On books.
2011 is the hundredth anniversary of this book. Time for blowing up fields to make a comeback methinks. Full text here—replete with section heading ‘Ploughing with dynamite’. But remember, when you finally get around to clearing those stumps: “cool guys don’t look at explosions”.
Looking at these extraordinarily strange and beautiful objects—mathematical models of complex surfaces—it’s not surprising to learn that they have had a profound influence on modern art. But the exact nature of that influence is still barely understood. My intention here is simply to sketch out a few of the details, pending further research.
The first thing to note is the date. The frontispiece above comes from a catalogue published in 1881 by Brill of Darmstadt. That puts them right at the beginning of the craze for mathematical models in university teaching. A brief potted history would take us back first to the 18th century and the models issued to illustrate Books XI and XII of Euclid’s Elements. Then, in the 19th-century, to the use of three-dimensional models in various fields, especially botany and anatomy—a way of standardizing methods in disparate departments.
The most important and widely documented development in late 19th-century mathematical modelling was James Clerk Maxwell’s 1874 thermodynamic surface. Maxwell, a master of communicating concepts visually, sculpted a 3-D graph to show a fictitious subtstance’s volume, entropy, and energy:
The left-hand chunk = solid; the bulbous right-hand segment = gas. This is half-way between a teaching model and an instrument of research; after constructing the model Maxwell plotted on the lines of equal pressure and temperature by positioning the model so that sunlight would glance off it through the day.
Now, I don’t know the link between Maxwell’s teaching methods and the general success of mathematical models, but I do know that the two things were linked explicitly in the 1929 Encyclopaedia Britannica, which contains an authoritative account of the various kinds and uses of models. But by then models were long past their high-water mark, so to speak, with manufacture petering out after 1910.
The neat coincidence here is that the early success of models coincides with the period when the sculptor Naum Gabo was at university in Münich. Going back to a previous post, I talked about Alfred Barr’s famous 1936 diagram:
The diagram’s ‘conclusion’ is what I’m interested in here. Barr divides the modern art-world into: “non-geometrical” or “geometrical”. In England in the late 1930s this meant either surrealism or constructivism.
The latter was a large and deeply influential movement. Artists who went on to become famous for free-flowing, organically inspired or even nostalgic forms—John Piper, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore—for a time espoused a harshly geometrical abstraction:
Piper, Hepworth, Moore. Hepworth’s could be sold to schools for lessons in solid geometry, but the forms are basic, and the influence hard to read. In fact, it seems to me that the more bizarre shapes issued by Brill affected artists only in a general way, perhaps via architecture:
(The interlocking ramp system in Berthold Lubetkin’s famous Penguin Pool at London Zoo, built in 1934.)
A much more direct and documented relationship holds between on specific aspect of mathematical modelling and sculpture in the period, and it has to do with string. Look again at that Moore, a sphere with interlaced surfaces represented by strings. And compare (click to enlarge):
This spectacular array was published issued by the firm Teubner in 1912, as the ‘H. Wiener and P. Treutlein collection’. It’s not hard to see why it has such an influence. Hepworth, Moore, Naum Gabo and even Man Ray all made documented trips to see the models wherever they could. Here is Moore:
Undoubtedly the source of my stringed figures was the Science Museum. Whilst a student at the Royal College of Art, I became involved in machine art, which in those days had its place in modern art. [...] I was fascinated by the mathematical models I saw there, which had been made to illustrate the difference of the form that is half-way between a square and a circle. One model had a square stone end with twenty holes along each side making eighty holes in all. Through these holes strings were threaded and led to a circle with the same number of holes at the other end. A plane interposed through the middle shows the form that is halfway between a square and a circle. One end could also be twisted to produce forms that would be terribly difficult to draw on a flat surface. It wasn’t the scientific study of these models but the ability to look through the strings as with a bird cage and to see one form within another which excited me.
I’m yet to identify precisely the model Moore is talking about, though I hope to soon, and also to plot the way he used the form. A more direct and well-known link comes from Gabo, who probably introduced these models to English artists around the time he moved to this country in 1936. Here’s a diagram from the 1929 Encyclopaedia entry I mentioned above:
Gabo traced this into his notebook sometime around 1936, and a year later made this:
And can we go back a stage further and ask: why did Gabo take such an interest in mathematical models? Well, in May 1936 the model in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which was and hopefully still is held at the Institut Henri Poincaré, was exhibited as an artwork at a surrealist exhibition in Paris. (Man Ray, no less, produced a photo series of the models that was published in Cahiers d’art.) So Gabo, a keen student of the international avant-garde and a former engineering student in Münich, found a personal coherence in the use of these instruments and tied it to a progressive and scientistic world-conception. The result of all this was the great manifesto Circle of 1937, but that’s for another blog post.
Returning to Barr’s diagram yet again, does this prove it to be all too neat? Perhaps not. After all, the surrealists exhibited an actual model, attempting to show that even a mathematician could produce art. The constructivists, led by Gabo, were quite clear that only a mathematician could furnish the materials for art. Here, uniting the two strands(!) at last, are a few more objets trouvés:
I.e. more from Teubner (englarges), and below from the Encyclopaedia Brtannica:
Octavo Blog is in meetings all of Friday, and then moving house at the weekend. Boo:
…with the regularity of some law at work the following process runs full circle within me: I am arrogant, dismissive, reticent, refined, happy. Some or other sense of power takes territorial hold. I have taken too much pleasure in my muscles while I was rowing or I am working at my dissertation with an intensity that blunts my senses. I feel first that my arrogance, with its conciliatory frontage on the outside world, is deserting me. I am no longer so friendly; I am less witty. I feel empty and work out of sheer desperation. My behavior in company deteriorates. I suffer a defeat. I feel that, by comparison with some other person, I am stupid. I behave with spectacular ineptitude, I cannot find an appropriate rejoinder to some insult. A few hours later I am, once again, arrogant, dismissive, reticent, refined, happy. Some or other sense of power takes territorial hold. I have taken too much pleasure in my muscles while I was rowing or I am working at my dissertation with an intensity that blunts my senses…
(Robert Musil, 29 May 1905).
This is ‘Continental Drift’ by Mona Hatoum (2000). It consists of a glass map of the world, on a North Pole projection, raised slightly from a sea of iron filings. Underneath, a large magnetized bar rotates, like the sweep of a radar display, creating a wave that washes against the various coastlines. Hatoum describes the piece here, pointing out that the endlessly rotating wave of filings and the gradual erosion and distortion of the map is at once sinister and mesmerising.
My interest in this piece comes from more general and speculative thinking about the links between plate tectonics and continental drift, the material culture of discovery, and the role of artists in all of the above. I like Hatoum’s piece because of the world-wide ‘survey’ that the rotating bar suggests, recalling the vast amount of global seismology that was undertaken during the Cold War, primarily to detect subterranean Soviet nuclear detonations. One of the great examples of the law of unintended consequences, it was this seismological data that was to feed directly into the debate about continental drift, finally understood in terms of the new science of plate tectonics in the late 1950s. (If you have JSTOR access this is a good read.)
As for material culture, one overlooked aspect of the plate tectonics revolution is the role of globes in the propagation of the theory. Here, for example, is the cover of S.W. Carey’s 1958 edited volume Continental Drift:
[SOLD]
Inside, along with Carey’s seminal ‘The tectonic approach to continental drift’, there are images and descriptions of globes in construction. It’s clear from the proliferation of different kinds of representation that there is something holistic about tectonics—perhaps this stems from the insufficiency of various parts of the evidence, but the sheer number of different phenomena that could be explained.
As yet, I’ve been unable to find any globes with tectonic information between the 1950s and 1972, when Kurt Ziesing published his ‘Tectonic globe of the Earth’:
In line with my guess about Carey’s paper, the booklet accompanying the globe points out that although there are regions with limited information, the inclusion of volcanic and earthquake data (the relation of which to tectonics is “beyond dispute”) encourages a “large-scale way of tectonic thinking”, impossible with 2-D maps that distort the information.
Meanwhile in Canada, an altogether stranger globe was being invented—the ‘Terrascope’, a gigantic 3-D photographic set-up that allows information painted directly onto a globe to be rendered back into 2-Dimensions without loss or distortion. Here’s the globe itself:
Here’s the photographic rig:
And here’s what it produces:
What’s so peculiar about this invention that it’s the work not of a geologist, seismologist or cartographer, but an artist—Juan Geuer, who by 1973 had been employed for a decade as a draughtsman at the Earth Physics Branch of the Department of Natural Resources in Ottawa. Another example of Geuer’s visualization techniques can be found in this paper, on a crater in Saskatchewan. Clearly a very brilliant man. (Sadly Geuer died in 2009, and it’s difficult to find out what’s happened to many of his scientific/artistic installations—there’s a good bio here. I’d love to see the “interactive seismometer” in particular…)
What was it about the early ’70s? At almost exactly the same time the person who has perhaps done the most for the understanding of the visual languages of science, Martin Rudwick, was moving from geology to the history of science, bringing with him a store of techniques that would result in such glorious historiographic diagrams as this:
(From ‘Charles Darwin in London: The Integration of Public and Private Science’, Isis 73, 1982).
What I like about all of these representions is that they make clear just how contingent our (literal) view of the world is. Before each of these interventions, it wasn’t obvious that they were necessary. (This was the topic of the brilliant Lines of Enquiry exhibition a few years ago at Kettle’s Yard.)
Now, of course, you wouldn’t think of talking about plate tectonics without a garish plasticky globe:
(At the Smithsonian, no less.)
If, as I do, you read a lot of Lovejoy novels, you might be under the impression that the antiques game—and by extension the rare books racket—is a cut-throat world, populated by callous murderers and womanizers, easy violence and sin.
But, if, as I also do, you have a penchant for 1930s political fiction, you’ll know that the protagonist of Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying has such a great aversion to cut-throatery that he ends up working in… you guessed it:
But how happy had he been, just at first, in Mr McKechnie’s bookshop! For a little while—a very little while—he had the illusion of being really out of the money-world. Of course the book-trade was a swindle, like all other trades; but how different a swindle! Here was no hustling and Making Good, no gutter-crawling. As for the work, it was very simple. It was mainly a question of being in the shop ten hours a day.
So which is it? Following a recent swindle purchase, I’d say the latter. Here’s what happened: late at night—like 3am late—I receive an email: “Abebooks has found the book you want.” But it should say “Abebooks has found the book you’d murder for.” It’s a £1000+ book at £15. I email straight away: “Dear Sir/Madam, by the time you read this you’ll have about a hundred emails like this one…”. I click ‘Buy This Book’, add a little pleading to the email, and go to sleep, hoping for the best.
The next day I wake up and check my email:
…you were right about the interest in this item, last night a fellow dealer told me to cancel your order and relist it…
Plus, that very morning, someone else has made an offer. My heart starts to sink. I actually have to re-read the next bit a few times before I get it:
I obviously made a mistake in the pricing, I feel I am honour bound to sell it to you, at the price quoted.
Amazing! I pay a little extra and sure enough, it arrives a few days later. This is what I find when I open the package:
I.e. the 1956 catalogue of the eponymous Whitechapel Gallery exhibition (online in its entirety here). How to characterize the show? Like the Festival of Britain on acid. Not so much an end to austerity as a desperate lunge towards the 60s. The book itself is marvellous: spiral bound in card covers; 1300 copies. I think the cover is screen printed—the deep maroon is almost embossed, and the blue is just as it looks in the scan, Patrick Heron vivid. Inside, the design is beautiful:
After this it goes crazy, because each group of artists got to edit their own section as they wished. On the one hand there are arch modernists like Colin St John Wilson, with pages like this:
And on the other there are proto-pop-artists like Richard Hamilton with the catalogue’s pièce de résistance, the collage ‘Just What Is It that Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?’—a satire as sharp, in its context, as Duchamp’s urinal. It was made by Hamilton specifically for the catalogue, so although there are other versions around, this b/w printed one really is the first appearance:
Moreover, I think the image has to be seen like this to be understood. In the catalogue it’s at home, so to speak: next to the psychedelic form on the facing page (also not far from Heron); in the same book as high architectural modernism and neo-Constructivist sculpture; in black and white, and looking much more like a perverse magazine ad than anything else.
It brilliantly captures the ambiguity of this is tomorrow—at the back of the volume, another thing I hadn’t appreciated, there are adverts for real home improvements. Hamilton’s work is satire, of course, but it’s joyous, not cynical. His group, #2, has a manifesto on the next page:
We resist the kind of activity which is primarily concerned with the creation of style. [...] What is needed is not a definition of meaningful imagery but the development of our perceptive potentialities. [...] Thus by presenting a complex of sense experience which is so organised, or disorganised, as to provoke acute awareness of our sensory function in an environmental situation.
Which is such a good summary of the collage that I’ll take its injunction against fixed meaning seriously and add only this fascinating piece-by-piece found on Wikipedia:
The collage consists of images taken mainly from American magazines. The principal template was an image of a modern sitting-room in an advertisement in Ladies Home Journal for Armstrong Floors, which describes the “modern fashion in floors”. The title is also taken from copy in the advert, which states “Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? Open planning of course – and a bold use of color.” The body builder is Irwin ‘Zabo’ Koszewski, winner of Mr L.A. in 1954. The photograph is taken from Tomorrow’s Man magazine, September 1954. The artist Jo Baer, who posed for erotic magazines in her youth, has stated that she is the burlesque woman on the sofa, but the magazine from which the picture is taken has not been identified. The staircase is taken from an advertisement for Hoover’s new model “Constellation”,and it was sourced from the same issue of Ladies Home Journal, June 1955, as the Armstrong Floors ad. The picture of the cover of Young Romance was from an advertisement for the magazine included in its sister-publication Young Love (no 15, 1950). The TV is a Stromberg-Carlson, taken from a 1955 advert. Hamilton asserted that the rug was a blow-up from a photograph depicting a crowd on the Whitley Bay beach, but this cannot be confirmed. The image of planet Earth at the top was cut from Life Magazine (Sept 1955). The original reference image for the collage from Life Magazine supplied to Hamilton is in the John McHale archives at Yale University. It was one of the first images to be laid down in the collage. The Victorian man in the portrait has not been identified. The periodical on the chair is a copy of The Journal of Commerce, founded by telegraph pioneer Samuel F.B. Morse. The tape recorder is of known make, but the source of the image has not been identified. The view through the window is a widely reproduced photograph of the exterior of a cinema in 1927 showing the premiere of the early “talkie” film, The Jazz Singer starring Al Jolson.
The moral of this blog post, of course, is far clearer than the meaning of the collage… So, thank you Walden Books.
Octavo Blog is ON HOLD for another week. Apologies, reader. In the meantime, go to this:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/gallery/2011/may/12/science-fiction-in-pictures
Today in Cambridge the camera crews were out in force, presumably to establish what the good denizens thought about their new Duke and Duchess. But OctavoBlog’s mind has been on other and more esteemed titles. Yesterday a friend sent me a link to the following paper:
D. Upper, ‘The unsuccessful self-treatment of a case of “writer’s block”’, Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, Vol. VII, No. 3 (1974), p. 497.
As the subject line of the email—”BOOM BOOM!”—indicated, this paper is a kind of zenith. (To some, doubtless, a nadir.) To explain: for a while now two fellow PhD procrastinators and I have been collecting absurd academic titles, usually involving tortured and tortuous puns, but occasionally straying into other, odder territory. Upper’s paper wins hands down—the whole thing a kind of ridiculous pun. It’s the printed equivalent of that mindbogglingly irritating exam story that everyone hears and tells, about the student asked to write about courage, answering merely “this is courage”. Grrr!
By now the collection has reached a certain size. I’m sure we’ve not exhausted the subject, but, well, maybe you could say it’s gone on long enough. So here are the results—to give the project a sense of completeness, if nothing else.
First, straight pun titles:
The rest that I’ve been able to dig out of my inbox are just curios—for example Christina Voss’s ‘Siège d’Amour: Sex in Furniture’, not so much for the title, but the first line: “Consider this sex chair from 1890, commissioned by Edward VII of Britain.” Then there are titles that are simply pleasing, like Rebecca Wexler’s ‘Onward, Christian penguins: wildlife film and the image of scientific authority’, and Megan Stern’s ‘Yes:—no:—I have been sleeping—and now—now—I am dead’: undeath, the body and medicine’. Finally, though this risks dragging us into the realm of paratext, there’s Nikolai Krementsov’s ‘Off with your heads: isolated organs in early Soviet science and fiction’, which has an average title, but a glorious set of keywords: ‘Aleksandr Beliaev; Sergei Briukhonenko; Death; Revival; Severed head; Russia’.
But if this all seems like heavy going, you can always unwind with a pleasant game of spot the genuine physics title…
A guest post by jbosfecit.
Ever heard of Dynamosaurus imperiosus? Probably not, but were it not for a bibliographic/taxonomic convention, this is the name we’d have given to the world’s favourite dinosaur.
Since one of my latest acquisitions came from this very blog, I felt I should repay Octavo’s generous discount with a guest post. So here is the tale of my latest find…
Scientific firsts are always in demand and, as a one-time geology student, I’ve long had a soft spot for publications containing the announcements of discoveries of various fossils. A great resource for these is an exhibition that can now be found online at the Linda Hall Library. But what to buy with limited resources? The first appearance of the word ‘dinosaur’ would have been cool, but alas it was beyond my budget, as was the mezzotint of the country of the iguanadons. So I went for the next best thing. The first appearance of T-rex:
Since it was published in a periodical the real bibliophile would want the offprint, but I quickly found that no copies were currently on the market (nor likely to be soon), so decided to settle on a bound copy of the journal. I was amazed to find a bookseller in the US selling a complete run of the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History volume by volume. The low pricing and catalogue description of it suggested a dreaded Print On Demand (POD). So I asked if the seller if books were modern reprints, or if they were the 1905/6 printings, and if so were all the plates present? All I got was a very curt reply: “Books are complete, refunds within 10 days of purchase”. Given that the shipping quote to the UK suggested 3-6 weeks for delivery, I was a bit fearful I was about to be scammed… To my delight when they turned up in the post they were exactly what I’d hoped for.
The discovery of the T-rex is an interesting example of when the rules for taxonomic nomenclature seem to break down. The first specimen to be dug out of the ground was in 1900 by Barnum Brown in Wyoming. Two years later another partial skeleton was found in Montana. However, when it came to Henry Fairfield Osborn’s write up in 1905 he thought the two were different species: Tyrannosaurus rex (gen. et sp. nov.) appeared on p. 262, and the earlier find Dynamosaurus imperiosus on p.263. A year later he realised they were one and the same species, but the naming convention for new species means the first named in print gets priority over the first specimen found. Which is why we call our favourite dino T-rex and not D-imp—in all honesty a rubbish name anyway.*
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* To add further to the complication it later emerged that some pieces of vertebrae found in 1892 and described by E.D. Cope as Manospondylus gigas were in fact from the same species. But by then the name Tyrannosaurus had been in use for so long that it was decided not to break with conventions and stick to T-rex. The purist in me says I should track down a copy of that 1892 publication.
OctavoBlog has its finger on the pulse. In this case, the pulse is erratic—dwindling to nothing and then, Lo!, juddering back to life: for today the Guardian.co.uk Books section has been relaunched.
To my untrained eye, it looks much like the old site. Still cluttered in a choking puce, but now with a porn-site style gallery at the top. If that doesn’t bring to mind glorious dates like 1848, 1917, or the ongoing triumph of the Arab Spring, then Sarah Crown is there to prompt you: “The revolution starts here, ladies and gentlemen; the revolution starts now.”
Delving a little, it turns out that the main addition is a Books Database, which works just fine but as yet serves no purpose. Amazon already has the reviews, COPAC the information, and WorldCat the comprehensiveness. Not to mention LibraryThing and the countless other sites that do this already.
Am I being overly cynical? Absolutely not. The Guardian Review, and by extension the Books section, is ailing badly. Hamstrung by an editorial policy of commissioning dead-end lists of Quotes for the Beach, Books for the Loo, the Top Ten Literary Suicides and suchlike, the really great pieces that they still get are swallowed up and never seen again.
Like much of the Guardian website, the Books section is collapsing under the weight of comments, interactivity, forums… That these are only of interest to those who use them should be obvious. And the fact that the bestseller for last week was A.C. Grayling’s godawful The Good Book serves as a timely reminder that the customer is rarely, if ever, right.
Checking back, on the front page right now there’s a comment from “freespeechoneeach”:
This morning I was reading Now We Are Six! by AA Milne. Well, I was waiting for a blood test, and in need of cheer!
Enlightening. In the words of Speak You’re Branes: if you love A.A. Milne so much, why don’t you go live there?
I don’t have time to write anything much this week, so, naturally, my lazy blogging mind turns to Other Sources of Information. The Guardian books section? Nothing there. My desk? Chaos. Books recently listed? Too complicated… Finally, the last resort, a blog post about a blog post. I know.
But this isn’t any ordinary blog post. This is Ron Silliman’s book news roundup, and because it’s just been updated—seemingly at the very moment I was casting around for something to write about—well, it seems apt is all.
A little background: Ron Silliman is a poet/market analyst (of course), and his blog has been going since the dawn of internet time. He’s had frillions of visitors. It’s hard to work out just what it is about this blog, but, well, somehow it seems to rile people. Here’s a parody at The Lyre. And here are some choice lines from a very glorious poem by Justin Katko and Keith Tuma:
fuck you beer guzzling undergraduates too stupid to read
fuck sushi with Pepsi on a summer afternoon in Beijing
fuck you gas station condom fuck you Dr Scholls insoles
fuck you Jim Behrle Ron Silliman and the rest of the bloggers
Yet somehow Silliman’s lists are compelling. Compelling, and liable to make you feel as though your head is being jumped on by James Joyce. I think the best thing I can do is a) point you to the magnificent overkill of today’s, and b) provide a very necessary bibliophiliac digest of Silliman’s own digest of, well, the world:
Google in trouble. (The rest of us in confusion.)
Borders… well, just generally sticking two fingers up to most of its employees and suppliers.
Keith Richards and Hunter S. Thompson in conversation.
And best of all:
