recent years to have
got interested in taxidermy at exactly the
point where taxidermy has come to seem
such an outdated technique. In part I think
this is because it offers the scope not for
creating a convincing illusion of life, but
something that will have enough cracks
in its surface for people to see that a more
critical, thought-provoking point is being
explored. Somebody like Mark Dion is an
interesting example in relation to that sort
of work, partly in terms of using what he
calls this crazy taxidermist who creates
various animals for him, like the polar bear
covered in goat fur, or the bear covered
in alpaca.
I guess what bothers me a bit is that artists
like Dion end up setting up fairly traditional
dichotomies, such as the idea that pets are
bad because theyre acculturated and, on
the other hand, the real animal exists in
the Amazon. And you get this sense that
hes found unmediated access to animals
by entering into the wild as a visitor.
I know he wouldnt put it in those exact
terms, but.
No, but hes far from unusual in drawing
that distinction. That for me is one of the
extraordinary ironies that I really hadnt
expected in doing this research. To nd that
that distinction between the wild and the
tame, the wild and the domestic, is still so
central for many contemporary artiststhe
determination that their work and that they
themselves are associated with notions of
the wild, the dangerous, the predatory and
so on. Its a terribly romantic notion.
Toward the end of The Postmodern Animal I
became interested in your discussion of pets.
It was partly out of selsh reasons since I
have two cats. You mention Deleuze and
Guattaris claim that anyone who likes a dog
or a cat is a fool. But you also discuss other
writers who have complicated that attitude
and left space open for a more complex
relationship between humans and their pets.
In the end I wasnt quite clear on your own
position. I know you werent really posing it

94

in those terms, but how do you feel about the

presence of pets?
Well, we have cats, too. And although that
has probably inuenced my writing in ways
I dont quite recognize, I certainly tried
throughout the book to avoid taking too
partisan a position. What interests me very
much, though, is the idea you come across
in the work of an artist like Carolee Schneemann but also, maybe more surprisingly, in
Derridas recent philosophical writings
the idea that they might learn things
from their cats that are not easily learned
anywhere else.
For both of them its a matter of taking the
time to engage with the cats own point of
view, and then of thinking about the impact
of that point of view on their own work.
Theres this great statement by Schneemann
where she says of Kitch, one of her cats,
something along the lines of her steady
focus enabled me to consider her regard
as an aperture in motion. Its as though
the animal allows the artist to learn
something new, see something differently.
And Derrida says that his cat provokes a kind
of critical uneasiness in him, and he seems
to imply that this uneasiness may
be the only frame of mind in which any
responsible human thinking about animals
can really begin.A

I
Draw a circle, and ray out from it the abject,
the melancholic, the wicked, the childlike.
Now in the zones between add the erotic,
the ironic, the narcotic, and the kitsch. Intersperse the Romantic/Victorian, the Disney/
consumerist, and the biologically deterministic. At the center of this many-spoked wheel
lies a connective empty space. Label it
CUTE.
II
What is cute? The technical denition
encompasses revealing distinctions that
tend to be elided in normal conversation,
where cute is cute and everyone knows
what this means. Cute by the book derives
etymologically from acute, and its
establishing usage dates to circa 1731.
From this root comes cutes rst meaning,
as clever or underhandedly shrewd, and
its second, as impudent or smart-alecky
Dont get cute. The standard connotation
of dainty or delicate prettiness then leads to
what might be termed mannerist cutethe
cutsey, which (like the folksy) is dened by
its excessive or self-conscious appeal to the
unembarrassed core quality.1
III
Such interconnections echo a number of
distinctions present in the larger motif.
Fundamentally, cute serves to displace, or
neutralize, or reconceptualize in a positive/
non-threatening direction; this is possible
only to a certain degree, at which point
the pendulum swings back the other way.
Because it is a device of masking and
semblance, cute is inherently circular (see
Thesis No. I). Note how the dictionary
denition enacts this closed progression,
which has to do at every stage with
things not being wholly what they seem.
Cleverness shields or distances; it plays
potentially hurtful games. Impertinence
simplies this game, softening the con
artists plot into a joke. Prettiness and
daintiness further soften a barbed joke
into an appeal or irtation; self-conscious
or excessive appeal becomes suspect.
Suspicious appeal shades toward a con.
IV
Cute marks a crucial absence. It guarantees,
by denition, the nonappearance of malice,
premeditation, irony, self-consciousness,
accusation, or mercenary agenda. However,
in its manufactured forms cute remains a
major locus forin some ways is synony-

mous withthe manipulative gesture, the

prepackaged, consumable demonstration
of (necessarily factitious) innocence, spontaneity, and need. Cute arises by manipulating the guarantee of non-manipulation.
Professing its own demure and complete
powerlessness, it gains power over and
directs all interactions with it: parents wait
upon the infant, not the other way around.
Simultaneously referring to and negating its
own vulnerability, cute functions as a selffullling system, maintaining its image as
100% stolid and happy and obvious only by
virtue of utter contingency.
V
Cute displaces and protects against violence
by caricaturing the object of potential violation. Drop-kicking a stuffed animal or crumpling an animal-baby poster, for example,
might generate a faint transgressive whiff;
either could conceivably make a small child
cry. But neither compares to the moment
for which such acts are prophylactic: it
is horrifying to feel the fragile bones and
heartbeat-warmth of the actual kitten in
ones hands, and to feel those hands exing,
as if of their own atavistic accord, to crush.
Even more so when the live kitten functions
as a surrogate for said small child.
VI
Put another way: William the cat is very
cute each morning when he stalks, torments,
and kills the cute stuffed robin and presents
it to Rebecca and Ira in the bathroom, at
their feet at the breakfast table, or in their
bed. Actual dead robins, complete with
mites and trailing blood, appearing in the
same situations with the same frequency,
would not be cute. Cute emerges as a
ritualized and declawed sublimation of
violence, a pantomime or parody neutralizing mortal threat. This threat arises at that
juncture where the destructive meets the
generative: Rebecca and Ira cradle William
furry-belly-up in their arms, laughing, asking,
Have you met our son?
VII
The sexy- or porn-cute obviously constitutes
a whole genre sui generis, characterized by
the Playboy bunny, the chick, the arm-candy,
the hey-baby. Boy-cute geared toward both
females and males tends to cutesify adult
or macho animal imageryTiger Beat,
beefcakerather than indulging ostentatiously infantile girl-cute models. As a term
for sexually desirable, cute marks a middle

95

path: where hot and innocent might

both be overwhelming (for different reasons),
cute is available, plausible, manageable. One
respondent queried about the meaning of
cute insisted that males of her acquaintance
identied sexually appealing women as cute
only when they were also intelligenta
reversion, conscious or not, to the words
eighteenth-century origin in mental acumen,
if not subterfuge. (See Thesis II.)
VIII
Cute might be thought of as a watereddown version of pretty; which is a watereddown version of beautiful; which is a
watered-down version of sublime; which is
a watered-down version of terrifying. In this
regard, the cute is akin to the ridiculous,
which is a watered-down version of the
absurd, which is again a watered-down
version of that which terries. By extension,
this suggests that all representation, whatever its stylistic bent, is tinged with an experience of terror: the terror of the convincingly ersatz, the killing disjuncture of the otherized, the pseudo-real. (See Theses IV, VI.)
IX
The trouble with a Kitten is that
Eventually it becomes a Cat
Ogden Nash
In keeping with its status as representational
rather than natural, cute suggests an
inherently eeting, forgettable, throwaway
quality, but this is distinct from ephemerality,
since by its very vapidity or inoffensiveness,
cute remains indestructible. Cute stabilizes
infancy, or the frailty of old age, or the
foolishly unconscious actions of a supposedly competent adult, by reframing them
in an atemporal, non-biological, and consequence-free zone, not entirely unrelated to
the xed reality inside a picture.
X
What, then, of organic cute, the reexive
and visceral response stimulated by a playful
baby or winsome gesture, animal or human?
If beauty is symmetrical, proportionate, and
shades toward perfection, while sublimity
is awe-inspiring, jagged, and larger than life,
then organic cute is disproportionate, asymmetrical, and smallerlighter, more humorous, and less ironicthan life. The stabbing
suddenness of organic cute, the irrepressible
swoon it evokes, echoes back again to
the acute not in its intelligence, but in its
directness.

XI
Morphologicallythat is, stheticallycute
relies on big eyes, round heads, fat bellies.
The limbs of the cute are stubby or
nonexistent, its mouth abstracted or disproportionately tiny, its nose button, its ears
enormous, or alternatively, invisible. Cute
tumbles, toddles, waddles, rolls; it is visibly
dependent, apparently engineered by natural
selection to stimulate a nurturing response.
If this is true in evolutionary terms, it follows
that the surplus cuteness manufactured by
culture might denote the cultures attempt
to trick itself into kindness. One respondent
dened it thus: Cute makes you do things
you wouldnt do otherwise. (See Thesis V.)
XII
The evil (or drunken) clown; the devilpossessed doll; Star Treks Trouble with
Tribbles: like porn-cute, wicked-cute
depends upon camp. When cute goes bad,
it deepens rather than transforms. Poisoned
cute retains its outward appearance while
proliferating cancerously toward a toxic/
comic exaggeration of itself. Its colors tend
to darken from pure pastel; its contours
sharpen or skew to the grotesque. Cute
melodies lilt or rollick and repeatwhen
sped to mania or slowed to dirge, their
whimsy boomerangs upon and guts itself.
(See Thesis X.)
XIII
The linguistic analogue of cute is formed by
a prolonged nonsense exhalation ltered
through the mouth aligned as if to smile;
when inected improperly, these sounds
become not porn-cute but directly pornographic: awww, oooohh, mmmm.
Since this lexicon is ostensibly derived from
baby talk, perhaps it makes sense that it
also gestures to the origin of babies. When
such sounds coalesce into words, they often
function as aliases for cute and rely on repetition and diminution, as if unconsciously
articulating the concepts dual nature: booboo, snookums. The infamous sufxes
-ie or -y and, to a lesser extent in English,
-ettereverse toward the abstract, pulling
normal words back into their malleable
infancy as preverbal sound. Of course, this
also has the predictably paradoxical effect of
making unremarkable words foolish, of
cutesifying them. (See Thesis No. VII.)
XIV
Cute in German: liebe or sss. Cute in
Spanish: lindo. Cute in French: mignon.

Bee Modern:
An interview with Juan Antonio Ramirez
Eric Bunge

In Japan (which vies with the United States

as self-anointed world capital of cuteit
might be relevant that the most extreme and
deliberate form of cute, the cutesy, originated as a term circa 1944, while these two
powers were at war. (See Theses II,IX.) Cultural categorization identies not only cute
people and cute objects, but cute hand-writingan extreme rounding of the kanji which
renders them almost illegible (see again
Thesis X). This style is variously referred to
as round writing (marui ji), comic writing
(manga ji), fake-child writing (burikko ji)
and kitten writing (koneko ji) (See Thesis
IX.) An American theorist of Japanese cute
also reports cute foodsugary, bland, pale
in color, soft in textureand, of course,
many sartorial examples (see Thesis VII).
Sayuri Koshino, a public-relations representative at Sanrio, the company responsible
for the eforescence of cute that is the Hello
Kitty product line, explains:
I believe we are all born with actual physical
organs of cute, tiny and valentine shaped,
pulsing away in our cerebella. But I also
believe that many of us, having developed
harsh and realistic life attitudes, have
repressed our cute impulses.2
XV
Toward a thesaurus of cute: adorable,
amiable, animated, appealing, artless,
articial, attractive, available, bland, boring,
bowdlerized, callow, cartoon, charming,
childish, childlike, cloying, comfy, comic,
consumable, cuddly, dainty, darling, dear,
delicate, desirable, diminutive, dippy,
easy, effeminate, embarrassed, engaging,
irtatious, foolish, free, friendly, frilly,
frivolous, frolicking, furry, fuzzy, gentle,
genuine, girlish, guileless, happy, happy-golucky, helpless, honest, idiotic, immature,
inexperienced, infantile, ingenuous,
ingratiating, innocent, innocuous,
inoffensive, itsy-bitsy, juvenile, lovable,
nave, non-threatening, maudlin, miniature,
mindless, mushy, natural, nostalgic,
passive, pastel, pathetic, pert, petite,
pink, popular, precocious, pretty, pure,
quaint, quiet, round, rotund, saccharine,
sappy, saucy, sexy, shallow, shy, silly,
simpatico, simple, sincere, small, smarmy,
smiley, soft, squashable, sugary, sweet,
sympathetic, syrupy, tasteless, teeny,
timeless, tiny, touching, unconscious,
unironic, unsophisticated, unstructured,
vapid, vulnerable, weak, winning, winsome,
waiike, wee.S

96

1 See Merriam-Websters Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth

Edition.
2 Sharon Kinsella, Cuties in Japan, in Women, Media,
and Consumption in Japan, ed. Lise Skov and Brian Moeran
(Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 1995), p. 253.

Although humans had long exploited bees

for their honey, traditional beekeeping relied
until the 19th century on the use of rustic
or traditional beehives, which entailed
the annual removal of the honeycomb, and
thus the destruction of the bees. Modern
apiculture was born with the blind Swiss
naturalist Franois Huber (1750-1831), who
made important discoveries about bees
and invented the rst rational beehive. Built
with hinged frames, Hubers leaf beehive
unfolded like a book, allowing the beekeeper
to both harmlessly extract the honey and
observe the hive in its totality. The technical
developments in the second half of the 19th
century were progressive improvements on
this model, and included the observation
beehive with a glass window, and the
removeable-frame beehive by the American
Lorrain Langstroth (1810-1895), still a fundamental principle of beehive design. These
inventions both afforded and were produced
by an appropriation of the beehive as a
metaphor for a perfect society, a fascination
crystallized by the Belgian writer Maurice
Maeterlinck in his famous 1902 essay, The
Life of Bees.
Juan Antonio Ramrez, professor of Art
History at the Universidad Autnoma
de Madrid, is the author of The Beehive
Metaphor: From Gaud to Le Corbusier
(2000). His book traces the genesis of
Modern architecture in the 19th and 20th
centuries through the lens of the multifaceted metaphor of the bee. In considering
the formal and ideological connections
between apiculture and architecture,
Ramrez proposes that the founders of the
Modern Movement were inspired by both
the social metaphor of the hive, and the
technological developments that emerged
with the advent of rational beehives in the
19th century. Eric Bunge spoke to him by
phone.

Whether real or mythical, animals have had

various associations with architecture since
antiquity. These associations have ranged
from the benevolent and inspirational to the
mysterious and deceptive, from the sphinx
to the Minotaur and the Trojan horse. More
recently, Robert Venturi made the famous
distinction between the duck and the shed,
forever associating this poor animal with
postmodern architecture, while Santiago
Calatravas fascination with the skeletons
of birds is a constant theme in his search
for structural expression. Do you see bees
as tting into a long history of relationships
between animals and architecture or as
a unique technical and philosophical
association that has helped produce Modern
architecture?
I think its a bit of both. I think these are
more examples of the use of metaphors of
the forms, bodies, and structures of animals.
But if we had to look for the equivalent in
other animals, wed have to look at similarities, which I have not found, between
the form of the bee itself and the form of
some buildings. In the case of relationships
between apiculture and architecture, we nd
ourselves in front of something different.
It has to do on the one hand with the perfect
society, the society of the beehive, which
until WWII has had positive implications.
And given that architecture always carries
the desire to organize social life in some
manner, it seems to me inevitable that there
is a desire to identify human society with the
society of bees. The other problem is that as
a consequence of this there has been a desire
on the part of some architects to copy both
the honeycomb and the beehive as a box.
The apian model has been very important in
the genesis of the Modern movement. This
does not mean that there have not been
apian inuences before this, for example
in San Ivo della Sapienza [1642-1650] by
Borromini [1599-1667], one of the most
important Baroque churches of Rome. This
church has a certain similarity to the bee
found in the coat-of-arms of its rst patron,
Pope Urban VIII.
But you think that otherwise the apian model
is a relatively new phenomenon?
I think its a relatively new phenomenon
that was produced between 1890 and 1945.
After WWII, there is an important transformation in ideological character: the beehive

97

model acquires a totalitarian signicance

through Nazism and Stalinism, and theres
no desire in the West to openly defend the
model of the beehive.
What are the different ways in which
the beehive metaphor operated in the
architecture of 19th and 20th centuries and
what are the distinctions between the formal,
spatial, and socio-political metaphors?
On the one hand there is the social model
which in reality is more the concern of the
social historian. What interests us most are
the examples in which the model of social
organization in beehives has been able
to have formal repercussions, concrete
architectonic repercussions. There have
been two fundamental ways of detecting
this inuence in the world of architecture.
On the one hand, there is the structure
of the honeycombthe clearest example
of this would be Frank Lloyd Wrights
Honeycomb House, made with a hexagonal
structure. The second is the way in which
bees build honeycombs by hanging
themselves and forming a catenary arc.
They grab each other by the feet and form
a sort of parabolic chain and from this they
initiate the construction of the honeycomb
from top down. This was very important
for Gaud, who made upside-down models
of the chapel of the Gell Colony in Santa
Coloma, near Barcelona, with string and
little bags of lead that approximated the
weight of the structure. The parabolic
shapes that result in tension are turned rightside up to produce arches designed for their
compressive loads.

Key to diagram overleaf

1
Behrenss logo for AEG, 1907
2 "Rustic" Beehives, from Layenss Cours complet
dapiculture, 1890
3
The huts of "savages," from Le Corbusiers
Urbanisme, 1924
4
Tauts Glass Pavilion, 1914
5
Le Corbusiers Ateliers dArt, 1910
6
Buckminster Fuller, geodesic dome
7
Steiners second Goetheanum, 1928
8
The parabolic arc of bees constructing a honeycomb
9
Natural honeycombs without guidelines
10 Parabolic arcade in Gaudis Colegio Teresiano, 1889
11 The Alley method for breeding queens, 1861
12 Gaudis sketch for the chapel of Colona Gell,
1898-1908
13 Behrenss AEG turbine factory, 1908
14 Natural honeycomb
15 Langstroths movable frame beehive, 1852
16 Hubers leaf beehive, 1792
17 Cross-section of Layenss "Primitive" beehive, 1874
18 Elevation of Miess Friedrichstrasse skyscraper, 1921
19 Perspective of Miess Friedrichstrasse skyscraper, 1921
20 Plan of Miess Friedrichstrasse skyscraper, 1921
21 A.I. Roots "Simplicity" beehive, 1870
22 Rauchfuss nursery for queen bees
23 Le Corbusiers Honeycomb Apartments, 1922
24 Lucio Ramirezs Elmisana Beehive, 1948
25 Prokopovich beehive, 1807
26 Le Corbusiers Unit dHabitation, 1947-1952
27 Bee larvae as illustrated by Langstroth, 1862
28 Le Corbusiers City for Three Million Inhabitants, 1922
29 Interior, Kurokawas Nagakin Capsule Hotel, 1972
30 Exterior, Kurokawas Nagakin Capsule Hotel, 1972
31 Kikutakes Tower Shaped Community, 1959
32 Section, Metabolist student competition, 1960
33 Kurokawas Takara Beautillion, Osaka Expo, 1970

Thirdly, there is the development of the

man-made beehive, the boxes that contain
honeycombs. The traditional conical beehives were generally made of straw, but with
the emergence of rational apiculture in the
second half of the 19th century perfectly
orthogonal beehives were invented. This
exerts a great inuence on the genesis of
Modern architecture. And then there is the
observation beehive which has a glass front
and which I think was very important for
the appearance of the rst glass skyscraper
by Mies van der Rohe [1886-1969].
But is it not possible to see the design of
beehivesespecially observation beehives
as a manifestation of cultural shifts in spatial,
technological and visual protocols that
precede both skyscrapers and beehives?

1.

2.

8.

14.

3.

10.

9.

15.

16.

21.

27.

4.

23.

22.

28.

29.

5.

30.

11.

12.

17.

13.

18.

24.

19.

25.

31.

7.

6.

20.

26.

32.

33.

Yes. I dont think the genesis of Modern

architecture can be ascribed solely to
apiculture! I think in considering the genesis
of architecture we ought to think about a
whole conuence of metaphors: mineral,
mechanical, and biological.
And apian metaphors can cut across all
three. I think its interesting to think of how
observation beehives and architecture
intersect in their nature as optical
instruments. There is perhaps a relation
there.
Yes, I agree. The observation beehive was
very common in the homes and gardens of
the upper classes at the end of the 19th
and the beginning of the 20th century.
It was supposed to be very educational,
because one could see a perfect society at
work. I think this was a stimulus to imagine
a society in which human life was transparent and in which there is no privacy.
Do you see any connection between
the observation beehive and the camera
obscura? I found interesting an image in your
book of 18th-century observation beehives
that had a single hole youd look through.
This is effectively like a camera obscura, but
the observation beehives that inuenced
Mies allow one to see the beehive in its
totality, which is the idea of a large curtain
wall. I see more a connection with the
panopticon.
Which implies its use as a social model.
Gauds [1852-1926] appropriation of
the beehive metaphor seems to operate
at multiple levels, from the formal to the
social. How would you qualify his deriving
of socialist models from nature, and
especially bees, with respect to the fact that
he was born into a Catholic, conservative
background?
Gaud is a very different architect than others
in his cultural milieu. He came from a very
dynamic cultural environment; on the one
hand economically prosperous, and on the
other culturally free and less oppressed
by cultural traditions. This kind of liberty
permitted Gaud to be more spontaneous in
his approaches towards both architecture
and nature. I think he observed many things
in nature and decided to transplant many of
these naively. In his youth, he was an
atheist, freethinker, liberal radical, anarchist

100

probably. For that reason, he produced his

rst building for the Cooperativa Mataronesa
[1864-1887], which was a very innovative
social experiment. He adopted all the
iconography and ideology of the workers
cooperatives of that eraanarchy, socialism,
and the idea of the beehive as a cooperative
society of workers. Gaud converted to
Catholicism later on when he started
working with the bourgeoisie, especially the
Gell family. When he got his commission
for the Sagrada Familia [1882-1926], he
became an extreme Catholic but he maintained the apian metaphor and readapted
it to the Catholic world, which wasnt very
hard because Catholicism had traditionally
used many of the virtues of bees as a
model for human virtues. There is also the
fact that his brother published a single
article, entitled Bees. This must have had
a large inuence on Gaud.
The roots of Gauds parabolic arches have
been traced to traditional Catalan architecture, amongst other sources. You believe that
this important invention can also be traced to
an interest in the parabolic hanging arches
made by bees in natural honeycombs.
Yes, there are examples of this kind of
architecture in popular Catalan architecture
but what is more typical are the Catalan
brick vaults. The parabolic arch appears and
almost disappears with Gaud. Gaud is the
one who gives it an application, for the rst
time in the Cooperativa Mataronesa. My
thesis is that in this project Gaud, having
designed the ag with the bee on it, the
coat-of-arms with the workers as bees,
decides to emphasize the idea of worker
cooperation. And so he came up with the
parabolic arch, which is in fact a catenary
arc upside down.
You quote Mies as having said I do not want
to change the times; I want to express
them. From this statement one can
excavate two opposing Modernist myths:
rst, the architect as hero and here Mies
is responding to this myth, and second, the
causal evolution of architecture as a result of
technological determinism. Does your study
of Modern architecture through the lens of
beehives place a focus on inspiration in the
act of designing, and therefore on the rst
myth of the architect as a visionary?
In the case of Mies, the beehive metaphor
gave him the opportunity to think of the

architect as someone who acts not as the

consequence of technological but of social
determinism. Lets not forget that Mies
was more revolutionary in those times.
He designed the monument to Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht [1926] and that
he published in Frhlicht, an avant-garde
magazine of the radical Expressionists.
At that time, Mies must have been more
inuenced than we tend to believe by all
the ideas and revolutionary ideologies that
proclaimed the inevitability that society
would nally move toward revolutionary
liberation. Therefore when Mies titles his
Friedrichstrasse ofce building project, the
rst glass skyscraper, Honeycomb [1921],
hes in reality suggesting that the new
society is unavoidable and with that a new
architecture is unavoidable. This is what
encompasses and brings him closer to the
idea of the beehive, because in the beehive
we nd a perfect society in a different
architecture. And this is not a purely
technological determinism. Perhaps the
novelty of Mies is not in his use of steel and
glassthese had been used for 100 years in
buildings like railway stationsbut in his use
of these materials for an ofce building.
So the difference between Mies and Joseph
Paxtons 1851 Crystal Palace would be the
distinction between a social rather than a
technological determinism?
I think that in Mies there is a social
preoccupation in this kind of application
of technology, which is what leads him
to propose an industrial architecture for
an ofce building.
The title of Miess Friedrichstrasse project
demonstrates the naturalist side of the young
Mies, who is formed during a period of German Expressionism. This side, in contradistinction to his iconoclasm which is better
known, is interesting today because of the
revaluation by historians of Mies as more
complex than a pure Modernist. There are
two opposing interpretations of the Friedrichstrasse project: on the one hand, through
the absence of a skin, as an anatomical
expression of the structural frame. I quote
from Frlicht: Only skyscrapers under
construction reveal the bold constructive
thoughts, and then the impression of the
high-reaching steel skeleton is overpowering.
With the raising of the walls, this impression
is completely destroyed. On the other hand,
there is the expression of glass as a

mysterious material, both transparent and

opaque more or less visible under different
lighting conditions. Which interpretation of
Mies aligns with his use of the beehive
metaphor?
I think in the case of Mies it operates in both
ways. The beehive is effectively a type of
society that has generated fascination.
Theres a lot of mystery in the world of bees
and beehives. And this perfect society must
have fascinated him. I also thinkalthough
Im not 100% convincedthat in the
rational beehive there are structures that
have inuenced Mies. For example, the
diagonal bracing in his convention Hall in
Chicago [1953-1954].
I think the diagonal brace is a technological
consideration that would apply to any
construction, whether a building or a
beehive.
This is possible, because the structure was
neither invented by Mies nor for beehives.
But the problem for me is another one:
when an architect expresses an unusual
element such as the diagonal brace, then
you have to ask where the stimuli came
from. And the question is, could one of
these stimuli have been the beehive? Im
not sure, but its possible, given that we
have proof that Mies was inuenced by
beehives in other aspects of his work. Of
course you have to be careful and not think
because you are obsessed with beehives
that everything derives from beehives!
This reading of stimulus is part of a larger
art-historical project that looks at direct
connection between inuence and the
design process. In your introduction, you
discuss this as a kind of detective looking
for clues. How do you situate this approach
with respect to an opposing project that
tries to historically contextualize the cultural,
technological, and even economic forces
as a Marxist historian might?
I come from a Marxist tradition, and I dont
think the two positions are incompatible.
But you know, whats interesting is that
the beehive metaphor is appropriated by
ideological opposites with minor adjustments. Gauds adaptation of the beehive
metaphor from his initial socialist ideology
to another one that was Catholic and
conservative is paradigmatic. Other great
architects inuenced by beehives, such as

101

Le Corbusier [1887-1965], irted with both

communism and fascism.
At which ideological extreme did Le Corbusier
appropriate the beehive metaphor? He was
very free in his use of images as references
for an architecture compatible with the 20th
century. It seems to me that these images
which included airplanes, ships, cars, and
ling cabinetscould adapt to his various
ideological agendas.
Ive tried to show in my book the many clues
that Le Corbusier was interested in beehives.
He had in his library Karl von Frischs Vie et
meours des abeilles that hed annotated.
Le Corbusier was friends with Blaise
Cendrars who lived in La Ruche [the
Beehive] during Le Corbusiers early stay
in Paris. Le Corbusier was a master of what
one could call the art of diversion, the art of
occultation of his sources. When he started
writing for a larger audience after WWII,
and especially after he designed the Unit
dHabitation in Marseille, he had to pass
through a period in which he was accused
of collaborating with the Vichy government.
He had to be very careful not to be associated with totalitarian metaphors, and the
beehive was a very dangerous metaphor
from an ideological point of view, because
it could allow for an identication with the
very positions that he had been accused
of during the war. I think Le Corbusier did
not want to specify what he owed to the
apian metaphor, but there is, for example,
the apartment project Lotissements ferms
lalvoles [1922, Honeycomb Apartments],
which is the rst collective residential skyscraper in Modern architecture. The idea
of putting many people to live in a compact
block is Le Corbusiers idea, and the rst
time it appears, it appears with the name
Honeycomb Apartments!
Does a space whose design was inspired by
bees and beehives in turn produce beehivelike human activity?
This is an ideological question. I think
the architects who invented the Modern
movement believed that forms could
be determinant in changing life. When Le
Corbusier says, Architecture or revolution,
hes making a very clear formulation. If we
have an architectural revolution, a social
revolution is not necessary because the
social revolution would be produced by itself
in a non-violent way. By modifying design

you modify life. When these architects were

inspired by the beehive, they were tacitly
imagining that a better society would
emerge as a consequence of the realization
of their designs. And now we know that that
is a very nave belief, and we know we can
establish a bomb factory in a beehive
building or in a church or synagogue.
So this was a Modernist arrogance?
Exactly. This was a fantasy of the makers of
the Modern movement, the supposition that
the mere modication of architecture
without modifying anything else would
produce another radical social formation.
While I recognize that your book is necessarily limited in scope and focuses on a
period ending with Le Corbusier, I think it
would be fruitful to update our discussion
through the Japanese Metabolist Architecture movement in the 1960s and 70s
and Archigram in the UK. The Metabolists,
for example, developed an architecture
and urbanism that acted as a critique of
both society and the construction industry.
The dwelling unit was considered a repeated
and irreducible unit. It minimized private
space and was plugged into an infrastructural megastructure that could grow or
adapt.
We have to nd out whether the beehive
metaphor was used casually or not. What
I wanted to show was that some of the
great innovators used the metaphor
consciously. In some way what I propose is
a reading that is not univocal but is more a
voyage through the beehive metaphor that
helps read some episodes of Modern
architecture.4

Mapping behavior
Tomas Matza

Walter Tschinkel, a Florida State University

entomology professor, has been making
plaster casts of ant nests since 1982, when
he rst heard of the strength of orthodontic
plaster. The painstaking process involves
pouring the plaster down the opening as
quickly as it will go in. After the plaster
hardens, the excavation begins, but the
nest must be taken out piece by piece. (One
harvester ant nest, for example, took some
ve gallons of plaster and came out in 180
pieces.) Sometimes more than ten feet tall,
the nests are as beautiful in structure as they
are complex.
Tschinkel has long been interested in nest
structure, and says the rst cast he made of
re ants provided him an invaluable way to
visualize ant colonies as they are, that is as
a three-dimensional network of tunnels and
chambers. Up until that point, seeing nest
structure was limited to compiling a series of
cross-sectional cuts in the soil.
I was astounded that the nest looked different than I had imagined, he says. I am
now convinced that nest architecture is
functional because it organizes the worker
force and is in turn organized by ant
behavior.
As an example of this feedback loop,
Tschinkel points out that workers are
arranged vertically according to age:
The younger workers are born deep in the
nests and spend the rst part of their lives
tending to the queen. As they age they
move closer to the surface, eventually
becoming foragers. The top of the nest,
which tends to be more hollowed out with
chambers, bears the mark of the older
workers partly because they have a higher
tendency to dig.
Certainly the nest is the product of their
behavior, he says, but it also serves as
a ladder on which they arrange themselves.
This long extended vertical structure allows
them to differentiate labor so that they
dont all do all the same tasks in the same
chambers. Its like a factory and its all
logically arranged so that the work can
move from one area to the next in an
efcient manner.

ferent colonies of the same species of ant

will typically make similar nests. This
has prompted him to hypothesize that
the instructions for nest construction are
contained within every worker so that a
single harvester ant, left to its own devices,
might build the same structure as a group
of its sisters. But he also says that its equally
likely that social interaction is needed to
produce a normal nest.
Aside from their scientic value, these
inverse ant sculptures, made one grain
at a time, also blend sthetic form with
function in ways that rival human architectural achievements. And Tschinkel is
planning to approach major museums about
exhibiting his casts. First, however, he plans
to master a new methodthe use of aluminum heated to over 700 degrees Celsius,
which he gures will be more moveable,
mountable, and require less piecing together
after excavation.
The only apparent downside to making these
ant sculptures is that abandoned nests tend
to lose their form quickly, and there-fore do
not make very good casts. Instead, Tschinkel
says, live nests will be sacriced
to make them, and perhaps appropriately a
few ant bodies can be seen suspended in
the tunnels theyve made.
Sometimes I call it the science of death.
Its not something I like doing; its just a
reality. But the living world is neither timid
nor cautious about death, so Im just
another agent of mortality, and not even a
particularly severe one. You cant do biology
without killing creatures. There are some
questions you can do without killing, but
ultimately you run up against the limit of
what you can learn.]
More photos of ant nests excavated using this technique
are available at www.immaterial.net/cabinet.

The casts have also suggested new sets

of questions, such as how ants know how
to build highly detailed nests in the rst
place? Tschinkel has conrmed that difNests dug by the Florida harvester ant under experimental
conditions by 200 workers in 4 days.
Photo Charles F. Badland

102

opposite
Nest dug by woodland ants
Photo Charles F. Badland

103

Audition for a pair of koalas

Kathy Temin

Artist wanting two people to be part of

an installation performance work. Fully
clothed in animal costumes, playing the
scene of two koala bears mating in an indoor
public-art space. Weekends for a period
of six weeks. Non-union performers. Pay.
Begins mid-March
During 1998 I placed the above advertisement in Backstage magazine and New Yorks
free weekly The Village Voice. I received 80
phone calls responding to the advertisement. I returned everyones phone call and
organized auditions with 14 actors. Six of
them were couples, two auditioned on their
own with the empty koala-bear suit on the
oor, and the last two pairs were organized
according to coinciding schedules. With the
exception of one Australian, everyone was
American and none had seen a koala bear
in real life. I videotaped the auditions to have
a record that would help me decide who
would be best for the parts. The nal work,
titled Pet Corner, was a performance over
several weekends in March and April 1998
as part of P.S.1s Wish You Luck exhibition.
The following pages show a selection of
video stills taken from the auditions that
I have divided into two groups. This project
for Cabinet is titled Too Human-/-Animal
Enough.l

Opposite
Angela Wyman, Rabbit Rising, 1999

105

TOO HUMAN

ANIMAL ENOUGH

Animals on trial
Jeffrey Kastner

Man is the only animal that blushes.

Or needs to.
Mark Twain
In the image, the crowd is thick around the
gallows. Townspeople ll the foreground of
the medieval view; some turned toward their
neighbors in conversation, most focused
on a raised platform in the middle distance
and the three gures arrayed on it. At the
left edge of the group stands an ofcial of
some sorta prelate reciting the last rites
for the condemned perhaps, or an ofcer
of the court, reading out the charges. At
right, the hunched and hooded shape of
the executioner looms, knee bent and back
arched as he sets to his task. And in the
middle, the star of the entire scenario (and
the narrative it illustrates): the doomed head
thrown back in terminal agony; the mouth
a thin frowning spasm beneath a blunt nose.
A really blunt nose. A pigs nose, actually
a sows, to be exactattached to a porker
that inexplicably seems to be sporting a
mans shirt.
The scene comes to us courtesy the
frontispiece engraving for an oddball gem
of social history, The Criminal Prosecution
and Capital Punishment of Animals. Written
by Edward Payson Evans and drawn from
a pair of articles he originally published in
The Atlantic Monthly in 1884Bugs and
Beasts before the Law and Modern and
Med-ival Punishmentthe text (revised
and expanded, utilizing both historical and
contemporary research by other scholars)
was rst brought out in book form in 1906.1
A remarkably detailed piece of research
and interpretation, Evanss volume includes
dozens and dozens of documented proceedings brought against animals by either
governmental or religious bodiesfrom his
earliest citation, discovered in something
called the Annales Ecclesiatici Francorum,
noting the prosecution of a number of moles
in the Valle DAosta in the year 824 to the
charges lodged against a cow by the Parliament of Paris in 1546 to the 20th-century
conviction of a Swiss dog for murder,
reported in the New York Herald the same
year the book came out.
The history of animals in the legal system
sketched by Evans is rich and resonant; it
provokes profound questions about the
evolution of jurisprudential procedure, social
and religious organization and notions of
culpability and punishment, and funda-

mental philosophical questions regarding

the place of man within the natural order.
In Evanss narrative, all creatures great and
small have their moment before the bench.
Grasshoppers and mice; ies and caterpillars; roosters, weevils, sheep, horses,
turtle doveseach takes its turn in the dock,
in many cases represented by counsel; each
meets a fate in accordance with precedent,
delivered by a duly appointed ofcial.2
Yet for all the import (both practical and
metaphysical) of the issues on which they
touch, in their details the tales Evans spins
often seem to suggest nothing so much as a
series of lost Monty Python sketchesfrom
the story of the distinguished 16th-century
French jurist Bartholomew Chassene, who
was said to have made his not inconsiderable reputation for creative argument and
persistent advocacy on the strength of his
representation of some rats, which had
been put on trial before the ecclesiastical
court of Autun on the charge of having
feloniously eaten up and wantonly destroyed
the barley crop of that province,3 to the
1750 trial in Vanvres of a she-ass, taken
in the act of coition with one Jacques
Ferron. In the latter case, the unfortunate
quadruped was sentenced to death along
with her seducer and appeared headed for
the gallows until a last minute reprieve
was issued on behalf of the parish priest
and citizenry of the village, who had signed
a certicate stating that they had known the
said she-ass for four years, and that she
had always shown herself to be virtuous
and well-behaved both at home and abroad
and had never given occasion of scandal to
anyone Nudge, nudge; say no more.
Other less elaborated details also emerge
from Evanss extensive tabulation of the
dates, locations, and defendants in various
trials featuring non-human participants,
made into a long list that appears among
the books many appendices.4 Its breadth,
though said by the author to undoubtedly
be incomplete, is awesome; its ye olde
timeframe and quaintly exotic Continental
locales (predominantly in Germany, France
and Switzerland, but also extending to the
British Isles, North and South America,
Scandinavia, Russia and other areas) and
often improbable casts (e.g. the Cow, two
Heifers, three sheep, and two Sows on trial
in one 1662 case) will have many contemporary readers lling in the numerous factual
gaps with narrative scenarios that are equal
parts Breughel and Gary Larson.

Protestants hanging a cat, 1554.

Courtesy Mary Evans Picture Library

108

What, for example, could have possibly

inspired the judiciary of Marseilles to bring
proceedings against a group of dolphins in
1596? How exactly did medieval Lausanne
come to be so astonishingly pest-ridden?
(Documents from the Swiss city record
separate prosecutions of eels, worms, rats,
numerous groups of vermin, and several
collections of bloodsuckers between the
12th and 16th centuries on the shores of
Lac Lman, after which things seem to have
taken a turn for the better). And just what
might have driven a lone goat to get mixed
up with sixteen bovine troublemakers in the
nefarious enterprise that brought them all
before the court in the town of Rouvre in
1452? (Or was it, perhaps, the goat that was
the mastermind, having enlisted the slow
and trusting cows as the muscle behind
some scheme?)5
Of all the various and sundry beasts that
populate Evanss narrative and his tables,
none appears so frequently as the pig; the
author connects the freedom of movement
generally afforded porkers in medieval
towns and villages to the disproportionate
number of them that seem to have run afoul
of the authorities. The book is peppered
with accounts of swine being punished for
various improprieties (often vicious attacks
against infants)6, including the one that the
frontispiece engraving is meant to depict
a particular 14th-century execution, carried
out against an infanticidal sow in the
Norman village of Falaise. Evans actually
gives us more on this one than usual. In
1386, he writes, the tribunal of Falaise
sentenced a sow to be mangled and
maimed in the head and forelegs, and then
to be hanged, for having torn the face and
arms of a child and thus caused his death.
[T]he sow was dressed in mens clothes and
executed on the public square near the city
hall at the expense to the state of ten sous
and ten deniers, besides a pair of gloves to
the hangman. Evans includes the language
of the executioners original receipt in one of
the appendices and, in the main text, angrily
denounces the whole event as a travesty of
justice that relies on the strict application
of the lex talionis, the primitive retributive
principle of taking an eye for an eye and
a tooth for a tooth, although its not
completely clear what exactly makes the
sentence meted out in Falaise any more or
less ignoble than his other examples.7 So
the facts of that fateful winter day in Falaise
seem clear. As for the image of it that has

110

come down to us, however, much remains

in doubta kind of doubt that both plagues
and enriches not just the rare visual illustrations of these kind of historical activities, but
the whole constellation of information on
which such history is built. The engraving
in the Evans book is obviously not from the
time of the trial. What it actually turns out to
be is a 19th-century reconstruction, published in a French picturebook, of a longsince destroyed fresco in Falaises Church of
the Holy Trinity. Now, this fresco supposedly
commemorated the execution, but was
never copied while it was extant and so
the modern illustration, says Evans, was
based on numerous descriptions of it by
various writers of the time. (No information
is provided about the date of the frescos
original creation, but it is probably safe to
assume that it was quite a bit later than the
1380s. And so it was itself a non-contemporaneous depictionin its case, not of an
image but of an eventpresumably based
on a mix of documentation, oral history, and
legend.) At any rate, the whole thing was
apparently painted over in the 1820s and
then further hidden behind a piece of interior
construction, and so had been effectively
lost for more than half-a-century when it
was reproduced in the version we now have,
which itself came into being roughly ve
hundred years after the event it purports
to document. In short, it provides a ready
example of the fog-bank in which this type
of material tends to residethe gray area
between fact and imagination where, for
contemporary lay observers anyway, it
becomes almost impossible to distinguish
between actual historical detail and the
otsam of cultural memory deformed by
fairy tale medievalism and a parade of
anthropomorphized cartoon animals.8

with animals biologically and environmentally. It has not, however, done much
to assuage the deep, atavistic sense that
for all its familiar ease, there is something
slightly odd about our contact with other
creatures, a lingering ambivalence into
which these kinds of historical memories
still neatly plug.

Whatever one makes of the big-picture

judicial and theological implications of
animal prosecutionsand theres obviously
no lack of ways to go with thatas sociocultural phenomena they do seem to make
a kind of weird sense. Theyre at once
unimaginable and eminently imaginable,
feeding and feeding off of our complicated
relations with animals and the way these
relations have found their way into our
myths and legends and stories; the part
theyve played in the development of our
cultural and social identity. Science has
given us (with the exception, perhaps, of a
few counties in Kansas) a feeling of certitude
about what kinds of things we might share

There was a week or so when we here

at Cabinet were trying to nd a copy of
the frontispiece engraving so we could
reproduce it along with this article. But at
some point it started to seem like it might
be best to leave the image, like the specic
story it illustrates and the general kind of
history it epitomizes, in the memory space
where it already resides, open to further
layers of retelling, available to yet more
speculation. So before it gets painted over
again in the mind's eye, a last glance
at the sow choking in her garrote and at
the faces that surround her, vengeful and
empathetic, appalled and fascinated.
Animal, too, and too human.E

The ritual environments of the trials Evans

and others describe no doubt functioned as
complex symbolic matrices through which
developing modern society worked out its
uncertainties about the place of man and
beast before God (or was it god and beast
before Man?), that is to say, its constituents
uncertainties about themselves, about the
creatures with which they shared their
existence, and about the chaos that buffeted
all of them. The assent of the public gave
such rituals their power and, in turn, the
rituals gave the public assurance, a semblance of order, a tangible example of both
human power and humane discretion.
If religion provided society with certain
transcendental truths, social systems
terrestrialized these truths, took a shot at
putting the Word into deed. History has
kept a record of botha record warped,
enhanced, and endlessly mitigated by
memory and subjectivity and uncertainty,
but one that nevertheless continues to
convey our lasting fascinations and fears
across the centuries. One some level, all
of this is obviously just strong animals killing
weaker oneshumans and non-humans
each playing out their evolutionary roles.
What separates the phenomenon from your
everyday food-chain behavior is the ritual it
involves, and the way those rituals acquire
meaning in their retelling, nd shape in
words and images.

1 The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of

5 For all their wonders, Evans asserts that his tables are

Animals was rst published in the United States by E.-P.

Dutton and has been reprinted several times, including a
1988 edition brought out by Faber and Faber in London
and, a decade later, in a facsimile published by The
Lawbook Exchange, Ltd., of Union, New Jersey. Of the few
recent commentaries to reference it, most notable is Rats,
Pigs, and Statues on Trial: The Creation of Cultural Narratives in the Prosecution of Animals and Inanimate Objects
a very smart and expansive treatment in the May 1994
issue (Vol. 69, No. 2) of the New York University Law Review
by Paul Schiff Berman. Bermans article relies heavily on
Evansand also makes impressive connections in related
source material ranging from St Thomas Aquinas, who
treated the subject in his Summa Theologi to Racines
1668 play Les Plaideurs, which satirizes animal trials, to the
contemporary British novelist Julian Barnes, who incorporates the phenomenon into his A History of the World in
10 Chapters. This piece is similarly indebted to Bermans
research, and his insights into the social and jurisprudential
contexts surrounding the issues. And, yes, it does say
statues: Berman describes an Athenian court of law housed
in a building on the Acropolis called the Pryteneion which
was, according to commentators including Aristotle,
dedicated to the prosecution of inanimate things and
animals in addition to unknown assailants. But this,
needless to say, opens another can of worms entirely.
2 Evans addresses two major types of trial forms. In civilian
courts, large animals were typically tried as individuals
or in groups for specic instances of misbehavior. In
ecclesiastical tribunals, large communities of smaller
animals (rats, mice, bugs, etc.) were tried symbolically; the
sentences (curses, excommunication, anathemas) were
obviously designed not to penalize particular animals but
to symbolically call down divine retributions upon entire
classes of creatures.
3 During the trial, which occurred at the beginning of the
16th century, Chassene rst argued that the summons
issued for the rodents appearance was not disseminated
widely enough to reach the more far-ung members of the
population. Then the barrister claimed that although they
had been duly notied (the court by then having issued a
second summons, which it had read from the pulpit of each
parish in which the offending rats dwelled), the failure of his
clients to appear before the prelate was not due to a lack
of respect for the court. Instead it was a result, as Evans
explains it, of the length and difculty of the journey and
the serious perils which attended it, owing to the unwearied
vigilance of their mortal enemies, the cats, who watched all
their movements, and, with fell intent, lay in wait for them
at every corner and passage. Chassene lost the case, but
the event apparently had a profound impact on the lawyers
career, sparking an interest in the issue that he pursued at
greater length in a 1531 treatise, which Evans discusses
in depth.
4 Along with a bibliography and the tables, Evanss
appendices also include the original text of a number
of period documents describing various prosecutions,
excommunications, and executions.

limited only to authentic, documentable cases of animal

prosecutions that ended in guilty verdicts. A few early
instances of excommunication and malediction, he writes
with his typical air for the resonant oddity, our knowledge
of which is derived chiey from hagiologies and other
legendary sources, are not included in the present list,
such, for example, as the cursing and burning of storks
at Avignon by St. Agricola in 666, and the expulsion of
venomous reptiles from the island Reichenau in 728 by
Saint Perminius.
6 The shortlist of these, at least for their value as curiosities,
must include the hanging of a pig at Mortaign in 1394 for
having eaten a consecrated communion wafer. Evans also
cites the undated trial of an infanticidal pig that ate the esh
of a child on a Friday and thus contravened the Catholic
Churchs jejunium sext, a fact that was accepted by the
court as an aggravating circumstance surrounding the
crime. And then there is the prominent 1379 trial in which
three sows were convicted of murder for trampling the son
of a swineherd near the Burgundian town of Saint-Marcelle-Jeussey. As Evans reports, [T]wo herds of swine, one
belonging to the commune and the other to the priory of
Saint-Marcel-le-Jeussey, were feeding together near that
town, [when] three sows of the communal herd, excited
and enraged by the squealing of one of the porklings,
rushed upon Perrinot Muet, the son of the swinekeeper,
and before his father could come to his rescue, threw him
to the ground and so severely injured him that he died soon
afterwards. The three sows, after due process of law, were
condemned to death; and as both the herds had hastened
to the scene of the murder and by their cries and aggressive
actions showed that they approved of the assault, and were
ready and even eager to become participes criminis, they
were arrested as accomplices and sentenced by the court
to suffer the same penalty. But the prior Friar Humbert de
Poutiers, not willing to endure the loss of his swine, sent an
humble petition to Philip the Bold, then Duke of Burgundy,
praying that both the herds, with the exception of the
three sows actually guilty of the murder, might receive a
full and free pardon. The Duke lent a gracious ear to this
supplication and ordered that the punishment should be
remitted and the swine released.
7 One wonders if it might be the costuming of the pig
that so troubles Evans, although he does not seem all that
bothered by the other examples he cites of the practice
of dressing animals in human clothes for their trial or
execution, a phenomenon that reaches its creepy zenith in
a bizarre account he furnishes of a 1685 trial in Ansbach,
Germany, of what is referred to as were-wolf. In that
case, the animal, supposed to be the incarnation of a
deceased burgomaster of Ansbach, did much harm in the
neighborhood of that city, preying upon the herds and even
devouring women and children. With great difculty the
ravenous beast was nally killed; its carcass was then clad
in a tight suit of esh-coloured cere-cloth, resembling in tint
the human skin, and adorned with a chestnut brown wig
and a long whitish beard; the snout of the beast was cut
off and a mask of the burgomasters features substituted

for it, and the counterfeit presentment thus produced was

hanged by order of the court. According to Evans, this
bit of startlingly macabre taxidermy was subsequently
preserved in a cabinet of curiosities to memorialize the
event.
8 The week this essay was started, the two highest grossing
movies in the US were Shrek, which stars an ogre, a prince,
a dragon and a talking donkey, and A Knights Tale, a love
story set in the milieu of medieval jousting tournaments.

Beastly agendas:
An interview with Kathleen Kete
Sina Naja

The history of animal rights and animal

protection is usually understood as part of a
larger history of the victory of middle-class
liberalism. But this linear story is complicated by the interest repressive political
movementsincluding Nazismhave had
in passing laws to protect animals. Kathleen
Kete, Associate Professor of History at
Trinity College, has written recently on the
complex ways in which the history of animal
protection and rights have been determined
by questions of class, nationalism, and
gender. Sina Naja talked to her on the
phone.

Your work on the history of animal protection

in Europe critiques the standard history of
animal rights. What is that history, and what
are some of the issues that it ignores or
oversimplies?
Its important to understand that research
on the history of European attitudes towards
animals is very new. It was not until the
1970s and 1980s that signicant work on
the subject began. What that work presents
us with is an unexpected account of the
human/animal divide in Europe, one whose
implications we should attend to. It tells us
that the history of animal protection belongs
neither to the ideological right nor to the
left, and that laws made to protect animals
fall sometimes within a progressive agenda,
sometimes within a repressive one.
We tend to think that the history of animal
protection is simply about the relationship
of humans to other animals, or that it is
coupled to liberalism and other movements
of liberation that trace Europes trajectory
from feudalism to modernity. But what is at
stake in the history of animal protection is
power, and that power is shifting, not linear,
and sometimes its very malign.
And why is the standard version of this
history attractive to us?
The Enlightenment belief in progress is still
very compelling, and we can assure ourselves in that belief by acting towards the
betterment of animals. We have control
over very little in our lives, but the status
of animals is one of those things our actions
can improve. Moreover, we have inherited
from the 19th century the association of
animal protection and civilization, and we
dont recognize the historical contingency
of that link.
What are some of the key landmarks or
examples in this alternative history of animal
liberation?
The landmarks are the same as those of a
nave history of animal liberation but we
have to look at them a little more carefully.
I think an interesting case is the Puritans
in England who in 1654 issued the Protectorate Ordinance, the rst legislation in
Europe against cruelty to animals. The law
was passed during the radical stage of
the English Civil War as part of the Puritan
program to reform mankind and establish

112

a godly republic on earth. It was part of a

widespread attack on popular recreations
such as dancing round the maypolewhich
were believed to distract the lower classes
from their main duties to be sober and
Godfearing.
The Ordinance outlawed cock-throwing and
cockghting. In cock-throwing, a cock is
tied to a rope and hit with stones and other
objects until it dies. Other so-called blood
sports of the age include bull-baiting
and bull-running. Bull-baiting is similar
to cock-throwing. Bull-running involved the
entire community.
Is the running of the bulls in Pamplona
related to this?
I think bull-running is a holdover from early
European slaughtering practices. There was
a belief that that bull meat was not tasty
unless the bull had been run. It was too wild,
too sexualit needed to be tamed, or subdued, before it could enter human culture
as food. The taming of nature is what we see
in Pamplona.
What was behind the Puritans drive toward
protecting animals?
Social control was criticalif you accept the
argument that a developing middle class
depended on the internalization of norms of
discipline on the part of the lower classes.
The Puritans attack on popular blood sports
set them in opposition to the Crown, and
some landed gentry, as well. The so-called
Kings Declaration of Sports issued in
the early 17th century defended popular
recreations against the Puritans attempt
to control them. Here we see that animal
protection was not important in and of itself
but as part of a social and political revolution.
But history also points us to other aspects
of Puritan animal protection. Reading the
Bible led Puritans to the conclusion that
humans have a duty to, if not be kind to
animals, at least not cause them any unnecessary pain. Animals, too, were expelled
from the Garden of Eden as a result of Adam
and Eves disobedience. We are responsible
for their state of suffering and therefore have
a duty to mitigate their suffering as much
as possible.
Were the British in fact at the forefront of
animal laws and liberation in Europe?

113

The rst animal protection society was

founded in London in 1824. The French
animal protection society, founded in 1845,
was modeled on the SPCA. The French
agreed with the English that it was the lower
classes who were cruel to animals and in
need of chastisement and instruction. Both
the French and the English agreed that urban
workers, peasants everywhere, the Spanish,
and other Mediterranean peoples living on
the fringes of civilization were marked by
their barbaric treatment of animals.
How did certain English practices, like
hunting, continue to elude this way of
thinking?
Some historians stress the class nature of
the animal protection movement of the
19th century, pointing to the objective of
social control. One of the main arguments
of animal protectionists at that time was that
violence towards animals led to violence
towards humansmurder and revolution
(and only in the last quarter of the century on
the part of anti-vivisectionists, rape.) It was
the lower classes who were feared for most
of the century. Closer to nature, like women,
they lacked self-control. Violence could tip
them over the edge.
Furthermore, the landed gentry had a
mandate to protect game from local
villagers who would not only kill deer to
eat, but destroy foxes, and badgers, and
rabbit warrens.
Was the rural gentry allowed to participate in
hunts at the time of the Puritans? I was under
the impression that at that time all the deer
in England, for example, was marked for the
king.
By invitation only. Then the Game Law of
1671 extended hunting rights to the landed
gentry for the rst time. I want to stress
that the landed gentry who were allowed
to hunt were also the ones who were in
charge of the protection of game, against
the depredations of villagers and other
poachers. The gentry had a close interest in
animals and the association of Englishness
with kindness to animals is intensied rather
than challenged by their behaviors.
So the ability to track animals down,
predict how they are going to react under
pressure, and then shoot them shows this
proximity?

More than that, its a matter of understanding habitat and the needs of various species,
and of breeding dogs and succoring wounded animals. Its not a claim that has a lot of
resonance anymore, but its one that helped
shape the history of animal protection in
England.
Did the Game Law extend any further
hunting privileges to the rural workers?
No. Rural workers were still prohibited from
hunting. One could be sent to Australia
or hung for killing deer. But the laws that
reserved hunting to the landed gentry were
not very successful, in part, because of an
increasing market for game. That demand
eventually led to a permit system. In the 19th
century hunting was commercialized and
opened to wealthy London professionals.
Thats presumably because game became
part of standard cuisine in the 19th century.
Yes, game speaks to status and we are what
we eat.
But is the same bourgeoisie that demands
game on its table also involved in the animal
protection groups of the 19th century?
Animal protection societies were voluntary
organizations of middle- and upper-class
people concerned about lower-class violence towards animals. Hunting is not
the issue because to a large degree, class is.
It is mainly over the issue of vivisection that
elite cruelty towards animals is dened, and
there the enemy is science and rationality.
Marx notes the class interests of animal
protection societies in a passing reference in
the Communist Manifesto when he groups
them with other reforming groups, like temperance societies. These groups wanted to
solve the social problem by transforming the
mores of the workers.
Were there other contemporary critiques of
these protection societies?
As vivisection became a concern, animal
protection societies were criticized for not
taking an aggressive enough stand against
the practice. Thus, anti-vivisection societies
were formed in the last third of the century
to specically address this issue.
Where was vivisection practiced?

French and German science depended upon

vivisection in the developing eld of physiology. Experiments were carried out on dogs
and horses towards understanding how the
body functions. Experiments on the pancreas and the liver, for example, laid the
basis for our understanding of diabetes.
Dogs worked well because they were easily
available, of a manageable size, and submissive. Horses from the army were available in veterinarian schools.
Reluctance to practice vivisection became
a way for the English to mark their superiority over the French, to establish the
special affection they had for animals. Public
opinion ran strongly against vivisection
throughout the century and prevented
French physiologists from demonstrating
their work in Britain.
Was vivisection practiced in universities?
The fears of anti-vivisectionists were
centered on private laboratories. The back
room of an apartment where the medical
student or researcher would be, secretly,
exploring the physiology of a live animal
was, in the phrase of the century, the
torture chamber of science. When animal
protection societies involved themselves in
debates over vivisection, they focused on
the need to regulate the practiceto license
its practitioners, to bring vivisection out into
the light of the law.
When was anesthesia invented?
Nitrous oxide was available for use on
animals from the 1820s. Experiments on
conscious animals continued because the
researchers believed the subjects needed
to be awake in order for the experiments
to work.
Were the animals nationalities important?
For example, the fact that a lot of monkeys
for experimentation today come from India is
a factor in the way the issue is discussed. Are
the French in the 19th century experimenting
on French horses, or are they importing them
from somewhere?
The French experimented on French horses
and French dogs. What is at issue is the fact
that the dogs experimented on are pets.
Faithful, loving, animals, the solace of the
old and the lonely, the childs companion in
play, they were snatched from the street or a

114

shelter to serve the needs of a cold, brutal

science. Feminist consciousness seems to
have crystallized when women came to
identify with these animals as victims of
male rationality. Some women were very
active in the anti-vivisection movements in
England and France.
Are dogs a problem because they fall on both
sides of the border as pets and as subjects of
experiments?
Exactly, and they cannot be both. An apocryphal story describes the young daughter
of Claude Bernard, one of the most famous
of French physiologists, discovering her
father vivisecting her best friends dog, a lost
pet Mademoiselle Bernard was searching for.
It is unclear whether this incident really
occurred, but we do know that the Bernard
marriage broke up over the issue of
Bernards workwhen Claude married he
was a medical practitioner not a researcher
and their daughter dedicated her adult
life to expiating the sins of her father. She
rescued stray dogs from the streets of Paris
to keep them out of the hands of scientists.
Is there a link between the rise of animal
protection societies and the rise of
vegetarianism?
The link lies between the anti-vivisection
movement and vegetarianism. Some famous
vegetarians, like Richard Wagner, were antivivisectionists. By way of contrast, we see
the French animal protection society in the
mid-19th century promoting the eating of
horseesh. It was hoped that fewer horses
would be ogged to death on the streets
of Paris by cab drivers if these workers had
an interest in keeping their horses alive
and healthy until they could be sold to the
butcher.
Was Hitlers vegetarianism related to
Wagners?
Its the connection between anti-vivisectionism and anti-Semitism that is important.
Anti-vivisectionists saw vivisection as the
extreme expression of European rationalism.
It represented the evils of modernity. In
some circles in Switzerland and Germany,
an earlier representation of modernity and
its dangersthe Jewmerged with the
image of the scientist. Jewish science
was targeted by anti-vivisectionists and
Jewish treatment of animalsevidenced

in kosher butchering, and countered by

vegetarianism was deplored.
Were there laws protecting kosher
butchering at that time?
The issue for animal protectionists in Central Europe was that there were no laws
against it.
And how do these different strands
culminate in the Nazi era?
The Nazis were responsible for the most
comprehensive set of animal protection laws
ever in Europe, issued from the moment of
their takeover of the German state in 1933.
Arnold Arluke and Boria Sax bring this fact
to light in an essay on Nazi animal protection
published in 1992. Kosher butchering was
outlawed and vivisection was at rst prohibited and then regulated. But the proper way
to cook a lobster was also prescribed, in
order to spare the live lobster unnecessary
pain as it dies, as was the least painful way
to shoe a horse.
The importance of the Arluke and Saxs
argument lies in its description of the Nazi
understanding of the relationship of species
to each other. Nazi radicalism can be understood as breaking the traditional binary of
human and animals. Humans as a species
lost their specialsacrosanctstatus and
a new hierarchy of being was established
whereby some races of animals lay above
some races of humans. Wolves, eagles,
and Teutonic pigs (despised by the Jews)
are near the top of the Nazi chain-of-being.
Jews and rats are on the bottom.

exploring some others. It is a mark of Peter

Singers importance that he has raised for us
this most central philosophical issue of our
time.
Is mad cow disease going to force us to think
through these issues?
In our reaction to mad cow disease, I see
the continuation of 19th-century and 20thcentury fears over the consequences of
tampering with nature. These fears are
indicative of the continuing uncertainty we
have of our place within the natural world.
I suspect we wont resolve this issue soon
and other phobias will follow this one.W
Some of the material for this interview appears in
Scribners Encyclopedia of European Social History (2001)
and has been presented at the Representing
Animals conference at the University of Wisconsin,
Milwaukee, in April, 2000.
Further reading
Arnold Arluke and Boria Sax, Understanding Animal
Protection and the Holocaust in Anthrozos, vol. V, no.1
(1992), pp. 6-31.
Douglas Hay, Poaching and the Game Laws on Cannock
Chase in Douglas Hay et al., eds., Albions Fatal Tree:
Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (New
York: Pantheon,1975).
Kathleen Kete, The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in
Nineteenth-Century Paris (Berkeley & Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1994).
Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other
Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge, Mass:
Harvard University Press, 1987).

Werent German shepherds bred by the

Nazis themselves?

Nicolaas A. Rupke, ed., Vivisection in Historical

Perspective (London and New York: Croom Helm, 1987).

They were deliberately bred to embody the

spirit of national socialism, according to
Arluke and Sax. The important point is that
in Nazism, we see the rst 20th-century
solution to the problem of what Keith
Thomas calls the dethronement of humans
which European rationalism effects. If
humans were not created by a supernatural
being, in His image and given dominion
over the earth (as Genesis claims), what is
our relationship to other species of animals?

Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: A History of

the Modern Sensibility, 1500-1800 (New York: Pantheon,
1983).

The radical right in the 1930s and 1940s

produced the worst possible solution to this
problem. Animal liberation, on the left, is
overleaf
Andrew Cross, Central Meat Market, London, 15 May 2001

115

116

117

Recollecting the slaughterhouse

Dorothee Brantz

What comes to mind when thinking about

slaughterhouses? Meat hooks, blood,
knives, animals and people engaged in a
deadly spectacle and carnivore feast. Noise
and the unmistakable sweet noxious smell
of blood mixed with efuvia, disinfectants,
and lots of steam. In the slaughterhouse
esh becomes meat in a mechanized and
literally bone-chilling production. They may
be vile, repulsive, and hideous, but
slaughterhouses also hold great fascination.
Before there were theme parks and movie
theaters, people ocked to slaughterhouses
in order to quench their thirst for thrills
derived from horror. When the World
Columbian Exposition was held in Chicago
in 1893, more visitors went to the stockyards
than to any of the Expositions own
attractions. In turn-of-the-century Berlin,
visits to the slaughterhouse were so popular
that special tour books were printed to guide
visitors through the facility. Even in the
1950s, one still could take a tour through the
Chicago stockyards ve times a day.
Animal slaughter is entrenched in tradition,
cultural determination, and historical
specicity. This is readily apparent in the
kinds of animals we eat and the species we
avoid. Holy in India, cows qualify as prime
cuts in the West, where dog meat is taboo,
even though in Korea it is widely accepted.
In many cultures, pork serves as the other
white meat, while Muslims and Jews reject
it as lthy and unkosher. The practice of
eating animals is an expression of culture,
but it is also dependent on historical
circumstance. In times of crisis, such as war,
almost any animal can become food. For
example, during the Prussian occupation of
Paris in 1871, rats became a regular staple.
During World War Two, most zoo animals
in Berlin were slaughtered to supplement
the meager scraps of available food.
Slaughter is deeply embedded in history,
offering a glimpse at how everyday practice
has evolved and transformed.
The art of slaying and aying a large animal
is an ancient craft reaching back to the
advent of civilization. Throughout history, the
butchering of animals has played a crucial
role in provisioning people. For centuries,
meat eating was considered a symbol of
status and a measure of living standards.
At the same time, butchering was seen as
a demoralizing practice that brutalized those
who were exposed to it. Even in Thomas
Mores utopian society, the slaughtering of

118

livestock and cleaning of carcasses is done

by slaves [criminals sentenced to hard
labor]. They dont let ordinary people get
used to cutting up animals, because they
think it tends to destroy ones natural
feelings of humanity.1 Butchering was
always a somewhat tainted practice, and the
level of public repugnance have risen over
time. As sensibilities softened and turned
bourgeois, the animalistic was banned
from allegedly civilized life. Distanciation
became the prevalent mode of existence.
As the German sociologist Norbert Elias has
argued, this distanciation occurred in the
household, where the carving of meat was
moved behind the scenes to the kitchen so
as to avoid any reminders of the animal from
which it had come. The same was true for
the slaughterhouse. It, too, was absorbed
by the peculiar civilizing process of the
West. Slaughter reects the course of
civilization, both its continuity and change.
Are slaughterhouses the perfect embodiment of modernity, or even human
civilization more generally? Especially in the
modern period, abattoirs have come to signify the extent to which such distanciation
has led to the rationalization of everyday
life and to the instrumentalization of death.
During the nineteenth century, the close
relationship between consumption and
death made slaughterhouses emblematic
of the rise of mass-production and the
amalgamation of science, technology, and
state politics. The proportions of this change
were nowhere more visible than in the city,
and the 19th-century city in particular is
unthinkable without the slaughterhouse.
As Denis Hollier has put it, abattoirs are part
and parcel of the logic of the modernization
of urban space.2 This logic is most strikingly
exemplied by two very different modern
cities: Paris and Chicago.
In late 18th-century Paris, animals were
slaughtered right in the back of butcher
shops all over the city, and especially in
the citys center at Chtelet, which LouisSbastien Mercier, one of Pariss most avid
observers, described as by far the worstsmelling place in the whole world.3 And
Mercier was not alone. Many Parisians
complained about the pestilent stench,
disturbing noises, and continuous ow of
blood in the streets. Attesting to the
changing sensibilities that accompanied the
onset of Pariss urban growth, bystanders
increasingly criticized the public display of

slaughter. Mercier asked: What can be

more revolting and distasteful than the
butchering of animals and the dismantling
of their bodies in public view?4 Most
critics agreed that slaughtering needed
to be removed from the streets of Paris to
clean up the environment and to protect the
health and morality of the public. Numerous
reformers demanded that slaughterhouses
be relocated, preferably to the outskirts of
town. However, nothing was implemented
during the ancien rgime, in part because
the government was unwilling to take an
initiative, but also because Pariss powerful
butchers guild strongly opposed any such
interventions into their business. In the
course of the French Revolution, all guilds
were abolished to grant freedom of
commerce. Yet this mandate produced
unintended side effects. Meat could be sold
anywhere, and animals were slaughtered
right in the streets without supervision or
any kind of inspection. Meat had become
the domain of the people, but also the curse
of the city.
When after a decade of revolutionary turmoil
Napolon Bonaparte arrived in Paris in 1799,
he vowed to establish order and to rebuild
the city. Napolon initiated a staggering
building program that included monuments
like the Arc de Triomphe and the Place
Vendme as well as public works projects
like sewers, markets, and slaughterhouses.
Monuments would beautify Paris while
public works projects would increase the
citys utility. Reviving the reform initiatives
of the 1780s, Napolon ordered that ve
municipal abattoirs be built in a ring around
the city. Construction began in 1810, but
was quickly caught up in the nancial havoc
caused by Napolons wars of expansion.
Consequently, the abattoirs, along with
most other Parisian building projects,
were not completed during Napolons
reign. However, the Bourbon Restoration
that followed recognized the need for such
facilities, and construction continued.
When they nally opened in 1818, these
public abattoirs were the rst of their kind
in Europe. Operated by the municipality,
located away from Pariss populated
districts, and hidden behind walls, they
provided a model for the spatial refacilitation
of slaughter, a model that would be
followed all over Europe in the course of
the 19th century. Yet, the Napolonic
abattoirs reformed rather than revolutionized
slaughter.

Although abattoirs radically altered the

spatiality of slaughter, they did not immediately alter the practice of butchering. While
butchers could no longer slaughter in their
own shops, once they were at the public
slaughterhouse, where each received a
separate work chamber, they could perform
their bloody craft in relative privacy and
according to their own traditions. In the
1820s, animals were killed and ayed much
as they had been 50 years earlier: a young
bull is thrown down and his head is tied to
the ground with a rope; a strong blow
breaks his skull, a large knife gives it a deep
wound in the throat; steaming blood spills
out in big bursts along with the life... Bloody
arms plunge into its steaming innards,
a blowpipe inates the expired animal
and gives it a hideous shape, its legs are
chopped off with a cleaver and cut up into
pieces and at once the animal is stamped
and marketed.5 The entire act was performed by one or two specially trained
men. In Paris and in Europe more generally,
butchering retained its status as an artisan
craft throughout the 19th and most of the
20th century. Traditions remained strong,
and butchers resisted the types of industrial
automation that would typify the stockyards
of Chicago.
The Parisian abattoirs, nevertheless, accomplished their two most important objectives.
They removed slaughter from public view
and placed it under state surveillance. It
should be noted that the term public in
public abattoirs did not refer to the people of
Paris, but rather to the state and its welfare
politics, which revolved around more
abstract concepts of population growth and
control. Especially in 19th-century cities,
the provision of growing populations posed
a major challenge to the process of urbanization. Public abattoirs were a rst step
towards the establishment of a mass-society
liberated from famine. They helped to ensure
the sufcient production of meat. They also
served to protect the public and contain
street pollution, while at the same time, they
aided the state in its quest to gain control
over its population, modes of production,
and acts of killing.
The urbanization of animal slaughter was not
just a matter of politics; it was also closely
tied to the accumulation of knowledge and
to evolving conceptions of urban space,
especially the emergence of the publichygiene movement that shaped the course

of urban reforms. Advocating a peculiar mixture of morality, social welfare, and environmental control, public hygienists studied
everything related to the health of humans
and the cleanliness of urban environments.
As a result, Pariss ve public abattoirs, too,
came under increased supervision during
the 1830s and 1840s. Alongside prostitution, hospitals, and sewers, abattoirs
became a central battleground in the
struggle to improve the physical and moral
hygiene of Paris. Starting with the conduct
of butchers and the physical appearance of
livestock, hygienists investigated anything
and everything related to the abattoir. Some
even went as far as to conduct self-feeding
experiments with rotten meat to determine
its effects on human health.
Meat became a critical aspect in the discourse about and demands for better living
conditions. The growing recognition of
protein as a life sustaining nutrient enhanced
the signicance of meat consumption, not
least because of its potential to extend the
general life expectancy of populations,
especially that of the lower classes. The
tremendous population growth of the 1850s,
which brought more than 600,000 new,
mostly poor, inhabitants to the city, heightened the need for reforms, because it further
intensied the already rampant problems
with Pariss urban space and its haphazard
infrastructures of provision. With regard to
meat production, the biggest problem was
the continued geographical separation of
the livestock market and the abattoirs.
Since they were located in different parts of
the city, livestock herds continued to be an
all-too-visible sight in the streets of Paris.
By 1850, close to a million animals traversed
the city annually, adding considerably to
trafc congestion and street pollution. And
there was another incentive for reforms
the invention of rail transport. The emergence of railroads drastically altered existing
infrastructures. Among other things, it
enabled the expansion of agriculture, but
also necessitated the greater concentration
of markets, especially in the city.
It is hard to imagine that slaughterhouses
could be the objects of pride, but for Baron
Georges-Eugne Haussmann, probably
the most famous and arguably the most
controversial Prefect of Paris, they were one
of the most considerable works accomplished by [his] administration.6 This is all
the more surprising since it was under

Haussmann that Paris underwent the most

dramatic transformation in its history. In
1858, following intensive studies of the
existing conditions, Haussmann proposed
the building of new slaughterhouses
combined with markets and connected to
railroads. Initially his plans were rejected by
the city council, but following the
annexation of numerous suburbs to the
territory of Paris in 1859, Haussmanns
project was approved, in part, because
suddenly the city housed nine separate
slaughterhouses.
Despite disagreements among reformers,
city ofcials, and butchers about the
necessity for new slaughterhouses, their
construction began in 1860. The chosen site
was located in one of the newly annexed
districts in the northeastern corner of Paris
at La Villette. A rapidly growing industrial
district, La Villette offered a premier site with
plenty of water and a ready connection to
Pariss railways. The market was completed
in 1862, and the slaughterhouses opened
in 1867 during the World Exposition that
was held in Paris that year. La Villette was
instant-ly considered a monument to the
new industrial design based on iron and
glass. The fty-six-hectare terrain housed
three market halls for the trade of livestock,
numerous stables for cattle, sheep, and
pigs, and several administrative buildings,
including a police station, post ofce, and
stock market. The design of the grand halls
followed that of the markets at Les Halles,
both of which were built by the then prominent architect Victor Baltard. Much like Les
Halles, La Villette combined elegant form
with commercial function. Many of the
adjacent buildings were built according
to the neo-classical style of architecture.
Attached to the market were the new
slaughterhouses just on the other side of the
Canal Ourcq, which served as the boundary
not only between the two facilities, but also
between the living and the dead.
The opening of Le March et Les Abattoirs
de La Villette completed the centralization
of slaughter. Trains delivered livestock right
to the markets, where animals were traded
and sent right to the slaughterhouse. Once
animals entered the abattoirs, there was only
one possible way outas a carcass en route
to a meat market. La Villette, at least for the
animals, was a one-directional enterprise.
The facility stood as an icon to the rationalization of space. By 1900, La Villette had

grown into a city within the city. Hundreds

of humans and close to two million animals
passed through its gates every year. Apart
from minor extensions and remodeling in
1904, 1920, and again in 1930, La Villette
continued to operate unchanged throughout most of the 20th century, until the facility
became obsolete in the 1960s, when large
urban markets no longer t into the decentralizing postwar economy. La Villette closed
its gates in 1974.
Many European cities took a similar course
towards urbanization during the 19th century. As cities grew, new infrastructures were
needed to provide for growing populations
and to accommodate the emerging dynamic
of mass society. The increasing concentration of people, goods, buildings, streets, and
factories required a new spatial order that
could support urban growth, foster mobility,
heighten industrial production, and improve
living standards. The necessity of transforming medieval towns into modern metropoles gave rise to urban planning as well
as public hygiene and welfare politics.
The responsibility to raise or at least maintain
the populations prosperity increasingly fell
into the hands of the expanding European
public welfare states. Centering on a troubled politics of population, governments
oversaw the operation of numerous public
facilities such as hospitals, bath houses,
parks, and sewage systems, gas works, and
schools. The emergence of public slaughterhouses in cities across Europe was part of
this larger process of transformation.
Quite a different set of forces was at work
across the Atlantic in Chicago. Just as La
Villette was being built in Paris, Chicago also
witnessed the emergence of large-scale
slaughter yards. The developments on both
continents were driven by similar ambitions
towards the greater rationalization and
increased efciency of slaughter. But the
particular circumstances in each city led
to the adoption of different approaches.
The most visible differences were the cities
themselves. Paris had existed for centuries
and its population had risen to close to two
million by 1871. Chicago, in contrast, was
a young city (growing up only in the 1830s),
and in 1870 its population amounted to
a mere 220,000. Hence, unlike in Paris, the
building of the Chicago Union Stockyards
was hardly about reforming existing structures, but rather about creating new urban
forms. Chicagos slaughterhouses were not

an obstacle to urbanization. Quite to the

contrary, they spurred Chicagos growth into
the city that the poet Carl Sandburg called
hog butcher to the world.7 By 1900,
Chicago would be the second-largest city in
the United States, in no small part due to the
slaughterhouses.
In the early 1860s, there were only a couple
of small livestock dealers in Chicago, mainly
to satisfy local demands. But with the arrival
of railroads in the early 1860s, Chicago
quickly developed into an important hub
connecting the East and West. As in Europe,
railroads offered a viable alternative to the
treacherous shipment of goods over water.
Yet, railroads required the centralization of
markets. Thus, several of the existing hog
companies decided to unite their operations
in an effort to accommodate railroad technology and in the hope of creating a large
protable livestock market that would
upstage Cincinnati. Consequently, on Christmas Day 1865, the Union Stockyards and
Transit Company was founded on the South
Side of Chicago. Within a few years, and
especially after the arrival of Philip Armour
and Gustavus Swift in 1875, Chicago developed into a leading market for meatpacking.
Whereas in the 1850s only about 20,000
hogs were slaughtered annually, by the
mid- 1870s, the number had climbed to
more than three million. By the beginning
of the 20th century, an average of 13 million
animals came through the stockyards each
year. Undoubtedly, Chicago had turned into
the largest producer of meat in the United
States and possibly the world. La Villette fed
Paris, but Chicago supplied the nation.
In 19th-century Europe, livestock, for the
most part, was still painstakingly raised in
small herds, while in the US large herds
grew with minimum effort on the prairie.
The stockyards were built for large herds
that were kept in open-air cattle holding
pens rather than stables. As slaughter facilities had to match this capacity, industrial
efciency became a key factor. New technologies of slaughter were constantly invented and old ones improved. One such
invention was the refrigerated rail car, which
enabled the transport of fresh meat. However, the most important of these inventions
was the two-story disassembly line. Invented
in Cincinnati but perfected in Chicago, the
disassembly line gave Henry Ford his ideas
for a prototype for car production. It consisted of an overhead rail system by which

animals were hoisted and moved through

compartmentalized workstations, where one
man would slit the animals throat, another
would tear off its hide, a third split the
carcass, and on and on until the dressed
carcass was hoisted into a rail car and sent
on its way to consumers. With this process
it took less than twenty-four hours from the
moment an animal arrived until it was sold
at the market, slaughtered, dressed, and
shipped off as meat. This disassembly-style
production enabled the stunning
mechanization of slaughter, but it could
not supplant manual labor completely.
The individuality of animal bodies prevented
the standardization of slaughter, which up
to this daydespite technological sophisticationstill often requires the human hand
and its exibility with a knife.
Such mechanization was possible because
Chicago was less entrenched in the traditions of butchering. Reforms in Paris were
constantly met with resistance by butchers
intent on preserving their traditional habits.
In Chicago there was little opposition; the
stockyards were built not as a place for
butchering but a factory of meatpacking.
A different work structure guided production. Not individual butchers, but an easily
replaceable manual work force arranged in
a disassembly line turned animals into meat.
By the late 1870s, the stockyards already
employed approximately 2,000 workers.
In the years to come this number would rise
up to 45,000. Polish, Irish, and Lithuanian
immigrant labor and African Americans from
the South primarily sustained this growth.
By the turn of the century, the stockyards
were surrounded by ethnic neighborhoods
that housed the workers and their families.
They hardly shared in the prosperity that the
stockyards were bringing to Chicago. Upton
Sinclair powerfully captured their dire existence in his 1906 novel The Jungle. He
described how the American Dream of the
young Lithuanian immigrant Jurgis Rudkus
turned into an American reality in the stockyards of Chicago. The slaughterhouses were
not only deadly for livestock, but also horric for workers, who had to endure
bloody working and poverty-stricken living
conditions.
The stockyards certainly were the American
Dream for some, most notably for Philip
Armour and Gustavus Swift, whose wealth
was born amidst the blood, noise, and
stench. One could get rich in Packingtown

Slaughterhouse in Germany.
Photo Oliver Bernt

121

because it was based on private enterprise.

In Europe most slaughterhouses belonged
to the city, but in Chicago, they belonged
to private entrepreneurs, whose motive
was prot rather than public welfare.
The developments in Chicago were less
driven by a politics of population than by
the economy of markets. The Union Stockyards illustrated how the pull of markets
initiated an unprecedented mechanization
and technological innovation. Nothing was
wasted; every part of the animals was used.
Packers prided themselves that they utilized
everything but the squeals. The primacy
of prot motives also manifested itself in
the lack of concern for hygiene conditions
and for the freshness of meat. Unlike in
Europe, where inspections increasingly ruled
operations in the slaughterhouse, in Chicago
there were hardly any inspections or regulations because the state could not intervene
as readily as in Europe. In Chicago, reforms
were not instigated by the state but rather
by scandala scandal brought on by
literature. Upton Sinclairs novel was ction,
but it shocked readers into demanding
change. He had described the horrid
conditions, poverty, and lth surrounding
meatpacking. As he himself stated, I aimed
at the publics heart, and by accident I hit it
in the stomach.
Like La Villette, the Union Stockyards existed
well into the 20th century. However, the
postwar spread of automation increasingly
rendered the once path-breaking multistorey system inefcient and obsolete.
Slowly the stockyards were replaced by new
facilities further west in Iowa, Nebraska,
and Colorado. Moreover, another transport
innovation, the super-highway, took livestock trafc off the rails and onto the road.
Once again market demands forced changes
in the process of production. Whereas
railroads had fostered centralization, now
truck transport promoted decentralization
and the search for cheaper locations in the
countryside. And nally, urbanization itself
was becoming an obstacle. The stockyards
proximity to downtown was a growing
nuisance, especially in terms of smell; thus
the city showed little interest in retaining
the slaughterhouses. Slowly the stockyards
closed down. Swift left in 1958, Armour the
following year, and most others followed
suit. The nal announcement, that after a
hundred years of operation the stockyards
would shut down completely, came in July
1971. Today there is nothing left of the
German slaughterhouse.
Photo Oliver Bernt

123

former stockyards except one entrance gate

and the small family-owned packinghouse
of Chiapetti Lamb and Veal. The terrain is
used as a multi-purpose industrial park for
warehouses and low-rise ofce buildings.
By the mid-1970s, neither Paris nor Chicago
operated slaughterhouses anymore. Tucked
away in the countryside, butchering has
truly moved out of sight. The post-industrial
age witnessed the demise of the modern
mass-slaughterhouse because it did not t
into the image of the so-called postmodern
city. All over the world, former slaughterhouses are being reclaimed by the living,
who are appropriating them for other
purposes. Just last year, Les Abattoirs,
a museum for contemporary art, opened
in Toulouse, France, on the premises of
a 19th-century slaughterhouse. In Landau,
Germany, a slaughterhouse has been put
to adaptive reuse as a library. Cities from
Buenos Aires to Frankfurt are partaking in
the slaughterhouse revival by turning former
spaces of death into clubs, restaurants,
boutiques, and other hip places. Meatmarket districts in New York and Chicago
have been transformed into trendy hangout
areas and loft neighborhoods, reinventing
the slaughterhouse as an stheticized space
for consumption and entertainment.
Not long ago, I was at La Villette for an outdoor screening of The Night of the Hunter.
La Villette is now a polyvalent cultural
complex that houses a science museum,
festival space, and la Cit de la Musique.
In the words of one of its architects, Bernard
Tschumi, La Villette has turned architecture
against itself.8 Watching the lm projected
onto the former cattle market, which is one
of the few buildings that remain, was an
eerie experience. The park of La Villette is
not just architecture turned against itself.
It is life turned on its head.6

1 Thomas More, Utopia (New York: Cambridge University

Press, 1989, o. 1516), Book II, p. 57.

2 Denis Hollier, Against Architecture: The Writings of

Georges Bataille (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), p. xv.

3 Louis-Sbastien Mercier, Tableau de Paris, 5 Volumes
(Paris, 1782), Vol. 5, pp. 101-103.
4 Ibid., Vol. 5, p. 28.
5 Ibid., Vol. 1, pp. 123124.
6 Georges-Eugne Haussmann, Memoirs du Baron
Haussmann, (Paris: 189093), vol. 3, p. 561.
7 Carl Sandburg, Chicago Poems (New York: Dover
Publications, 1994), p. 1.
8 Bernard Tschumi, Cingram folie: Le parc de la Villette
(New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1987), p. vii.

The mouses tale:

Standardized animals in the culture and
practice of technoscience
Karen Rader

In mid-September 1999, Princeton University neurobiologist Joe Tsien created a

mouse named Doogie, named after the
TV child prodigy Doogie Houser, M.D.
Doogie is a so-called smart mouse, which
means that his memory has been enhanced
through genetic manipulation of NR2B,
a gene whose product pairs with another
genes product, NR1, to open what biologists believe to be the physical mechanism
of memory in the brain. Doogies forebrain
now produces some extra NR2B product, so
his memory mechanism stays open an extra
150-thousandths of a second. This is enough
time, Tsien and his colleagues say, for the
creature to outperform other normal mice
its age on standard tests of rodent intelligence. Time magazine didnt miss a beat:
the smart-mouse study, they proclaimed,
sheds lights on how memory works and
raises questions about whether we should
use genetics to make people brainier.1
Meanwhile, Princeton has led for a use
patent on the NR2B gene, which would give
the institution the right to develop drugs to
enhance NR2B production in humans.
At rst, this scenario may seem to echo
familiar motifs of utopian science ction
a brave new world for the four-pawed
furry set. On closer inspection, however,
things are more complex. Doogie is not a
person. He is a non-human animal insofar
as he is manipulable: scientists have altered
his genes and experimented on his body in
ways ethically unthinkable for members of
our own species. But in some sense, Doogie
is human: he bears a human name and
performs functions signicant only within
our culture. Donna Haraway has argued that
scientic animals are liminal objects, and
derive social power from this: they are, she
writes, simultaneously research models,
cultural metaphors, and potent jokeswe
inhabit their narratives and they inhabit us.
A dissonance registers, then, in the brief
moment when we, as human social actors
and captive listeners of the mouses tale, try
to translate the use of laboratory mice into
something meaningful for us. This act itself
interrogates two important boundaries. First,
what is the line between human and nonhuman animals (or, as one scientist put it, to
what extent are the patterns displayed by
such rodents comparable to whats going
on in humans)? Second, in a world where
these objects of basic biomedical research
wouldnt even exist save for the efforts
of human scientists, how much of the
Page from C. C. Littles Experimental Studies of Inheritance
of Color in Mice.
Courtesy The Jackson Laboratory Archives

124

knowledge we obtain from them is natural

and how much is technological marvel?
A better understanding of these questions
is perhaps best conveyed through a history
of the rst standardized scientic mammals:
Jax Mice. Jax Mice are the rodent
products of the Jackson Laboratory of Bar
Harbor, Maine, founded in 1929 by biologist
Clarence Cook Littleno relation to Stuart
Little. Today, Jax, which took its nickname
from its old cable address, now houses
and distributes more than 1700 genetically
dened mouse strains to laboratories all
over the world. By many scientists description, it is the scientic bureau of mouse
standards. Its large, diverse, and wellorganized stocks all but dene the available
mice for biomedical laboratory use in the
US and abroad. Jax is not the only place
you can get laboratory mice, but Jax Mice
are the sine qua non of laboratory mice.
In mid-1920s the Jackson Lab was merely
Littles pipe dream. A Harvard-trained
geneticist, Little sought to create an independent research institute for the simultaneous investigation of mammalian genetics and cancer. His own work on the genetics of mouse cancers had revealed that
inbreedingthat is, breeding within mouse
families, usually brother-sistereliminated
much of the variation that made it difcult
to draw genetic conclusions from work with
mammals. Practically, this resulted in the
rst inbred-mouse strain used in a laboratory, called dba, an abbreviation for its coatcolor genes. Signicantly, Little also found
that dba displayed a hereditary tendency
to develop mammary, or breast, cancer.
He conceded that the cancer genetics of
dbas were exceedingly complicated, but
argued that cancer should be recognized as
a problem essentially biological in nature.
In many lectures and scientic articles, he
called for making it a priority for research.2
Littles initial goal was relatively limited:
to use mouse-genetics work to realign the
professional and disciplinary boundaries
of cancer research. In 1925, only 20% of
the research articles in the Journal of Cancer
Research was on mouse topics, and only
one employed inbred mice or Littles
genetics methods.3 But after many years
of working in isolation, Little left his research
behind for college administrationironically,
only to be drawn right back in by demands
for his inbred mice. These demands shaped

subsequent research and development

even though they came not from fellow
scientists but potential patrons. In 1925 he
assumed the presidency of the University of
Michigan. One year later, while summering
in Maine along with the rest of Detroit high
society, he struck up a conversation about
mouse cancer research that captured the
imagination of Roscoe B. Jackson, the
president of the Hudson Motor Car Company. By this time, cancer was a publichealth problem with major media momentum. Government statistics ranked it second
only to heart disease as a leading cause of
death in America. In 1928 West Virginia
Senator Matthew Neely proclaimed before
Congress that cancer was a monster more
insatiable than the guillotine [which had]
inicted more suffering and agony upon the
American people than all the other diseases
known to humanity.
Jackson understood Littles main point:
that the genetics of mouse cancers would
contribute to a cure for cancer. But he also
noted the independent value of standardized
strains for making biomedical research more
like a Detroit factory assembly line. Being
a good businessman, Little later wrote,
Jackson saw that [inbred mice] added
efciency, accuracy, and repeatability to
biological work. Two years later, when Little
resigned his presidency over bitter clashes
with the Michigan trustees, Jackson and his
colleagues pledged more than $70,000 per
year over three years to transform Littles
mice into proper cancer-ghting tools.
In October 1929two weeks before the
Jackson Laboratory ofcially opened its
doors in Bar Harborthe US stock market
crashed, threatening to destroy Littles
edgling enterprise. His Detroit sponsors
withdrew almost completely. Before the
crash, Little appeared on the verge of
convincing both biologists and society-atlarge of the value of mouse-cancer genetics.
The previous month he had consolidated
his power in the medical-research and policy
community when he was elected both
President of the American Association
of Cancer Research and Managing Director
of the American Society for the Control
for Cancer (ASCC). A group of Littles
researchers at Michigan had also created
C57Black, a new non-cancer strain,
and found more evidence that there was
a genetic explanation for susceptibility
to inoculated tumors in the dba strain.

125

In response to these circumstances, Little

tried to salvage his institution by again
arguing for the suitability of inbred-mouse
genetics for cancer research. In his 1931
presidential address to his colleagues, he
praised what he called the growing interest
of medicine in genetic research [as well as]
the continued growth of that cooperative
spirit between geneticists and medical
men. Previous experimental data, Little
argued, [have] many statistical artefacts
due to the mixed genetic nature of the mice
used. Use of inbred mice in laboratory
experiments, he concluded, would serve to
accomplish more quickly and carefully both
geneticists and physicians goals.4
But it was Littles adoption of an industrial
strategy that saved the Jackson Lab, and in
the process, created the research organisms
that scientists recognize as Jax Mice
today. In 1933, in order to eliminate mounting budget decits, Little and his group
began stabilizing a wider variety of standard
strains of spontaneous tumor inbred mice.
The target market, in Littles view, was
broad: the heads of all medical schools
and various biological departments in school
and universities. Though the practice
behind this enterprise was the same (i.e.,
inbreeding mice), its immediate goal was
signicantly different: not the production
of mice strains with stable dened genes
(as it was when the mice were being used
for their own studies of cancer genetics)
but the production of mice with predictable
tumor incidence.5 Thus, alongside strains
dba and C57Black, Jackson Lab workers
developed more specialized low- and highbreast-cancer strains that they werent using
for their own research. CBA, for instance,
showed a 13% incidence of breast tumors,
while C3H showed an astounding 90%
incidence. They also began inbreeding to
stabilize strains with predictable spontaneous lung tumorsstrains A, with an 8085% incidence, and X, an 8% incidence
in the hopes that these might prove useful
for lung cancer researchand generate
some revenue for Jax.6
In mid-March that year Little drafted the rst
primitive catalog of laboratory mice, which
created universal specications for each of
the ten stocks available at Jax. The list
noted each stocks known gene make-up,
including the number of inbred generations,
as a sign of homogeneity; percentage of
tumor incidence; and a standardized name.

All mice were priced equally: ten cents each

plus the cost of delivery, with additional
charges for specic sexes. And in the
true spirit of American consumer culture,
researchers were offered a money-back
guarantee in the rare event that mice might
arrive dead.7 Littles marketing scheme
worked: cash orders for these mice quickly
came in and nearly exceeded available
supply. These orders, in turn, generated
enough money to obtain resources for more
mouse production.8
For several years the Jax mouse factory
operated with little or none of the fanfare
over possible cancer cures that Littles initial
patrons had expected. But in the process
of making these creatures widely available,
the standards for successful scientic mouse
production and use in research changed.
Laboratory mouse suitability ceased to
be a matter of the mouses place in the
intellectual economy of a particular research
program (cancer genetics), and
it became a matter of its place in the freemarket economy of biomedical research
more generally. The reliability and availability
of standardized Jax Mice dened what
counted as laboratory mice (as opposed
to creatures one nds in the kitchen cupboards). In turn, the Jackson Lab came to
be dened by its ability to meet a wide
variety of research user needs in different
disciplinary and institutional contexts.
Another later episode in this history reveals
how this scientic denition itself could
be adapted to suit new social needsand
in turn, how such adaptations affected the
science itself. The late 1930s marked a
turning point for the American political
fortunes of cancer. Anti-cancer sentiments
reached a fever pitch both in the media
and on the oor of the US Congress.
Earlier deadlocks between the executive
and legislative branches gave way to a
near-unanimous agreement among federal
ofcials that cancer was a problem requiring
immediate government attention. Viewed
in context, however, this tide of events
which culminated in the passage of the
rst National Cancer Institute Actalso
uncovered a persistent policy anxiety: how
exactly should the US government construct
a program to ght this chronic disease?
Little went before Congress in 1937 to offer
inbred mice as one answer to the question.
Let me point out, he told the gathering
of politicians, that research in the cause

of cancer is not entirely a medical problem.

The emphasis entirely shifted from working
with the slow, unsatisfactory human material
to material that is easy to handle, rapid[ly]
[bred] and conveniently controllable. That
has been the biggest change in cancer
research.9
Around the same time, Little also penned a
Scientic American article entitled A New
Deal for Mice, in which he juxtaposed
the changes the mouse had undergone in
science with respect to the prevailing negative cultural images of the animal. Do you
like mice?, he asked his readers. Of course
you dont. Useless vermin, disgusting little
beasts, or something worse is what you are
likely to think as you physically or mentally
climb a chair. Against this background,
he cast himself as (in his characterization)
attorney for the defense, and argued that
through science, mice have been positively
transformed. Inbred miceas opposed
to their wild mouse relativesprovided
a particular service. Little implored his
readers to visit one of Jaxs laboratory
cities where thoroughbred mice have
become an integral part of mans helpers.
Inbred mice, he wrote, [are] the troops
which literally by the tens of thousands
occupy posts on the ring line of investigation [into the] nature and cure of cancer.
In this and other media outlets, Littles
rhetoric combined to express what had
previously been a tacit moral stance regarding the suitability of mice for research.
Mouse manipulation (in the form of the inbred strain creation and production at Jax)
and suffering (in the form of such experiments as tumor transplants) was a small
price to pay for future human well-being.
Cancer research was, as Little put it in a
Time cover story, a hard task requiring
patience: trench warfare against a ruthless
killer.10 A few weeks later, 274 of Jaxs
Bagg-albino cancer mice appeared
on the cover of Life magazine, introducing
readers to the story US Science Wars
Against Unknown Enemy: Cancer. Under
these circumstances, Little wrote, perhaps
mankind will accept and develop his
relationships with mice in a different light.11
Scientizing mice was the only way to
redeem these otherwise socially useless
organisms.
Passage of the NCI Act generated broad
social support for cancer research and
Mice photos courtesy of The Jackson Laboratory Archives

126

increased scientic support for inbred

mouse production. Ultimately, the Jax
mouses suitability for experimental cancer
studies became institutionalized through
a policy that promoted their use for all
federally sponsored cancer research. One
of the rst grants the US government
approved was a three-year subsidy to Jax
s production enterprise, with the hope
that this industrial state-of-the-art facility
would provide enough mice for NCI cancer
research over the next ten years. Shortly
thereafter, Rockefeller Foundation Program
Ofcer Warren Weaver visited the Jax facilities and immediately grasped the business
value of supporting mouse-production
expansion: Should the proposed increase in
breeding facilities be available, Little would...
sell approximately 120,000 mice per year.
Ultimately, Weaver agreed to provide
$40,000 in additional funds from the
Rockefeller Foundations Division of Natural
Sciences.12
Within a year, construction on the rst Jax
mouse house was complete and the new
wing housed between fty- and sixtythousand inbred mice. Little immediately
sent the Rockefeller Foundations publicity
ofce pictures for their Annual Review which
foregrounded the scaled-up, industrialized
nature of mouse breeding that the new
building embodied: scientist-workers
marking and recording litters of mice and
an external view of the modernistic glass
and steel production wing. During 1939,
110,000 inbred Jax Mice were produced
and distributed to mouse workers all over
the globe a 175% increase in two years.
In the rst six months the building was
operational, mouse production itself soared
53%. Jax was also making substantial
income on the new arrangement: annual
prots from mouse sales doubled between
1936 and 1939, from $7,000 to $14,000.
The March 1940 Rockefeller Foundation
Trustees Bulletin gleefully reported that Little
and his Jax Lab had thus outwitted the
old proverb that you cant eat your cake
and have it too.13 Over the next 15 years,
Jaxs mouse-supply system grew even
more dramatically: by 1953, more than a
quarter million mice were sold.14
This new laboratory mouse was so potent
socially because it simultaneously accommodated the multiple goals and values
of health policy makers, scientists, and
members of the lay public. In the case

of policy makers and scientists, these were

the need for control, coordination, and
timeliness in experimental research; in the
case of the public, the utility of research
and the morality of using mice for research.
Indeed, on this latter issue there was
so much agreement that Little could
contemplate (in a 1954 letter to his lawyer)
the possibility of Jackson Laboratory obtaining some publicity by (as he put it) arousing
[Walt] Disneys interest in...[a] lm, to tell
the story of our mouse (which might easily
be a brother or some other relative of
Mickey)....15 This lm never got made.
Though he supported Littles cancer work,
Disney never elected to tell the tale of the
laboratory mouses kinship to Mickey,
perhaps because he realized it would bring
the public face-to-face with inconsistencies
in their cultural understanding of this animal.
Celebrating the innocence and charm of
a friendly mouse like Mickey for the sake
of entertainment dissolves the boundary
between humans and animals; celebrating
the laboratory mouses sacrices for the
sake of scientic knowledge solidies it.
Scientists often emphasize a naturalistic
explanation for the transformation of mice
into model organisms: mice are small
mammals that breed readily and often (the
young are born three weeks after females
have mated), and they are susceptible
to many of the diseases that afict human
beings (such as cancer). But paying closer
attention to the historical process by which
Jax Mice came to dominate early-20thcentury biology-research laboratories
suggests a more complicated interpretation:
the suitability of these animals for research
was not pre-determined, but engineered.
These rodents physical bodies, as well
as their representations, were not static.
They were adapted and constructed for
a scientic culture that valued genetically
controlled answers to biological and medical
questions. Laboratory mice, then, are only as
human and as natural as they need to
be. They possess chromosomal constitutions enough like ours that the knowledge
obtained from them can be (within a
research context) convincingly applied to
human health problems, but not so much
like ours as to make the experimental
manipulation of their genomes ethically
problematic to most of society. And their
bodies constitute a space that Bruno Latour
would call technoscience, because
they are inhabited at once by both natural

127

knowledge of mammalian processes and its

controlled manipulation and application
by, in Latours words, all the elements tied
to the scientic practice no matter how
dirty, unexpected, or foreign they seem.16A
1 Michael D. Lemonick, Smart Genes? Time, Vol. 154,

Issue 11 (September 13, 1999), pp. 5459 plus cover

photo.
2 C.-C. Little, The Relation of Heredity to Cancer in Man,
Scientic Monthly, 1916, 3: 196202, p. 198.
3 By 1925, the situation remained roughly the same: the
percentage of mouse articles was about 20% and inbred
animals were used in only one study among this group.
I am very grateful to Gail Schmitt for research assistance
with the cancer journal article counts.
4 C.-C. Little, The Role of Heredity in Determining the
Incidence and Growth of Cancer, American Journal of
Cancer, 1931, 15: 278089.
5 On this point, see also Ilana Lwy and Jean-Paul
Gaudillire, Disciplining Cancer: Mice and the Practice of
Genetics Purity, in The Invisible Industrialist: Manufactures
and the Production of Scientic Knowledge, eds. Jean-Paul
Gaudillire and Ilana Lwy (New York: St. Martins Press,
1998).
6 Cf. L.-C. Strong, The Production of the cba Strain of
Inbred Mice: Long Life Associated with Low Tumor
Incidence, British Journal of Experimental Pathology, 1936,
17: 6063; List of Stocks, in letter to Warren Weaver,
4 December 1937, RF Archive, RG 1.1; 200D, Box 143,
1774, Rockefeller Archive Center, Tarrytown, NY (hereafter,
RAC-NY); Supply Department, Stock List, 1 July 1938,
Box 7-2, Jackson Laboratory Archives, Bar Harbor, Maine
(hereafter, JLA-BH); C.-C. Little and P.-A. Gorer, The
Genetics of Cancer, in H. Gruneberg, The Genetics of
the Mouse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1943).
7 Interestingly, Little rst solicited some small commercial
mouse breeders/pet dealers to determine the market
price for their non-genetically-controlled mouse material,
and he set the cost for his material below industry
averages. CCL to Mary Russell and enclosed inbred-mouse
sales listing, 3 March 1933, Box 730; Irwin Wachtel to
Mary Russell, 18 March 1933; C.D. Haedrich to CCL, N.D.;
both box 740: all from the C.C. Little Papers, Raymond
Fogler Library, University of Maine, Orono, Me. (hereafter,
CCL-UMO).
8 For replies from medical researchers, e.g. Halsey Bagg
to CCL, 4 April 1933, Box 12, JLA-BH; Howard Andervont
to Wm. Murray, 29 March 1933; C.-W. Turner to CCL, 8
May 1933; CCL to C.-W. Turner, 12 June 1933: all Box
739, CCL-UMO. There are no extant Jackson Lab Annual
or Trustees Reports for the pre-1938 period, and I have
found no other source that mentions the numbers of
mice distributed during this initial period. One annual
budget notes a gure of $2,519 in income from mouse
sales during the rst six months of 1933, but because
of varying prices it is difcult to extrapolate from this.
See also Jean Holstein, The First Fifty Years at the Jackson
Laboratory, 19291979 (Bar Harbor: The Jackson

Laboratory, 1979), p. 79.

9 House of Representatives Committee on Interstate and

Foreign Commerce, Hearing on The National Cancer Act,

Congressional Record, 75th Congress, 1st session, Report
No. 1281, p. 4.
10 Quoted from a published excerpt of a Little speech in
Cancer Army, Time, 1937, 29: 4041. In late 1936, he
created the new ofce of publicity director in the ASCC,
and he appointed veteran media man Clifton Read to ll
the position. Together, Little and Read engineered a virtual
media blitz in many of the popular magazines of the day:
see James Patterson, The Dread Disease: Cancer and
Modern American Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1987), chapter 5.
11 C.-C. Little, US Science Wars Against Unknown Enemy:
Cancer, Life, 1 March 1937, 2: 1117.
12 WW Memo to Raymond Fosdick, 20 December 1937;
RF Archives, rg 1.1, 200D, Box 143, Folder 1774, RAC-NY.
13 Eating Your Cake and Having it Too, Excerpt from the
RF Trustees Bulletin, March 1940, RF Archives, RG 1.1,
200D, Box 143, Folder 1775, RAC-NY.
14 Twenty-fourth Annual Report of the Roscoe B.
Jackson Laboratory, 1952-53, p. 7, JLA-BH. In the last
fty years, many more such creatures have entered
laboratoriesthough it is very difcult to know precisely
how many of these are Jax Mice or Jax-type mice. In
1965, a total of nearly 37 million mice were consumed
in all US laboratories, both commercial and academic (in
people terms, a number just under the 1999 population of
California). By 1984, that gure had risen to an estimated
45 millionor 63 percent of the total number of animals
used by US scientists (again, in people terms, just under
the combined 1999 populations of California and New
York). See Andrew Rowan, Of Mice, Models and Men
(New York: SUNY Press, 1984), chapter 5though Rowan
does not break down these numbers in terms of inbreds
vs. outbreds. Later lumped data from the NIH indicate that
mice and rats together account for 6070% of all animals
used, and approximately 90% of all mammals used
though exact numbers are not made available, presumably
to protect on-going scientic work from animal rights
activism. See Ofce of Technology Assessment, Report on
Lab Animal Use, 1990. I am grateful to Dr. Louis Siebel for
this material.
15 C. C. Little to Roy Larsen, 5 November 1953, Box 12,
Folder L, JLA-BH.
16 Bruno Latour, Science in Action (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 174.

And

The lion in the Swedish winter

Mats Bigert

The royal castle of Gripsholm to the south

of Stockholm houses the oldest lion taxidermied in Sweden. The tongue and teeth are
made of wood and the eyes are two dull,
soulless pieces of glass stuck with glue.
The taxidermist, unfamiliar with lions, copied
the pose from two bronze mythological lions
standing outside the royal castle. The hand
that in the bronze lions rested on a polished
granite sphere now hovers awkwardly in
mid-air, as if the lion were offering its hand
to be kissed.
The living lion arrived in Sweden in 1731
as a gift to Fredrik I from the Algerian Bey.
In 1729, the Swedish king had signed a
treaty with the Algerian ruler to protect
Swedish merchant ships from sea pirates
off the coast of Algeria. To seal the treaty,
gifts of guns, mast poles, and anchors had
been offered to the Algerian ruler. He in turn
offered the lion to the Swedish king.
The lions arrival posed a practical problem
for the court architect, Carl Hrleman, who
suggested that an Algerian menagerie be
built in a central square in town. The lion
was nally housed, however, in the old lions
den on the royal hunting grounds where
earlier lions had been housed. A lion from
Prague that had arrived after the Peace of
Westphalia in 1648 had been placed there
and received brutal treatment from the
bears and oxen. The lions feeble display of
courage had surprised everyone.
It is possible that the Algerian lion met with
a similar fate as it fought an uneven ght
against the Nordic beasts of this barren and
cold climate. Its nal incarnation would
then reect the Swedes disappointment
over its lack of courage and its failure to live
up to own symbolic character. Its front paw,
then, is in fact only asking for mercy and
forgiveness.7

Photo Mona Skoglund

128

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